We’re just over halfway through our school year, and that means we’ve been contemplating our theme at the Columbia campus, “Be strong and courageous,” from Joshua 1:9, for almost twenty weeks. It’s a good time to consider what courage means, where it comes from, and what it looks like in practice.
Aristotle would say that courage is the golden mean between cowardice and rashness. This is a good definition, but it helps us understand courage in terms of what it is not, rather than pinpointing quite what courage is.
Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird famously says that courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” That’s better; it tells us what courage looks like in practice. But that definition in and of itself doesn’t quite get at what rightly motivates courage.
There’s a moment in G. K. Chesterton’s wonderful epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse which I think demonstrates beautifully not only what courage looks like in practice but also what properly motivates it. The story is set in the time of the Viking invasions of medieval Europe. The English King Alfred has gathered together a small army of Christian warriors from across southern England to make the last stand for Christendom against this overwhelming wave of pagan conquerors.
And when Alfred’s pitiful little army meets the Vikings on the battlefield, the two armies approach each other and halt, and the leaders of the armies exchange some words. One of the Viking warriors insults the raggedy army of Alfred, which consists of a few brave knights but, to be fair, is mostly just peasants with pitchforks.
And in response to the Viking insults, a Welsh chief named Colan actually hurls his sword across the battlefield at the insulting Viking and strikes him in the head. It’s an incredible, tense moment because, while Colan has certainly made his point and stopped the offensive words of his opponent, he’s also now essentially fired the first shot and left himself without a weapon before the battle has even begun.
And you might think that King Alfred would condemn such a move as being not courageous, but rash. But incredibly, he turns to Colan, and he offers him his own sword:
“And the King said, “Do thou take my sword Who have done this deed of fire, For this is the manner of Christian men, Whether of steel or priestly pen, That they cast their hearts out of their ken To get their heart’s desire.”
Your “ken” is your range of sight or field of vision. It’s what you can see, what you can know for sure. So to cast your heart out of your ken is to throw yourself forward, boldly, not knowing what the outcome will be. And yet that’s not rashness, because of what’s motivating it.
In the lead-up to this moment, one of the insults hurled at the English is that they are “broken bits of earth.” And Colan, before he hurls his sword, responds that yes, the English are broken; he says that their hearts have been broken by Christ, and so now they’re called upon to stand for Christendom. And so when Alfred says that “this is the manner of Christian men,” that it’s incumbent upon Christians to cast their hearts out of their field of vision to get their heart’s desire, he’s not talking about the selfish, ugly desires that arise out of our sinful human nature. He’s talking about the desires of a heart that has been broken from its hardness and that has been rightly ordered to love and desire those things that God has laid upon it: the vocational works or sometimes great deeds He calls us to.
From this episode we can derive a pretty good definition of courage: casting yourself out of your ken to get your heart’s rightly ordered desire. Courage means throwing yourself forward boldly, not knowing what the outcome will be, but confident that the desire God has laid upon your heart is worth that effort, and confident that God will honor that effort and use it to some good, even if you never get to see the final outcome; even if, like the men in Alfred’s pitchfork army, you’re likely to die in the pursuit of it.
But when God lays a desire on our heart, he calls us to exercise courage in the pursuit of that desire. And like Joshua, we can “Be strong and courageous,” rather than frightened or dismayed, knowing that “the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
