Cinemas, Aristotle, and Courage: Why Truth is Not Enough

The young Englishman sat in the darkened movie theater smelling the popcorn, listening to the excited hubbub of voices around him, and waited for the movie to start. Fleeing a rising sense of impending disaster, and disillusioned after years by what he called “ideological activism,” he had escaped an increasingly anxious Europe and arrived in New York seeking safe haven and a fresh start. The theater was located in an area of Manhattan populated largely by German Americans and he had ducked into it looking for two hours in which to forget his concerns about what was happening in Europe.

The clack of the projector started behind him, a broad beam of light cutting through the darkness, casting flickering images of Nazi tanks flying across broad plains sweeping away fleeing Polish forces like so much chaff; reminding him of why he’d come to America. It was when the pictures of ragged, defeated Polish soldiers began to appear on the screen that he first heard it, bursting out of the darkness from the audience around him, freezing his blood, and leaving him stunned: “Kill them, kill them all!” The insistent, explosive cries continued every time Poles appeared in the newsreel.

After the movie, as he stumbled out into the glare of a frenetic Manhattan day, he was confronted by the unwelcome and startling realization that the modern beliefs and ideals he had trusted in possessed neither the strength nor the intellectual coherence to answer the strong, potent, and deadly force that had revealed itself in the theater.[1]

The young poet was W.H. Auden, and his experience in the movie theater with the German-American audience would start him on an intellectual and spiritual journey that would eventually lead him back to the Christianity of his youth. He came to see it as being the only force strong enough, and only truth clear enough, to answer the monsters both metaphorical and literal, of a modern world preparing to tear itself apart.

But truth alone is not enough. One must also have the courage to speak and act on behalf of the truth—often at the risk of personal loss. One person who understood this was C.S. Lewis. In a letter to his brother written in 1940, Lewis describes one such act of courage on the part of a friend, Charles Williams (at the time, Williams was lecturing at Oxford on the English poet, John Milton):

On Monday, Charles Williams lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb—because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about “the sage and serious doctrine of virginity” which it would never occur to the modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which cannot be faked, very puzzled, but spellbound. He forced them to lap it up. I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected. What a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion—I wonder is it the case that the (person) who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins? After all, the Nazis largely got into power by simply talking the old straight stuff about heroism in a country full of cynics and buggers.[2]

Lewis understood that knowing the truth is not enough. One must have the courage to steadfastly and patiently proclaim it, even in a culture that stubbornly and angrily shouts that no such thing exists. That’s why at Cambridge House one of our values is courage: engaging in the most important matters while never compromising the truth of God’s Word. This will mean that at times, we will need to “disregard the temporary climate of opinion,” not out of spite, but in order to remain faithful to God’s Truth even when doing so risks making us unpopular.

But where are we to find the courage required to proclaim the Truth, particularly in a culture that often denies the very idea of such virtues? As Lewis put it, “we make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” One answer is to mine the riches of the historic Western and Christian tradition for authors who can give insight on courage and where it can be found. One such author is Aristotle, and he gives us a succinct answer: courage is to be found and developed by engaging in acts that require courage. As he puts it:

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts…by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and by being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly.[3]

This is why at Cambridge House as we seek to remain faithful to God’s Truth (even when we’re hesitant to do so), our hope is that we’ll grow more and more in courage and thus become obedient to the Apostle Paul’s admonition found in 1 Corinthians 16:13-14: “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love...”

[1] This incident is referenced in Jacobs, Alan. Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. Oxford University Press, 2018.

[2] Lewis, C.S. Yours Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis. Harper One, San Francisco, 2008, p. 60.

[3] Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics Book II, Moral Ethics, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press. (emphasis added).