By Joseph R. Wood
A long car trip recently allowed me to listen to the complete audiobook of Homer’s Odyssey. Every one of its more than 780 minutes was worth it.
Listening to the poem helped me understand why it is fundamental to the Western conception of human life and how archetypal it is of human experience. My reactions are not those of a learned critic, but merely those of an amateur, someone who undertakes an activity more out of love than for profit or fame.
In other words, I am not going to quit my day job.
Having fought in the Greek expedition against Troy, Odysseus must find his way back home to Ithaca, where his family awaits him. Crossing the “wine-dark sea,” he overcomes a series of natural and supernatural obstacles. He demonstrates the virtues of courage, perseverance, and loyalty, along with the cunning and strategic thinking we associate with classical heroism.
The poem implicitly recognizes that realities of truth, beauty, and goodness exist. Human excellence consists in rising above the mere pursuit of pleasure and overcoming everything that obstructs us in a life lived in accordance with those transcendentals, a life of honor. Death is always a possibility, and there are things worth dying for.
Not all the characters in the Odyssey live out the virtues of Odysseus. As Aristotle would later explain, we choose to cultivate the virtues. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, does so during his father’s absence. The suitors who exploit Odysseus’s wealth and pursue his wife, Penelope, while he is away, choose differently.
Our sometimes perplexing relationship with the divine is also evident in the poem. Odysseus knows he has the help of Athena, one of the “immortal gods.” But he does not always know which gods oppose him or why. This confusion reflects our own experience. The psalmist sometimes wonders why God seems to have withdrawn in our moments of greatest need. We cannot understand why God does not seem to answer our prayers in the way we think best.
Yet Odysseus does not simply surrender to fate. He knows he must use his reason to act, even while invoking divine assistance.
The virtues of the Odyssey are for all of us, not only for heroes. The humble swineherd Eumaeus, who tends Odysseus’s flocks while the hero is far away for many years, shows unwavering fidelity. When he must risk everything to help Odysseus rid his home of the idle parasites lodged there, he demonstrates the same courage as Odysseus.
That need to dare is a paradigmatic feature of human experience, and it appears throughout the poem. Odysseus must repeatedly demonstrate physical boldness.
But in my listening, the most striking boldness was the constant daring to hope. Penelope, Telemachus, and Eumaeus never lose hope of Odysseus’s return, even when that hope sometimes fades. Odysseus himself never loses hope of seeing Ithaca again, even when misfortunes overwhelm his crew and death constantly lurks.
The Odyssey presents universals of human nature. These are often seen in Scripture, where stories of journeys move from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, to Abraham, Jacob and his sons, Moses and the Jews fleeing Egypt, and the Apostles who are asked to leave everything and follow Christ. God calls some to dare to travel far from home with hope but with uncertainty about the outcome. Some respond immediately, others have doubts. Joseph, son of Jacob, took many years to understand that his call to his journey, effected through slavery, was in fact providential.
Western and Christian literature often revolves around journeys: Homer and Virgil; Dante’s odyssey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, frequently celebrated here in The Catholic Thing; Tolkien and Lewis. The latter two even portray Heaven itself as a journey, as in Tolkien’s «Leaf by Niggle» and in Lewis’s The Great Divorce and The Last Battle in the Narnia series. And that without even touching on the literature of pilgrimage and wandering.
The call to risk the journey comes in every life. Some gain fame, but most undertake the journey in hidden and obscure ways, in seemingly ordinary circumstances. It is followed, with special intensity, in the silent enclosures of monasteries, cloistered convents, and hermitages.
Some commentators see evidence in the universality of the Odyssey that all myths spring from some human source, perhaps an evolutionary development. Judeo-Christian revelation can therefore be dismissed as an interesting mythology among many.
Because every culture has at least some intuition of human nature and of the transcendent, it makes sense that different cultural stories share certain characteristics. The Odyssey highlights many of those characteristics brilliantly.
We see them today in movies and television shows. Advertisers can play on that universality with great effectiveness for profit. I have wondered whether the carmaker Honda understood the depth of what it was tapping into when it named its minivan “Odyssey.”
But Judeo-Christian teaching understands the nature of life—of individuals, of peoples, and of the Pilgrim Church—as a journey whose final good is found in God the Creator. The happy ending is not merely a return home to family and friends—certainly a good outcome—but a full consummation that transcends death.
Homer often distinguishes mortals from the immortal gods, into whose immortality humans cannot finally enter. But there are hints of what Christianity calls “deification,” or being made divine as we were created to be. And there is some kind of life after death, seen when Odysseus descends to the underworld.
At times, Athena particularly attends to Odysseus and his father, making them stronger and more magnificent, more like the gods. The effect is not to exempt them from mortality, but to point toward a more divine condition that divinity can grant to its chosen ones.
Fr. James Schall’s final lecture at Georgetown was titled “The Final Joy”. It is a reference to Hilaire Belloc’s return home (himself a great pilgrim and traveler) after a long journey. The return is joyful, but it does not produce a final joy.
Man’s access to that final, deified joy would have to await the Redeemer. Homer seemed to glimpse a flash of it. It is toward that our odyssey should lead.
About the Author
Joseph R. Wood is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is a pilgrim philosopher and an accessible hermit.