Despite the extraordinary cinematic advances of our time, fantasy will never achieve the status of reality, for the two are immiscible substances. But fantasy has its gifts and its genius. The power of fantasy lies in its ability to recast the truths of the Real in the veiled form of allegory and by that to tell a story already told a thousand times with sparkling freshness, to awaken deaf ears to the sounds of forgotten music, to remind the mind of its passion for fascination and the heart of its need for hope. Such is the birthright of the superhero and the singular cause of his fame. One need not even ask what it is about a man whose eyes are all-seeing, whose skin is soft yet impervious to bullets, whose ears hear the cries of a billion hurting souls, whose strong arms bind up the wounds of the broken, and whose kindness is boundless and freely given, that so captures our imagination. The cry of the human heart is to believe in such a man, to touch the hem of his cape, to immortalize his memory in a photograph and forever tell others of the time you stood by his side.

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Across the span of centuries, many among the literati have been applauded for dissecting and disclaiming the ancient yearning for a Savior. But the affections of average men and women for the exploits of heroes undermine the pretension of the elites and crown the truth with laurels of jasmine. No matter how efficiently intellectuals may dismantle their visions of grandeur, ordinary people will always believe in a power greater than themselves. For the golden children (and megalomaniacs) of mankind have yet to achieve divinity. Even Alexander the Great, the generalissimo of conquest, met his match in the Brahmins of India and the waterless wastes of the Gedrosian desert. Even Nietzche who wrote polemics against “dead” tradition and conjured images of a master race endowed with undefiled genetics and unblemished upbringing knew only squalor and insanity in his personal twilight. Even Einstein who by the exercise of his genius succeeded in relativizing that which for millennia had been constant—the measuring stick of time—was a mere mortal who succumbed to the ravages of age. The soul of man longs to believe in more than its own flesh because life in the flesh is, to use the somewhat overwrought words of Hegel, nasty, brutish and short. Given the privation and finitude of existence, Man longs for transcendence, for the fountain of youth, for the graces of a real Superman. Indeed, even Voltaire, paragon of enlightened Reason, knew enough of his own heart to pitch his creedal tent with the hoi polloi in sight of eternal springs.

In the summer blockbuster recently released, the character of Lois Lane struggles with a question whose parallel in real life is as old as the sin of pride: “Why does the world need Superman?” As all good fantasy, the film gives the answer in the lineaments of metaphor and allegory, not in cold, angular dogmatics. Yet its answer bears sufficient profundity to fill a systematics text. The world needs Superman because his is the only providence that is gentle and good; his is the only wrath before which evil must kneel; and in him and no other dwells the power of an indestructible life. Superman is not merely the ideal human being elevated to a celestial throne. By his nature he is Other; his likeness is alien to us. Yet his selfless love is the very language by which our hearts speak. We behold him with spellbound wonder, enraptured by his miracles, trusting in his superintendence, and captivated by the twinkle in his eye when we catch his gaze. In beholding Superman, our eyes turn Heavenward, to the stars, to our origins, to the One who made us and sees us in our need. In the day of Superman’s sojourn with us, we are satisfied as never before, because in his presence the Right and the Real are brothers, united in indivisible harmony, crowned by the unvanquished supremacy of truth above all lies.

In the age of entertainment, movies are a dime a dozen. Few percolate to the surface of the competitive sea and become classics. Of those that do transcend, however, so many tell tales that are larger than life, stories of tragedy and glory, epics of kings and knights and gods and generals. Contrary to the view of the skeptics, this phenomenon is not traceable to the post-industrial fancy for escapism. Instead, it is a consequence of ordinary human intuition, once paralyzed by the fallacies of naturalism and scientific triumphalism, reasserting its preeminence in the postmodern age. Thus the curtains close on Superman Returns to a chorus of unabashed cheers. People love Superman in the same way that children love fairy tales. Superman teaches us to think again with our hearts, to recall the tapestries of purpose and beauty that seemed so genuine when we were young but whose stitching has faded and frayed under the aging of education and experience. Superman transports us into the epochal past, into the primordial forge of the human soul, and instructs us again what it means to feel and know and believe in something wonderful.

Yet Superman’s greatest gift exceeds even that. Beyond recapitulating the truths of our own psychology and ancestral history, Superman unearths for us the divine icons we have lost amid the shifting sands of secular ideology. Indeed, though many will not wish to admit it, the legend of Superman reminds us of the life of an authentic superhero whose existence is shrouded in the mists of eternal truth—that Man who walked on water, healed lepers and raised the dead, who turned the Roman world upside down with a revolution of soft-spoken words, and who saw the heart of mankind and loved it in spite of its glaring imperfections. Of this Man the ancients wrote that he was the Father’s Son, the divine regent destined to reign over death in a Kingdom without end. As went the celluloid narrative of Superman, so went the story of the Resurrection and the Life. The Savior suffered and poured out his life so that those who are alive could truly live. The Light of the World defeated the machinations of an evil mastermind and shed his flame abroad to illumine the nations and warm hearts frozen by despair. As one who knew Him wrote, “We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Ultimately, the world needs Superman because the world needs Jesus of Nazareth but has forgotten how to say his name without cringing. The world needs Superman because we who follow Jesus have slighted His memory with centuries of tomfoolery and venom, frivolity and vanity, narrow-mindedness and depravity. The world needs Superman because in many ways he is a type of Jesus in a blue suit and a red cape. He is the light who shines in darkness and overcomes it. He is benevolence personified. He is the cosmic redeemer of a fallen Creation. He is the dream of the darkened heart. The parallels between the Man of Steel and the Son of Man are not perfect, of course. For fantasy will never quite tell the story of history. Yet the luminous potency of Superman makes him unique among fantasies. For unlike any other mythic tale, the story of Superman adumbrates the greatest story every told in a fashion fit for postmodern consumption. At its heart, shorn of its romantic and journalistic subplots, the message of Superman is the message of the Gospel. Though the misery of sin and evil may inflict the world with grief, yet there is One who holds the world in his hands and says with beneficent intention, “Behold, I make all things new.”

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