CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN CHARACTER: JUSTICE

 

In the tv series, The Good Place, four young people 

    live faulty lives, die young, and are consigned 

        to the bad place.

But they negotiate for a 2^nd chance, are returned to life, 

    and behave impeccably.

But again, they are sentenced to the bad place, because 

    the motive for all their good behavior was selfish.

They were doing it for themselves to get into the good place.

So they negotiate for a third run at it.

There is no way to deliberately get the external good 

    of the good place.

Their only possibility is the internal good 

    of becoming good people.

 

Ethics is about what we do. Virtue is about the reason we do it.

Virtue ethics is the point where action and motive connect.

The Christian way is to grow into the likeness of Christ 

    through the disciplined practice of Christlike virtues 

        over the course of a lifetime.

It isn’t about external goods or rewards. 

It’s about who we become.

 

Christian virtue ethics holds that the core of the Christian life 

           – not all of it; but the core tradition – 

            consists of 7 primary virtues 

            – 3 theological virtues: faith, hope, and love; 

and 4 cardinal virtues: 

    prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance.

 

First we considered Prudence, the mother of all virtues.

Prudence is wisdom in practical affairs, 

    seeing things clearly as they are and acting sensibly. 

The 1^st Commandment of Prudence is:  Deal with the real.

Next, we considered Fortitude, mental and emotional strength 

     in facing difficulty, adversity, (or) danger . . .  courageously.

 

Today we take up the cardinal virtue of Justice.

So much has been written about justice 

    from different perspectives 

– philosophical, theological, sociological, psychological, political.

Much of it has been tendentious and there has often been 

    a failure to see that the writers are coming 

        from different disciplines and are not so much disagreeing

             as talking past each other. 

The classical sense of justice as a virtue has gotten lost.

The word virtue still gets used and abused in justice talk 

       – but what they mean by virtue is something quite obscure. 

 

I do not intend to go down the rabbit hole

     of competing theories of justice.

I’ll just focus on the Christian virtue.

Even that isn’t going to yield anything neat and simple.

 

Justice can be understood as a set of principles 

         defining right and wrong.

Justice can also be understood as a social value, 

            something we care about.

But in virtue ethics, we are looking for a quality of character, 

            something we can practice and grow.

The virtue of justice is individual  

         – a quality of a person’s character.

It’s also social -- a quality of the community,  

            an attitude and pattern of behavior that a people share.

Social virtue can be expressed by the state as laws 

          but it isn’t limited to laws. It’s broader, more cultural.

 

Old Testament morality is more about rules than virtues.

But the Old Testament is nonetheless 

    profoundly interested in justice.

Deuteronomy

      Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue  . . . .  

      Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, 

                   orphan, and widow. 

Amos: 

            Let justice roll down like the waters and righteousness 

            like an ever flowing stream.

Micah: 

            What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, 

            love mercy, and walk humbly with your god.

 

 

Two rival visions of justice carry on a sustained argument 

         throughout the Old Testament.

First, there is the Moses view, 

           a freedom and equality kind of morality.

It demands lending generously to those in need, 

                but don’t count on getting repaid.

All debt was cancelled every 7 years 

            and all land was to go back 

            to the family of its original owner every 50 years.

Aliens were to be welcomed, supported, 

          and included in the community.

There were no kings, only local spiritual leaders.

People didn’t need the law enforced top down. 

Law enforcement was vigilante style. 

The mob was assumed to be moral.

Better than having oppressive police like the Egyptians, 

             they thought.

            

The other side was the King David view, 

        a hierarchical nationalism.

The king was the adoptive son, the beloved of God.  

To love, honor, and obey the king was 

            to love, honor, and obey God.

The kings liked to build palaces and temples,

            to keep standing armies, and to wage wars 

            of imperialistic conquest.

This meant heavy taxes, forced labor, and the draft 

             -- but also law and order

            with more due process than the supposedly moral mob.

 

Moses’s view was taken up by the Prophets 

            – Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah 

            – who defied the kings to their faces.

Two rival senses of justice argued their way 

         through the Old Testament.

But the contest was played out on the same field.

That field is the word both sides used, sedeq. 

We translate it justice or righteousness.

It means to be in right relationship.

 

The Ancient Israelites didn’t agree 

             on the political structure for their relationships,

            but they persisted in a conversation about it 

             for over a thousand years.

Contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas, 

            who wrote about discourse ethics and intersubjectivity,

            would say the point of the Old Testament 

            may not be who was right,

            but the fact of the persistent conversation.

Habermas says,

            We all live in a world surrounded by people of different 

             background and personality. 

            Relating with one another and settling our differences 

             is not always an easy task

            but it is a task we must embrace . . . . 

            Trust or suspicion, authentic communication or lies . . . , 

            unconditional love or self-interest

            are just some of the causes of strengthening 

            or breaking human relationship.

 

Persistence in relationship enriches our souls 

          and is necessary to our survival.

He believed Martin Buber’s attitude of I And Thou, 

          viewing the other person as a subject in their own right,

            not just an object to be persuaded into our view,

            is the foundation for authentic conversation. 

 

Turning to Jesus, the best place to start is the Beatitudes.

Matthew 5: 6 reads,

          Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for (Greek word) 

         “dikaisune” for you shall be satisfied.

We usually translate dikaisune as “righteousness” 

         but it could as easily be translated “justice.”

Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for justice . . . .  

Either way, it means right relationship.

            

Jesus told stories of relationship, often relationships 

             that crossed conventional boundaries

            -- the Good Samaritan, the Unforgiving Servant,

           the Prodigal Son.

And he gave specific examples:

            If you bring your gift to the altar and remember that your

           brother holds something against you, 

           leave your gift there and go be reconciled to your brother,

          and then come    back and offer your gift.

 

            Judge not that you may not be judged; 

            for by whatever judgment you pass you shall be 

           judged and whatever measure you measure 

           shall be meted out to you.

 

            Let the one among you who is without sin cast 

           the first stone.

            Be like your Father in heaven who causes the rain 

            to fall and the sun to shine

            on the good and the evil alike. 

 

Jesus’ disciples included a Roman collaborator 

           and a Zealot insurrectionist,

            the moralistic Pharisee Nicodemus 

            and the prostitute who washed his feet,

            the cynical skeptic Nathaniel 

           and the madwoman Mary Magdalene.

He not only befriended these diverse people, 

           he wove them into community with each other. 

 

Jesus envisioned a Moses kind of justice. 

He explained his mission by quoting Isaiah,

                    The Spirit of the Lord is on me, 

                    because he has anointed me to proclaim 

                    good news to the poor, . . . freedom for the prisoners

                 and recovery of sight for the blind,

                   to set the oppressed free . . . .

Jesus wasn’t neutral on power and wealth. 

But, having staked out his position, 

         he engaged people of all stripes in conversation. 

 

He resisted the idea that a merely political revolution 

            could create a virtuous society

            in which people could flourish.

Judah had done that before when the Maccabees 

            threw out the Greeks,

            but then their rule was so bad 

            that Judeans actually invited Rome

            to liberate them from their Jewish oppressors.         

Changing the state may help. 

But it is never enough to create a just society.

 

The definitive view Christian view of the social order 

             is from Augustine,

            but we need a bridge between Jesus and Augustine.

That bridge is Plato. 

What he said about justice is certainly flawed.

But there’s still something in it that is essential 

         to understanding justice as a virtue.

Plato taught that justice in the state 

           was merely individual justice writ large.

A just state was the product of just individuals. 

 

Let’s start with the state and work backwards.

Plato said there were three basic kinds of people: 

            rational philosophers, passionate warriors,

            and responsible workers.

The state was just when each fulfilled their proper purpose 

            -- the right person for the right job.

 

Likewise, each individual has three corresponding parts.

We have a mind to think, a spirit with the bravery for life, 

         and a body with its appetites.

Individual justice is an inner balance 

             of the three parts of the person,

just as justice in the state is each kind of person doing their job.

 

That’s obviously simplistic. 

There are more than three kinds of people 

         and our individual selves are more complicated.

But we do each have parts. 

Freud gave us Id, Ego, and Super-ego.

Transactional Analysis gave Child, Parent, Adult.

Norse mythology divided the individual into 4 parts.

Jung gave us Persona, Shadow, Animus, and Self.

Psychosynthesis gives each of us a whole inner community 

            of sub-personalities competing for space 

            in the same body.

 

But these psychologists all agree with Plato: 

We need to work things out inside.

What Plato called justice, 

          psychologists call inner harmony or integration.

 

That requires the different parts of our personalities 

            to stay in conversation with each other,

            respecting each other’s right to exist, 

            making room for each other.

We need the different parts of ourselves playing the role 

            for which they are suited, like keeping the passions 

            in the passenger seat and Mother Prudence 

            in the driver’s seat.

