Hero and Saint: From St. Francis to Kierkegaard's Abraham
This paper examines how the ideal of the hero and the saint evolved from the medieval Catholic world of St. Francis and Dante, through the Renaissance Humanism of Michelangelo, into the Enlightenment and Romantic era, and finally to Søren Kierkegaard's portrayal of Abraham. Beginning with the unified Christendom in which both sanctity and literary heroism were grounded in Catholic revelation, the paper traces how successive cultural shifts — the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment empiricism, and Romantic individualism — gradually displaced God-centered ideals with self-centered ones. Kierkegaard's Abraham is presented as a figure who attempts to recover Old World faith within a modern, liberalized intellectual climate, though he struggles against the weight of post-Enlightenment skepticism.
- Introduction: Saints and Heroes in Christendom: St. Francis and Dante as Catholic hero-saint ideals
- Michelangelo and the Shift from God to Man: Renaissance Humanism recenters the hero on mankind
- The Enlightenment and the Fragmented Hero: Empiricism and Romanticism fragment the unified hero
- Kierkegaard's Abraham and the Modern Believer: Abraham as Old World faith in a modern context
- Conclusion: The Devolution of the Hero-Saint Ideal: Modern hero is self-centered, lacking medieval humility
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What makes this paper effective
- It constructs a clear historical arc — from medieval Catholic unity through Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism — giving the argument momentum and direction.
- It uses well-chosen literary and artistic exemplars (St. Francis, Dante, Michelangelo, Byron, Kierkegaard's Abraham) to ground abstract cultural claims in concrete figures.
- Primary source quotations from Burke and Rousseau are deployed precisely to illustrate intellectual shifts rather than merely as decoration.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative intellectual history: it places diverse figures — a medieval friar, a poet, a Renaissance artist, Enlightenment philosophers, and a 19th-century theologian — within a single evolving framework, tracing how a shared concept (the hero-saint) is progressively redefined by changing worldviews. This technique requires the writer to identify a through-line across centuries without collapsing genuine historical differences.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the Catholic ideal embodied by St. Francis and Dante, then traces the Renaissance transition through Michelangelo, moves into the Enlightenment's empirical fragmentation of the hero, and pivots to Kierkegaard's Abraham as a case study in recovering Old World faith under modern conditions. A synthesizing conclusion draws the arc together, contrasting the humility of medieval saints with the self-assertion of the modern hero.
Introduction: Saints and Heroes in Christendom
Francis of Assisi is one of the most famous saints of the Church, and Dante is one of its most famous literary heroes. St. Francis received his vocation at the beginning of the 13th century, while Dante had his celestial vision roughly a hundred years later. One was a friar, the other a poet. Yet both grew out of a vision of the Church, the world, and man's place in it — and his relation to God. St. Francis was officially declared a saint two years after his death; Dante has been revered ever since his Comedy appeared. St. Francis was recognized as a saint because he embodied all the virtues of sanctity — perfect humility, perfect charity, perfect love of God — and Dante was recognized as a literary hero because of his epic journey, his grand vision, and his participation in the battle between Heaven and Hell for his soul. The two were, in other words, products of Christendom — the Old World, which held the Catholic religion to be the one, true religion. When Christendom fell following the rise of Protestantism and Liberalism, the concept of the hero and the saint also underwent a profound change. This paper will analyze that evolution.
St. Francis and Dante may be called Romantic, but only in the same sense that one might call the poetry of the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins Romantic. They each strive for an ideal — and Romanticism is a form of idealism — but St. Francis and Dante (and Hopkins) all saw the Catholic hero/saint ideal as universal, just like their religion. That ideal was not based on Liberalism, Naturalism, or Individualism, but on the truths of revelation and their Catholic faith. While the Romantics who emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment conformed to no creed or doctrine — instead joining Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762) in proclaiming that "man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains" (p. 14) — the Catholics of St. Francis's day, Dante's day, and even Michelangelo's (15th–16th centuries) professed one Creed, centered on the Trinity and the holy sacraments of the Church.
References
Burke, E. (1909). The Sublime and Beautiful. Harvard Classics, vol. 24, part 2. New York: P.F. Collier. (Original work published 1756).
Rousseau, J. (2008). The Social Contract. (G. D. H. Cole, Trans.). New York, NY: Cosimo. (Original work published 1762).
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