'Tis not too late to seek a
newer world.
Push off and sitting well in
order smite
The sounding furrows; for
my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset,
and the baths
Of all the western stars,
until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down:
It may be we shall touch
the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles,
whom we knew.

Alfred Lord Tennyson put these words in the mouth of aging Ulysses, who was prepared to risk his old bones in one last voyage rather than rot in a static and safe kingship:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven;
that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It is this resilience, this deep-rooted courage that cannot abide the contented somnolence of decay, that characterizes every hero in every memorable tale of human lore: Ulysses, Arthur, Christian, Rudolf Rassendyll, Bilbo Baggins and the rest. Heroes have restless hearts and need adventure with its accompanying effort and peril in order to be in their true element. And it is with heroes that we most easily identify, since it is their lives, fictional or otherwise, that have made the deepest impression on the imagination of men.

Why should this be so?

Looked at in the cold light of reality, the efforts and perils that heroes like Ulysses undertake are highly undesirable, not something that we naturally go looking for. A normal human being is not by reflex a masochist. We do not have a deep-rooted need to get killed or maimed; what we want is to be happy: completely, securely, blissfully happy. We do not want, as a modus vivendi, the life of a hero.

So why our interest?

There are several easy answers. Heroes do good deeds and so are models of virtue which we can admire, some will say. This is to some extent true, but it does not explain the fascination the hero has for us. People can be good without being heroes, and heroes themselves can be imperfect in their virtue without losing their heroic appeal. The great theme of tragedies is the flawed hero, a man who is fundamentally good but who does evil and suffers the consequences: Oedipus, Cuchulain, Hamlet. They need to be good in order to be heroes, but it is not just goodness that makes us so willing in spirit to put on their shoes.

A second explanation is that heroes are simply supermen, with powers and abilities enabling them to do things we frail mortals can only dream about. In other words, heroes live out our ego trips. But this is to forget that villains can be supermen too, and many heroes are not as physically endowed as a Hercules or a Samson. In fact, part of the interest in heroes is the fact that they are vulnerable: they set out to confront dangers that could easily destroy them, they need a lot of help from the gods, fate or luck, and it is the choices they make and the courage they have rather than their physical prowess that is the meat of their adventures.

Another idea is that the hero makes a big impact on human (and non-human) affairs. In other words he is a hero because he is not an anonymity. Ordinariness is something we have an innate horror of: being born, growing up, working, getting married, having children, getting old, and dying. We instinctively abhor this kind of existence if we come to think that this is all that there is, with nothing beyond death except a decaying corpse. We need more, and it is in the adventures of a hero that we vicariously find it.

This is halfway toward the truth. The underlying restlessness of a hero (and of us who admire him) comes from the perception that the ordinary achievements and joys of an ordinary life are just not enough by themselves to make that life worth living.

Now God be thanked
Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth,
and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye,
and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old
and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour
could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

 

Such wrote Rupert Brooke in 1914. He had enjoyed what life had had to give, and was glad to leave it all for a uniform. If we are not completely sunk in hedonism or materialism then at some time in our lives we will surely feel the same need, to shake free of the convenient and the comfortable and do something worthwhile. We all need, if our souls are not at the level of the mud, to be heroes.

But the question then is, why should an ordinary life not be enough? What is wrong with this world or with ourselves that we cannot be content?

It is a little quick to answer, Original sin. Original sin has two aspects: the sin itself, which means we are conceived in a state of separation from God, without grace, and the effects of that sin on our nature, leaving us with what are called the fomes peccati, or sources of sin. These sources of sin consist in a fourfold wound to our human nature: ignorance, whereby the intelligence has difficulty in grasping truth and falls easily into error; malice, whereby the will is egocentric; concupiscence, whereby the concupiscible appetites get out of control, and weakness, whereby the irascible appetites (i.e., our desire for things that take time and effort to achieve) falter and fail. It is possible to a great extent to overcome these defects by grace and the practice of the cardinal virtues: prudence against ignorance, justice against malice, temperance against concupiscence and fortitude against weakness. But putting Original sin right does not make a man more contented with the world, human and natural, in which he lives. Quite the opposite. Virtuous men, who are able to raise their minds and hearts above the low and narrow limits of sinful desires are more likely (dare I say it) to feel that inborn dissatisfaction with the portion of this universe that God has given to man. It is the men who live good lives on earth who feel that nameless longing when gazing at the stars. Those preoccupied with the tight, practical world of sin never take the time to glance upwards and so awaken that sense of missing something. Anyone who has eyes to see cannot get away from the impression (at least I can't) that there is something not right about the mechanism of Creation. It is a beautiful, complex, balanced, wonderful thing, but it is not—our hearts never stop telling us—as it could and should have been.