A just individual is self-aware and well-balanced.

 

The second gem from Plato is that just individuals 

       actively shape their community.

By bringing our internal balance into the community process,

            we lend sanity, dignity, and order to the common life.

The justice of the community is an outer network of relationships 

            that arises from the inner network of relationships 

            in individuals.

 

That brings us to St. Augustine.

Augustine wrote The City of God 

               as the Roman Empire was crumbling.

He might well have preempted Dickens 

        and titled it A Tale of Two Cities,

        because he described the world as inhabited 

         by two metaphorical cities,

         the Earthly City and the Heavenly City. 

 

Because the world is fallen 

            and sin isn’t about to disappear anytime soon,

            the Earthly City is governed by arbitrary, amoral, 

            dominating power.

The Heavenly City is God’s realm in which the virtues reign.

But we cannot escape the one to live in the other. 

We all have a foot in each city.

Augustine’s overarching metaphor for earthly life 

           is Jesus’ parable of the field sown 

            with a mix of wheat and weeds.

We cannot root out the weeds now 

           without destroying the wheat.

So the wheat and weeds grow together 

           until God sorts them out in the end.

The virtues sometimes manifest in the state, 

            just as the vices manifest in the Church.

 

Augustine taught that Christian participate in the world 

         -- the state, the market, and the social community -- 

        both as Christians as responsible citizens, 

       but with our ultimate allegiance not to any institution 

       or ideology but to God, and under God, to each other.

 

For Augustine, the virtue of justice is relational. He said,

            Justice is found where…the soul rules the body in all  

          (people) who belong to this City and obey God, and

           reason faithfully rules the vices in a lawful system 

           of  subordination … the association . . . of  righteous 

          (people) lives on the same basis of faith, active in love,   

          the love with which a (person) loves God as God ought to

          be loved, and loves his neighbor as himself.

            

Some years ago, I was wandering about the City of Jerusalem

            and found myself in a highly politicized 

            Palestinian neighborhood.

I stepped into a political bookstore 

        where every book was a diatribe against Israeli occupation.

I am not criticizing that, just describing it.

But then, I came upon a book that didn’t fit, 

            The New Religious Intolerance: 

            Overcoming The Politics Of Fear In An Anxious Age

            by the Jewish philosopher, Martha Nusbaum.

            .

Nusbaum said our fear-based experience of the world 

            narrows, shrinks, and rigidifies

            when we fail to practice participatory imagination.

Participatory imagination is empathy,

            imagining our way into someone else’s experience 

            to see things their way.

It doesn’t mean we agree with them. 

But we understand them as if from the inside.

 

Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, 

             echoed Jesus in his rationalist language.

            Never treat another person as a means to an end, 

            but always as an end in himself.

We can treat others as ends themselves, 

            we can love them as we love ourselves, 

            only if we know them, 

           if we see the world as our neighbor see it.

That’s in line with Martin Buber and Jurgen Habermas.

 

But it’s even more in line with Emanuel Levinas.

Having lost loved ones in the holocaust, 

         he asked how that happened 

         and concluded Western philosophy, 

         including utilitarianism. was immoral.

So Levinas called us back to relationship 

          with those who differ from us.

 

Levinas wrote about the encounter with the other, 

            the discovery that we aren’t the only ones here.

We are not even the center of the universe.

The very existence of other people gives rise 

         to an ethical demand. 

Nigel Zimmerman sums Levinas up this way:

            The Other – the suffering other – the poor one, 

             the widow, the orphan – is a subjective presence 

            who appears before the self .  . .  .(T)he other person 

            . . . . issues an ethical demand to one’s own self. . . .

 

Levinas saw justice as something that happens face to face.

But that kind of encounter is in a chicken and egg relationship 

       with a larger social context he called 

        the fraternal community.

It takes face to face encounters, one on one meetings, 

           to form a fraternal community.

But it takes a fraternal community to form us as people 

         capable of face to face encounters.

The fraternal community acknowledges we are each unique

            but we all share the same ethical duty 

           -- to see each other as selves,

            to acknowledge each other’s perspective.

 

That’s why Martha Nusbaum challenges us

            to adopt the moral practice of seeing things 

            from the other side.

Or as Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw put it 

            in their song Undivided,

            When we gonna learn to try on someone else’s shoes?

            When we gonna see through someone else’s eyes?

