Courage Defines Character

 1.   Courage defines character, as Boethius suggests as he faces his final hours before his execution as a Christian. In Boethius' words, "Commit your boat to the winds, and you must sail whichever way they blow." This passage from Ancius Boethius, a Roman philosopher whose fearlessness in the face of death has inspired others for over fifteen hundred years, represents a noteworthy example of a hero on a spiritual quest. The following passage from the imprisoned Ancius Boethius suggests the omnipotent influence of the Wheel of Fortune, as it governs the lives of men impartially and indifferently. Awaiting torture and death at the hands of the religious leaders of the Roman Empire in 524 A. D., Boethius pens these lines as he courageously finds the inner strength to accept  a verdict  that will lead to his death. In essence, we give, love, and forgive because we live; no other standard is necessary, save faith and courage.

  2.    The Wheel of Fortune:  "With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel, Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro; Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kings While trustees still, from low she lifts a conquered head; No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds, But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung. Such is the game she plays, and so she tests her strength: Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hour Sees happiness from utter desolation grow "(Boethius II 56). In this passage, Boethius employs four illustrations to reflect man's courageous quest against the forces of his physical existence. Using the metaphor of servitude, he observes that man's struggle  may serve merely as sport for tragic irony, but that "once you have bowed your neck beneath her yoke, you ought to bear with equanimity whatever happens on Fortune's playground." One's course cannot be changed as one would "choose a mistress to rule [his] life" and then expect to control her behavior. Boethius understands that just as a relationship would suffer under similar circumstances, so would any attempt at predetermining one's fate. He next employs the metaphor of the courageous steersman, saying, "Commit your boat to the winds and you must sail whichever way they blow, not just where you want." One must allow the winds of Chance to plot his journey. Boethius' final metaphor compares man to a farmer who "entrusts his seed to the fields" and must "balance the bad years against the good." In essence, the prisoner's realization of his inability to chart his earthly course encourages him even more to demonstrate his faith and devotion through a stoic acceptance of his lot (Boethius II 55-56). Boethius, martyred for personal views that divided the Roman and Greek Orthodox Church, calmly and courageously goes to his death, like Christ and Socrates. In Peace of Mind (1946), Joshua Liebman expresses a similar sentiment when he says, 'Man perhaps displays his most remarkable and his most unselfish genius when the turns from the thought of individual immortality and finds strength and inspiration in the immortality of the human race, when he transfers his allegiance from his own small ego to mankind as a whole. Man at that moment transcends himself, his own life becomes significant as one link in the magnetic chain of humanity. The more we concentrate upon the immortality of mankind, strangely enough, the richer becomes our own individual life. As we link ourselves to all of the heroes and sages and martyrs, to all of the poets and thinkers of every race and every clime, we become a part of a great and moving drama" (Liebman 140).  As William Cullen Bryant wrote in "Thanatopsis":  "So live, that when they summon comes to join   The innumerable caravan which moves                                                                                                                      To that mysterious realm where each shall take                                                                                               His chamber in the silent halls of death,                                                                                                               Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,                                                                                                         Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed                                                                                   By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,                                                                                                     Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch                                                                                                      About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."   

 3.            In The Life We Prize (1951),  D. Elton Trueblood, Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, theologian, and former chaplain to both Harvard and Stanford Universities, makes the following observation on the heroic life of Boethius: "Thus there lived a man named Boethius in Rome, fifteen hundred years ago, after the old Roman order had been shattered and the Dark Age had set in. This man was finally thrown into prison by a despotic government, but, inside the prison, he wrote one of the enduring testaments of the human spirit. This book, The Consolation of Philosophy, is a brilliant example of how light can be preserved in the darkness. The experience of the Roman philosopher has a singular appropriateness now, because there is a sense in which we are all in prison. Like Boethius, we must seek whatever enduring values there are that are independent of the changing political or military scene. Like him, in the face of adversity, we may be able to catch a sense of the relativity of both our common goods and our common evils. To do this is to achieve a philosophical stance, in which we refuse to exaggerate on either side. If our material fortune seems fleeting, we can be sure that material misfortune will be equally fleeting, and that both miss the main point of human life" (Trueblood 34).

