A man to remember: Martin Luther King, Jr., moral hero.

A few years back, Lynn Cheney, who was then head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (she's also the wife of former Defense Secretary Richard Cheney), wrote an interesting essay titled "American Memory." She deplored the deficient sense of history that Americans, especially young Americans, suffer from nowadays. She said that without an adequate awareness of where we were yesterday, we can hardly know where we are today and certainly cannot decide where we ought to go tomorrow.

Days like the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, days on which we commemorate the lives and achievements of our great national heroes, provide us with occasions to renew contact with our history, and, like Atlas touching the earth, to recruit our energies for future national tasks.

The great figures of our nation's history--e.g., Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln-- stand the test of time. No matter how often we reexamine their lives and careers, we continue to discover new levels of significance. True enough, this continual study reveals their shortcomings; but it reveals also a genuine greatness that throws these imperfections into the shade.

Too often we forget that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a minister of the Christian religion, speaking of him as though he were nothing more than a gifted political leader. Without question, he was a social and political reformer: one of the greatest in the long history of this reform-addicted nation. But he was much more. Remember the wonderfully paradoxical lines from Lovelace: "I could not love thee, Dear, so much/Loved I not Honor more." King could not have been so great a reformer had he not been something better than a mere reformer. His social reform activities were the spontaneous overflow of a richly endowed, marvelously cultivated spirit and personality.

Since his death, of course, we have learned much about his imperfections. His adulteries would be relatively minor blemishes on the record of a mere politician. But King came before us as more than that, as a kind of saint: the American Gandhi. And adulteries don't fit easily into the curriculum vitae of a saint. More recently we have learned about the plagiarized passages in his doctoral dissertation at Boston University. If you are one of those who agree with Dante's assignment of liars to a deeper circle of hell than adulterers, this latter offense seems even more of a stain than the former. To those who always disliked him because of the cause he represented, these revelations have been a boon; now they can dismiss him with contempt as a pious fraud. But for those of us who observed him in his prime and regarded him as the clearest witness in our age to the reality of spirit, these revelations have been disheartening. Did we get it wrong when we viewed him as a saint for our times? Was it a false light he shed? Was it a false inspiration we drew from him?

For the Calvinist, the saint is always a saint, from the first moment of existence straight through to eternity. From this point of view it is difficult to understand how the saint could possibly lapse into serious sin, the commission of which seems presumptive evidence that the sinner in question is a mere sinner and no saint at all. But from the Catholic point of view there is no difficulty in understanding that even saints might have their bad days--or weeks or months or years. It was this Catholic theory of the dialectic between sin and sanctity that Graham Greene used to exploit in his novels.

King, the Baptist, was closer to the Calvinist tradition of Christianity than to the Catholic tradition; yet his sanctity is more easily understood on the Catholic theory than the Puritan theory. It isn't a question of balancing his virtues against his vices and then calculating which side of the scale has the net advantage. It is a question rather of what he was at bottom. Was he an inveterate cheater who happened to have a knack for charismatic leadership?

Or was he what he seemed to be, a sinful yet God-intoxicated man whose faith, inseparable from his very self, led him down the road to a foreseen martyrdom?

Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems to me, was a striking example of what Henri Bergson called the "moral hero." Moral heroes, according to Bergson, transcend particular connections and loyalties. They rise above all particularity to the level of the universal, the level of the truly human. They call to that which is universal in all of us, and there is something in us that responds to that "call of the hero."

Some follow the call; some are moved to admiration but fail to follow; and some hate the hero, not because they fail to hear the call but precisely because they do hear it and feel it pulling away from their lives of particular, narrow attachments. They sense that the hero is demanding of them a change of life, a moral revolution. It seems so much easier to hate the moral hero, even to wish the hero dead, than to renounce old loyalties and change our lives. Thus the hero inevitably risks career, reputation, life itself.

This is a paradox. Moral heroes, more than anyone else, affirm the absolute dignity, the infinite value of the human person. Yet they put their lives on the line every day, walking down paths that lead to injury, to insult, to the worst sort of humiliations, even to death. If the dignity of the human person is so important to them, how can they subject their own persons to such indignities?

The answer, of course, is that human life is precious because it involves the possibility of participating in values even more precious than life, values so precious they are worth not only living for but dying for as well. Moral heroes are great because they call us to these values, and in doing so call us to our own highest possibilities. To verify the reality of those possibilities and the values that define them, they are willing to sacrifice their own lives. Moral heroes rarely die peacefully in bed.

America has always been fortunate in her national heroes, but rarely more fortunate than in the case of Martin Luther King, Jr., who, warts and all, is as much a great figure in our moral history as in our political history.