Heroes and Hero Worship

In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle argues that hero-worship is the source of all religion, including Christianity, the form of all loyalty and faith, the foundation of human society.

All ranks, he says, “are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes)—or a Hierarchy, for it is ‘sacred’ enough withal! The Duke meansDux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning. Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold.” Some notes are forgeries, yet “‘gold,’ Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases.”

Carlyle’s contemporaries were busily dismantling “great man” theories of history, trying to “account for” a Luther rather than admire him, claiming that “Time” called him forth. Despite the assault on heroes and great men, Carlyle claimed that the desire to worship is ineradicable. Even the atheistic French have their Voltaire: “he old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places—in short that he too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if persiflage be the great thing, there never was such apersifleur. He is the realised ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god -such god as they are fit for.”

In short: “from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?”

Let’s say that Carlyle is right. If so, then egalitarianism is a delusion and a pretense, a mask of our deepest needs and desires. And if that’s the case, an egalitarian society may be more vulnerable to the enthusiasm of hero worship than a society that is more self-aware.

After a century of great murderers, it’s difficult to read Carlyle without a shiver. And that leaves us wondering how to acknowledge the instinct to worship while keeping it in check so that it doesn’t become abject submission to pure evil. Here I think we get to a cultural malaise more fundamental than egalitarianism, which is our idolatry. What prevents us from worshiping Hitler or Stalin or, perhaps, Trump is an unwavering commitment to the worship of God, a worship that relativizes all other worships. What afflicts us is not only egalitarianism. It is, as Solzhenitsyn said, that we have forgotten God. And, having forgotten Him, we are left vulnerable to forgeries of divine glory.