Josef Pieper (1904–1997) was a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher from Elte, Westphalia, Germany. He imbibed the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas but thought deeply about the rest of the Western tradition, ancient and modern (read a little more about him here). I have found his work a particularly helpful guide to thinking deeply and clearly about what it means to live rightly as a human being. His most famous work is Leisure: the Basis of Culture. If you want to get a sense of the breadth of his work, An Anthology, which he compiled at the end of his life is a great place to start.
In his book, The Four Cardinal Virtues, he describes the four virtues that the ancients considered basic to any good and virtuous life: wisdom, justice, courage (which he calls fortitude here), and temperance or self-control. In this scary time, I think we need very clear thinking about courage and fear. I found these few paragraphs a really good summary of the best I have read on the subject in the Western tradition:
To be brave is not the same as to have no fear. Indeed, fortitude actually rules out a certain kind of fearlessness that is based upon a false appraisal and evaluation of reality. Such fearlessness is either blind or deaf to real danger, or else is the result of a perversion of love. For fear and love depend on each other, and he who loves falsely, fears falsely. One who has lost the will to live does not fear death. But this indifference to life is far removed from genuine fortitude, it is, indeed, an inversion of the natural order. Fortitude recognizes, acknowledges, and maintains the natural order of things. The brave man is not deluded; he sees that the injury he suffers is an evil. He does not undervalue and falsify reality; he “likes the taste” of reality as it is, real; he does not love death nor does he despise life. Fortitude presupposes in a certain sense that a man is afraid of evil; its essence lies not in knowing no fear, but in not allowing oneself to be forced into evil by fear, or to be kept by fear from the realization of good.
Whoever exposes himself to a danger—even for the sake of good—without knowledge of its perils, either from instinctive optimism (“nothing can possibly happen to me”) or from firm confidence in his own natural strength and fighting fitness, does not on that account possess the virtue of fortitude.
It is possible to be genuinely brave only when all those real or apparent assurances fail, that is, when the natural man is afraid; not, however, when he is afraid out of unreasoning timidity, but when, with a clear view of the real situation facing him, he cannot help being afraid, and indeed, with good reason. If in this supreme test, in the face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear is not deterred from doing that which is good; if, moreover, he does so for the sake of good—which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward—this man, and he alone is brave.
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