Study Guide: Starship Troopers

A Tale of Two Soldiers: From War Hero to Saint

We extend a special thanks to Sadie's professor of Moral Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Dr. Donald Asci, for the excellent content and insights that aided us in writing this reflection on law, grace, and the saints.

And behold, a man came up to him, saying, "Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?" And he said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments." He said to him, "Which ones?" And Jesus said, "You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." The young man said to him, "All these I have kept. What do I still lack?" Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

*Matthew 19:16-22*

Let's consider the stories of two young men, both seventeen, both vain, ambitious, and hungry for glory. Neither one knew it yet, but both were asking the same question the rich young man asked Jesus: what must I do to inherit eternal life?

In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Juan Rico enlists in the Mobile Infantry because a girl smiled at him. Carmen Ibanez was beautiful and planning to become a starship pilot, and Rico thought: why not? If that's what it takes to be near her, sign him up. He was a spoiled rich kid who'd never worked hard for anything, never sacrificed, never put anyone else first. He wasn't asking about eternal life. He was asking how to impress a girl. But beneath that shallow question was the deeper one he couldn't yet articulate: what is my life for?

Now let's turn to Ignatius of Loyola, who became a soldier to win fame and fortune. He was extravagant in dress, obsessed with his reputation, and driven by a desire for vainglory. He fought for the honor of Spain, dreaming of saving damsels and being celebrated as a hero. He wasn't asking about eternal life either. He was asking how to achieve glory. But beneath that was the same question: what will satisfy the deepest longing in me?

Both young men stumbled into commitments they didn't understand, and both discovered that duty transforms. Both developed genuine virtues through discipline and hardship. One became a hero, and one became a saint. The difference is that one discovered the answer to the question he didn't know he was asking, and the other's story ends before that question fully surfaces.

The Formation: Virtue Through Habit

The Federation in Starship Troopers understands something undeniable: you become what you practice. Rico enters boot camp as a selfish teenager, and through relentless drill, physical hardship, and military discipline, he's transformed. He doesn't just learn about courage, he becomes courageous. He doesn't study loyalty in a classroom, he practices it until it's instinct.

This is Aristotle's great insight, articulated twenty-three centuries before Heinlein: virtue isn't primarily knowledge, it's habit. You become brave by doing brave things, loyal by practicing loyalty. Practice shapes habit; habit shapes character; character determines who you are when it matters.

In the world Heinlein creates, the Federation proves this works. By the time Rico faces the alien enemy brain bug, he's no longer the boy who joined on a whim. During the chaotic hunt for this leader of the opposition, he loses contact with his superiors, his men are scattered, communication has broken down, and the mission is falling apart. The teenager who enlisted for a girl would have panicked, would have frozen, and people would have died. But that's not who Rico is anymore. His training kicks in. He brings order to chaos, keeps his unit together, makes the hard calls, and holds the line. He's become someone capable of sacrificing everything for his brothers-in-arms and for the mission.

The virtues Rico displays are real and admirable amongst many soldiers: courage, loyalty, self-discipline, self-sacrifice. Aristotle called this process the path to eudaimonia, which we might translate as human flourishing or living at your best. Adherence to the natural law (moral truths accessible through reason alone) works exactly as Aristotle said it would. Rico is genuinely a better man than he was.

The Closed Loop

But here's what Rico is never shown: what is all this formation for? He doesn't ask this question explicitly, but it's there beneath the surface. The young man who joined for a girl is becoming someone capable of dying for his brothers. That transformation points toward something, suggests a purpose beyond itself. But what?

The Federation has an answer, and we should take it seriously. Heinlein was not a careless thinker. He constructed a society built on a genuinely compelling civic philosophy: service earns citizenship, sacrifice for the common good is the highest calling, and the Mobile Infantry exists to protect everything humanity has built. Mr. Dubois, Rico's History and Moral Philosophy teacher, lays this out with real intellectual force. The Federation isn't confused or cynical. It has looked squarely at the question of how to form virtuous citizens and arrived at an answer that works. Rico's transformation is their proof. The system produces men willing to die for each other for the sake of the Federation, and that is no small thing.

But notice what the Federation's purpose ultimately rests on. You sacrifice for the Federation so the Federation can survive so people can sacrifice for the Federation. The purpose is self-referential. It's a closed loop. Not because Heinlein failed to think it through, but because he's honestly depicting what civic virtue looks like when transcendence is not on the table. The Federation has no anchor outside itself, no purpose beyond its own continuation.