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

What is wrong with the universe?

Well, ultimately, nothing, in the sense that all the bad in Creation is used by God to the effecting of a good that will make all the imperfection worthwhile. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas:

...as Augustine says (Enchir. 11), God is so powerful that He can even make good out of evil. Hence many good things would be taken away if God permitted no evil to exist; for fire would not be generated if air was not corrupted, nor would the life of a lion be preserved unless the ass were killed. Neither would avenging justice nor the patience of a sufferer be praised if there were no injustice (Summa Theologica, I, Q.48, A.2, ad 3).

Here I shall put my head on a block and query, not the argumentation of Augustine and Aquinas, but the example the latter gives of the lion and the ass. A lion is not evil: nothing is that is created by God. But it is harmful to the natural good of other creatures. Anyone who has seen a film of lions hunting will have a sense of unease at watching them spend up to a quarter of an hour choking the life out of a hapless buck. If an animal must die, why should it be so gruesomely? Why, come to think of it, should creatures die? Why did God make lions, or tigers, or deadly viruses and bacteria, or leeches or the thousands of species that kill and maim other creatures? And why create a world in which all creatures can be frozen by cold, or drowned by floods, or burnt by fire?

These questions raise a hundred others like them. I shall save space and crystallize them all into one: looking at the world around us, we can understand what constitutes the good of everything in it: we know what any creature needs to be complete and content; and looking at the world around us, we can perceive that the good of everything is threatened, undermined, weakened and even destroyed by some or other agent. Why should this be so? The question is important because these evils seem to be built into the order of things. Pain, sickness, death, are as much a part of this existence as breathing. And it seems clear enough that it was this way right from the beginning. When Adam was created, he was endowed with the Praeternatural Gifts which protected him from the physical harm around him. Physical harm has always been a part of the order of things. But why have such an order?

The answer is that this universe was designed for a humanity that is not yet saved, and hence not yet arrived at its true home. When we see the goodness of things—the beauty of a landscape, the joy of life of a bird, the contentedness of a cow—we know how they should be in their perfect state. We instinctively grasp what the perfect state is: the trouble-free, misery-free, fear-free paradise that has many names: Arcadia, the Elysian fields, Atlantis, Valinor, a paradise that has never in fact existed. Knowing it, picturing it, longing for it, we can never really be contented with this world as it is, and thus is born in us the restlessness, the desire to somehow find the blessed realm that—however vaguely and confusedly—we sense must exist if there is to be any sense in things at all.

All this is on the natural plane, but it is the indispensable ground on which the supernatural seed of the Faith is sown. The whole force of Faith lies in that it confirms that a perfect, and more than perfect, happiness can be found, that there is a blessed realm that God has made for us, and that this existence is not a spoiled Utopia but merely a preparation for the bliss to come. God will have His creatures to be happy, but He will have them seek Him out with all the generosity of their free wills, with this life as a path and they as pilgrims.

"But now in this Valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again that he had no armour for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture, and stand his ground. For, thought he, had I no more in mine eye, than the saving of my life, 'twould be the best way to stand" (Pilgrim'sProgress).

Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

It is typical of any hero that at some time he reaches a point of no return: the deed he must do will cost him dearly, but to turn back will cost him everything. There is no convenient third option. The idea is always the same: the great prize the hero seeks has a great price attached to it, and the price will cost the hero all he has to give and even then be scarcely enough. There is no such thing as a go-slow hero. This we take for granted; the question is, why?