 

We can contrast Nusbaum’s approach to life with a passage 

            in Marcel Proust’s epic novel In Search Of Lost Time.

The protagonist, when he’s a teenage boy, 

           is obsessed with girls at this stage of life.

 

As he rides along the beach, 

            he sees each girl and wants to possess her,

            but it isn’t about sex.

He later explains that sex doesn’t work for his purpose.

What he wants to possess is her mind. 

He wants her to notice him, then think about him.

He wants to invade her consciousness with his own image 

             and turn her into a mirror for his ego. 

 

Contrast that to participatory imagination.

What if instead of trying to change her thoughts, 

              he had tried to see them,

            understand her experience as it was, 

                  uninvaded by his agenda.

The prayer of St. Francis seeks the grace, to seek

            not so much to be understood, but to understand.

 

The moral practice of a virtue grows us spiritually.

Instead of imposing ourselves on others, 

            Justice, right relationship, truly sees them, as they are, 

           an image of God -- a distorted image, but still an image.

The Vision of God enlightens our souls, 

            and it’s right there waiting for us 

            if we just practice participatory imagination.

If we see the world through many perspectives 

            instead of just our own,

            it becomes a vastly larger, more interesting place

            and we multiply many times over our capacity 

           to apprehend and appreciate reality.

 

Christian justice isn’t neat, but it includes unexpected elements.

From the Old Testament, we see that justice may reside

            not so much in rival visions of the social order

            as in our process of working with our differences.

Jesus gives us a picture of non-judgmental relationship 

        with people who are different from his.

Love your neighbor, he said, 

            then gave an example of a neighbor

            as a person of a different race, different religion, 

            different nationality.

Plato shows us to start by harmonizing our psychological parts,

            because whatever we have not integrated, 

           we will project on someone else.

Levinas shows us justice as recognizing 

            the other’s moral claim on us,

            and Nusbaum says that recognition begins 

            with empathy, seeing the world through the eyes 

                        of someone as different from us as possible.

CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN CHARACTER IN OUR CONTEXT: FORTITUDE

 

This is a course on how virtue ethics might help us through 

            pandemic, recession, racial divisions, 

            political insurrection, and whatever comes our way.

Last week we said that Christian virtues are Christlike qualities 

           of character that shape who we become.

The Christian way is to grow into the likeness of Christ 

        through the disciplined practice of these attitudes 

        and actions over the course of a lifetime.

It isn’t about external goods or rewards like getting God 

        to bless us.

It’s about who we become.

 

Virtue translates the Greek word arete, 

        which is literally an excellence.

As Aristotle put it, the sharpness of a saw is an excellence 

        because it helps the saw cut wood.

A virtue is a moral excellence because it helps us live better.

We’ll look closer at what living better means 

        as we examine each virtue. 

 

We can clear up some objections to virtue ethics 

         with a super quick historical recap.

By the 4^th Century, Christianity identified the core 

             of Christian living as three theological virtues 

           – faith, hope, and love – 

            along with four cardinal virtues 

            – prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance.

We took the system of virtues from Greek 

          and Roman philosophy.

But we redefined them.

 

St. Augustine said that the Roman understanding 

           of honor, a warrior virtue, was really a form 

           of individual pride and idolatry of the Empire.

Today, some people object that the virtues 

             are culturally defined and don’t fit places and peoples 

             outside the European norm.

But the virtues are organic, not fixed, 

             and have from the very beginning 

            had to be reinterpreted in new contexts.

 

The virtues remained the core of Christian morality for 1,200

            when Luther insisted on sola fides, faith alone, 

            rejecting all the other virtues, including hope and love,

            then re-defining faith as theological correctness.

In the 18^th Century, Catholicism went the opposite way, 

         replacing the virtues with a rule book.

It’s called manualist ethics, because it took the form 

       of manuals for confessors.

The manuals defined what acts were sins 

          and prescribed the penance for each.

 

Meanwhile, secular philosophy, 

          finding both Catholic and Protestant approaches silly,

          adopted consequentialism also called utilitarianism,

         meaning you measure an act 

        by its consequences or utility.

The end justifies the means. 

That end is the greatest benefit for the greatest number.

That unfortunately reduced people 

       to producers, consumers, commodities, and instruments

       for the state and the market. 

So virtue ethics disappeared until the cultural cataclysm 

            of World War II. 

After it was over, artists, psychologists, sociologists,    

          philosophers, and theologians were all asking, 

          “What the hell happened?”

