Big Dope

Headed to the hospital recently for a rather unpleasant surgical procedure, I figured I’d bring a book to pass the down time. I was about to grab Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, the novel I’d been reading about a nearly 20th-century Catholic postulant who may or may not have seen a vision of Christ and suffered stigmata on her hands and feet. But the thought of nurses and order-lies glancing at the title, thinking ‘pervert’ and perhaps surmising that my demise really wouldn’t be all that great a loss for human-kind dissuaded me. Instead I brought along the Buffalo News sports section. I told a Kentucky woman about this titular discretion.

Thomas Carlyle, in ‘Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History,’ divided heroes into six categories in order of human greatness as he conceived it: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters and as king, the heroic ruler of men who in Carlyle’s own description is the actual philosopher-king. In the modern world, kings have been replaced by prime ministers, presidents, strongmen and dictators; that is to say, by politicians of one sort or another. No one with the qualifying virtues of such a man would descend to the moral level of a tyrant, while no mere politician is endowed with the wisdom, gifts and virtues either of a kingly philosopher or a philosophic king, whom no democratic electorate would elevate to the office anyway.