  4.      For man today, there exist numerous theories explaining human behavior, many of which suggest elements of fatalism. Current trends reveal that human achievement is both genetic and behavioral in origin. Religion suggests a loss of identity resulting in separation from one's creator, hence the need for rebirth and redemption. Although man perceives himself as an active, responsible entity, his motivation and perspective also depend upon his chemical, physical, and psychological structure. The mental processes through which he interprets reality, by synthesis or analysis, reveals conscious, or perhaps unconscious, patterns latent in the human psyche. Behavioral influences also dictate varying individual responses, even among subjects of similar backgrounds, depending upon each person's unique view of his external environment. Anthropology suggests that recurring patterns in behavior reveal similar manifestations, traversing social or cultural barriers. Theories of learning known as "deep structure" also reveal an innate propensity for language, which suggest the notion that acquisition of knowledge is, to a degree, deterministic. Although these factors, in a manner of speaking, could contribute to a person's victimization, a hero could use them equally to his benefit by not using them to rationalize the inexplicable. Faith allows man to transcend the inscrutable by recognizing these tendencies when possible and incorporating them into a living, spiritual existence. In The Will to Believe (1899), William James emphasizes the importance of faith in the following passage: "Now when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by 'trusting'? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,--this bare assurance is such to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by it circumstances on a natural plane" (James 56-57). Theologian Martin Buber maintains that it is man's spiritual apostasy, itself, induces his overwhelming sense of loss and betrayal, as opposed to any acquired or inherited influences. According to Buber, "The sickness of our age is like that of no other age, and it belongs together with them all. The history of cultures is not a course of aeons in which one runner after another has to traverse gaily and unsuspectingly the same death-track. A nameless way runs through their rise and fall: not a way of progress and development but a spiral descent through the spiritual underworld, which can also be called an ascent to the innermost, finest, most complicated whirlpool, where there is no advance and no retreat, but only utterly new reversal—the break through. Shall we have to go this way to the end, to trial of the final darkness? Where there is danger, the rescuing force grows too." This passage from Buber's I AND THOU (1937) reflects the sense of futility and alienation that the Jewish community experienced during World War II. Tragic circumstances rendered millions of helpless victims subject to the brutal hands of a dictator ordering the course of history. Henrik Ibsen said, "The worst that a man cando himself is to do injustice to others." More than theory, man perceives the cruel hand of fate as it inordinately extinguished the hopes and dreams of countless human beings. In this case, man uses determination to justify his inability to grasp the inexplicable. As Buber commented, "The quasi-biological and quasi-historical thought of today' however different the aims of each, have worked together to establish a more tenacious and oppressive belief in fate than has ever before existed" (Buber I and Thou, in Oliver 56). Interestingly, Charles Darwin, the father of natural selection, humbly credits a Supreme Being for the glory and order of His creation. On the final page of  The Origin of Species, Darwin states, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved" (450). Darwin, like Buber, perceives an underlying power guiding the forces of nature which determinists fail to recognize. Just as Hume is humbled by the limitless majesty of the Divine, so is Darwin overwhelmed by the unparalleled order of Nature. Like the Romantics, he too experiences the intensity of the Sublime; and in the process realizes that only the miracles of Nature can evoke an epiphany of this magnitude, as inscrutable as the mysteries of God. In all things of life, we must make the choice to live and act. As Tennessee Williams said, "Not facing a fire does not put it out."

                                                                                             Works Cited

Bryant, William Cullen. "Thanatopsis." Yale Book of American Verse. Thomas R. Lounsbury,                            editor. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1912 from "Poetry Archive."  poetry-                                         archive.com/b/thanatopsis.html.

James, William. The Will to Believe.New York: LONGMANS GREEN AND CO., 1899.

Liebman, Joshua Loth. Peace of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Trueblood, Elton. The Life We Prize. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1951.