In their search for explanations for the workings of the world around them, some would perceive the influence of these additional, divine powers: the busyness of the gods in the rising of the sun, the flowing of a river, the change of the seasons, the variability of the weather. Some would long for and seek the intercession of the power of the superior being in pursuit of good things (say, a successful hunt) and to prevent bad things (say, a drought). Others might conclude that such a divine being was not real, but rather entirely imaginary—a point of view that, should it be expressed, might call forth the wrath of believers worried about the reaction of the superior being to the presence of unbelief among mere mortals. It’s only the degree of severity of a potential angry reaction to disbelief that distinguishes these prehistoric debates from those taking place in the modern world on precisely the same subject.
Whether God is in his Heaven or not, human beings from the beginning of “the Word” have been moved to contemplate their own mortality in contrast to the prospect of eternal life. Much of the speculation, of course, has centered on whether death is really the end, and if it is not, what happens afterward. The prospect of a benevolent eternity of life has long beguiled people, although it has often been accompanied by the anxiety that eternity will be a torment. What, if anything, one can do while alive on Earth to influence the outcome favorably has also been a subject of intense interest. But we start with human beings in a tragic position: Almost from the very moment at which they can say to each other, “We are alive,” they long for a permanency to life they cannot have—except, perhaps, through death, though here the afterlife remains entirely a speculative affair. Life without death is a primal longing of mortal being.
Human beings have developed an extraordinary array of strategies for coping with this unattainable longing. They have developed religious faith, or, if you prefer, they have accepted the truth of religion on the basis of revelation. Most religions promise that earthly mortality is not the end. The immortal soul goes on to another plane of being, or perhaps awaits reincarnation in a new body.
Some have tried philosophy: The Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero called the “whole life of a philosopher . . . a meditation on death,” which the philosopher Montaigne took to be the exercise of “learn[ing] to die.” Perhaps the consolation of philosophy is individual possession of eternal truth, or an awareness of what it means to long for such truth. Perhaps it is the pleasure of membership in an elite community of those, living or dead, now and to come, who know the truth.
Some make art that will outlast them. No one will ever know what got into the heads of the people who made the first cave paintings, which date back more than 30,000 years in Europe. Maybe the paintings were merely an ephemeral effort to spruce up the cave. Maybe, on the other hand, the desire to leave a permanent mark was part of the motivation. If so, the fact that the paintings can strike wonder in the minds of those living 1,200 generations later constitutes vindication. The desire of those ancient cave painters may be the same desire that motivates some of the artists of our day.
A small number seek by earthly deeds to win glory—not only the acclaim of human beings of their time, but also of generations to come as their stories are told and retold. The path to glory might entail conquering the world or exploring its unknown reaches. It might also be the pursuit of great scientific discoveries or sports triumphs.
On a more mundane level, people have children and grandchildren, and they often see a piece of themselves as living on through their descendants. They took this view long before the development of knowledge of genetics enabled us to think in terms of passing our genes along. Of course, we ourselves had our genes passed along to us, all the way back to the primordial soup, so perhaps we ourselves are merely temporary embodiments of a gene pool that preceded us and will extend itself indefinitely into the future; the human species, if not life itself, can become the vehicle for the contemplation of a type of immortality for each of its members.
Denial is also an option. One can just try to live out the life one has while giving as little thought to death as possible. In the state of nature as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, the “worst of all” elements of the human condition was “continual fear of violent death.” He detected three passions that “incline men to peace”: “fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.” The state of nature includes a primal vision of a quiet and comfortable life, as well as the acknowledgment that such quietude and comfort are not natural; they have to be created by human “industry.” Such industry would include not only performing the work necessary to secure one’s daily bread, but also the work involved in creating and sustaining a state with a government strong enough to secure liberation from the “war of every man against every man.”
The modern, developed world, has come a long way from the Hobbesian state of nature. For those lucky enough to be born into it, unlike for the vast majority of human beings who have come before and for most of those alive now, life can be quite pleasant, what with evenings and weekends off, the Internet, cable, sporting events and concerts, and decent food available year-round. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew quotes Jesus admonishing his listeners: “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). So it did; coping with the here and now was a challenge sufficient to keep most people fully occupied. The message of modernity is not to worry about tomorrow because each day brings pleasures of its own. And who can doubt that people born in pre-modern circumstances today, at least those seeking chiefly a quiet life for themselves, would switch places in a heartbeat to rid themselves of as much daily trouble as they could?
Unfortunately, none of these strategies for dealing with mortality—from religion’s promise of life after death, to philosophy’s contemplation of the eternal, to the creation of something meant to last, to the pursuit of glory, to one’s sense of place in the passing of the generations, to the urge to change the subject—has had the effect of actually eliminating physical death. And it is at this dead-end, so to speak, where we first encounter the subject of our study, the hero. The first thing that distinguishes heroes from the unheroic vast majority of human beings is a very different attitude from most others on the subject of mortality, starting with their own.
Heroes seek, by actions risking their lives, to demonstrate that death has no power over them. Their greatness will out, come what may. As Lord Krishna advises the warrior-king Arjuna on the eve of a great battle: “Be intent on action. / not on the fruits of action; / avoid attachment to the fruits”—including even the personal life-or-death consequences of action.
It’s not that heroes are under the illusion that they won’t themselves die. Homer’s Achilles, the greatest hero of the classical world, was thoroughly imbued with this sense of his own mortality. Though the son of the immortal goddess Thetis, Achilles was not exempted from the mortality of his father Peleus, the great king of the Myrmidons.
The “continual fear of violent death” that Hobbes identified as the worst aspect of the human condition is something a hero such as Achilles overcomes. A hero doesn’t seek death, but neither does a hero let the possibility of violent death deter resolute action toward the purpose at hand. Of those who are so deterred, one may say that death has a power over them even as they live. The fear of death shapes their responses to the events of their lives. The prospect of putting oneself at additional risk of untimely and violent death is simply abhorrent, a non-starter: one would ordinarily run in the opposite direction from such a risk. The response