Courage And Cowardice

Dictionary.com  defines courage as "the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear," [1] and defines cowardice as "lack of courage to face danger, difficulty, opposition, pain, etc." [2]

This entry defines them differently.  Borrowing words from Dictionary.com, courage is defined here as the heart driven by love "that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear," and cowardice is defined here as the intellectually-calculated and rationalized decisions "that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear" after a careful weighing of risks versus reward.

Christ endured all the pains leading up to and including His crucifixion out of love in His Sacred Heart for God and for man.  At the end, Christ had not gained anymore for Himself than when He had begun, for He was already the Son of God before His Passion and remained the Son of God after it.  In this sense, Christ is the picture of pure courage.

By this strict definition, there cannot be that many people in the history of man who can claim to have the courage equal to that of Christ, for even those seemingly courageous would likely have in the back of their minds some expectation of reward in exchange for a courageous feat (this includes the saintly ones who chose to become martyrs with the expectation of Heaven but excludes those humble enough who never had any expectation of a Heavenly reward), nor can it be said that there has been nobody who had laid down his or her life for the love of another without an expectation of some kind of reward.

A seeming absence of a reward could very easily be mistaken as selfless when on close examination, it is not.  For example, a man who saves his wife by dying is not entirely selfless if he had wanted her to raise their children, or a bodyguard who takes a bullet is not entirely selfless because he is paid to do so, but a man who saves a complete stranger by dying is selfless if he is not otherwise rewarded, and the mother who pushed her daughter out of the way from a vehicle headed toward them had died selflessly with love in her heart. [3]

The first two examples in the paragraph above are harsh. Equally harsh, perhaps or perhaps not, is to call a leader who has the power to send other people to war to die for their country or for an ideology (whether it is democracy or extremism) a coward despite his reluctance to send his own children and lovers first to war or going to the front lines himself.  However, it would be most unconscionable to call a person who enlists in the military voluntarily knowing full well that he could die in an armed conflict a coward based on this entry's definition of a coward despite the person who enlists must have known of the risks and had deliberately weighed such risks before making the decision to enter the military.  On the other hand, the volunteer soldier cannot be deemed courageous because his actions in dying for another would not have arisen out of a selfless love but rather after an assessment of risks and benefits.  In other words, a soldier's death on a battlefield is not the same as the courageous death of Christ on the cross: there is no equivalence.

Christ with His pained and bleeding Heart is the perfect portrait of courage.  In contrast, Satan with his cold, calculating and cunning intellect has to be the epitome of cowardice for Satan would never want to suffer in an incarnated state even though it wants man to suffer in the flesh by selling his soul for false and transient earthly rewards, and then to suffer eternally for finding futility in the repentance of sins and rejecting God with heartless and calibrated disdain.

Courage requires man to come face to face with his enemy, just as Christ came face to face with Satan in the desert and Satan's minions that eventually led to His crucifixion. Courage also requires man to love, not vanquish, his enemy who was once a neighbor.  To do otherwise is to be like Satan, the quintessential coward, whose goal is to destroy man, God's beloved creation, since it cannot destroy God.


[1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/courage
[2] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/cowardice?s=t
[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mother-dies-mother-apos-day-175828136.html