What is Courage.

Quotation:
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much
addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely
rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It
means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to
die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is
not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece
of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be
printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the
whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite
brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if
he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from
death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier
surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to
combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness
about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will
be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for
death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He
must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it;
he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic
riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done
so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of
it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the
distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him
who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since
above the European lances the banner of the mystery of
chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death;
not the [Oriental] courage, which is a disdain of life.
... Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), Orthodoxy,
London, New York: John Lane Company, 1909, p. 170
See the book at http://cqod.com/r/rs377