“Ambition,” the fourth chapter of Courage, New Hampshire inspired a question for our cast:

“Is ambition, in any age, a virtue?”

Allen Marsh, “Abraham Foxe” in Courage, New Hampshire, has this to say:

Well, the Greeks certainly thought so. The Hebrews not so much. And the Romans couldn’t decide.

Personal ambition, to the Greeks, was indeed regarded as a virtue of sorts. In The Iliad, Achilles wanted glory rather than a long life, and that just about sums up the definition of ambition to my mind — the desire for something beyond the average. The general evidence of Greek ambition is visible in the ruins of the Parthenon and the Acropolis, and in the highly advanced sculptures left behind. Still, even the Greeks were careful to add that one must ever guard against hubris — ambition carried too far.

The ancient Hebrews believed that righteousness, and not ambition, was the fundamental aim in life. The Hebrew God spends a large portion of the early Old Testament thwarting the ambitions of the ancient people, ejecting Adam and Eve from the garden “lest they eat of the Tree of Life and live forever,” toppling the early boondoggle project known as the Tower of Babel, and visiting plague after plague upon those ambitious pyramid builders the Egyptians. The commandment against graven images is presumably a divine attempt to curb the ambition of man to glorify himself and, really, anything other than God.

The Romans had mixed feelings on the subject. The Roman republic as a group was ambitious enough to conquer the known world, but Julius Caesar’s personal ambition to be emperor was terrifying enough to his fellow senators for them to take matters into their own bloodstained hands. His successor, Augustus, had the more modest ambition of maintaining the empire as it was, without senseless expansionism, and this un-ambitious period of contentment ushered in an era of peace, at least for a while.

Christian teaching has much to say about ambition. The life of Christ was full of dire warnings about the consequences of heedless ambition, from the story of the rich fool who tore down his barns to build bigger ones to Jesus’ own overturning of the money changers’ tables in the temple. Still, it took a rich and presumably somewhat ambitious man to ask Pilate for Jesus’ crucified body and place it in his own tomb. And the rapid dissemination of Christianity throughout the known world and the subsequent collapse of Roman paganism must be regarded as one of the more ambitious of the plans of the Almighty.

So while ambition may not always be a virtue, I do think that the lack of ambition is widely regarded as, if not an outright sin, at least a character defect. And this is particularly so here in America. This land was discovered, conquered, and settled by people who all, at some point, had to have at least enough ambition to get on a boat and sail off into the unknown in search of a better life.

And from a storytelling point of view, without ambition you really don’t have much of a story. Without his ambition to be hardworking and honest, Joseph might never have risen to greatness in Egypt. Without his ambition to get home to Ithica, Odysseus might still be hanging around with the lotus eaters. Without his ambition to find the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones would have spent his fall semester grading papers. And without Silence Laud’s ambition to return to London and make something of himself, well… to paraphrase his own lines, Courage would be a very quiet town indeed without him as pastor.