And that means it has a ceiling. The novel ends before Rico gets to ask the deeper question, and the Federation wouldn't have the vocabulary to answer it if he did.

Heinlein creates a character in Rico who never notices this. He's too busy becoming courageous and loyal, and the satisfaction of becoming more than he was fills the space where deeper questions might otherwise grow. But the shallow satisfaction of self-improvement is not the same as the ultimate fulfillment of the purpose for which human beings were made.

And here we should note something the novel's idealized world obscures. Rico is a fictional character, and he behaves like one. He never thinks of using his considerable discipline to rationalize something selfish. He's never tempted to twist his courage toward a dishonorable end. He never discovers that his will is weaker than his training. He never does anything irrational at all. No real human being has ever worked like this. Rico is a thought experiment in what formation would look like if human knowledge could attain a perfect moral understanding, and human nature cooperated perfectly. And this is an impossibility, due to the reality of original sin.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image and likeness, endowed with reason, intellect, will, and freedom, all ordered toward seeking and loving what is true and good. But the first human beings chose to abuse these gifts, turning them toward evil rather than good. This twisting of our rational gifts is inherited, and every human person is born with this internal ordering to use them towards the end of committing and justifying sin, and attempting to mitigate the consequences. We have a nature that, while it still desires the good, is now inclined toward evil and subject to error. We are divided against ourselves. Our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, and our passions pull us toward what we know is wrong. Original sin disfigured the divine image in us, impairing both our capacity to seek moral truths without a self-serving agenda and our ability to orient our will toward the good we find.

This is why the ideal of natural law working on its own is a convenient fiction. It is not simply that we lack a transcendent anchor, though we do. It is that our fallen nature actively undermines even our best rational efforts. We know what it is like to see the right thing clearly and not do it, to use our intelligence to justify what we already want, to find our willpower mysteriously absent at the moment it matters most. We do not merely fail to reach the good through reason alone. We put our reason in the service of our disordered desires, rationalizing what we want rather than pursuing what is true. Discipline alone cannot fix this. The formation that produces stable virtue without any deeper help does not exist outside of fiction.

And this points to another limitation in Heinlein's vision. If the Federation really is able to produce soldiers with this stable virtue, it requires love. If one is willing to die for a person or a country, it's going to take more than just affection or camaraderie, a drive for personal gratification, or even a lot of really solid abstract rational proofs. It takes a rightly ordered love that wills the genuine good of the other and ultimately the good of God. The Federation trains Rico in loyalty and self-sacrifice, but in reality those virtues can only be built on top of a foundation of Christian formation. Charity, the love that orders all other loves, that animates virtue from the inside and keeps them from collapsing, is a theological virtue. It comes from God. It is sustained by relationship with God. Without that animating center, even the most disciplined formation is running on a fuel supply that will eventually run out. You can train the muscles, but if the heart isn't fed, the whole body weakens.

This is the ceiling of natural law. Aristotle could tell you how, up to the limit of unaided human reason, to become virtuous. He could show you the path to human flourishing up to that limit. But he couldn't explain why the human creature failed again and again to reach it. Seven centuries later, Thomas Aquinas (who simply called Aristotle "The Philosopher") demonstrated that Aristotle, having gotten as far as human reason could go with virtue ethics, natural law, and teleology, had proved that something more than human was required for the perfection of the human: divine revelation and grace. What God can do with us not only surpasses our scale of human excellence, but He entirely changes the question of what that even means.

The Saint: Ignatius and the Journey to Union

Ignatius of Loyola received the same sort of formation Rico did. His story shows what happens when the ceiling of natural law leads to a door.

Born in 1491 as Inigo Lopez de Loyola in the Basque region of Spain, he was the youngest of thirteen children in a noble family. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised in a world of courtly ambition. As a young man, he served as a page in the court of a relative, absorbing the culture of chivalry, romance, and military glory. He was vain about his appearance, meticulous about his dress, and deeply concerned with his reputation. He loved stories of knights and ladies, dreamed of performing great deeds that would win him fame and the favor of noblewomen.

When he became a soldier, it wasn't for God or country in any deep sense. It was for glory. He wanted to be celebrated, to stand out, to prove himself the equal of any knight in the stories he'd devoured. And then the military took this cocky and immature kid and gave him exactly what the Federation gave to Rico: discipline, courage, loyalty, the whole formation. He had become a better man, more capable of virtue.

Then came May 20, 1521. French forces were besieging the citadel of Pamplona, and Spanish troops wanted to surrender. The battle was already lost, defense was hopeless. But Ignatius refused, not out of strategic wisdom (he knew they'd lose), but because surrender felt dishonorable. His vanity demanded he make a stand. So he rallied the men to defend a position they couldn't hold, and a cannonball shattered his right leg and wounded his left.

