Why are superheroes so popular? Here’s what Aquinas has to say

It would be an understatement to say that there has been an explosion in movies about superheroes in the last several years, especially in the last decade or so. This sharp rise in popularity has been so drastic that such movies have now garnered their own genre: “superhero movies.” This incredible spike in interest in superheroes may cause one to ask: Why might people be so drawn to superheroes? What is it about them that make them so attractive?

There is probably a slew of different answers to these questions. But I suspect that this recent widespread fascination with superheroes is indicative of something more profound, something having to do with the very nature of mankind and its longing for ultimate goodness.

What I mean here can be found in the ethical writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas noticed, as Aristotle did, that, “The good is that which all things desire.” To be clear, Aquinas (with Aristotle) does not mean here that all that is desirable is good, but rather that all good things are desirable. I make this distinction because we might—as we often do—mistake something bad as good and hence worthy of desire when it really isn’t (this is of course the case in sin). Nor is this to say that things are good because we desire them, or that things are good insofar as we desire them—again, it’s the other way around: we desire things because or insofar as they are good, or at least to the extent that we perceive them to be good.

The crucial inference from this, though, is that not all goods (i.e. desirable things) are inherently useful, like cars or knives, whose goodness is dependent on their order towards something else, something beyond them. For we only see cars and knives as good to the extent that they help us attain some other good. But if everything were good only because they allowed us to obtain something else, we would have no reason to desire or do anything; for we would be perpetually frustrated—never really content with the goods we attain because their goodness would only lead us to something else, and that to something else, and so on. Therefore, Aquinas concludes, there must be some ultimate good that is desired for its own sake, something which we long for whose goodness is not dependent upon anything beyond itself and accordingly gives us a genuine reason to act and desire things.

This ultimate good tends to go by a few names: “happiness” and “beatitude” are a couple of them; but the one I want to emphasize is “perfection.” We can understand what “perfection” means here by considering the Greek word “telos.” Generally translated as “end,” telos refers to the completed (or perfected) state of a being, i.e. that state in which it is at its best as the sort of thing that it is, when it is doing well as a thing of its kind: it is the end of a knife to cut, and it is the end of a car to transport. Similarly, with living things, it is the end of a tree, for example, to grow, nourish itself, sprout leaves, and reproduce. It is the end of a zebra to live with other zebras, mature, and nourish itself. And we say they achieve those ends to the extent that they do those things well. But the important part of this understanding is how intimately it involves the nature or “essence” of something. That is, something’s perfection is its best state as the kind of thing that it is. Consequently, Aquinas is effectively claiming, I would argue, that what we long for as our ultimate good is perfection as a human being. What we want, ultimately, is to do well as humans.

This is the reason, I think, we are so drawn to superheroes—they are meant to be examples or role models (of a sort) of what it means to be a good human being. We want someone to look up to, to show us how to achieve the perfection we all so badly long for, to show us what it “looks like.” I would argue that this is the case with superheroes who are not even humans, like Superman or Martian Manhunter, among others. It’s even the case in superheroes who don’t always have the appearance of good moral character, like Rocket Raccoon, Jessica Jones, or Tony Stark. These characters are “creatures” of our own invention—what we want to see as incredible human achievers. They all have something spectacularly extraordinary about them—else we would doubt their “super” quality—but what makes all of them so attractive and what makes us want to watch them is that they are, to some extent, examples of perfection because, remarkably, they always seek to do the right thing (according to human moral standards), even when it’s difficult, even when it may cost everything. This bold claim is bolstered by the words of none other than Stan Lee himself: “That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.”

To be clear, I am not saying that all superheroes fully exemplify human perfection. Of course, their moral character is entirely dependent upon how their writers, implicitly or explicitly, understand what makes someone morally good. But what’s interesting about them, and what largely accounts for their attractiveness, is precisely this fact. Take, for example, Spider-Man. One of Peter Parker’s essential features as a character is that he is a simple high school student with ordinary high-school-student problems, for whom nothing seems to go right. And yet, with his fantastical powers, he, almost inexplicably, always strives to do good, no matter how many tragedies he faces.

What drives Peter to use his powers in this way is the words of his uncle: “With great power comes great responsibility.” That is, he acts out of a sense of moral obligation, i.e. a sense that there is genuine good in the world and, if one has the capability, one should seek it always. The fact that he not only possesses this sense of moral responsibility, but that he has the virtue—the moral habit—to act on it out of a sort of instinct is a sign of functioning well as a human. Besides the aforementioned qualities (e.g. being a simple high school student, etc.), it is this moral sense that perhaps defines Peter as a character. It’s what makes him interesting, what makes him likable and, more importantly, watchable.

It’s not surprising to me, then, that Spider-Man is as popular as he is because, given our fallen human nature, we long to see someone make the right choice, even when we can’t. We like seeing someone succeed as a human being and attain at least some portion of the ultimate good which we all desire. We want to see someone, someone like us, make his way through the muck of human life and still achieve that perfection (to some degree) which we all cannot help but long for, even while making mistakes along the way.

The irony in this, especially for Christians, is we have already been given the perfect example of how to attain the ultimate goodness, and He did it while suffering the greatest of human suffering—Jesus Christ. God saw this longing in the human soul for someone to look up to, for someone to show the way, and out of pity condescended from his almighty throne to give us His very self in the person of his only-begotten Son. He, who by his divine nature is infinitely un-relatable to us, crossed that infinite threshold to become as relatable as it gets—he became one of us.

It should be no surprise, then, that we sometimes find in superhero movies implicit (and sometimes not-so-implicit) reflections of Christ or Christ-like imagery (as, for example, explained here). It is as though the makers of these films cannot help but admit that the goodness of these heroes is found most perfectly in the divine. (I am not suggesting that superheroes ought to be abandoned in our culture, only that they are imperfect in their function.)

The mission Christ set for us, then, is imperative: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14). We have been given the light of the life of Christ to be examples for the rest of the world, to show the way to those who wander in the darkness of death, who look to these imperfect examples of our own invention of what we all pine for. We are the citizens of that “city set on a hill” which “cannot be hid” so that we might be seen by all and, with the divine pulsing in our souls, conform the world to the Almighty.