Faith & Spirit Quote by Anita Brookner

Brookner’s line turns existentialism into a moral dare, not a mood. “Being a saint without God” is an intentionally provocative splice: she borrows the most loaded figure in religious culture - the saint - then yanks out the machinery that usually makes sainthood legible and rewarded. What’s left is ethics without an audience, virtue without a scoreboard. The bite is in the loneliness of it: existentialism isn’t just freedom; it’s responsibility stripped of alibis.

Calling it “being your own hero” adds a second twist. “Hero” is modern, narrative, self-authored; it implies a life lived as a series of chosen acts rather than inherited duties. Brookner’s phrasing suggests existentialism as a kind of self-mythmaking under pressure, where you must generate meaning and courage from scratch. There’s admiration here, but also a warning: self-heroism can veer into self-dramatization, the temptation to turn morality into personal style.

The final clause is where the historian’s sensibility shows. “Sanction and support” points to institutions as engines of legitimacy: religion and society don’t merely instruct; they certify. Brookner is mapping the cultural cost of modernity - the erosion of shared frameworks that once told you who you were and why your suffering mattered. In that vacuum, existentialism becomes a bracing, almost ascetic project: to act decently without cosmic guarantees, to choose integrity when nobody is keeping the books.