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Reason may then approve or submit. But it remains for the heart of courage with the will to believe and the vision of imagination to embrace the beauty of goodness and the strength of truth as the foundation of virtuous living.
courage is the moral and spiritual capacity to risk harm or danger to oneself for the sake of something good.
Courage, therefore, is an important natural virtue that helps us navigate a course to the supernatural end of perfection through obedience to God.
Irene’s courage, like all natural courage, comes from the struggle with fear. But courage also needs the ground of ultimate trust on which to stand and act—something or someone who embodies goodness and truth wholly and unqualifiedly. Then it may deepen into a courage to be wholly for others and to risk the self in their behalf.
Authentic courage, therefore, makes use of faith and love—or, rather, it fulfills itself in faith and love through selfless and unselfish acts of being for others.
Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing”
Patience is the practical fruit of faith and is a natural ally of courage.
“The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it,” wrote MacDonald. “It is ours, that we, like Christ, may have somewhat to offer—not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly: then it can no more be vexed.”
According to MacDonald, the process by which a human being attains full maturity includes not only psychological development and moral growth but religious conversion, and, finally, mystical participation in the Divine Life.
Baptism is an initiation into and the beginning of a whole new way of being, a way of being whose ultimate end is life unspoiled by fear and ripened instead by Love.
Lewis had searched for the essential truth in religion that, he thought, could be held on to after the mythic wrappings are removed. MacDonald’s fantasy works persuaded him, however, that the moral and spiritual truth of religion is inextricably interwoven with myth and story, such that it cannot be removed like the kernel from the husk.
The dialogue rings with the musicality and rhythm of the ancient anaphoras (thanksgiving prayers) of Jewish and Christian worship.
Joy is “a desire turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object,” writes Lewis.
“Obedience is the opener of the eyes.”
John Henry Newman says in one of his Oxford sermons: “Every act of obedience is an approach—an approach to Him who is not far off, though He seems so, but close behind this visible screen of things which hides Him from us.” And, Newman writes, “you have to seek his face; obedience is the only way of seeing Him.”
C. S. Lewis’s sensibilities, no doubt, were less mystical than George MacDonald’s. But he too draws the important connections between faith and courage enacted as moral character and faith and courage fulfilled in the vision of God.
We mistake the dazzling for beauty and are awash in the banal. And when genuinely beautiful things give us pleasure, that pleasure very often sinks to smugness or ostentation.
The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. —Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God”
The mechanical nightingale of Andersen’s story reminds us of the peril of inordinate love and attachment to earthly objects even the most beautiful of them: Their beauty is relative but if properly approached can lead us toward that transcendent beauty which is beatitude itself.
Aristotle states in his Ethics that the nobility and the happiness of a good individual, of a person whose character is whole and healthy, will be evident, even when that person is living under circumstances that ordinarily inhibit or constrain virtuous behavior.
Spinoza sums this up. “Happiness,” he explains, “is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”
Ruskin has gotten attention for his ecological sensibility, notably his conviction that the natural world has an inherent value that transcends any usefulness it might have to human beings and that, therefore, the relationship of human beings to nature ought to be cooperative and not exploitative.
In the Christian religious and moral imagination, hospitality is above all else a fervent reception of God and Christ into one’s life, lived out in deeds of kindness and generosity, especially toward strangers, the most vulnerable, and the least comely.
A true princess has mastery over herself and the discipline to do what is right, especially when she is pulled by her passions or desires to behave differently.
A person who possesses a good and righteous character is someone in whom duty is ingrained as virtue itself—as a power, in other words, to choose to do what is right in all circumstances, a habitual intentionality that is much more than thoughtless habit or even a wishing or desiring to do what is right.
A good or righteous person is someone in whom there is a complete identification of who one is with what one is supposed to do and to become.
For most of Christian history, obedience, aligned with faith, hope, charity, and all of the other cardinal virtues, ranked high in the religious imagination.
in our day, the objective language of obedience and duty before God is supplanted by the subjectivistic language of self-fulfillment and being true to oneself.
She emerges from these trials a real princess: someone who is in possession of herself precisely because she is obedient to an authority higher than herself.
“Words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were”
Beauty is not merely an object of sight: beauty is mysteriously related to purity, to a seeing and a doing that are not greedy, grasping, or self-referential.
Is there something within Rosamond, perhaps a seed of undefined, unseen potency that germinates, grows, and blossoms into personal integrity, incorruptibility, and consistency of intention, all three of which together make good character?
He does mean, however, that the moral and spiritual truths that make us complete human beings are not so much objectives that we grasp with our minds as they are visions we hold up in our hearts and imaginations and which we constantly strive for.
We envision truth and it captures our whole being, drawing us continually forward “into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.”
Throughout this book I have endeavored to demonstrate how fairy tales nourish the moral imagination with the best food.
“Now there isn’t anything wrong with our children. But there is something the matter with the way we are raising them.”
A message of this book has been that reading good stories to children is one small but very important way to begin to do that something.
The story also teaches a lesson about friendship: we must always respect the freedom of a friend, because in the absence of that respect, genuine friendship cannot survive, nor do the friends grow to be mature and responsible persons.
“When we see people suffering or unfortunate,” the narrator interjects, “we feel very sorry for them. But when we see them bravely bearing their suffering and making the best of their misfortunes, it is quite a different thing. We respect, we admire them.”
Prince Dolor was loved, “first because, accepting his affliction as inevitable, he took it patiently; secondly because, being a brave man, he bore it bravely, trying to forget himself, and live out of himself, and in and for the other people.” This is a description of a saint.
I venture to say that George MacDonald had more to say about obedience as the cardinal condition for the perfection of our humanity than any writer of his time, or of ours.
Obedience is not, as some imagine, a choice to accept things blindly, but rather a path of knowing that enables us to act in a way consistent with our very nature and its perfection.
