Comparing The Concept Of Hero And The Saint

Changes in the Concept of Hero and Saint The symbolic ideas of 'the Hero ' and 'the Saint ' are at the very root of the human experience, and they have been represented -- in different manners from different perspectives -- throughout our history in art, religion, literature, and philosophy. These representations have varied widely depending on the changes in thought that have inevitably taken place throughout the five-thousand years of human history in large part because of cultural shifts triggered by the Romanticism promoted by the likes of St. Francis, the agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo, the cultural mutation that took place during the Enlightenment, Kierkegard 's portrayal of Abraham, and the nearly endless list of other cultural
developments, perhaps most influential of which includes the work of William Shakespeare. Professor Francis Ambrosio in his lecture, "Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life," examines how such cultural developments have changed the concept of hero and saint by comparing the two ideas of the Hero and the Saint in an attempt to explain how these changes relate to the meaning of life and the human experience as a whole, and by juxtaposing his ideas with some of the ideas put forth by Shakespeare throughout his plays, one can, at the very lest, get a grasp on the topic. According to Ambrosio, both the ideas of the Hero and the Saint lead to the path of wisdom, or, put another way, to the meaning of life.
"For the Hero," he says, "reality appears as fundamentally shaped by the human struggle, the struggle with forces which are essential imperishable, the forces with individuality and fate"; "For the Saint," he says, "reality appears much different, it is ultimately configured by the bonds of a conveyed relationship among persons, human and divine, a covenant based on an exchange of promises, promises based on the mutual hope of love and lasting and unconditional trust" ("Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life,” lecture 1). Using the drama inherent to both the Saint and the Hero, Ambrosio goes on to offer some abstract answers concerning the purpose and the meaning behind the human experience. He, for example, uses the agony and ecstasy of present in the life and work of Michelangelo to highlight how the ideas of both the Saint and the Hero are directly related to Man 's innate desire to crate art. He, in fact, suggests that the passion that drives Man to create art is an extension of the Saint and that the well-known struggle of the 'struggling artist ' is a direct extension of the Hero. Each individual, therefore, must choose his or her approach to life. The Hero 's approach is based on the realization that there is reward at the end of life and that the setting and reaching of goals is, in fact, the meaning of life. On the other hand, the Saint approaches life is based on religion, meaning that an individual 's so-called purpose is divine and that one is put on earth to reach the afterlife by spreading love to other humans through a strong
faith. Ambrosio’s conclusions on the human experience and the role that the Saint and the Hero play in that experience, however, is largely selective. He doesn 't, for example, use an contemporary examples because the complexity of modern society simply does not enable one to find meaning so easily. In fact, in today 's society, the ideas surrounding the Saint and the Hero are outdated. Take, for example, the work of Shakespeare. Although his plays are still widely read and taught, they do not offer rational answers to today 's human experience. The contemporary Shakespeare reader, for example, will, as Milward writes in "Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition" (1972), interpret his presentation of the Hero as a negative entity (335), and that, from the perspective of a modern reader, not even the obvious heroic characters of Brutus and Othello are interpreted as such (336). The same goes for his depiction of the Saint. For example, he writes, concerning the saintly characters of Cordelia and Edgar from King Lear, that if a contemporary reader does interpret them as Saints or even Heroes, it is only because "they fall short" of the traditional ideal and "are crushed by the consequences of their own vices, yet come to accept their crushing as just" (336).

Works Cited
Ambrosio, Francis. "Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life." Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2013.
Milward, P. (1972). Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Book). Modern Language Quarterly, 33(3), 335-338.