Authors: Brett McKay
The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues (6 page)
In a battle outside the gates of Thebes, seven great Argive warriors are killed, but the ruler who takes power in that city, Creon, decrees that their bodies will be left to rot.
The mothers of the dead soldiers beg Athens to help them bring back the bodies of their dead sons so that they can be buried. The King of Athens has mercy on the mothers, attacks Thebes, and retrieves the corpses. The men are given a proper funeral.
In this selection from the poem,
The Suppliant Women
, Adrastus, the King of Argos, eulogizes the deeds and character of five of the dead soldiers. Each man who died was not only a great warrior, but embodied the characteristics of true manliness.
Hear, then. By granting me the privilege
Of praising friends, you meet my own desire
To speak of them with justice and with truth.
I saw the deeds—bolder than words can tell—
By which they hoped to take the city. Look:
The handsome one is Capaneus. Through him
The lightning went. A man of means, he never
Flaunted his wealth but kept an attitude
No prouder than a poor man’s. He avoided
People who live beyond their needs and load
Their tables to excess. He used to say
That good does not consist in belly-food,
And satisfaction comes from moderation.
He was true in friendship to present and absent friends;
Not many men are so. His character
Was never false; his ways were courteous;
His word, in house or city, was his bond.
Second I name Eteoclus. He practiced
Another kind of virtue. Lacking means,
This youth held many offices in Argos.
Often his friends would make him gifts of gold,
But he never took them into his house. He wanted
No slavish way of life, haltered by money.
He kept his hate for sinners, not the city;
A town is not to blame if a bad pilot
Makes men speak ill of it.
Hippomedon, third of the heroes, showed his nature thus:
While yet a boy he had the strength of will
Not to take up the pleasures of the Muses
That soften life; he went to live in the country,
Giving himself hard tasks to do, rejoicing
In manly growth. He hunted, delighted in horses,
And stretched the bow with his hands, to make his body
Useful to the city.
There lies the son
Of huntress Atalanta, Parthenopaeus,
Supreme in beauty. He was Arcadian,
But came to Inachus’ banks and was reared in Argos.
After his upbringing there, he showed himself,
As resident foreigners should, not troublesome
Or spiteful to the city, or disputatious,
Which would have made him hard to tolerate
As citizen and guest. He joined the army
Like a born Argive, fought the country’s wars,
Was glad when the city prospered, took it hard
If bad times came. Although he had many lovers,
And women flocked to him, still he was careful
To cause them no offense.
In praise of Tydeus
I shall say much in little. He was ambitious,
Greatly gifted, and wise in deeds, not words.
From what I have told you, Theseus, you should not wonder
That these men dared to die before the towers.
To be well brought up develops self-respect:
Anyone who has practiced what is good
Is ashamed to turn out badly. Manliness
Is teachable. Even a child is taught
To say and hear what he does not understand;
Things understood are kept in mind till age.
So, in like manner, train your children well.
“Have an ambition to be remembered, not as a great lawyer, doctor, merchant, scientist, manufacturer, or scholar, but as a great man, every inch a king.” —Charles Sumner
By Rudyard Kipling, 1895
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
COURAGE
P
hilosophers have attempted to define courage for millennia. Aristotle, in his
Nicomachean Ethics
, establishes perhaps the best working definition of this virtue. Courage, according to Aristotle, is the mean between fear and recklessness. Cowards shrink even from things that shouldn’t be feared, while reckless men, buoyed by unwarranted confidence, take unnecessary risks. The courageous man, however, strikes a balance between irrational fear and foolhardy recklessness. He fears that which should be feared but remains steadfast for the right reason. That right reason, according to Aristotle, is for the sake of honor and nobility. In short, courage consists of acknowledging rational fears but acting nobly despite these fears in order to maintain manly honor.
A man can display courage in different ways. Physical courage is the type of courage that often first comes to mind when we think about this virtue. Tales of brave soldiers charging up a hill amid whizzing bullets consume our boyish imaginations. We are inspired and humbled by the stories of firemen and police officers rushing into the burning towers on 9/11 while everyone else was running out. We all hope that when called upon in a crisis, we too would be willing to risk our physical safety to save the lives of others.
A man can also display intellectual courage. History is filled with great figures—men like Socrates, Descartes, Bacon, and Darwin—who faced persecution for their ideas, yet endured social sanction with manly courage. Because of their courage to think differently and stand up for their ideas, society advanced and improved.
Finally, a man can show moral courage. Moral courage can be defined as the determination to follow what one believes to be right, regardless of the cost to one’s self, and irrespective of the disapproval of others. Moral courage has been displayed by great leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and ordinary people like the Chinese protester who stood in the way of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, young American civil rights activists who faced down angry mobs, brutal fire hoses and ferocious dogs, and the saints and believers of many religions who chose punishment and death rather than the renunciation of their faith.
In this chapter, we’ve pulled together writings that discuss the many different expressions of courage. They demonstrate the way in which all three types—physical, intellectual, and moral—are vital not only in life’s great challenges, but in the small day-to-day decisions we must make. Courage is needed not only in extreme acts of heroism but in the decision to uphold our more mundane commitments and promises. Courage grants us the strength not only to withstand danger but to approach life as a pioneer and adventurer, embracing risk and plunging ever forward into the unknown.
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.” —Winston Churchill
F
ROM
M
ANHOOD,
F
AITH AND
C
OURAGE
, 1906
By Henry Van Dyke
This is a sermon about courage—one of the simplest and most straightforward of the virtues; necessary, and therefore possible, for every true and noble human life.
It is a quality that we admire by instinct. We need no teacher to tell us that it is a fine thing to be brave. The lack of courage is universally recognized as a grave defect in character. If in our own hearts we feel the want of it, if we cannot find enough of it to enable us to face the dangers and meet the responsibilities and fight the battles of life, we are not only sorry, but secretly ashamed. The absence of courage is a fault that few are willing to confess. We naturally conceal it, and cover it up, and try to keep it secret even from ourselves. We invent favourable names for it, which are only unconscious excuses. We call it prudence, or respectability, or conservatism, or economy, or worldly wisdom, or the instinct of self-preservation. For in truth there is nothing that we are more reluctant to admit than cowardice; and there is no virtue which we would more gladly possess and prove than courage.
In the first place, it is an honourable virtue. Men have always loved and praised it. It lends a glory and a splendour to the life in which it dwells—lifts it up and ennobles it, and crowns it with light. The world delights in heroism, even in its rudest forms and lowest manifestations. Among the animals we create a sort of aristocracy on the basis of courage, and recognize, in the fearlessness of the game beasts and birds and fishes, a claim to rank above the timorous, furtive, spiritless members of creation.
And in man bravery is always fine. We salute it in our enemies. A daring foe is respected, and though we must fight against him we can still honour his courage, and almost forget the conflict in our admiration for his noble bearing. That is what Dr. Johnson meant by saying, “I love a good hater.” The enemy who slinks and plots and conceals—makes traps and ambuscades, seeks to lead his opponent into dangers which he himself would never dare to face—is despicable, serpentine, and contemptible. But he who stands up boldly against his antagonist in any conflict, physical, social, or spiritual, and deals fair blows, and uses honest arguments, and faces the issues of warfare, is a man to love even across the chasm of strife … A brave, frank, manly foe is infinitely better than a false, weak, timorous friend.