Courage

From an essay by Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger, “Mut,” in Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1980), p. 52 (my translation):

Courage is the wind that drives ships to far shores, the key to all treasures, the hammer that forges great empires, and the shield without which no culture survives. Courage is the individual's commitment to inevitable consequences, the hurtling of an idea against matter without regard for the outcome. Courage is allowing yourself to be nailed to the cross, alone, for your cause. Courage is to affirm, in the final nervous spasm and with your dying breath, the principles for which you stood and fell. To hell with an age that wants to take courage and men from us!

Everyone has experienced this feeling too, no matter how dull he may be. There is something about courage that cannot be resisted, something which jumps from one heart to other hearts at the moment of action. Unless one's character is utterly depraved and ignoble, the feeling for the heroic is not so easy to escape. Struggle is certainly sanctified by its cause; and a cause is even more sanctified by struggle. How else could you respect an enemy? Only the brave can fully understand this.

Struggle is always a holy thing, God's judgement over two ideas. It is up to us to support our cause with greater and greater determination, and so to fight is our ultimate reason and what we have fought for and won is our only true possession. No fruit will ripen for us unless it has endured storms of iron, and the best and the most beautiful also demand that they be won through earnest struggle.

Rudolf Schlichter, Ernst Jünger (c. 1929)