Why everything starts with courage.

Courage is the “executive virtue”.

It isn’t simply one among the others: self-control, prudence and justice. It’s the precondition for all the others. Prudence without courage becomes analysis paralysis: the man who sees clearly but will not move. Self-control without courage turns into repression: the man who suppresses his feelings rather than integrating them. Justice without courage stays entirely theoretical: the man who knows what is the right thing to do but will not act on it. Every virtue, if it’s to become real in a man’s life rather than remain an ideal, has first to pass through the gate of courage.

Churchill put it plainly: "Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others." [Great Contemporaries (1937), “Alfonso XIII.”] That’s not rhetoric. It’s a description of how it actually works.

So we begin here with courage.

The word

The Greek word for courage is andreia, ἀνδρεία, which means, literally, manliness. It comes from anēr, the Greek word for man, which you’ll recognize in words like androgen and androgyny. The Latin is virtus, from vir, man. So courage is manliness in Greek and virtue is manliness in Latin, and the virtuous man and the courageous man turn out to be, etymologically, the same man.

This matters more than a bit of etymology ordinarily would. Somewhere along the way, a great many men have absorbed the notion that being a virtuous man is an impossible ideal, something imposed on him from outside, and aspirational in the worst sense of that word, meaning that it’s ultimately unattainable. St Maximus the Confessor says something altogether different. He says the virtues are, in fact, native to the soul.

For the one who is not a fool is wise, the one who is not cowardly or rash is courageous, the one who is not licentious is temperate, and the one who is not unjust is just… So, when we take away what is contrary to nature, that which is according to nature — and that alone — is wont to appear, just as when rust is removed, the natural gleam and brilliance of iron appears. — St Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus 95 (PG 90.309C–312A).

Note what that does to the picture: The virtuous man is not an impossible ideal; rather, he’s what a man is supposed to be, naturally. It’s the vices that are the departures: unnatural, distortions of what a man actually is when he’s functioning as he’s meant to function. They drag us down from what we could be. They make us less.

That’s the frame for everything that follows. The work here isn’t about you becoming something foreign to your nature. It’s about recovering what is already a natural part of you.

What courage actually is

Let’s be precise, because precision matters here.

Dr Cynthia Pury, one of the leading researchers on the psychology of courage, defines it as (1) a voluntary act, (2) in response to a perceived threat or risk, (3) in pursuit of a personally meaningful and often moral outcome [Pury & Woodward, “Courage,“ Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology (2009) vol. 1, p. 247]. Three elements, then, are necessary if we’re really talking about courage: it has to be voluntary, risky, and aimed at something that matters. Take away any one of them and you no longer have courage.

It isn’t courage if there’s no risk. If you’ve got no skin in the game, if it costs you nothing, if there’s no real possibility of loss, then you’re not being courageous. You’re being comfortable, which is a different thing entirely.

It isn’t courage if the thing doesn’t matter. What you’re risking something for has to carry moral weight or personal meaning; the stakes have to be real. Jumping into the ocean for the fun of it is a different act from jumping into the ocean to save someone.

And it isn’t courage unless you freely chose it. When you’re forced into doing something, your moral responsibility in it is compromised. Courage, by definition, is chosen, which means that every time you act courageously you are asserting something about who you are and what you value.

Aristotle makes the same point from a different angle. He describes courage as the mean, the virtuous middle, between cowardice on one side and recklessness on the other. [Nicomachean Ethics, Book III.6, 1115a.] The coward feels the fear and collapses under it. The reckless man feels nothing, or pretends to, and charges in without discernment. The courageous man feels the fear accurately and proportionately, and acts anyway, toward something genuinely good. He is neither paralyzed nor foolhardy. He’s measured.

This matters especially for men who have mistaken the suppression of fear for courage. Suppressing fear isn’t courage. Suppressing fear is aggression turned inward; it is the mark of a man who calls his avoidance stoicism and his passivity humility. The courageous man doesn’t suppress the fear; he walks through it.

Why courage comes first

There’s a second reason we begin with courage, beyond the logical one.

In the developmental sequence for men, courage is bound up with “Warrior energy,” and Warrior energy is the first of the four masculine archetypes to come fully online as a boy grows into a man. It’s what blossoms when puberty hits: the surge of drive and aggression, the urge toward independence, the need to go out and push against limits, to step outside the comfort zone, to test himself against the world. This is natural to the adolescent boy; it’s what he’s supposed to do.

When it doesn’t happen — when that fledgling Warrior energy isn’t supported, or is actively suppressed, or simply has nowhere to go — it creates problems that surface years later. I’ve seen it for decades in the men I work with: “failure to launch,” lack of direction, inability clearly to articulate a vision or a mission for his life, a nagging sense of inadequacy (which is John Eldredge’s question in Wild at Heart: do I have what it takes? [see ch. 3]), poor boundaries, self-medication. The patterns vary, but the root is the same: Warrior energy that was never properly forged.

So, a lot of men need to start here with courage. Maybe you need to start here, not because courage is the only virtue, but because without it nothing else moves.