The French forces, impressed by his foolish courage, carried him back to his family castle at Loyola to recover. The surgeons set his leg, but it healed poorly, with one leg shorter than the other and a protruding bone that would prevent him from wearing the fashionable tight boots he loved. This was intolerable to his vanity. So he ordered the surgeons to re-break the leg and reset it properly. They did, without anesthesia. Ignatius made no sound during the excruciating procedure, and only clenched his fists. That level of physical control is not natural. It's a result of formation. But the formation had brought him to a strange place: military discipline had made him capable of extraordinary suffering for the sake of his self-image.

After the resetting he faced months of recovery, bedridden and bored. Ignatius asked for romance novels, the chivalric tales he'd always loved. They had none. All they could offer were two books: a life of Christ and a collection of lives of the saints. With nothing else to do, he read them.

At first, his mind wandered between two sets of daydreams. In one set, he imagined returning to his old life: performing great deeds in battle, winning the favor of a certain noble lady, achieving the fame and glory he'd always craved. In the other set, he imagined imitating the saints: traveling to Jerusalem as a pilgrim, living in radical poverty like St. Francis, performing penances and devotions to match the great heroes of the faith.

Both sets of thoughts gave him pleasure while he entertained them. But then he noticed something strange. When he stopped thinking about worldly glory (the battles, the lady, the fame), those thoughts left him dry and empty. When he stopped thinking about the saints and Christ, those thoughts left him filled with peace and joy.

This was the beginning of what Ignatius would later call the discernment of spirits. He realized he could test the movements of his heart, could distinguish between what merely pleased him in the moment and what truly brought him closer to God and the deepest fulfillment of his heart. Consolation versus desolation. One set of desires led to life; the other led to emptiness. One way was temporary, shallow, and ultimately meaningless gratification; and the other was a total sacrificial offering of one's entire being to the ultimate meaning. The only thing that "gave" was the complete giving up, in love, to the will of God in union with the person of Jesus Christ.

This insight changed everything, not by destroying what military formation had built in him, but by revealing what it was for. He began to see that God had been preparing him all along, that every virtue the military had instilled was meant for something greater than the glory of Spain or the aggrandizement of his reputation. He was meant for the kind of perfection that would allow him to rest in perfect unity in the life of the Trinity itself. God made man not just for the purpose of being a great man, but to join into the divine. The ceiling for the human creature was made to exist outside of human limits.

Ignatius was finally asking the right question: what must I do to have eternal life? And in the reading of those two books, in the discernment of his heart's movements, he was discovering the answer: give up everything you have, and follow Christ. Be united with him. Let everything you are and everything you're becoming be ordered toward that union.

He decided to give his life entirely to God. When he was finally able to travel, he made a pilgrimage to the Benedictine abbey at Montserrat. There he left his sword and dagger at the altar of the Virgin Mary. The soldier was laying down his weapons, not in surrender but in transformation. He exchanged his fine clothes for a pilgrim's robe and spent the night in prayer.

From there, he traveled to the small town of Manresa, intending to stay a few days before continuing to Jerusalem. He ended up staying nearly a year. It was here, in intense prayer and penance, that the core of his Spiritual Exercises took shape. He lived in a cave, begged for his food, spent hours in prayer each day. He experienced profound spiritual consolations and devastating desolations. At times he was tempted to despair, tortured by scrupulosity about his sins. At other times he experienced visions and mystical graces that confirmed his path.

The Spiritual Exercises that emerged from this time weren't just a prayer manual. They were a systematic method for bringing someone into the same transformation Ignatius had experienced: learning to discern the movements of the spirit, to recognize where God was calling, to order one's entire life toward union with Him. The Exercises taught people the essence of conversion: how to close the gap between who they were and who God was calling them to be.

Eventually Ignatius did make it to Jerusalem, but he couldn't stay. He returned to Spain and realized he needed education if he was going to serve God effectively. So this former soldier, now in his thirties, sat in classrooms with teenagers to learn Latin grammar. He studied at the universities of Alcala, Salamanca, and finally Paris. It was in Paris that he began gathering companions, young men he led through the Spiritual Exercises who then joined him in his mission to give their lives to know, love, and serve God.