How could cultured, civilized societies like Germany, Italy, 

            and Spain collapse into hateful, violent, 

            fascist, nationalistic personality cults?

How could Kristallnacht and Auschwitz happen?

Arnold Schwarzenegger condemned the Capitol Riot 

            as the American Kristallnacht           

            where one rioter donned a shirt that said 

                    Camp Auschwitz.

 

In response to the cause of World War II question, 

            several major voices brought back virtue ethics.

The first and most important was Elizabeth Anscombe, 

           an English Catholic at Oxford.

Her paper Modern Moral Philosophy rejected consequentialism

            which uses us in favor of virtue which grows us. 

Her best work was about prudence so I was grossly remiss 

          in not mentioning her last week.

 

The 2^nd philosopher, Iris Murdoch, 

             while teaching philosophy at Oxford, 

            also wrote famous novels.

Although she was an atheist, Murdoch wrote 

            to revive the virtues as a way of life, 

            inspired by Aristotle, but also by Simone Weill.

 

Some feminists have called virtue a guy thing. 

But its leading modern proponents 

         were Anscombe, Murdoch, and Weill.

This isn’t to say traditional virtue ethics is the final answer.

It can be enriched by feminist perspectives 

             as Robin Dillon did recently 

            in The Oxford Handbook Of Virtue. 

Valerie Saiving rightly cautions that some virtues, 

            like humility, actually weaken us as moral agents, 

             unless we reinterpret them.

No argument. Augustine already said virtues need reframing.

But we don’t need to throw 

            Anscombe and Murdoch out with the bath

            on the premise that prudence, fortitude, temperance, 

            and justice are exclusively masculine traits.

 Philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, novelist Toni Morrison, 

            and poet Natalie Trethewey

            are proof men have no monopoly on those virtues. 

The womanist social ethicist Katie Cannon said 

          that Black women struggling against oppression

          need virtues like invisible dignity, quiet grace, 

                       and unshouted courage.

And philosophers like Jennifer Frey and Nancy Snow 

            are continuing the tradition of virtue ethics 

                      in compelling new ways.

 

Another criticism of virtue ethics that it’s all about the individual 

            instead of community relationships.

That is drastically wrong because ethics or 

          morality are all about relationship. 

There is no morality for the solitary individual.  

Community is the context of all moral practice.

Some virtue teachers of the old days assumed the context 

         of a community so they didn’t talk about it.

But others, from Aristotle in the 4^th Century BC 

             to Alasdair MacIntryre today have seen 

            community as necessary to virtue 

            and virtue as necessary to community.

 

Joseph Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher 

            in the post-war era said the absence of virtue 

            in the German community

            had left a cultural vacuum that Nazism filled.

MacIntyre focused less on Hitler and more on Stalin. 

He thought the collapse of the supposedly egalitarian 

            and liberating Russian Revolution 

            into a leftist personality cult of the individual strong man

            resulted from replacing a virtuous community 

                       with a revolutionary vanguard.

Political and social virtues, or the lack thereof, are connected.

For example, the Capitol rioters were already acting riotously 

         on the airplanes they took to DC.

 

Last week we considered Prudence, 

                 called the mother of all virtues.

The dictionary definition of prudence is 

              wisdom in practical affairs.

But Pieper emphasizes it isn’t just knowing. He says:

        This knowledge of reality must be transformed 

         into the prudent decision.

Prudence is seeing things clearly as they are 

          and acting sensibly. 

The 1^st Commandment of Prudence is:  Deal with the real.

 

This week, we take up Fortitude.

The dictionary definition is 

             mental and emotional strength in facing difficulty, 

            adversity, danger, or temptation courageously.

Fortitude is a rope woven of three cords 

               – courage, strength, and resilience.

As I present, I invite you to remember people you’ve known 

            who showed courage, strength or resilience 

                      in the face of challenges.

 

At Luke 12: 32, Jesus said,

             Have no fear, little flock, for your Father has resolved 

             to give you the Kingdom.

 

The imperative sentence Jesus said more than any other was  

              Do not be afraid.

The Bible says Do not be afraid 365 times, 

            once for each day of the year. 

Leap year, we’re on our own. 

Our religion is not so much about niceness as bravery. 

To understand what kind of bravery we mean, 

            let’s look at a verse that tells us

            why we should be brave.

Luke 17: 33 
            Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it. 

            and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.

 

 

Life is a risky business. Vulnerability is part of the package.

