Endlessly quotable, a Ulysses of adventure, Winston Churchill continues to fascinate all comers. Apropos our current literary project, we find the Great Commoner described in Aristotelian terms: "(Churchill's) great virtue lay in choosing well."
Fight or flight?-- courage (says Aristotle) is a moral virtue, prudence an intellectual one. Active yet contemplative, Churchill excelled at both: "By precept and example, he wove thought and action seamlessly, heroically together." Aristotle asserts that "magnanimity", greatness of soul and spirit, is humankind's great excellence.
Of all Americans, we think Abraham Lincoln most sanctifies Aristotle's insight. (Washington too, in different contexts.) Yeats wrote, "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the Life or of the Work." Perhaps for we mere mortals... but Churchill, Washington and Lincoln attained magnanimity as of Mahatmas, "a beauty of the spirit that transfigures you and me."
One could do worse than meditate these matters. "And will a' not come again?"
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