SCOTT FOREST AIKIN
Princess Bubblegum holds up in the dim light a magical globe. Finn’s eyes grow large in its luminance.
“. . . It’s a book meant only for heroes whose hearts are righteous . . .”
With those words still ringing in Finn’s ears, Finn and Jake begin their quest to Mount Cragdor. As they adventure, numerous perils confront them, and Finn seems up to the task . . . mostly. Finn shows great strength and ingenuity, when suddenly, a massive lumbering ogre eats Jake, but Finn kicks the ogre in the stomach and saves his friend. And he shows great compassion when confronted with a dark magician who he kicks in the crotch to save an ant. . . . But Finn does leave a few old ladies to die when he runs away . . .
In the end, though, the boy hero beams as the manly minotaur hands him the Enchiridion. Within it are the secrets meant only for true heroes.
“You’re the goodest of heart and most righteous hero I’ve seen here. Tenderness, ingenuity, bravery, nard-kicking ability . . .”
And isn’t it really there that our story begins?
Finn faces the trials to test if he’s really a righteous hero, and after a shaky start (mostly the deserting old women being killed by evil gnomes part), he passes the tests and receives the Enchiridion for being the most righteous hero Mannish Man ever met. . . . Awwww, Yeah!
But there are two things I’ve got to know. The first is: what makes Finn righteous? Why is it that he deserves the Enchiridion and, say, you or I don’t? Given the trials, it seems being righteous means facing danger, slaying evil things and refusing to slay good guys. It also seems like Finn is supposed to know when enough punishment is enough, refuse to follow unjust orders, and have the right motivation for his heroic deeds. But should we buy these criteria for heroic righteousness? I’m not convinced these tests are really enough to say Finn’s righteous. Doesn’t it seem like righteous people (even the heroically righteous) shouldn’t be so quick to use violence? Finn uses a lot of violence, pretty quickly. In fact, as his attempt to follow Billy the Hero’s pacifism proves, he kind of sucks at being non-violent. Not to mention, doesn’t it also seem like Finn uses pretty weak proof to decide who’s evil, who isn’t, and whether or not to slay them!? That’s totally not righteous, dude.
My second question is what the Enchiridion really should be. It is a book meant only for righteous heroes, but what information should we expect in such a book? We see that there are instructions for kissing a princess, and in a later episode, there is lore regarding Cyclopes and their healing tears. We get some brief glimpses into some other chapters, but really we don’t know much. True, the book has other uses—it can be thrown at worms and is used to knock food out of a dopey bear’s mouth. It also has powerful magical properties, as it is a portal to travel between the multiverses. But I want to know what is in the darned book!
What should be in a handbook for righteous heroes? An Enchiridion is literally “a handbook,” and so it should play a major role in the hero’s life! It needs more than being a source of obscure facts about medicinal tears or methods for smooching royalty. Here are things I think a true Enchiridion needs:
1. It should have explanations of how to improve your virtues
2. It should help prepare you for the inevitable decline in ability that comes with age—all heroes must face this, even Billy
and
3. It should have an account of how to face defeat and how to acknowledge mistakes—as heroes, being heroes, are used to winning and being right (but since they are fallible, they will not always win).
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55–135 C.E.) wrote an ancient Enchiridion, a handbook to the “good life” a life of righteousness. Epictetus calls us to a life of righteousness, and he identifies ways we can be pulled astray, ways our lives can be upset by accident and by age and death. Even heroes. In other words, a truly righteous Enchiridion doesn’t just explain how to win, it explains how to lose. A truly righteous hero needs to be ready to improve and be ready for losses. Is this true of Finn? Or was he rewarded for being “righteous” just a bit too soon?
Epictetus thought that being a hero requires focusing on our duties, having the right motivation, and even recognizing that doing the right thing is sometimes a drag. Okay, this sounds like a hummer. All this focus on loss and losing isn’t very heroic-sounding, but the reality is that life is grittier and less glamorous than heroes Finn and Jake make it out to be. And it’s really too bad for Finn—the Land of Ooo can be a pretty dark place, and anyone who wants to be a good person there needs all the help they can get.
Finn’s Three Trials
There are three tests of Finn’s righteousness in his quest for the Enchiridion: the illusionist gnomes, the confrontational giant, and the encounters inside the temple at the top of Mount Cragdor. What we see is that in all three cases, Finn displays some admirable qualities. But, not all of Finn’s actions are admirable. . . . I think Finn may not be righteous!
