Fortitude
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The Virtue of Fortitude is to do the right thing even when we don’t want to. Fortitude enables us to overcome the strong feelings of dislike or fear that prevent us from doing what we should. In this way Fortitude enables us to overcome obstacles, threats, sufferings, difficulties and fears in pursuing what is good.
The primary fear which fortitude helps us overcome is the fear of death. That is why fortitude is the virtue of the soldier willing to give his life to save his people. And Fortitude is the virtue of the Christian who is willing to sacrifice what is lesser for the sake of what is greater, and the greatest thing is our relationship with God and the promise of heaven.
I think John Wayne captures the essence of Fortitude:
Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.
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Fortitude lies between Extremes
All the virtues lie between two extremes of vice. Fortitude is the balance between recklessness and cowardice.
Cowardice is the vice of refusing to take a prudent risk or make a prudent sacrifice because of fear. It’s the abandonment of the greater good due to the terror of sustaining loss and hurt. The coward is so concerned with total self-preservation that he becomes crippled in relation to the world; the world presents itself not as an opportunity for attaining goods, but rather as a collection of personal threats. Such a person is incapable of taking advantage of the joy and happiness of life.
Christians are not people who retreat into a refuge but rather boldly go out into the world to convert it even at the cost of your life.
Secondly, excessive daring or recklessness. To be reckless is the vice of lacking a proper awareness of or concern for real danger. A brash man, an excessively bold man, foolishly charges into dangers and difficulties that could have been avoided. He’s the one who goes looking for trouble, who enjoys risk for its own sake. But there’s nothing virtuous about needlessly courting danger; such an attitude is foolhardy, not brave. In the early Church, Christians were forbidden to go looking for martyrdom – if we have to make sacrifices and we make them, that’s courage, but to make a needless sacrifice is simply poor planning. The virtue of fortitude helps steer a middle course, as it helps overcome fear and yet restrains excessive boldness.
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Fortitude, Fear, and Love
In order to have courage you must have fear, and in order to have fear you must have love. Let’s unpack this idea a little bit: Courage means being able to overcome fear in order to pursue the greater good. This is not the same as being fearless; quite the contrary, the fearless person can never be truly brave. That’s because fear is based on love for something, and a desire not to lose it. As St. Thomas says, “Fear is born of love.”[1] But if a person doesn’t love the thing he risks, doesn’t value it, then where’s the merit in risking it? A daredevil isn’t brave for risking his life for anything; he’s stupid for not recognizing the value of his life, and for so casually placing his life in danger for the mere entertainment value.
A brave man experiences fear because he loves the thing he is risking, and so he is afraid to lose it. No one fears the loss of something he doesn’t love and value. Yet what makes a person able to be brave is that he values the thing he’s pursuing more than the thing he’s risking. Courage means the willingness to sacrifice something lesser for something greater.
This means that if you don’t have a clear-cut value system, where you recognize that some things are objectively more valuable than others, you simply can’t be courageous since you don’t know how to sacrifice lesser for greater. Put it another way: courage is when you overcome your subjective feelings in order to do what is objectively right. But if you’re a moral relativist, and you don’t believe in objective right and wrong, then all you’re left with is your subjective feelings. But that implies that you can’t sacrifice your subjective feelings for the sake of the objective good – since you don’t acknowledge the objective good – and that means you can’t be brave. The point is that relativism kills heroism.
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The first step in gaining fortitude is to ask yourself, “What do I value the most?”
Another way to ask the same question is, “What do I fear losing the most?” St. Augustine said that virtue is correctly ordered love.[2] In other words we must deliberately construct a hierarchy in our mind, with the most valuable thing at the top, and then be willing to pursue that one thing at the expense of everything else. So, what do you see as your number one goal in life? Is it success in your profession, financial security, some vision you have for your children, good health, high academfearic grades? Or is it your relationship with God? Which of these things do you love/value the most? Which of these is the last thing in your life you’d be willing to sacrifice?
To have courage, it’s absolutely essential to have your priorities straight. As we just said, a man who pursues a lesser good at the expense of a greater good is not brave, but stupid. It’s stupid to exchange a dollar for a penny, and it’s of no profit to a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. Courage is about ordering your loves and fears so that you fear most the loss of what is truly most valuable. Only then will you be able to overcome lesser fears in carrying out what’s right. Pray then to the Holy Spirit for His gift of the “Fear of the Lord,” which allows us to fear the loss of His love before all else.
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Courage is about overcoming fear.
Courage enables us to overcome the fear of losing lesser things to preserve or gain greater things.
Jesus said greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends. St. Maximilian Kolbe made a quick assessment standing there on a hot summer day in Auschwitz in 1941, to choose the love of God and neighbor over his own life, then he made the heroic choice and stepped forward and traded places with a man condemned to death.
To be courageous we must have a hierarchy of loves: we must know what is of greater importance and is of lesser importance and be willing in every circumstance to sacrifice what is lesser for what is greater.
[1] Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 126, a. 1.
[2] City of God, 15, 22.