The more we try to secure ourselves, 

           the more we learn how futile that is.

We waste our lives, we lose them, 

            by trying to carve out security.

Joseph Pieper said,

‘           Fortitude presupposes vulnerability; 

            without vulnerability there can be no fortitude . . . .

            Because (humanity) is by nature vulnerable, 

             (we) can be brave.

We are vulnerable to all manner of misfortunes,

            but Pieper grounds all our vulnerability, 

            the thousand mortal shocks that flesh is heir to,  

            as Shakespeare put it,

            in the fundamental fact of mortality. 

He says,

                        By injury we understand every assault on our . . 

                     .  inviolability, 

                        every violation of our inner peace, 

                         everything that happens to us 

                        or is done . . . against our will;   

                       thus everything in anyway negative, 

                       frightening. . .  or oppressive. 

                       The ultimate injury is death . . . 

                       All fortitude has reference to death. . . . 

                       Fortitude is basically readiness to die . . . .

 

Ernst Becker said in his book, The Denial of Death, 

            that all our neuroses and the things that hold us back

            from the fullness of life stem

            from trying to avoid the truth of our mortality. 

From William James to T. S. Eliot to Henry Miller, 

            literature is replete with accounts of lives unlived 

            because of  unwillingness to risk vulnerability. 

We can’t play the game without taking the hits.

 

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love our lives.

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t feel the pain 

            when we are injured

            or grieve for ourselves and each other 

                       in the face of death.

But it does mean to love life, to live it, 

            we have to love it in its morality,

            in its precious transitoriness.

 

Emily Bronte wrote in her poem Faith,

            No coward soul is mine
            No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
            I see Heaven’s glories shine
            And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

            Though earth and moon were gone
            And suns and universes ceased to be
            And Thou wert left alone
            Every Existence would exist in thee.

Jesus did not say

     If you have no fear, the Father will give you the Kingdom.

He said, 

    The Father has already given you the Kingdom, 

           so have no fear.

 

In his last speech, Martin Luther King recalled 

            having been stabbed,  almost fatally, ten years earlier.

He was so grateful he’d survived to see all the good things 

             that had happened.

But then he ended his last speech that night in Memphis:

            I would like to live a long life. . . . But I'm not concerned

           about that now. I just want to do God's will. 

           And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. 

          And I've looked over. 

          And I've seen the Promised Land. 

         I may not get there with you. But I want you to know 

         tonight, that we, as a people, 

        will get to the promised land! 

         And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about 

        anything. I'm not fearing any man.         

       Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. 

 

Christian fortitude isn’t a Stoic disregard or contempt for life. 

It’s embracing all of life including the pain.

Fortitude isn’t fearlessness. 

It’s grounded in prudence that knows all about danger.

But Fortitude is also grounded in faith and hope, 

         trusting that in Eternity, as Lady Julian said,

            All shall be well and all shall be well  and all manner 

            of things shall be well.

 

In our society, shaped by action movies and video games,

            we are apt to associate courage with aggressiveness.

That fits the Roman definition of fortitude -- but not Augustine’s.

Christian fortitude isn’t aggressive.

It is sometimes said not to be about attack, 

             but rather endurance.

Pieper says,

 Power is so manifestly of the very structure of the    world      that endurance, not wrathful      attack, is the . . . decisive test of actual fortitude which is nothing else than to love and           realize that which is good in the face of injury or death . . . . 

Endurance is definitely part of it. 

Some hardships are inevitable. Lashing out doesn’t help. 

Endurance is what we do unless we cave in.

But, for other hardships, like injustice, endurance is too passive.

Sometimes fortitude is more about persistence.

 

Endurance and persistence are different; 

         but they have something in common – patience.

Fortitude is a long haul virtue.

 

As we practice this endurance/persistence/patience, 

            what are we to do with our anger?

St. Thomas Aquinas is explicit and emphatic 

           that anger is an appropriate response to evil.

By evil  we mean things not being good, kind, life-giving, 

            as they should be.

Evil can be a political injustice or it can be nature going 

           against us as with wildfires or diseases.

St. Thomas says we are right to be angry.

 

The word anger was introduced into the English language

            around 1200 by Brother Ormin, 

            an Augustinian monk living in Mercia, 

                         a Danish region of England.

He took it from the Norse noun angr which means affliction

            and the Norse verb angr-a which means to grieve.

Anger is our grief over the distance between how things are 

              and how they ought to be.