The gnomes and their illusions are first. After entering the forest at the foot of Mount Cragdor, Finn and Jake hear cries for help in the forest. They rush to find three gnomes in a pit of lava. They pull the gnomes out—very heroic, brave, and so on. Moreover, Finn even admits that saving the gnomes may interfere with the quest for the Enchiridion. This is pretty good-hearted—Finn is willing to do something for others, even if it means his quest is interrupted.
Then trouble arises. The gnomes, as it turns out, are evil. Once released from the lava, they start destroying old ladies. Finn is horrified! He objects, but the gnomes reply that the more he objects, the more old ladies they will destroy. Finn is even more horrified, and the gnomes really twist the knife and tell him that if he acts sad about the old ladies, they will kill more! Finn retreats. (Jake then grabs the gnomes and tosses them back in the lava, where they belong!)
Finn’s reactions are all appropriate—objecting to the harm done and feeling remorse for having, even inadvertently, contributed to it. This all expresses good moral character, and Jake clarifies the situation further by noting two important things: those were likely not old ladies (what would they be doing out in the woods like that?) and these are all tests of Finn’s “heroic attributes.”
Jake, of course, is right in the end. Finn shouldn’t pay attention to gnomes and their illusions—they’re just gnomes and illusions. But Finn is rightly troubled by his performance. He needs to be righteous, but he’s not doing so well. He admit he is instead, “wrongteous, stupidteous.”
Notice that Finn doesn’t have the clarity to see that in these encounters, he’s being tested. He’s only reacting, responding only on impulse. It takes Jake’s reflection to refocus Finn, to remind him that it’s all gnomes and illusions.
Finn doesn’t have long to worry about his shaky start, since he must face the second test: the bulgy-eyed giant. The giant crashes through the trees, pops Jake in his mouth, and hollers that “You cannot pass!” Pretty random.
Here, Finn is being doubly tested. First, he is on a quest, and so he must actually pass the giant—that’s how he needs to get to Mount Cragdor. So he faces a physical confrontation with someone a lot bigger than him who has already defeated Jake. Finn’s in serious danger. In a way, it’s exactly the kind of challenge we’d expect Finn to have to face in a quest to test his heroism. What would a heroic quest be without a battle with a giant?
Second, Finn suddenly must face this challenge without Jake. And, as Jake has been eaten, it becomes clear he may not have Jake with him for any future battles, either. You see, after Jake pops out of the giant’s nostril and ear hole to show he’s okay, the giant reports that Jake “fell into my stomach,” and so likely is a goner. The challenge, now, isn’t just to fight the giant, but to face the loss of a friend. Things just got real.
Finn, in a rage over the prospects of losing his friend, steals an appropriately giant dollar from the giant’s wallet and hang-glides away with it. The giant is furious, “Hey! My big money! Give it back!” Finn proposes a deal: the dollar for Jake. But the giant claims he’s killed Jake. Finn glides back and furiously kicks the giant in the belly, which causes him to barf up Jake. Reunited, the two glide to a perch up on Mount Cragdor.
And with that, it seems the test is done. But it isn’t. The giant is crushed—Finn has stolen his dollar. He blubbers and cries, and he suddenly looks more like a giant baby than a giant ogre. Finn pauses to fold the dollar into a paper airplane and he tosses it back to the giant. Jake, witnessing this, remarks: “You know what that was? That was righteous.”
For sure, Jake is right. Finn showed himself to be brave, inventive, and even merciful. The giant hardly has any right to say he deserves his dollar back—it was his eating Jake that led to his losing it. But, amazingly, Finn holds no grudge. He takes pity on the blubbering bulgy-eyed giant. Finn shows some mercy with the giant, even if he really doesn’t deserve it.
But the whole situation and Finn’s mercy are perplexing. Finn never asks the giant his motive for preventing them from passing. Was the giant merely there as a guard, or is he another illusion? Is he simply a giant spoiling for a fight? Compare this gesture of goodwill from Finn to Jake’s tossing the gnomes back into the lava. Keeping people from passing doesn’t require that you eat them—the giant meant to do real harm to Jake. The gnomes were only destroying illusory old ladies. Yet the giant gets his dollar bill back and the gnomes get thrown in the lava. That’s weird—the guy trying to really hurt real people isn’t punished at all, and the guys only pretending to hurt illusory people get thrown in lava. How is that fair or even?