The answer is in the underlying perception we have that once a man has divined what is truly to his happiness, what he is made for, then his love of it must be made adequate for it, and this is done by his being forced to forego love for anything less. He is obliged to purge himself of any attachments, comforts or affections that in any way impede his great love from breaking out of its seed. The drama of the hero is that sometimes the lesser love he abandons seems scarcely inferior than the one to which he gives himself. In Christian's case the fear for his soul is counteracted by the fear for his life; for the Light Brigade a love of England that leaves no room for cowardice is counteracted by the perception that their death will be militarily futile. There is an interior struggle, the greater love triumphs and grows stronger in consequence.

Perhaps the point is better made by saying that no man will be happy in Paradise if he is not ready to be happy in it. The prince will not live happily ever after with the princess until difficult and costly deeds (like killing dragons) have forced his love to grow beyond the sentimental and become something like an ingrained virtue. In other words, it takes time, and great efforts, and great trials, to really mould the soul.

This is rich soil for the Faith. The whole purpose of the Christian life is not so much to avoid Hell as to make our souls fit for Heaven. God will have with Him those who are like Him and totally given to Him. Those who are like God are those who have the fullness of grace in their souls along with the supernatural virtues that enable them to think, love and act as God Himself would in their bodies. Those totally given to God are those who have shed all egoism, all lesser affections that were used to feed self-love.

Here I must make clear that we are not expected to abandon lesser affections purely and simply—our love for those near to us will last into the next life—but only those affections that in any way detract from the love of God and hence feed love of self. At the bottom of our souls we veer between love of God and love of self, and all other loves are ultimately expressions of one or the other of these two fundamental inclinations.

Growing in the love of God is a radical exercise of free will. Because it involves overcoming the egoism of our fallen nature there can be nothing half-hearted about it—pride is too stubborn an enemy for that—either in the acceptance of what God imposes as conditions for our love of Him, or in what we are left to do of our own generosity. Holiness is not for the halfhearted, or as someone succinctly put it: every hero may not be a saint, but every saint is a hero.

Bright Eärendil was then lord of the people that dwelt nigh to Sirion's mouths; and he took to wife Elwing the fair, and she bore to him Elrond and Elros, who are called the Half-elven. Yet Earendil could not rest, and his voyages about the shores of the Hither Lands eased not his unquiet. Two purposes grew in his heart, blended as one in longing for the wide Sea: he sought to sail thereon, seeking after Tuor and Idril who returned not; and he thought to find perhaps the last shore, and bring ere he died the message of Elves and Men to the Valar in the West, that should move their hearts to pity for the sorrows of Middle-earth. (The Silmarillion)

And there grew great tracts of wilderness,
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
But man was less and less, till Arthur came.
For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,
And after him, King Uther fought and died,
But either failed to make the kingdom one.
And after these King Arthur for a space,
And thro' the puissance of his Table Round,
Drew all their petty princedoms under him,
Their king and head, and made a realm,
and reigned. —Idylls of the King.

To my mind it is characteristic of the true hero to seek not only his own good, but the good of those near and dear to him. In the first passage quoted from the Silmarillion, Tolkien's epic account of his mythical world of Middle-earth, almost all the kingdoms of Elves and Men have been destroyed by the power of Morgoth, the terrible dark lord of Angband in the north. The survivors have fled southwards to the mouths of the Sirion River, awaiting Morgoth's inevitable mopping up. Eärendil is their king, all the other kings having been killed, and it is he who undertakes the near-suicidal voyage westwards to the lands of the Valar—of whose order Morgoth was once a member—to seek their help.

In Arthur's Britain the inhabitants are in a similar state of ruin thanks to constant civil wars, and it is Arthur who, by his ingenuity and courage, temporarily sets things right. No hero helps purely himself.

What motivates his altruism?

