I will tell you of William Wallace.

What we are told of William Wallace should, to a healthy soul, be easy to discern; but Mel Gibson's Braveheart has not had the good fortune to be received by only healthy souls, and his message has been missed by more than a few. The more picky literalists expected a historical drama, and have complained of factual inaccuracies. As for historical interpretation, the film answers for this matter itself.

Historians from England will tell you I am a liar; but history is written by those who would hang heroes.

More importantly, however, than the defense that Gibson's history might be right, is the reminder that Gibson's history might not be history; it is a song. Gibson is not following the historians, he is following the poets. History is concerned with facts, with the arrangements of bodies individual and corporate; poetry is concerned with truth, with the intentions of souls, personal and national.

The success of Braveheart is the clarity of its moral vision: it makes moral certainty not only plausible, but actual. To see Wallace on the screen is to see a man pure of heart in a world sick with evil, it is to see a man betrayed, it is to see a man risking his life for justice. This is real justice, that requires no theoretical framework; it is immediately perceived, perfectly natural, and necessary. You do not choose to root for Wallace, you find yourself wanting to fight with him; you do not pretend to dislike the traitors and tyrants, you find yourself hating them, and thanking God that young Wallace remembered the fate of his family.

The scene is set in Braveheart when Wallace's father and people are betrayed by the English crown; Wallace tolerates injustices perpetrated against his people until years later, when his new and innocent wife is murdered for resisting the rape of an English soldier. Wallace leads a rebellion against the illegitimate English powers, despite the reluctance of weak and petty Scottish lords. Wallace is many times a victor, and many times the victim of betrayal. In the end, captured and painfully tortured, he dies in dignity, a martyr.

Gibson the poet has allowed us to avail ourselves of the main characters as if they were symbols: Wallace's love Murron (Catherine McCormack) is smart and strong, and she is also beautiful and pure; she is the perfect object of wicked violation and betrayal. The Scottish lords remind us of our own most common modes of public reasoning. They are unable to lead, and unable to recognize leadership; in them is captured the ineffectual and distracting voices of policy-politics, all theory justifying greed, no action in the name of principle. King Edward the Longshanks (Patrick McGoohan) is unforgiving and unkind, heartless and crafty, and terribly powerful. He is more than a worthy villian. Milton knew that the Devil could not be cheapened, and Gibson gave McGoohan the role of personifying the evil against which it was worth our hero's fighting, and dying.

At one point, King Edward throws his weak son's homosexual lover out a window, killing him. Critics without poetic vision have dwelt on the political significance of this scene rather than its moral significance for the movie, and have leveled charges of "homophobia." The charge ignores the slight complication that the villian kills the sodomite. But the fact that the charge is made is evidence that there may be something troublingly sympathetic in Longshanks' actions, something recognizable in his evil, something rational in his wickedness. If this is the enemy, what could Wallace do with less than violence?

Robert the Bruce (Angus McFayden) is the Chorus, the audience in the play. In him is captured the psychological struggle between a desire to participate in the clarity of moral vision, and the temptation to sacrifice that clarity for something else. Wallace is pure because he has no such temptation. The Bruce is attracted to the purity of Wallace, who fights with passion, but he is weakened by the ugly temptation to deny the strength of his moral certainty. The temptation is personified by his father, the aging earl, who tells him: "Admire this Wallace, he has courage; so does a dog; but it is precisely the ability to compromise that makes us men." The words are as ugly as the man who utters them. In the end, not without mistakes, Bruce forsakes temptation and gains Wallace's pure vision.

Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it.

Wallace yearns for, and dies for, freedom. It has been objected that Braveheart illegitimately projects an Enlightenment idealization of freedom onto an unphilosophical medieval warrior. This implies that the romanticization of freedom began in the 18th Century. It would be more accurate to say that it was forgotten then. Freedom is a theme proper to poets, not to theoreticians. Blind Harry, the Scottish bard whose epic is a primary source for our knowledge of Wallace, crafted a poem concerned with the freedom of family, clan, and nation, and the theme was naturally inspiring. Philosophers, from Rousseau to Rawls, destroy freedom; they miss first and foremost that before freedom can be the life and health of individuals it must be the life and health of cultures and communities. Gibson did not read 18th Century philosophy back into Wallace's struggle, but some critics, by expecting theory, have missed the beautiful force of Wallace's love for freedom:

I want a wife, and children. I want to raise crops.

Wallace isn't living a political philosophy, he is fighting for his life, and for his way of life. He is killing traitors, serving a people, sacrificing his blood. He isn't moved by a law or a treaty, he is not concerned with economics or equality, he cares only for sovereignty and self-sufficiency--freedom.

It is a shame that the meaning of Wallace's freedom does not register in the hearts of the popular critics of our age, but then neither do rolling highlands, fertile soils, the virtue of women or the honor of ancestors. If we are not jealous of Wallace's times, because we are satisfied with the version of freedom realized by technological advance, we can at least appreciate Wallace's opportunity to die for a cause. We may not wish to give up petroleum and plumbing, but Braveheart does depict a world that most of us lack: a world in which evil is apparent and righteous action is immediately available, a world in which the simplicity of life makes heroism not only possible to imagine but possible to achieve.

Of course, true poetry is not self-contained; it reads itself into life. If the themes are universal, and if that clarity of moral vision is so right, then we must carry it into the world outside the theater. It would be a fool who claimed he could appreciate Wallace but who could not recognize evil in his own times. Our times do not lack evil, for at the very least we do not lack threats to our freedom. What our times do lack is Wallace's opportunity for action. His struggle assembled itself on a field; when the enemy threatened to bear down in violence, Wallace had an army full of his own countrymen that he could exhort to battle at his side. Wallace and those who followed him had not just moral certainty, but occasion to die putting that certainty into practice. At the bloody battles of Stirling and Falkirk we are not confused about what is wrought by war. War is awful, but at least it is opportunity for action. We do not envy the Scottish warriors their glory, for they are anonymous, and so won none; they fought for justice, not glory. But, though tired and outnumbered, they fought. It is easier to believe that their souls are saved than to believe that ours will be.

Lord, I am so afraid. Give me the courage to die well.

Reprinted with permission from Right Reason, an independent student journal at the University of Notre Dame.