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War
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Passion, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Passion represents hero-worship and religion as fundamentally destructive forms of passion, because the passionate person cannot truly know their love object or have their passion reciprocated by their love’s object. The novel illustrates the destructive nature of hero-worship and religion through the fates of Russian peasants, the young French soldier Henri, and Henri’s mother. When Napoleon Bonaparte invades Russia as winter is approaching, the Russian army burns the land and homes of Russian peasants to prevent the French army from taking advantage of the peasants’ crops or shelters. The peasants actively cooperate in the burning, even though it will mean their death by starvation or hypothermia, because they “worship” Russia’s leader, the Czar, with a quasi-religious passion. Yet the peasants have never met the Czar, and the Czar will never love them back as individuals—showing the strange, delusory, and fatal nature of their passion for him. Marching through Russian with the French army, Henri comes to see that the Russian peasants’ worship of the Czar is fundamentally similar to his own worship of Napoleon: he has been idolizing a famous man he barely knows to a dangerous degree that may cause his own destruction.
Additionally, the novel treats Henri’s mother’s religiosity as something like hero-worship: she cannot “know” God or the Virgin Mary directly in the way that people usually know their loved ones and have their love reciprocated, yet she devotes most of her attention and energy to them up to the moment of her death. The book portrays this type of religious fervor as a waste. And, more generally, The Passion represents religion and hero-worship as unhealthy forms of passion because they seem to preclude interpersonal knowledge and reciprocity and thus often lead to destruction.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Hero-Worship and Religion ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Hero-Worship and Religion appears in each part of The Passion. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Hero-Worship and Religion Quotes in The Passion
Below you will find the important quotes in The Passion related to the theme of Hero-Worship and Religion.
Part 1: The Emperor
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I wrote about her or tried to. She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.
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Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.
Part 2: The Queen of Spades
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Could a woman love a woman for more than a night?
I stepped out and in the morning they say a beggar was running round the Rialto talking about a young man who’d walked across the canal like it was solid.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
Part 3: The Zero Winter
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They called the Czar ‘the Little Father’, and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror for my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far.
If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once-loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?
Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?
Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.
I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.
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Part 4: The Rock
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They had notebooks with them mostly. His life-story, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.
I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.
Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else.
