376 becoming more human by becoming more godliketo the structures of society, of thought, and of character and by refus-
ing, in our relations to others, to settle for the middle distance.
Courage may at fi rst not seem to be a virtue of connection at all. It
touches on every aspect of existence, not simply or directly on our deal-
ings with other people. Courage is not simply the fi rst virtue of the citizen
and of the thinker. It is also the enabling virtue, without which all other
virtues, including respect, forbearance, and fairness, are rendered sterile.
Courage has a decisive bearing on our connections to other peo-
ple. We cannot become bigger without being courageous. We cannot
transform our ties to others, in the direction sought by the religion of
the future, without becoming bigger. Cowardice is belittlement. Th e ac-
cep tance of belittlement negates a defi ning goal of the spiritual trans-
formation for which the religion of the future speaks and corrupts all of
our relations to one another.
In the forms of moral consciousness that prevailed before the rise of
the higher religions, courage was associated with the ethic of martial
valor that the world religions rejected in favor of an ethic of universally
inclusive fellow feeling and disinterested, sacrifi cial benevolence. In so
doing, they also redefi ned what it means to be courageous and what
makes courage so important. Th ey separated courage from fi ghting and
domination, and associated it, instead, with agape and mindfulness of
others.
It is this reinvention of courage that the religion of the future must
both reaffi rm and develop. What it must reaffi rm is the rejection of the
old ethic of proud self- assertion and will for dominance. What it must
develop is the internal relation of courage to the experience and the
virtues of connection. In the moral vocabulary of Western civilization,
this eff ort may appear as an attempt more fully to reconcile the pagan
ideal of greatness with the Christian ideal of love and, inside Christi-
anity, the ideal of love with the idea of embodied spirit as the infi nite
within the fi nite.
Th ese categories, laden as they are with the baggage of over two
thousand years of spiritual confl ict and intellectual history, fail to do
justice to the human experience that is at stake in the reinvention of
courage. Th e same theme recurs in this account of each of the virtues of
connection: the quality of our attachments is modifi ed by the enact-
ment of our powers of transcendence. Th e solution that we give to the