Recovering the sense of the heroic as a means of restoring coherence

AS A CULTURE, INDEED AS A world, we are passing through a highly fractious period. The divisions in our society, so evident within culture, politics, and even the Church, are deeper and more rancorous than most of us, if not all of us, can ever recall.

Already there is a small library of books and studies attempting to account for this erosion. I find this sensibility expressed in a 17th-century poem, “Anatomy of the World,” written by John Donne, whose despair becomes our own reality:

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

Donne’s entire meditation is worth the effort to probe. For our purposes, however, I only wish to focus on that sense of despair he articulates and its relation to absence of coherence or harmony in our present moment. As I say, there are many reasons offered for this decline, but I want to focus on only one: the diminishment of heroes.

Heroes are models of courage and bravery that point us to virtue. It is not as though every hero is a saint (though all saints are heroes), but in their actions they point us at least to some aspect of sanctity – or, at the very least, to the notion that there are values that transcend the immediacy and practicality that usually occupy our priorities. A society without heroes, or one that denigrates its heroes, or one that perverts the very notion of the heroic, is a society in decline, one that is breaking apart — or, as the poet says, “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone…”

One prominent source of heroes in our society has been normal people — very often unnoticed and unnoticeable people — to whom falls, in the course of their otherwise mundane existence, a call to heroism. These are people who reach out beyond their own “comfort zone,” who are not expected or paid to risk their lives or even their convenience. Rather, they go beyond the question of compensation or mandate; they go even beyond themselves or what might even have been expected of them.

The parable of the Good Samaritan found in Luke’s Gospel (10:30-37) provides one such example. Here was someone considered an outsider from the general populace. The Samaritan is literally going about his own business, on his way to Jericho, a dangerous trade route. We know well the story of his coming upon a victim of theft and assault whom he bandages and to whom he administers first aid, transporting him to a place of safety where he pays for his recovery. The very fact that the Samaritan goes beyond the cultural boundaries and expectations of the time underscores the heroic element of the parable.

To point to this parable as a model of the “welfare state” is to miss its core lesson. What makes the story such a compelling model of charity is precisely that this love is personal, not administrative; it is spontaneous and freely undertaken, not the result of a political mandate. It is a sublime example of the principle of subsidiarity in action (see Centesimus Annus, 48): the belief that charity is most potent when it is most proximate and personal.

To the extent that our modern social environment farms out such opportunities to bureaucracies, we lose that sense of coherence — and with it, a sense of the heroic.

Father Robert A. Sirico is president and co-founder of the Action Institute and pastor emeritus of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish and Academy, both in Grand Rapids, MI. His latest book is "The Economics of the Parables".