The Candy Kingdom and the Land of Ooo generally make for a morally strange place, and it seems that real righteousness should require that we understand why a giant must eat travelers or why gnomes would perform illusions. To be hurdles for hero-tests is an insane explanation. Imagine that as a job, your job. You hang around in the forest waiting for some knight or random hero to come along. Then your job is to test him or her. What might you do in the meantime? Talk to the other testers? Read? Surely, the denizens of the forest at the base of Mount Cragdor have reasons for what they do. They stand as tests for heroic virtue, and that means they put themselves in harm’s way. To test a hero’s virtue is to put yourself on the wrong end of a sword. What makes that job worth it?
Couldn’t righteousness here be, instead of running around fighting willy-nilly, seeing the insanity of the quest and the tests? Wouldn’t a thoughtful hero wonder what kind of heroic tester would risk the lives of a bunch of people just to test a hero’s valor? And what kind of hero would want to pass, or even take, such a test?
These questions bring us to the third test. Finn meets a creepy mage inside the temple, and the mage takes him into his “brain world” for the final test. First, Finn must slay a beast. It’s pretty hideous, with a heart-looking shape for a body and a big, glowing skeleton arm. Finn asks the mage if it is evil, and the mage assures him that it’s “completely evil.”
Finn replies, “Shoot, yeah, I’ll slay anything that’s evil! That’s my deal!” He and the monster fight, and the monster explodes in a shower of blood. Finn, covered in the gore, is pumped. He feels the bloodlust.
The mage then challenges Finn to slay an “unaligned ant.” But Finn can’t bring himself to do it, and he breaks the brain world illusion. He promptly kicks the mage in the nards.
We should applaud Finn withholding violence against the ant. This is an important thing, and it is something we had not seen in Finn—he’d seemed pretty much happy to fight anyone, but he draws the line with the ant. But now notice a few things. First, all Finn’s slaying, though rightly directed at things with the alignment ‘evil,’ depends entirely on being told who is evil and who is not. Finn is just tossed into a “brain world” and is told that something’s evil. And then he just kills it. That’s all it takes, and he doesn’t test out his sources! He kills the heart-beast simply on the say-so of the creepy mage. Being inclined to slay evil things is righteous to a degree, but being inclined to slay anything you’re told is “evil” is not righteous. It’s dangerous. It’s wrongteous, stupidteous. What if the dark mage had said the ant was evil?
A perfect picture of Finn’s failure of careful distinction between evil and non-evil happens right after the third trial. The Key-per arrives dressed as a devil (with a little red jumpsuit with a horned hoodie and pitchfork). Finn promptly sets to walloping him. It is revealed that the devil costume is Keyper’s pajamas (but why the pitchfork?). Key-per was simply hurrying over to congratulate Finn for completing the tests. For his trouble, as we see, he receives a beating. Why? To Finn, only seeming like a bad guy is enough to start kicking butts! That’s not virtue. That’s just looking for excuses for violence . . . it might just be viciousness!
The Manly Minotaur along with the Key-per sit down with Finn for a picnic of spaghetti and juice. The Manly Minotaur gives a little speech with the presentation of the Enchiridion:
Yes, Finn, you are the goodest of heart and most righteous hero I’ve seen here. Tenderness, ingenuity, bravery and nard-kicking ability. And when you took that ogre’s dollar . . . [laughs] Man! The Key-per nearly fainted!
But what about the cowardice, lack of fairness, gullibility, and hasty violence Finn has shown?
So, Is Finn Righteous? No
Okay, look, we all love Finn. I don’t mean to trash our righteous young hero. But that’s the point, isn’t it, he’s a young hero. The trouble is, Finn is good of heart, but he has no wisdom. He is impulse, no thought. He can’t distinguish the good from the bad on his own—it must be done for him. And when the wrong people do it for him, he is easily fooled.
True righteousness requires the wisdom to know that we must be careful distinguishing good from evil. Especially when slaying stuff is on the line. I don’t mean that Finn is himself evil, but his virtues . . . bravery, ingenuity, good cheer . . . are incomplete without good judgment.
Virtues are virtues only when exercised with good judgment. Without good judgment, virtues become bad things. Bravery is no virtue if we are brave for the wrong reason. A Nazi can be brave, a terrorist can be brave, heck even the Lich can be brave. . . . Bravery is no great thing if it is not deployed for the morally right purpose.
The reality is that Finn is still a kid. And though he has remarkable resilience, skill, and enthusiasm, he has a lot of growing up to do. The problem is that there aren’t many better examples of righteous heroism for Finn around.
