Before Thomas Carlyle, there was another kind of popular hero: the saint. Maybe the saint is better seen less in the context of the hero’s or strongman’s evolution than as running against it. While warrior-heroes strove against the gods, or could only please some while displeasing others, saints were granted whatever virtues they had as a result of their piety to those gods.

Thomas Aquinas believed that because God was a rational being he had endowed everyone with a purpose. For him, saints were humans with a particular skill for tuning into their purpose. This may not have allowed them to melt flesh with their eyes or combust at will, but it gave Abraham the superpower of faith, Moses meekness, and Job patience. Saints didn’t have to be stronger or more magical than the rest of us; they had to be good at being themselves.

Virtues have a different quality to actions; they’re not discrete. As Aquinas wrote, “good is diffusive of itself.”¹²⁷ By this, I think he meant that moral goodness should only—maybe can only—be pursued for its own sake.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a similar point: “when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (Matthew 6:3). If a “good” act is done to achieve a particular end, then the moral impulse will likely die with that deed. If you help someone carry their shopping to impress onlookers—your left hand proudly watching over your right hand—you’re less likely to do it again. But if “goodness” is not something you can succeed or fail at, being a state of diffusive virtue, it has no necessary end. It ripples into eternity.

This was the realization Obama claimed to have in Dreams from My Father. Working as a community organizer in Chicago, he observed how Harold Washington had towered over the city’s politics, as a lawyer and then as its first black mayor. He was almost too singular and overwhelming a force: “the entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun.”¹²⁸ After he was gone, where did that leave his supporters and project?

Keanu’s characters—the ones who understand this—are always letting go, ceding control. In Point Break, Johnny Utah starts out in denial, trying to be someone he isn’t—a soccer player, an FBI agent, a surfer—before choosing the path of self-diffusion. His mistake was ever thinking his identity needed to be fixed, that a hero has to look a certain way. At the end of the film—having let go of the criminal he’s spent years chasing—Johnny throws his FBI badge into the sea. He discovers who he is by abandoning himself.