A Hero With a Thousand Meanings?

Don't worry this is not some sort of Joseph Campbell--Luke Skywalker equals Jesus Christ which equals your mama--kind of a thing. Rather, I have a confusing question, or perhaps a perplexing paradox, or perhaps a muddled mystery, and this is where all of the B&B faithful and unfaithful alike come in.

Since I was a little boy I have always loved the term HERO. I love everything about this word: I love how it sounds when it rolls off one’s tongue; I love what this word represents and who has represented this word. Allow me to name a few of my favorites: Heracles and Theseus, Hector, Achilles and Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, Arthur and his Knights, Robin Hood, Aragorn and Frodo, Hester Prynne, and Alyosha Karamazov.

You will notice, as I did when I was preparing this list, that these are perhaps all fictional characters (although I like to think that these are all real people in a real world that I would like to travel to someday). Interestingly, when I was trying to think of Heroes who have lived in our time, though there are many, I could only think of one name; Mother Theresa. Now, certainly Mother Theresa looks nothing like these people I have listed above. However, I consider, and will always consider, her a hero, or perhaps a saint. Perhaps with the dawning of the Christian world and the evolution of words, the term hero has become synonymous with saint? Nevertheless, I think that Mother Theresa is a hero.

What makes Mother Theresa a hero? More importantly, did Mother Theresa know she was a hero? It is the latter question which I wish to discuss. I suppose I would think it strange that Mother Theresa would have called herself a hero. I've never heard her say any such thing, nor have I read any such thing that supposes or quotes Mother Theresa saying such a thing. But I think such a thing is true of Mother Theresa, and were she to say such a thing I would not consider her any less a hero for having said it.

This is an interesting point, I think. Mother Theresa never considered herself a hero. I suppose if you were to ask Mother Theresa if she were a hero she would have said “Of course not…I am just doing my duty” or something quite like this. This is not true of the heroes above (except perhaps Frodo—I will come back to this in a minute). The heroes, especially the heroes of the Greeks, believed that they were heroes and declared themselves to be such. One of my favorite lines in the Iliad is just after Andromache begs Hector to stay with her and not go back to the battle, Hector says,

Wife, I too have thought upon all this, but with what face should I look upon the Trojans, men or women, if I shirked battle like a coward? I cannot do so: I know nothing save to fight bravely in the forefront of the Trojan host and win renown alike for my father and myself. (Book VI)

I don’t suppose that Mother Theresa thought like this. Although she did, perhaps, have her heavenly father’s renown in mind, I don’t think that she cared about hers. She would have thought it foolish to even suppose that what she was doing, in her small world in India, mattered at all to anyone else in the world. She did not do these things to be a hero, and yet I consider her a hero for having done these things.

I suppose that this is different from Homer’s heroes and the rest of the Greek heroes, as well as the Roman hero Aeneas. I suppose this is even different for Beowulf, Arthur and Robin Hood, Aragorn, Hester Prynne (in a way) and Alyosha Karamazov. Perhaps the one exception to this is Frodo who considered the ring to be more of a burden than a blessing, and who at times wished he had never been given the ring. I think it was through Frodo’s weakness (humility perhaps is a better word) that he became the hero (quite unlike the rest of the heroes listed above).

There is a distinction going on here. I don’t know if you see it, but it is an interesting one. Allow me to put it in the form of a question, and I will leave our discussion at this point. Why is it the case that we suspect the heroes of our imagination to believe they are heroes and declare themselves to be heroes, but we would consider those, not in our imagination but in reality, who believe that they are heroes (at least on the scale of Heracles and Beowulf) to be LUNATICS? And those who would declare themselves to be heroes we would consider to be LIARS? Blinded by their own hubris? Why is it the case that those who seek to be heroes are not considered heroes, but those for whom the whole hero idea is the last thing on their mind we would consider to be heroes? This, for me, is puzzling and I have yet been able to solve it.