The Enchiridion should go to the most righteous hero. If Finn earned the Enchridion then that means there isn’t anyone more righteous than him in Ooo! This says something horrible about the Candy Kingdom and the Land of Ooo generally. Finn is not particularly righteous, but he is the most righteous. That makes Finn the best, but we have to admit he is missing at least one really important righteous quality . . . wisdom. That means that every other hero in Ooo is less righteous than an impetuous and often unnecessarily violent boy! I’d said earlier that the whole place is morally strange, and awarding Finn the title of “most righteous” proves that. The Land of Ooo is a broken, fragmented place. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that Finn is the best it can do.
Who Could Write a Decent Enchiridion? Not Billy
So far, I’ve argued that Finn isn’t particularly righteous. That’s bad news. But the good news is that he gets a book that might help—the Enchiridion, a handbook for heroes. The trouble is that the book, at least what Finn reads of it, is not a resource for improving his character. Instead, it’s more like a book of useful information—how to kiss a princess and other things heroes might need to know. This comes as no surprise, as the Candy Kingdom and Ooo do not seem to have, really, anyone capable of writing a book more helpful. That is, if you’re going to have a good book for righteousness, you’d need someone who knows what righteousness is to write it. Who in Ooo could write that book?
Maybe Billy? After all he’s the supreme hero and subject of Finn and Jake’s adoration. But I don’t think it’s likely. What we see of Billy does not inspire much confidence. He strikes me mostly as a lunkhead. When we first meet Billy, he’s completely given up on fighting evil. That sounds interesting, but his reasons for retirement are very, very strange:
All my life, I’ve beaten on evil creatures . . . [sighs]. But new evil keeps popping up. Kicking their butts was a worthless effort!
And when Finn explains that he saved a MiniQueen from an evil creature just a few minutes ago, Billy replies:
You know where she is right now? She’s probably being eaten by a different monster.
Billy’s point is that the hero’s life is wearisome, draining. But the challenges continue. That is, of course, not a reason to give up saving people! Just because a job is repetitious doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Finn asks what else he should be doing to help if not kicking butts, and Billy answers:
Nonviolently! By being active in your community.
But Billy doesn’t seem to believe what he’s saying. Is he being active in his community? No! He sits locked in his cave, rotting away with his treasures and the skeleton of his dead magic dog. He gives Finn and Jake no direction as to what activity they should take in their community, which, of course, leads to disaster. Billy might have been a great hero, but he sure doesn’t have any idea how to help Finn and Jake.
Even Ooo’s greatest hero is a bit morally disappointing. After all, if he really believes its right to be active in his community, shouldn’t he get off of his big blue-gray butt and do something???
Even Kicking Ass Gets Boring
Shouldn’t the Enchiridion have a good answer to Billy’s challenge? There is evil in the world, and even if new evil is to arise later, we must face and oppose it. The reality of any life, heroic or not, is that we face the daily grind of work, housekeeping, obligatory social gatherings, classes, and so on. There’s a special Latin word for the grind of small details and tasks that eat up our days: “quotidia.” Our quotidian lives are filled with repeated micro jobs that, when seen from the perspective of having to do them again, again, and again, are burdensome . . . or even absurd. You make your bed, again, and again, and again. Only to mess it up that night, again, and again, and again. Same for cutting the grass, getting a haircut, trimming your nails, going to school or work, paying bills. It’s the same grind, same thing, a rat race. Absurd, and hardly worth it. Sigh. That’s what Billy was complaining about . . . the quotidia of being a hero.
For the hero, fighting evil becomes quotidian, just like doing homework or doing taxes. That is horrible news for someone who wants that life for its excitement and glory. The life of the hero is supposed to be exciting at its core, to be a break from the kind of lives we normally lead. It’s strange to hear from Billy that it’s not. But then, again, maybe it’s not so strange.
But Billy’s forgotten something. He has a duty to others. Imagine a teacher saying something along Billy’s lines:
All my life, I’ve been teaching kids. And every time I teach a kid, the kid needs to learn something else. Even worse, half the time they forget what I taught them and I have to teach it again!
