# “The form of every virtue at the testing point” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2026/11/01/the-form-of-every-virtue-at-the-testing-point-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2026-11-01T08:59:12-06:00
- Author: tollelege

“Hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely
painful—horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has
its pleasures.

It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself
for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is
also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you should 
therefore first defeat his courage.

Now this is a ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices, but not of
cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war
or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously
lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is
still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame.

The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce 
real self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility. And
in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice,
discovered the whole moral world for the first time.

In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the 
issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is
here a cruel dilemma before us.

If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into
the Enemy’s hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or
later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable
issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.

This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—
a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do
that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the
testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.

A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest
or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward;
he may learn too much about himself!”

–C.S. Lewis, _**[The Screwtape Letters](https://link.amazon/B0dgWR4Oi)**_ (New York:
HarperOne, 1941/2001), 160–162.

[⌊The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis⌉⌊The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis⌉[