The Warrior

Robert Moore, in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, describes the Warrior archetype. And if the word “archetype” puts you off, then think of it as a behavioral pattern or a human potential: a description of what a man looks like when this particular capacity is well developed and rightly ordered, and what he looks like when it isn’t. I use the language of archetypes as a heuristic, as a map, not as a manifesto.

The mature Warrior, in Moore’s account, is characterized by disciplined action in the service of righteous goals. Emotional regulation under pressure. Protective instincts toward those in his care. A commitment to excellence and to honor. The Warrior is not the man who picks fights. He is, however, very much the man you want beside you when things go sideways…

And just as Aristotle’s virtue is a mean between a deficiency and an excess, so, too, in Moore’s work, the Warrior has two bipolar shadow forms: (1) the Sadist, who has too much of the Warrior, who uses aggression for its own sake: domination, cruelty, or force as an end rather than a means. And (2) the Masochist, who has too little, who turns the aggression inward, toward self-destruction, self-sabotage, and toward victimhood dressed up as virtue.

In my experience the expression of the Sadist is more the exception. The Masochist is far more common. Most men who struggle with courage are not struggling because they’re too aggressive. They’re struggling because they’ve turned their Warrior energy against themselves, in ways that undermine their own agency and sabotage their own authority.

A footnote worth making: the four archetypes are no more independent of one another than the four virtues are. You cannot embody the Warrior fully without the King’s sense of justice and purpose to direct it, the Magician’s discernment to guide it, and the Lover’s passion to sustain it. Moore’s account, like Aristotle’s, is a portrait of integration and not of isolated strengths. But courage is where we begin.

How you build it

So how does a man build courage? The short answer is that you lean into your fear, push your edge, and stay there as long as you can.

This short answer is similar to something St Sophrony (Sakharov) said when he was a young monk on Mt Athos and which led to him meeting St Silouan of Mt Athos:

On the second day of Pascha [Monday of Bright Week], in either 1930 or 1931, an educated Russian hermit monk, he was an engineer, came to visit me in my cell at the Monastery of St. Panteleimon’s. “Fr. Sophrony, how will we be saved?” I loved this person. He was a very gentle and sweet person, but also very clever. I prepared him a cup of tea, gave it to him, and told him, “Stand on the edge of the abyss and when you feel that it is beyond your strength, break off and have a cup of tea.”

The next day, I ran into Elder Silouan, with whom I had not yet had personal contact, but I could sense his spiritual strength. And he said to me,

“Was Fr. Vladimir with you yesterday?”

I didn’t answer him, that is, I didn’t say, “yes, he was,” rather I said, “Perhaps I said something wrong?”

Silouan answered, “No, but what you told him was beyond his strength, beyond his measure. Come and let’s talk.”

That’s how he called me to speak with him. And because of this phrase, “Stand on the edge of the abyss and when you don’t have any more strength, rest a little and have a cup of tea,” our relationship began, our spiritual connection. [Archimandrite Sophrony, Conversation with Archimandrite Ephraim of Vatopedi, 20 Sept 1992.]

The longer answer is that courage is built the way any capacity is built: through practice, through repetition, and through the accumulation of evidence that you can do hard things. Albert Bandura, the Stanford psychologist who developed self-efficacy theory, identified four sources from which genuine confidence is built. [Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997), p. 79.]

(1)Enactive mastery experiences, which is actually succeeding at difficult things.

(2)Vicarious modeling, which is watching other men succeed at difficult things (and admiring them for their success rather than envying them).

(3)Verbal persuasion, which is being told by credible people that you can do it.

(4)And managing your physiological states, which means handling well the anxiety and the stress that accompany genuinely hard action.

The first of the four sources, enactive mastery, is by far the most powerful, because succeeding at a task gives you the most authentic evidence that you can, in fact, do it. And the way you accumulate mastery experiences is by starting with small steps and stacking up wins. Not small in the sense of trivial; no, small in the sense of calibrated, achievable, and ordered toward something larger: the cold shower, the conversation you’ve been avoiding, the commitment you’ve been postponing. Each of them, done, adds to the pile, and the pile, over time, becomes a foundation.

St Maximus again, and this is one of his better lines: “theory without practice is the theology of demons” [Ep 19. PG 90.601] You cannot think your way into courage. You cannot wish, or plan, or research your way into courage. You have to act, bodily, in ways that cost you something. And you have to act now rather than when the conditions are right, brother, because the conditions will never be right.

Your work this week

One sentence to finish, and I’ll say what I always say: don’t give yourself the noble answer, give me the true one.

One thing I’ve been avoiding because it genuinely scares me is…

Write it down if you can. What comes up will be diagnostic. It will tell you where your Warrior energy is stuck, and where the forging needs to happen first.

Next: the problem of inaction. Because knowing all of this, as you’ve probably already noticed, does not automatically produce any of it. There’s an epidemic of passivity among men right now, educated, capable, intelligent men who know exactly what they need to do and will not do it. We’ll look at why, and at what it takes to break the cycle. St Maximus has something to say about it. So does James Clear. I don’t know if they agree on much else, but on this they’re aligned.

The Forge is open.