Before they reached Rome, Ignatius received one of the greatest of consolations. At a small chapel in the village of La Storta, he had a vision. He saw God the Father alongside Christ, who was carrying his cross. The Father turned to his Son and said, "I want you to take this man as your servant." And Jesus accepted him. Ignatius had been praying for exactly this, to be "placed with the Son." Not placed with an idea, not aligned with a philosophy, but taken into personal relationship with the living Christ carrying his cross. This was the heart of everything. The discernment of spirits, the Exercises, the pilgrimages, the penances: all of it had been leading to this. Not a system, but a Person. The door in the ceiling wasn't an abstract transcendent purpose. It was Jesus.

In 1540, Pope Paul III officially approved the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) with Ignatius as its first Superior General. The rest of his life was spent in service: writing constitutions for the order, sending missionaries across the world, founding schools and colleges, directing souls through the Exercises. But what emerges most vividly from the records of those years is the depth of his personal intimacy with Christ. He kept a spiritual diary, and its pages reveal a man who wept so frequently during Mass out of love for God that his eyesight was damaged. He recorded telling Christ in the Eucharist, "I wouldn't leave you for anything in the world." The prayer that most purely distills his spirituality is the Suscipe: "Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own: you have given it all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me."

That is enough for me. This is not the language of a man who merely found a transcendent purpose. This is the language of a man in love. And that love, that total, personal, intimate union with Christ, is what made Ignatius not just a hero but a saint. It is where being a virtuous, good man and being a holy man became the same thing, because both flowed from the same source: the Person of Jesus Christ living in him as he had lived in his own life.

Ignatius died in 1556, having sent Jesuit missionaries to India, Japan, Brazil, and beyond. His order would go on to found universities, evangelize continents, and shape Catholic theology for centuries. But the legacy that matters most for our purposes is simpler than any of that: Ignatius showed what happens when a soldier falls in love with Christ.

Three Characters, Two Parts of the Answer

We now have three figures before us (Rico, Ignatius, and the young man in Matthew) and each one illuminates a different facet of the relationship between virtue and its purpose.

Consider Rico first. He keeps the moral law, or its natural law equivalent. He doesn't steal, he doesn't betray his brothers, he honors the authorities placed over him, he sacrifices for the common good. The Federation's moral code corresponds to what St. Paul describes when he writes that Gentiles who do not have the law can still "do by nature what the law requires," because "the work of the law is written on their hearts." The Commandments aren't foreign impositions. They're articulations of what our own humanity already asks of us, and Rico is living proof.

But now consider the young man in Matthew. He's kept the Commandments too. He tells Jesus so, and Jesus doesn't dispute it. Yet the young man feels something is missing. "All these I have kept. What do I still lack?" This is the moment that reveals the pedagogical function of the law. The Commandments do more than guide behavior. They teach us something about ourselves. When we're called to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves, we discover our limitations. We can sometimes follow the letter of the law, but we struggle to keep it in spirit. We struggle to love as fully as we're called to love. The law shows us our need for grace. It reveals that our own strength isn't enough, that human flourishing requires something beyond what discipline and willpower alone can accomplish.

Rico never has his "what do I still lack?" moment, at least not within the pages of the novel. But the young man in Matthew does, and he brings it to the one person who can answer it.

Jesus's answer comes in two parts. The first, keep the Commandments, maps to everything the Federation does well. The Commandments show us the path to freedom from sin and establish the conditions of covenant with God. They are the foundation.

But the second part changes everything. "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." Pope Saint John Paul II called this the Sequela Christi, the call to follow Christ, and in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor he identified it as the essential foundation of Christian morality. It's offering something radically different from external imitation. It's offering union. This union begins in baptism, where we're brought into the Body of Christ, adopted as children of God, given a share in divine life itself. We're no longer just trying to copy Jesus's actions from the outside. We're inviting him to live in us as he lived in his own life.

This is what Ignatius discovered, lying in bed with two books and a shattered leg. His training in discipline and virtue had taken him as far as it could, and it wasn't enough. He needed something beyond the disciplines and rules that could only bring him frustratingly short. He needed to be taken beyond himself into the person of Jesus Christ through the gift of grace. As John Paul II explained, grace becomes what the Church calls the "new law," not a new set of rules, but a transformation of the heart through the active presence of the Holy Spirit. When the law matches what is already in our hearts through grace, the commands become secondary, because the inner dynamic of grace is already working. St. Paul calls this life according to the Spirit. Ignatius experienced it as the difference between consolation and desolation, between the thoughts that left him dry and the thoughts that filled him with joy.

