reat truism
of the [Greek: meson] remains for all thinking men, and these people have
not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to
keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that
balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:
that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a
very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it
was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of
course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was
hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the
martyr and the suicide; and 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
Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex pas