Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the

province of St Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for

the Tomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas. So in the tradition, plenty of people ask the question,

what is courage or what does it mean to be courageous?

And they answer that question in different fashions.

But it's not clear that before the coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ that any of those answers are satisfactory and I'm not just

saying that like I'm Christian like I'm a Catholic priest and nothing before

Christ comes is good. But the authors themselves

who think seriously about this matter admits at some level that their responses, that their answers

are unsatisfactory. They realize a certain

tension or they realize a certain incompleasion for which they can't

sufficiently account. And so I want to ask the question, can a non-believer be

courageous and see what we can find in these resources that are present within

the tradition which ultimately come to perfection in our Lord Jesus Christ.

So let's get after it.

Okay, so I want to take little stops along the way with Homer and then with Plato and then with Aristotle. And as we pick up resources for with on our question here. Okay so first, Homer, you know Homer wrote these two poems the Iliad and the Odyssey and those poems they treat courageous deeds or

courageous feats so there's a kind of meditation there on what constitutes courage and we can

think especially of the character of Achilles who kind of dominates the

Iliad so you know that the Iliad begins with the line sing oh muse of the rage of Achilles why is he enraged well

He has been dishonored by Agamemnon who has taken away his slave girl and then he is enraged further by Hector who has

killed his friend Patrickless and so Achilles is posed with a kind of dilemma in the

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