The reason we pray thy kingdom come is that it isn’t here yet.

Things are not as God or we would have them be. 

So we are angry.

But how do we fold anger into our fortitude?

Ephesians 4: 26-27 says, 
            Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down 

            on your anger,

            and do not give the devil a foothold.

 

 

Jesus got angry at the Pharisees, the Sadducees, 

            money changers in the Temple,

            his disciples, his family, and even at God. 

So the first thing to do with anger is to be angry, 

         acknowledge it, not pretend it away.

 

The second thing is to manage it.

Do not sin means literally, do not miss the mark.

Don’t lose your head, don’t let an amygdala hijack 

         make you do something stupid.

Keep your anger in the passenger seat. 

Don’t give it the steering wheel.

Fortitude keeps our anger at a slow boil, maybe a simmer.

 

The third point: Do not let the sun go down on your anger

            means don’t get stuck in it.

Don’t identify with it. That’s when we lose ourselves.

 

The final point about anger is to recognize what lies behind it:

The poet David Whyte says

            Anger is the deepest form of compassion, 

            for another person, for the world,

            for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, 

            and for our ideals,

            all vulnerable, and all, possibly about to be hurt.

Proper anger is a form of love.

So it’s important to keep our love in view.

When we lose the point of our love, 

             the anger can become a thing unto itself,

            and there again, we lose ourselves.

But anger grounded in love fuels our fortitude.

 

But what about our fear? 

Fear is the other side of the same coin as anger.

The angriest people are often covering the greatest fear. 

As we have said, fortitude has room for fear.

But just as fortitude manages our anger, 

           it also manages of our anxiety.

Dread of one thing can morph into a generalized attitude 

           of fear and loathing that can turn violent.

Before George Floyd, the pandemic began with a wave 

         of xenophobic violence against Asian-Americans.

Fear is contagious. 

It spreads in a society through phenomes like an airborne virus.

We catch it from each other and the cable news, social media,

        and rumors fuel it.

Communications professor James Dillard says, 

            Once the world feels like a dangerous place, 

            where bad things happen, fear knows few limits.

I recently heard a rap song written by a 9 year old that went,

            Be afraid. Be very afraid.

            Because if you’re not afraid, you’re not aware.

But fear doesn’t keep us safe. It makes us more vulnerable

    --  vulnerable to political manipulation 

                    and conspiracy theories.

Chronic stress raises our inflammation levels increasing 

          our risk for infection.

 

So what to do with fear?

Do not be afraid does not mean do not feel fear. 

It means don’t live in your fear. 

Don’t believe your fears. Don’t let fear control your life. 

Have your fears; but don’t let them have you. 

Nadia Bolz Webber recently said, 

            Don’t let fear define the contours of you heart. 

            Love does that.”

 

So what are we afraid of? 

Death, illness, financial stress, loneliness, 

      loss of the meaning we used to find in our daily activities? 

When the generalized too-big-to-manage fear is on the loose, 

           it’s apt to infect us. 

To get our feet on the ground and focus on our own fears 

            instead of being caught up in mob panic, 

           we identify the threat and look it in the eye. 

The beginning of fortitude is to name the fear. 

Then notice how it feels in your body. 

Don’t identify with it or judge it as valid or invalid. 

Just let it be the feeling that it is and hold it 

            as you might hold a frightened child. 

Let it be, but do not let it rule. 

 

Then, remember that others are afraid too. 

Pray for them and find some small act of kindness 

           you can do for somebody 

            – a call, a note, order them something online. 

Any act of kindness will do. 

St. Therese of Lisieux and Mother Theresa both said 

            we live our faith not in grandiose gestures 

            but in small acts done with great love.

 

The art of fortitude in a fearful time is 

            to make our fear the occasion to practice love 

             because our Bible teaches,   

            There is no room for fear in love. 

             But perfect love casts out fear.

I’ll close by summing up fortitude with David Whyte’s

               definition of courage. He writes:

            Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation 

            with life, with another, with a community, a work; 

            a future.

            To be courageous is . . . to make conscious those things

            we already feel deeply and then live through the 

            unending vulnerabilities . . . . .

            To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply 

            in the body and in the world:

            to live up to and into the relationships that already exist, 

            with things we already care deeply about, with a person,

            a future,  a possibility in society,

            or with the unknown that begs us on 

            and always has begged us on. 

            To be courageous is to stay close 

            to the way we are made.