The death of heroes, the recovery of the heroic

Christian Century, Dec 22, 1993 by David Hein

So in the nonheroic 1990s we are content to relegate our superheroes to the Saturday-morning cartoon shows. Indeed, the kind of hero worship practiced long ago would seem out of place today, when human beings have "come of age," having moved far beyond those primeval days when Homo sapiens paid obeisance and offered petitions to the vaguely remembered, awful, heroic ancestors of the tribe.

ASPECTS OF the contemporary mode are captured in the film They Came to Cordura (1959), in which Gary Cooper, working against his established screen persona, plays an army major who has been disgraced for showing cowardice in battle and consequently has been assigned as "awards officer" in a 1916 expedition into Mexico against Pancho Villa. Major Thorn selects five men as candidates for the Congressional Medal of Honor and guides them through rough border country to the safety of a rear base at Cordura. On the journey the five heroes reveal far more than was at first apparent about their motives and characters: the selfish and venal sides of these men are exposed, while Thorn's quite determination and self-sacrificial devotion to duty become apparent.

Christians should be familiar with such ambiguity. We speak of the church as a corpus mixtum because it comprises both saints and sinners. Of course, in each and every member is both saint and sinner--Christians are forgiven sinners still in via. The Christian story is an account of the journey of one true hero, whom many pilgrims follow at a greater or lesser distance. So the proper Christian understanding of war, for example, can never to be regard it as a righteous crusade replete with heroes and villains; at best it is a tragic last step undertaken in an attitude of repentance by those who may be only somewhat less guilty than their opponents. As H. Richard Niebuhr once stated, "Wars are crucifixions," in the course of which the greatest suffering falls not on the mighty but on the weak and the relatively innocent--on ordinary draftees, on mothers, on the children of Coventry and Cologne, of Somalia and Bosnia, of Cambodia and Iraq.

Religious-studies scholar Conrad Hyers has proposed replacing the perspective of "tragic heroism" with the outlook of "the comic hero" precisely because the latter view recognizes our fallenness and opposes all forms of dualistic thinking, and is thus much more congruent with Christian faith and the reality of the human condition. Tragic heroism, Hyers says, involves absolute dedication to causes and the clash of contending forces: good vs. evil, truth against error. It embraces the warrior virtues of courage, duty and honor. It is consonant with unquestioning obedience, the fight to the death, and kudos for the champion.

The comic vision, on the other hand, is intolerant of pride and pretension, of self-righteousness, of all finite claims to the infinite; it endorses humor, humility, child-likeness and the willingness to negotiate and settle differences. It is deeply suspicious of dividing the human family into the lowly and the lofty, the unrighteous and the righteous, the cowardly and the courageous. Its loyalty to the ultimate prompts the rejection of all human professions of goodness and claims to greatness as vanity, and enjoins acknowledgment of the dignity and worth each creature before God.