Aristotle's brave man also has a life worth losing
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity
Aristotle offers a particularly close counterexample to this tentative claim. In the Nicomachean Ethics III.9, the virtuous and happy person feels death more painfully precisely because his life contains greater goods, yet accepts that loss for a noble action. III.8 also allows passion to assist courage when joined to choice and a worthy motive. His mean is therefore compatible with powerful feeling and costly attachment to life: it need not mean an emotionally diluted compromise. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III.8–9, W. D. Ross translation.
There remains a difference of emphasis. Aristotle makes the noble end decisive, whereas Chesterton's escape examples initially make survival the end and danger the means. The classical account does not supply Chesterton's exact formula, but it already brings together the value of living and a willingness to die. The opening opposition between ‘Paganism’ and Christianity consequently works better as Chesterton's dramatic arrangement of ethical ideals than as an exhaustive historical distinction. His concluding judgments about suicide and ‘Chinese courage’ likewise belong to the paragraph's moral polemic; they do not establish the motives of people who die by suicide or a clinical account of suicidal distress.
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