Just saw a PBS piece on courage, with some journalists familiar with trench warfare and the behavior of soldiers. It got me wondering how we would define courage as a virtue, since it isn't listed as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

What of terrorists such as we've seen lately? Do we simply say true courage wouldn't destroy innocent lives, and thereby imply compassion as part of its larger virtue? Certainly courage isn't the absence of fear; in fact, it appears to overcome tremendous fear in many cases.

It's ad hominem to excuse ourselves and say that the Al Qaeda suicide bombers were simply desperate or profoundly antisocial (the way they and the Taliban treated Afganis isn't a weak case for this, though). However, my sense of the terrorist phenomenon, at least the Islamic variety, is of a tribal mentality where individuals must radically and completely identify with the collective, and wherever the collective is threatened, behave according to its survival needs. IOW, to not act, would be, in that context, psychological suicide itself.

The justification of honor killings throughout that region of the world, where women can, and have been recently, stoned to death for acts of adultry that were often thought to be rapes (the woman's only strong defense is the evidence from an eye-witness!) illustrates how strongly these kinship ties can run, since it is often the family members executing their own. From what I've read, the murderer is exonerated, while the male adulterer is either overlooked, or more recently, incurs a few years in prison. So how do we understand courage in this context of terrorism, where the impulse is to protect a shame-based set of proprieties, distinct(?) from the impulse to overcome fear to save a helpless life? Can Palestinian child suicide bombers be acting bravely, or compulsively according to these kinship ties that leave them no choice as tribal zombies? Since Hamas seems to have been driven to eradicate the state of Israel in the first place, Israel's military oppression of Palestinians doensn't seem to be their primary motive.

And so honor and courage seem to differentiate each other. Courage can have honor in it, but honor can act alone and blindly, sacrificing innocent lives for the sake of a belief-system to avoid humiliation, even where threats to physical survival aren't present. IOW, if an intersubjective state of mind is intolerable, such as accepting non-lethal behaviors like adultry, then to eliminate the offending object seems to reflect the narrowness/fragilness of that consciousness.

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And so honor and courage seem to differentiate each other. Courage can have honor in it, but honor can act alone and blindly, sacrificing innocent lives for the sake of a belief-system to avoid humiliation, even where threats to physical survival aren't present.

I think you said it all right there, W.C. I have no problem with associating courage with virtue. A lot of stuff we see described as courageous might more accurately be described as having a lot of nerve or as an act of self-preservation or, conversely, being afraid of something more terrible than death itself: dishonor. That's also an interesting take you have on some of these acts, if not acted, being the equivalent of cultural suicide.

Of course we are making moral judgments when we define courage as virtuous, and these judgments are quite subjective. Was Joe Kennedy being courageous when he blew up in (or near) a plane full of explosives that was meant to be remotely guided into a German installation while the 911 terrorists were not? From the whacko perspective of some Moslems these and other suicide bombers are also courageous. In the case of Joe Kennedy he was fighting to defeat a clearly oppressive regime. What about the terrorists? Who or what is invading their soil? Who is enslaving or killing their people? What they are fighting FOR is domination. They are fighting a war of aggression. I find them about as courageous as the kamikaze fighters of WWII. They perverted the notions of honor and courage to justify horrible actions.

Actually, courage is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit mentioned in the Isaiah listing, which has formed the basis for the traditional understanding of the 7 infused gifts. It's called fortitude, which pretty much means the same thing. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a good discussion of how it's been understood from ancient times to now (not much on terrorism and Islam, however; we're writing that section here ). The way the virtue has come to be understood in Christianity follows:

(4) Fortitude as one of the gifts from the Holy Ghost is a supernatural virtue, and passes beyond the Aristotelian range. It is what, as Christians, we must always have in mind in order to make our actions acceptable for eternal life. But we still keep hold upon the natural principles of fortitude as those whereon grace has to build. In the spiritual life of the ordinary Christian much that Aristotle has said remains in its own degree true, though we have to depart especially from the master's insistence upon the field of battle. Our exercise is mainly not in war strictly so-called, but in moral courage against the evil spirit of the times, against improper fashions, against human respect, against the common tendency to seek at least the comfortable, if not the voluptuous. We need courage also to be patient under poverty or privation, and to make laudable struggles to rise in the social scale. It requires fortitude to mount above the dead level of average Christianity into the region of magnanimity, and if opportunity allow it, of magnificence, which are the allied virtues of fortitude, while another is perseverance, which tolerates no occasional remissness, still less occasional bouts of dissipation to relieve the strain of high-toned morality and religion.