And this is where morality and spirituality become inseparable. We have a tendency to think of morality as "being virtuous" and spirituality as "being holy," as if these were two different projects. But Jesus is the common term that bridges both, and love is what's asked of us in both. The Commandments require us to do what love requires. The evangelical counsels of the Beatitudes remove what hinders love. And because love at this depth exceeds our natural capacity, we see the absolute need for the redemption of our divine image before the disfigurement of original sin. We see the need for grace to accomplish in us what we cannot do for ourselves. We can't imitate Jesus as long as we're burdened by our sin and fallen nature. He has to take that away and give us a new experience of our humanity, as creatures made for more than human ends.

The young man in Matthew walked away sad. He heard the second part of the answer, but he couldn't accept it. He had great possessions, and he couldn't let them go. Rico's story is different: the novel simply ends before that second part arrives. Ignatius heard the answer, and he ran toward it, all the way from Pamplona to Montserrat to Manresa to the ends of the earth and beyond.

The process Ignatius underwent has a name: conversion. It has two movements, repeated throughout the Gospels: deny yourself, then follow. Take up your cross, then follow. Renounce, then follow. Repent, then believe. Take off the old self, put on the new. It's the heart transformation that leads to transformation of life on the outside, and it's available to anyone willing to hear both parts of the answer.

Union with God: The Answer to the Question

The specific answer to the question, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" is to leave the old life behind and follow Christ into union within the life of the Trinity. This is the specific purpose for which human beings were created. This is the good news of Gospel morality. Not "try hard enough and you can make yourself perfect by your own limited concept of perfection." But rather: "You are made for a capacity that exceeds your wildest imaginations, far more than your weaknesses suggest, by the power of God's grace and the power of the Holy Spirit working in you."

When Ignatius discovered that his hard-won virtues could be ordered toward this union, duty became joy. Not because the tasks got easier, but because they now meant something beyond themselves. He could suffer and know the suffering was accomplishing something eternal. He could fail by every worldly metric and still know his life mattered. He was free from results because the results weren't the point. The point was perfection in sanctification towards the ultimate end of participating in God's life for eternity.

This is what the saints show us. St. Francis embracing the leper despite his revulsion, St. Ignatius enduring years of Latin grammar as a grown man sitting with teenagers, St. John Chrysostom enduring the persecution of his religious brothers, the martyrs going joyfully to their deaths: these aren't people who've transcended their humanity. They're people who've discovered what their humanity was always meant for.

Two Soldiers, Two Destinations

So we return to our two young men.

Rico gets heroism. The Federation's formation works exactly as advertised, and it deserves real admiration. He becomes capable of extraordinary courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. He gets the first part of Jesus's answer. And the novel leaves him there, still young, still serving, his story unfinished. Whether the virtues the Federation built in him ever carry him toward a door he hasn't yet seen, we don't know.

Ignatius gets the same heroism, and then the second part. At Montserrat, a former soldier lays his sword and dagger at the altar of the Virgin Mary. Not in surrender, but in offering. And God doesn't discard any of it. He completes it.

The Federation forms soldiers. The Church forms saints. Not because the Church rejects what the Federation teaches, but because the Church shows you what it's for. Grace perfects nature.

The virtues you're developing right now, through your work, your relationships, your commitments, are real, and they matter. You're getting the first part of the answer.

But the question remains: are you getting the second part?

Rico reaches the ceiling. Ignatius lays down his sword and walks through the door. Two soldiers, two destinations. And the invitation stands: if you would be perfect, come, follow me.

Discussion Questions

1. Rico enlists for a girl and ends up willing to die for his brothers. Have you experienced a commitment changing you for the better, even if you entered it for less-than-noble reasons? What virtues emerged that you didn't expect?

2. Mr. Dubois argues that moral behavior is ultimately a mathematical function of survival instinct. How convinced are you by his arguments? Where do they break down?

3. One of the most emotionally powerful threads in the novel is Rico's relationship with his father. His father opposes his enlistment, and they're estranged for much of the story. Then after Rico's mother is killed his father enlists in the Mobile Infantry himself. What do you think motivates his decision? The Federation would call it civic duty, but is that sufficient to explain a father following his son into war after losing his wife?

4. The Federation's premise is that only those who serve earn the right to vote. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

"It is the duty of citizens to contribute along with the civil authorities to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom. The love and service of one's country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity." (CCC 2239)

If you were a Catholic living under the Federation, would your conscience point you towards serving or not? What do you believe would be most in line with the instruction of the Church?

5. The Federation offers Rico real formation, real virtue, and real brotherhood, but no transcendent purpose. If you had everything the Federation offers but nothing beyond it, would that be enough? What would be missing?