I Need a Hero: The Radical Origin of the Heroic Ideal

My PhD considers Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the most charismatic figures in history, and the problems he poses to the poets of his day. The core question these poets ask is what to make of this man? Is he a hero, or a villain? This is a question we keep asking ourselves.

Our culture is inundated with heroes – perhaps to the point of oversaturation – from the next big Marvel film, the next TV show or video game from DC, and the non-stop speculation about which characters will appear in the next blockbuster.

Our generation has grown up with superheroes, so perhaps it is no wonder that our current obsession seems to be to critique and deconstruct the hero, giving rise to films and shows like Invincible or Injustice that ask the questions: What if superheroes were evil and corrupt? What if the villains or antiheroes were the main characters? The question behind these questions, at the heart of our cultural moment, is what is it that makes a hero?

The answer, I think, regardless of whether it is executed well or executed poorly, is sacrifice – this is the central heroic ideal. 

This is Superman sacrificing himself in every Superman storyline, Batman becoming a pariah to save Gotham in The Dark Knight; Iron Man snapping his fingers to save the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Avengers: Endgame; and the classic dilemma Spider-Man faces, choosing between his desires and his duties. But this is not just true of comic book properties. Think of your favourite story, and chances are, you know when the story is approaching its climax when one of the characters must face a choice, and ends up sacrificing themselves to save the world, or their family, or what have you. Think of Harry Potter meeting his fate by going to Voldemort, Maximus entering the arena in Gladiator, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, the T-800 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, Anna in Frozen, and you can doubtless think of more. Once you notice it it’s impossible to ignore.

This is not just the case in fiction; values in literature reflect what we value in life. Read any Victoria Cross or Medal of Honor citation and you see the same thing; someone laying down their life for the good of others. This value also determines the live political issues of our time, as we think about the economic cost of supporting wars, the sacrifices people made during the pandemic, and what price we should be prepared to pay to resolve the “climate crisis”. The debates on these issues tend to revolve around the question of whether these sacrifices are worth it. After all, there is a fine line between noble sacrifice and needless self-destruction.

Since this is such a pervasive dilemma, we need to trace the genealogy of the hero and question where this ethic of sacrifice comes from. Sacrifice has not always been the heroic ideal. If you travelled to Ancient Greece or Rome and asked who their heroes were, you’d hear Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus, Perseus, and the like. Or if you travelled to Scandinavia, you’d hear Beowulf, Thor and Sigurd. Sacrifices were an integral part of these cultures and their religions, but not their heroes. These heroes are mighty conquerors, not the ones who die. They lie, they cheat and deceive, but they always come out on top. Heroes don’t lose, or if they do, they deserved it.

Indeed, if you wanted to see a sacrificial death in Ancient Greece, you’d have to watch a tragedy in the theatre. Here, broken men like Oedipus must face the consequences for their actions, and either kill themselves or be exiled from the city. The ‘sacrifice’ here is more a punishment, and the hero a scapegoat who gets their just desserts. In fact, the word ‘tragedy’ comes from the Greek for ‘goat-play’. Aristotle, who began Literary Criticism with his text The Poetics, wrote that the ideal tragic hero should be ‘a person neither eminently virtuous or just, nor yet involved in misfortune by deliberate vice or villainy, but by some error of human frailty’.

Culture has squabbled over heroes for generations, but it isn’t until the dawn of Christianity that heroes in literature take on the virtue of sacrifice; Jesus’ life, but especially his death on the Cross, has been described by historian Tom Holland as a ‘depth-charge’ underneath western culture that subverted the ancient world’s cultural ideals. It can be easy to take this for granted and miss how radical Jesus is. We see crosses everywhere, but often fail to recognise how subversive it is for Jesus’ humiliating and shameful death on the Cross to not only be the climax of the Gospel narratives, but celebrated as a victory over death. But the magnitude of the Gospel – by which we mean Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, not just his ‘teachings’ – is what has so profoundly shaken and redefined our cultural values, such that we simply cannot understand Western culture unless we understand this.

Christopher Booker, in his masterwork The Seven Basic Plots, which takes a comprehensive look at why we tell the stories we tell, sees the Cross as the defining moment in Western culture. He writes:

What is so striking is that this appears to be such a complete inversion of what the pattern of Tragedy is about. The purpose of the tragic archetype is to show what happens when human beings become so possessed by the darkness of the ego that in the end they bring about their own destruction […]. Yet Jesus […] is wholly ego-free. The darkness in the story is all outside him. Thus his death on the cross seems to be a total victory for darkness (pp. 619-20).

Jesus’ death isn’t because of his fatal weakness like Achilles, nor a punishment for crimes like Oedipus, or even a tragic martyrdom as psychologists like Carl Jung read it. As the Resurrection proves, Jesus’ death worked, as a victory over the grave, as a sacrifice to save others. What seems like weakness and tragedy becomes a glorious victory, and a triumphant act of love, as Jesus says: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13).

We gauge how meaningful a sacrifice is based on the value of what it saves, but the Gospel goes even further than this assumption. Paul, writing to a Roman audience with their Roman values, acknowledges that ‘one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die’ (Romans 5:7), and goes on to underline that it was ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (5:8). Jesus’ sacrifice saves his enemies, not the great and the good. This is the real ‘depth-charge’ of Christianity, which turns the moral framework and heroic ideals of the ancient world on their head. The hero saves the underserving, even to the cost of his own life. The way of humility, meekness and self-denial, rather than a mighty, conquering hero, becomes the model of Christian ethics, and our notion of the heroic ideal. Self-sacrifice is the unique contribution of Christianity to our cultural framework.

It is perhaps the consequence of losing sight of this reality that we struggle to find heroes worth telling stories about; we are no longer familiar with the Christian template for heroism, and have watered down Jesus’ ministry into altruism, charity and caring for one another, rather than the radical reality of ‘giving his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). We still want heroes, as our cultural examples demonstrate, and we still use the language of ‘hero’ to describe anything from footballers to the NHS, but we no longer have a consensus of what a hero is, or what a hero should be.

The cultural conversation has always asked the question of what makes a hero, be that the mighty warrior, the gallant Chivalric ideal, the brooding Byronic antihero to the humble civil leader, but what’s at stake here is far more than our storytelling; this encompasses our everyday values, our political conversation, and how we view our place on the world stage. In our current climate of crisis, it’s evident that the heroic conversation is just as relevant as ever. It is vital that in our stories, in our morals, in every aspect of life, we find heroes worth looking up to, worth emulating.

The indelible mark made by the Cross on Western culture is so fundamental, it is simply impossible to ignore. This can be an uncomfortable truth in our secular age, so we can try to explain it away. You have the likes of Sam Harris arguing that the ethical legacy of the Cross, and the Christian nature of self-sacrifice, is a complex expression of evolutionary herd mentality or self-preservation. Or you can have psychologists like Jordan Peterson, who approach the Gospels as “true”, in the sense that they somehow codify the most archetypal and poignant of human stories. I shan't go into making the case for the historic reliability of the Resurrection here – though do get in touch if you'd like to talk about it – but let me offer a final thought on this to close. 

The Cross is so counter-intuitive to all ancient sensibilities, both Jewish and Greek, and has gripped our culture so thoroughly, that the only way to account for such a radical event to take root, is for it to be true. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, it simply would not have got this far. We would be imitating Achilles, not him.