Not by bravery alone: as the September 11 terrorists showed, courage alone--without the other classic virtues of justice, prudence, or temperance--is no virtue at all. (culture in context).

IN SEPTEMBER 11, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH hurled his vilest invective at the suicide bombers, calling them "faceless cowards." Standing amid the rubble and rescuers at ground zero, a grim-faced New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani concurred--"yeah, cowards."

Really?

Susan Sontag countered in Ms. magazine that it took more courage to fly into buildings than to drop bombs from 20,000 feet, and the ever-so-Politically Incorrect Bill Maher agreed. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer condemned talk about brave terrorists or cowardly Americans as heretical and dangerous, and West Wing's opening episode dismissed the notion of brave hijackers. But even conservatives like Mark Steyn of The Spectator said it was folly to call the bombers cowards, and FBI profilers admit they saw an unexpected and steely determination in the terrorists.

It rattled and upset many of us to think that the zealots who murdered almost 4,500 people might have had the same courage coursing through their veins as the New York firefighters and cops who gave their lives trying to rescue the victims of this slaughter. And it felt like an affront to consider that the fanatics who flew airliners into crowded buildings might be more fearless than our own military personnel. Isn't America the "home of the brave"? How could these terrorists be just as brave, or braver? What does that say about our courage, or courage itself? What sort of a virtue is bravery if mass murderers can possess it?

The scandal of brave terrorists is intense for Americans. In our folklore, films, and politics, courage is the prince of virtues, and we are half in love with the warrior's bravery. From James Fennimore Cooper's Hawkeye to Owen Wister's Virginian, Jack Schaefer's Shane, and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, our literary icons have shared a single trait: unflinching courage. At the cineplex, our celluloid heroes--Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, or Angelina Jolie--continue to be action figures who rush in "where angels fear to tread."

And in Washington and elsewhere our politicians are forever trying to cast themselves in this same heroic mold. Candidates fall over themselves trying to persuade us that they are "tougher" than their opponent on crime and drugs (and now terror), more willing to wage "war" on these social evils. To establish their warrior credentials, Democrat and Republican alike vote for unproven and unnecessary weapons systems and maximum-security prisons destined to house nonviolent drug offenders. Hardly anyone on Capitol Hill is willing to be tagged as thoughtful or compassionate when their challenger is brave.

The trouble is--as September 11 drove home so forcefully--even villains can be courageous. In literature and life, the lionhearted are often jackals and serpents. Melville's Captain Ahab would follow Moby Dick into hell and not flinch at losing limb or life along the way. Jack London's Wolf Larsen fears nothing above or beneath his decks, but it would be tough to find a crueler pair of shipboard despots. Macbeth was as brave a soldier as ever served a king, and Richard III as fearless a regent as Henry V, but even Judas could have taught these two a lesson in loyalty. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon had courage enough for an army but couldn't have filled a thimble with their justice, prudence, or compassion.

COURAGE--OR FORTITUDE--IS ONE OF THE FOUR CLASSIC virtues, a partner with justice, prudence, and temperance. The willingness to stand up for what one believes, to defend the state against foreign threats, courage was the virtue of soldiers, according to Plato and Hegel. John Stewart Mill, however, said ordinary citizens would need civil courage to protect their democracies--often from their own soldiers. This bravery, Western thinkers have argued, is the virtue we need to do the hard thing, to be willing to suffer pain and death for a just cause. Without courage neither individuals nor states could be good.

But courage alone, without justice or prudence or temperance, is no virtue at all. Plato said that "justice, temperance, and wisdom, when united with courage, are better than courage only," but Saint Ambrose was more blunt. According to the fourth-century bishop of Milan, "Fortitude without justice is an instrument of evil."

Augustine echoed this sentiment, noting that unless courage is grounded in the love of God it is but a "noble vice." And Thomas Hobbes argued that "amongst the passions courage inclines men to private revenges, and sometimes to endeavor the unsettling of the public peace." Indeed, in a line that aptly describes our reaction to September 11, Hobbes noted that the "coolness of a villain not only makes him far more dangerous, but also makes him more abominable in our eyes than he would be without it."

In the aftermath of the bombings, Giuliani and others have encouraged us to be brave, to find the nerve to get back on our feet and on with our lives--in spite of this tragedy and a continuing anthrax scare. To inspire and fortify this stamina, a field of American flags have sprouted on lawns, windshields, and ballplayers' uniforms, and "God Bless America" has become the national anthem and the punctuating refrain of every presidential comment.

Meanwhile, editorial pages and radio talk shows are cluttered with letters and pundits suggesting that America would never have fallen prey to the September 11 bombings if we had shown more nerve in hunting down the villains of previous terrorist attacks. It was our lack of courage, our timidity on the world stage, that invited these bombings and emboldened our enemies.

This is a tired harangue, and in a nation that spends more on defense than the next seven largest countries combined, it seems like folly. Still, all this focus on courage raises some hard questions. Were we attacked because we weren't brave enough? Is courage the single virtue we need to respond to the present crisis? And if it is, is it only the physical courage to stand against terrorists? Don't we also need some of the moral courage California representative Barbara Lee showed on September 12 when she alone called upon Congress to stop and think before acting. As we shift into a siege mentality, won't we need a press and public with the courage to ask hard questions about the justice and methods of our war on terror? Won't we need the courage to take a long hard look at our own sins?

IF WE DO NEED COURAGE, WE NEED A bravery rich in justice, compassion, and wisdom. Only a few months ago our Lone Star president stood on the world stage and flouted the judgment of every other democracy, rejecting an international treaty on the environment and ignoring a chorus of pleas to abandon an unproven and destabilizing missile defense initiative. That wasn't courage. It was arrogance.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to refuse to sign dozens of international agreements on human rights or to submit to the authority of international courts of justice. And Americans consume global resources--particularly fossil fuels--at a gluttonous, unconscionable pace, mainly because we can. It is not courage to defend the "American way of life" if that way of life threatens the future of the planet and all our children's children.

Thomas Aquinas called Courage one of the "cardinal" or "hinge" virtues, because these four virtues support one another and every other good habit. On September 11 we got a glimpse of what unhinged courage looks like, stripped of justice, prudence, temperance, or mercy.

In America we have tremendous faith in the power and nobility of courage, particularly physical courage. So it's a sobering lesson to be reminded that--in ourselves or our enemies--fearlessness without justice or mercy isn't bravery. It's savagery.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.