We might reply that to be a teacher is, for sure, to face this kind of grind, but good teachers are resilient. They find ways to effectively motivate not only their students but themselves. Duty is the motivation in these circumstances—even though the job is repetitive, it must be done, and it is my job to do it. Taking ownership of a role, seeing how it fits with the rest of the whole, doing it for the sake of the others it benefits (even if temporarily and contingently)—that is true heroic motive. Living otherwise, expecting otherwise, isn’t realistic. That’s stupid. Problems are never permanently solved, nothing stays fixed forever, selfishness and violence recur. But that is no reason not to solve problems, fix things, or stand against evil. That is the reason why the hero’s life, like the teacher’s (or the parent’s, student’s, office worker’s, doctor’s, or dishwasher’s) life is full of the continuous and repetitive work of doing one’s duty in light of one’s role. The object is to do it well, but Billy just checks out. Some hero. Some role-model.
A handbook for heroes would prepare a hero for that challenge, the challenge Billy faces and fails. A real handbook for heroes would prepare the hero for other challenges: future failures, misunderstandings, errors, and the hero’s own limitations. Heroes aren’t gods, they aren’t immortal. They have limitations. And the reality is that they will always bump up against those limits. Even Billy, the greatest hero, wore down and checked out. The Enchiridion, if it’s a real handbook for heroes, needs to have some of that wisdom. Righteousness is hard to keep up.
How to Stay Righteous
In Epictetus’s Enchiridion, he outlines the way a person can, in heroic fashion, become invulnerable to the world, to be invincible to the opinions of others, to do one’s duty, and to be content with one’s life. For better or worse, Finn’s Enchiridion demands comparison with its ancient namesake.
Epictetus’s Enchiridion was literally a handbook for Stoic living (en-cher being ancient Greek for in-hand). The Stoics were philosophers living in ancient Greece and Rome, and the core tenets of their philosophy were that only virtue is valuable, and that we have to master our emotions in order to be virtuous. A Stoic is indifferent to all things except virtue. And so, the Stoics think it doesn’t matter whether they are rich, healthy, well-liked, fancily dressed, yada yada. The only thing that matters to a Stoic is whether she is a good person—whether she keeps her word, stands up for what’s right, treats others with respect, and does her job. The satisfactions of fame, riches, and pleasure are the satisfactions any thief or liar could appreciate, but the satisfactions of the job well-done, of doing the right thing, of having been morally attentive are satisfactions only the righteous can enjoy.
This Stoic perspective of self-control and duty is both stark and appealing. It is stark for sure, since the Stoic must view pain, poverty, and ill-repute as no big deal. This is a difficult position for most people. But the Stoic perspective has its appeal, too. Consider someone you’ve admired. If you’ve admired the person, it doesn’t matter whether they are rich or poor, healthy or sickly, famous or not. If you admire the person, you admire how they handle adversity or how, when success comes their way, they don’t let it go to their heads. If you admire someone because of their clothes or wealth or fame, you don’t admire them, you admire the clothes, wealth, and fame.
The Stoic strategy is to be the kind of person someone could admire no matter how you’re dressed, no matter your wealth or social station. It is the dignity we keep in doing our jobs and keeping our word, no matter how small the deed or repetitive the task, that we find that we are admirable. Embracing that perspective yields a good life. It may not yield wealth or fame, but it yields a job well-done, a life of dignity. That’s what really matters.
A handbook for heroes needs a lesson like that. Billy could have used that lesson. Billy wants to defeat evil once and for all. But that’s impossible, so Billy checked out. What about Finn? He reacts, on instinct and impulse, to the things around him, and that is sometimes good, but not always. He needs direction, guidance. But Jake will not always be there for him, nor will Princess Bubblegum, or any of the other characters. Finn needs to develop his own perspective, his own life; to be more than someone who just reacts to the things around him. He needs good judgment. Finn could use the Stoic Enchiridion to remind him to focus on virtue rather than on loot, butt-kicking, and the fleeting fame that often comes with being a hero.
Flawed Heroes
Finn is a good guy. But he is incomplete, and I think that drawing him that way makes him interesting, but not admirable. It’s a better story, for sure, with a flawed hero. But you nevertheless have a flawed hero. But Finn’s flaws, are not tragic flaws, well not yet anyway. They could become really bad in the wrong circumstances. Think about how easily Finn is led by others—this can yield terrible results if he started taking orders from the wrong people. Finn is exceedingly enthusiastic to slay evil, which is why he starts pummeling Key-per. Good thing for everyone that it was just a punch in the gut and the Key-per could take the blow—if it was a blow delivered with a sword, Finn’s enthusiasm might have resulted in the murder of one of the good guys! Finn could use a little Stoic virtue. . . . Maybe that’s the lesson that should be in Finn’s Enchiridion—a hero is just another murder with a sword unless he tempers that violence with vurtue and good judgment!