Periods of anxiety are times for dreaming of heroes. James Bond and Han Solo dominate the movies. At airports we can take our pick of fictional heroes who save the world. And at the same time we contemplate our own pedestrian lives and our pedestrian politicians, and long for someone who can lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land, while of course sharing all our views. Heroes are our alter egos who can do all the things that we would like to see done but lack the taste or strength for.
Yet heroes are Janus faced. From one perspective they invite us to dismount from our couches, breathe the open air and take on the world as they do. But they also persuade us that they are a different breed, urging us to keep within our divinely given limitations and leave the business of change to those sown as lions' teeth.
These reflections, I confess, arose out of my own summer reading, and particularly out of a recent collection of articles entitled Heroes of the Faith. The genre is an old one. Once the Catholic version would have included Catholics martyred by the Protestants, and the Protestant version vice versa. But this genial collection is genuinely catholic in its breadth, and discloses as much about the writers as about their subjects. Still, it left me asking whether heroes of the faith are a good thing, and indeed whether any heroes are.
When I think of heroes I call to mind the people I worshipped when I was young — in my case, young men skilled with cricket bats or footballs of different shapes. I adjusted my cap the way they did when taking strike, took a little skip before I kicked for goal, as they did. (And generally missed ball and goal, as they didn't.)
Heroes were people who could do no wrong. My heroes were paragons of virtue, as indeed were all the players in the teams I supported.
Of course, the age of heroes usually ends in disillusionment, aka wisdom. But even as adults we may continue to have heroes whose faults we overlook indulgently and whose virtues we contemplate with satisfaction. They are the people we would secretly like to be, even though we know we never shall. They can encourage us to lift our game.
The making of heroes can have a downside. It can distract us from the