The death of heroes, the recovery of the heroic

Christian Century, Dec 22, 1993 by David Hein

THE "HEROIC" POINTS to certain positive features of flawed human beings who are in fact a mixture of virtues, vices and motives. The heroic vision accepts the fact that, as Plato makes clear in his Republic, the heroic by itself is not enough. England's King Henry V and his "happy few" were heroic in their victory at Agincourt, but the point of their endeavor, the conquest of France, was less praiseworthy. The same is true of Lieutenant Redwood and his band of brothers. The Christian sees that the heroic needs to be guided by the wisdom of faith and ruled by love, and so finds the stories of Perpetua, Polycarp and Telemachus, of Oscar Romero, Jerzy Popieluszko and Mother Teresa, more meaningful than those of Jason, Theseus and Heracles.

The heroic needs neither a heroic age nor fortunate to be operative. It asks for no special trials, only the ordinary tests occasioned by our being in the world, thrown as we are, Pascal said, into a corner of the cosmos where meaning is not apparent. If the experience of the hero often includes the brutal sequence of glorification followed by public humiliation, the heroic course is more one of quiet effort, repentance, amendment of life and renewed striving.

THE PATRON saint of the heroic might be Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Enchiridion militis Christiani, published in 1503, was a manual for a new kind of Christian knight. This kind of hero displays no spectacular powers but does teach the ignorant, lift up the fallen and comfort the unhappy; he rescues no beleaguered maidens but remains loyal to spouse and children. The Christian soldier engages in an inner struggle to control envy, greed, lust and wrath. "When burning grief of heart goads you to vengeance, remember," Erasmus said, "that nothing is more unlike anger than the thing which anger counterfeits, namely, courage." His valiant knight--humble, loving, practical, studious, peaceful--looked more like an antihero to Erasmus's contemporaries than a hero. But the portrait limned in the Enchiridion provides us today with the sort of preliminary sketch we need as we begin to consider the meaning of the heroic in this age of the death of heroes. It is, moreover, an image of the hero that is very much in harmony with the distinctive portrayals of heroes in literature by women in recent decades. As religion scholar Mara E. Donaldson has observed, the heroes in popular fantasies written by women are typically involved not so much in accomplishing great deeds as in becoming a certain type of person. Meg Murry, the hero of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, undertakes a successful mission of rescue, but her real journey entails a movement toward selfawareness and the mature love of others.

Joseph Campbell has said that the hero of myth is a being who does what no one else can or will do. Today we must distinguish the heroic from the hero and say that the heroic is what all of us can and must undertake. The most important occasions of heroic striving lie pretty close to home: the efforts of the young to achieve independence and a sense of purpose, the commitment of responsible selves to marry and raise families, the work of parents in setting their children free and then in renewing their own lives. The Aztecs, who had a notion of multiple heavens, were wise to believe that women who died in childbirth went to the same heroic heaven as warriors who were killed in battle. The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has rightly pointed out that while ethics courses tend to focus on big social questions like capital punishment, censorship and the policies of hospitals and corporations, students also need to think carefully about the virtues and vices of everyday life: compassion, self-respect, courage, honor, genorosity, jealousy, narcissism and self-deception.