When I was a child, my favourite book was a children’s book on world history. I remember my mother reading it to me by my bedside as I went to sleep. The richly colored illustrations on each page filled my childlike imagination with wonder and awe. But there was one page that left a lasting impression on me - the one on Alexander the Great. I remember every detail of the illustration. Alexander, mounted his rearing horse Bucephalos, with a beige tunic, brazen breastplate, a sword in his right hand, and the iconic Macedonian helmet on his head, decorated with a vibrant red horse comb in the middle and two white feathers on either side. History took me captive that day. I will never forget it.
My superhero as a child was not Superman, but Alexander the Great. I would play in the forest for hours imagining I was one of Alexander’s soldiers, battling Indian elephants in the exotic battle of Hydaspes. I admired him. While all other conquerors let their soldiers do the fighting, Alexander fought alongside his men. He was tough, he was adventurous, he was smart. He had it all. And he achieved the “impossible” at such a young age, having conquered the “known world” by the time he died at age 34. Though I was just a kid, his young age made him strangely relatable. Later, my scope of interest expanded to other eras, and I found new heroes in Caesar, Augustus, Harald Hardrada, and Napoleon. I started a YouTube channel and made videos about all of these characters - selling their story with much emotion and passion.
As I matured, my obsession for history did not change, but my approach to history certainly did. My writing became more nuanced, and my YouTube videos improved in quality and historical accuracy. The turning point, however, came when I realized that history has no true “heroes” the way I imagined them.
My great heroes - Alexander, Caesar, Harald Hardrada, Napoleon - were all human. They had many character flaws with massive consequences on the world. For many years, I resisted this and insisted on my idolization, rushing to their defense every time someone levied an accusation against them. But after reading Paul Johnson’s Napoleon, I finally conceded. Paul mentioned Napoleon’s adulterous affair with the Polish countess Maria Walewska in 1807, and I was very disappointed in him.
I realized that I held Napoleon and the other “heroes” on a pedestal as my personal role models. All this time, since I first laid eyes on that rich illustration of Alexander the Great, I was looking for someone to admire and seek to imitate. Someone I could embrace wholeheartedly as my hero. And since I knew adultery was wrong, how could I keep Napoleon as my personal hero?
So, who is my hero? The answer lies in my objection to Napoleon. Whoever established that adultery is wrong, is who I actually admire, surely. So my study of history levelled up. It became more profound. Mankind is flawed, so what are we to do about it? This question is at the heart of political and religious philosophy. I started studying the history of ideas. Myriads of remedies have been tried and tested throughout history - which ones failed, and which ones worked? Luckily, we have all of recorded history to find answers to these questions. But then again, what do we even define as “failing” and “working”? What metric can truly measure “success” for humans? Economic growth? Life expectancy? What are we striving for? What is our goal, as humans?
I explored many “isms” on what the answer might be, but each one just felt inadequate. Something was always missing. They were often too simplistic and static, like a room with a low-hanging ceiling. If you want to grow in stature, you will eventually bump your head, and the only way for you to stay there is by curling your back. I didn’t want that. If my head bumped into the ceiling, I left the room. I looked somewhere else.
Then, at the ancient Stavrovouni monastery in Cyprus, I encountered something unique. It wasn’t a political ideology, a lawbook, a set of moral teachings, or anything else I had seen before. It was both historical and forthcoming, unknown yet known, personal yet communal. It was mystical and dynamic. It was a room with no ceiling, where growth was not only allowed but essential. It was ancient Christianity (Orthodoxy).
The heroes that the monks at Stavrovouni commemorated were not like Alexander or Napoleon. They were men and women from all walks of life who had dedicated their whole lives to the imitation of Jesus Christ, striving to acquire perfect humility and fidelity. Some of their stories were almost insultingly strange to me, but I couldn’t get their strangeness out of my head. It gripped me as if it was a personal challenge. There was something different between them and the rest of us, and a part of me didn’t like being left out. They were operating at a completely different metric system. Their style of heroism was self-denial, not self-aggrandizement. They wanted to be nobodies, and for some reason, that bothered me. Why would you want that?
I didn’t know what to make of it. For years I tried all sorts of mental acrobatics to justify my own “Alexandrian” definition of greatness in the teachings of Christ - to find pomp and pride in the Gospels - but I failed. Christ commanded no armies, was no politician, nor amassed any treasures in gold or silver. The paradox, however, is that his words nevertheless command a transcending authority above all others. Our modern sense of morality is rooted in his sermons, and if that was not enough, our whole way of categorizing history is based on his birth (B.C and A.D). If that isn’t greatness, I don’t know what is.
I found that Jesus Christ is the only figure in history that has never been overcome. His presence in history can be intimately felt every year since his birth. He is not mythical, but undeniably historical, and far better attested to than figures like Julius Caesar or my very own Alexander. He is the One person who we simply can never get enough of. He cannot be put in a box and stowed away. Men are obsessed with branding him in all sorts of ways. Why is that?
Interestingly, Napoleon himself is reported to have thought about this a great deal. While awaiting his death in exile on St. Helena, he reflected on his life and times with one of his aides, General Bertrand, and reached a fascinating conclusion on Jesus Christ. Some of Napoleon’s comments on Jesus are recorded in an apocryphal memoir as such:
“I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not [merely] a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity. Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him.”
Perhaps the biggest controversy surrounding Jesus Christ, however, is his resurrection. While many can appreciate his sermons, or see him as a key moral teacher, the persistent insistence in the testimonies about him that he walked out of his tomb on the third day, scandalizes us. How can we be so irresistibly absorbed by the teachings of Jesus while denying the crux of his life? We are unsettled. We are bothered by the strangeness of it. No one escapes death, surely? Even Alexander the Great was reduced to dust and bones, a discovery made by St. Sisoe as he mournfully watched over his barren remains (see top image).
But Alexander was not Christ, and as I delved deeper into Christ’s resurrection, I finally gained a better understanding of what true heroism is. Those who relentlessly pursue the satisfaction of their own desires are not heroes. They can be respected, and their tenacity can even be admired, but they lack the key ingredient to heroism: sacrifice of self in service of others. It is love that stirs our souls to tears, not power. It is humility that grips our inner hearts with wonder, not vainglory. And in all of history, there has never been a more potent, engrossing, enthralling example of that than Jesus Christ. He sets the standard of true heroism. That’s the standard we intuitively follow today.
History can only be read through the lens of an objective value system. We must choose what matters in order to make sense of information. What is important to us? What do we care about? But these questions cannot be answered unless we revisit the question, where are we going? We all have a sense of adventure in us. We love epic stories of danger and love - of brave people who withstood difficulty to achieve great things. In other words, we love heading somewhere, striving for something. We hate being static. We love movement. And after years of studying humanity through history and philosophy, I cannot avoid concluding that the only sensible direction we can move towards is Christ. He is the summit of all that moves us. He is the archetype of all archetypes. He is our obsession, whether we like it or not. We find his shadow in everywhere, from medieval folk stories to blockbuster cinema.
Christ is heroism itself, and imitating Him is being heroic. The saints demonstrated this, and that is why they are commemorated. They denied their selfish desires to make room for the love of God to pour into the world. That is what changes the world for the better. The sort that leaves tombs empty. That is what is worth admiring.
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