It is not enough to say, a simple kindheartedness. A kindly man will not undertake superhuman toils and hang his life from a thread, perhaps for years on end, simply because he feels sorry for the misfortune of others. The desperate urgency of purpose in an Eärendil or an Arthur manifests something far stronger than benevolence. One feels that the hero's own need and the need of the people for whom the hero makes his extraordinary efforts are one and the same thing. For a hero, to save his own is to save himself. The hero, in other words, has become aware of the bond between himself and those around him and acts in consequence.

The way we human beings are designed, we are made for something outside of ourselves. It is the nature of any creature not to find its purpose for existence in itself. Any creature that tries to do so becomes evil, as did Lucifer when he said, I will not serve.

We are made, first and foremost, for God, naturally. But this dependency, this incompleteness, if I can put it that way, of a created being is underscored by there being many different creatures, each dependent upon the others in some way, and each designed to bring good to the others. I can so much the more appreciate that I depend upon God by being aware just how much I depend upon my neighbour, and it is by helping my neighbour, often grumblingly and grudgingly, that I am eventually taken out of myself and brought to the service of God. It all hangs together.

In the hero this truth is highlighted in a dramatic way by the fact that the help he must give is indispensable. The nation perishes if he does not do what is required of him. Eärendil sets sail, Arthur takes up the sword because they live for that purpose: that mission of saving their people has been given to them and to none other, and to reject it would be to reject their own existence.

It is the same with us. To think a life is futile because it is not filled with grand deeds is to miss the point. The grand deeds of a hero are a literary way of expressing the grandeur of lesser deeds that Providence is contented with from most of us. We want our lives to be worth something—which is why heroes attract us—but it is just a case of seeing where the true worth is, since we cannot all save the world and are not meant to. Acts of charity or simply of justice are important because the stakes are so high. Christ's description of the Particular Judgment makes our eternal fate depend to a large extent on the acts of charity we do or don't do for others, and it is acts of supernatural charity that can be the make or break of another soul's salvation. To give the decisive push to a single soul on its journey to Heaven is of more importance than the political well-being of a dozen Arthurian Britains, keeping in mind that that decisive push may be the decisive push for oneself, too: "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."

The world of heroes is a world artistically crafted, that is, something like a painting or a poem. In creating it the writer so arranges, highlights and suppresses events and details that one can grasp clearly truths about this existence that in the real stream of the world are obscured. The great tragedy with the modern world is that the obscurity has become so great that all too many people lose sight altogether of those truths. How many equate happiness with material comfort, seeing their purpose in life—if they still think there is any purpose at all—in the acquisition of the maximum amount of money with the minimum inconvenience? How many have any concept of moral generosity and are prepared to sacrifice a lesser good for a greater? And how many have that sense of solidarity with others which is the foundation of natural as well as supernatural charity? We live in a world that is inimical towards heroes and as a consequence is producing people that are directionless, morally spineless and indifferent to the welfare of even those nearest to them. Whoever said, "Democracy does not need great men" uttered something as terrible as it is true.

Which brings me to the final point. This article has shown that tales of heroism, be they pagan or Christian, appeal to the believer because they deal with things that with his Faith he has already perceived to be important. But on the flip side of the coin, a glance at authors shows that it takes a religious mind, who, however instinctively, has understood what this life is really all about, to write of heroes and their deeds. Atheists do not create epics. Lord of the Rings, the greatest modern epic and certainly the most popular, was written by a practising Catholic. With the world as it is today there are few now, if any, who could write another like it. But its popularity is encouraging. Tolkien's readers may not have his Faith, but if they are drawn to the kind of world he describes then it is a sign that they have not forgotten, in the modern tomb of hedonistic triviality, what their hearts are really made for. There is still ground in which the seeds of Faith may grow.

All we need now are real heroes to sow them.

The author, Fr. Justin Swanton, is a native of Zimbabwe. He was ordained in 1991 for the Society of Saint Pius X and is currently stationed in Durban, South Africa. This article was taken from his contribution to Nova et Vetera, the monthly newsletter of the South African District (Oct. and Nov. 2000) with the title, "Arcadia Remembered."