Note 119 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal (continued 2)
Richard Aldington translation
Laws, Book I. The exact text of Plato is: ‘In the order of virtues, wisdom is first, temperance comes next, courage occupies the last place.’ Plato here means by courage (see the context, notably the passage about those soldiers who ‘though insolent, unjust, immoral, know how to fight’) Man’s aptitude for facing death. It seems that he would not have given the first place to the courage which is strength of mind, a resistance to misfortune, as the Stoics afterwards did. With him strength of mind always comes after justice—according to his doctrine, it is a consequence of justice. Moreover, the courage placed in the supreme rank by Barrès is not Stoic patience but the active defiance of death. For Nietzsche and Sorel it is essential audacity, where audacity is irrational—a form of courage depreciated by all ancient moralists and their disciples. (See Plato, Laches; Aristotle, Ethics, VIII; Spinoza, Ethics, IV, 69; even the poets—‘Our reason which commands our fire,’ Ronsard.)
It seems that facing death, even on behalf of justice, was not so much the object of praise among the ancient philosophers as it is among the moderns. In the Phaedo, Socrates is praised for his justice; he is not very loudly praised because he died for justice. Moreover, the views of the ancients on this point seem to me well expressed by Spinoza: ‘Death is a thing of which the free man thinks least of all,’ a thought which does not imply much admiration for those who face death bravely. One wonders whether the veneration of courage, at least among the moralists, has not been created by Christianity, with the importance it attaches to death, and the subsequent appearance before God.
I cannot leave this point without recalling a passage where Saint-Simon speaks of a nobility ‘accustomed to be good for nothing except to get itself killed’, Mémoires, t. xi, page 427, ed. Cheruel. It may be asserted that there is not one modern writer, even a Duke of France, who would speak of courage in such a tone.