St. John’s Summer Academy (Santa Fe): Courage and the Soul

What is courage, and what are its deepest possibilities for each of us? What does the life-risking courage of battle have to do with the courage to reflect upon our own lives? We will follow the theme of courage through a range of texts, spanning the ancient and modern worlds: from the Greek historian Herodotus’ 480 BCE account of the battle at Thermopylae, where three hundred Spartans held off the massive Persian army for seven days by fighting with “bare hands and teeth,” to Aristotle’s philosophic exploration of the virtues of courage and “greatness of soul” in the Nicomachean Ethics, to 20th-century depictions in American film, and finally to Charles Portis’ American novel True Grit, the story of a tenacious young girl’s self-discovery on a quest to avenge her father. We will also reflect upon quietly courageous contemplations in the poems of Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, and Angelou.