By guest blogger Reverend Matthew Metevelis of Reformation Lutheran Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
I’ve been a big fan of the epic poet Homer since
reading him in high school. The richness
of the narrative, the resonance of the words, and the imaginative world it
depicts has always been a source of fascination to me – not to mention the
mystery surrounding who Homer is. Homer
was the first “author”, with the help of an outstanding teacher, who showed me
what literature is and how to love it. I
also used to write what only can be classed as “fan fiction” in horrible little
iambic hexameter rhyming poems describing my favorite scenes from the epics. So
when I came about Clint’s blog post about how much he loved reading Homer and
how much it made him think of the gospels as a fellow Lutheran pastor with a
love of the Greek and Roman classics I couldn’t help but start engaging with
him on Facebook. He asked me to write my
thoughts and here they are.
The epics of Homer were the
causes of deep scandal not only for the fathers of the early church but also
for Greek philosophers. Gods were
supposed to be perfect beings – safely above the capricious and often
uncontrollable feelings, jealousies, anxieties, and pains. The depictions of the gods in Homer’s poems
were in no small way responsible for Plato to exclaim that poets would be
absolutely barred from his perfect city.
How can we exhort people to the moral rectitude that philosophy demands
of them if the gods themselves misbehave?
Some of the earliest theologians of the church, Clement, Augustine, Jerome,
agreed and strove to depict God in Jesus Christ as a superior rational and
moral center to the dissolute pagan mythological universe that the Homeric
epics represented. For them Christianity
was less a religion and more “the true philosophy.” The God they preached was
the “logos” of the philosophers with a compassionate crucified center and a
human face.
Perhaps because of the
theological success of the ancient philosophers and the achievement of the
church fathers Homer has been relegated for us to the role of a mere
storyteller. Nobody would ever read
about Homer very much in a history of religious thought or even find him cited
in a sermon. For us Homer tells stories
to make Hollywood blockbusters and also bore high school and college students as
great books in the “you should read” category.
Homer is used to excite the imagination but never to lift the
spirit. We work hard as preachers with
the help of centuries old doctrine to make the saga of Jesus Christ relevant
for our congregations. But is there good
news in Homer?
I’ll avoid the analysis,
already voluminous, on how great stories create and add value to our
lives. This is certainly true for Homer
as well. But in the case of Homer this
good news rises above teaching and inspiring us in the same way that the morals
of all our favorite stories like Star Wars and Harry Potter do. The good news in Homer comes from more than
just the stories and the characters. Homer
preaches to us by placing those stories and characters within a very unique
interpretation of his (or maybe her?) own world that is dripping in theological
assumptions. These stories can’t even
begin to exist in Homer’s poems without the bold assertions Homer makes about
the gods and men.
Let’s begin with the problem
of evil. It is an enormous testimony to
the triumph of the ancient philosophers and the early church theologians that
we typically pose the question about the problem of evil in the following way. How does evil exist if the world has a
rational and good creator? Think about
it. We now culturally take the existence
of a good God or a rational order as the granted. It would not have been so in the world of
primordial religion. I’m about to do
some major speculating but still journey with me, I promise it will be fruitful
if you’re not already an anthropologist ready to rip my head off. The original question would have been like
this. Why does this evil stuff happen to
me? The answer that would have been
given would have been that there was some god you offended or your family
offended somewhere that could be appeased by following a simple ritual. The primitive idea of a god might have been
not only a way to answer the question about why stuff happened but the deeper
question of why bad stuff happens to me and my family. The world Homer inhabited was one like the
one the philosopher Thales described, “full of gods.” None of them cared about you unless there was
something in it for them, and it would have been entirely common for bad stuff
to happen to you just because you got pulled into their mess. You could only hope to follow the right
rituals and sacrifices so that the gods would either grant you some boon or
leave you alone. Crop failure, infant
mortality, unaccounted natural disasters, and brutality greater than we can
imagine today were the rule of life in ancient times. The chaos people experienced from these
things was imagined to be a battleground for superior but cruel and careless
beings called gods.
For the most part Homer not
only lives in this tumultuous world but seems uncritically comfortable with
it. To my knowledge nowhere in Homer do
his characters yell at the universe like Hamlet or King Lear (or Job) do
feeling like the system is rigged against them.
When humans do think about the gods in Homer’s stories they do so with a
great degree of fatalism. The characters
in Greek tragedies at least whine and moan (Orestes, Oedipus, Hippolytus) but
Homer’s characters just go about their business as pawns in a great game with
no rules and they don’t seem to care. This
is what the ancient philosophers and the early church theologians were swiping
at when they sought to improve upon this, looking for the solid ground of a
universe that is more rational and moral.
Homer not only accepts the world of capricious and immoral gods and the
people who suffer from it but seems totally comfortable with it.
The good news of Homer begins
to stream in when we seek to discover why he is so comfortable with a
capricious, immoral, and chronically fallible universe. It has less to do with anything Homer has to
say about it than what Homer sees in it.
And what he sees ultimately is the human. Homer sees human beings laughing, loving,
parenting, farming, relaxing, teaching, striving, planning, plotting, consoling,
building, fighting, dancing, shopping, eating, drinking, and ultimately
living. For him there is a beauty in the
fleshy trees that gets lost when you think too much about the lofty forest as
philosophers later would. Note one of
the most unique sections in the Iliad, the depiction of Achilles’ shield (the
translation is Robert Fagles):
“And the crippled Smith
brought all his art to bear
on a dancing circle, broad as
the circle Daedalus
once laid out on Cnossos’
spacious fields
for Ariadne the girl with
lustrous hair.
Here young boys and girls,
beauties courted
with costly gifts of oxen,
danced and danced,
linking their arms, gripping
each other’s wrists.
And the girls wore robes of
linen light and flowing,
the boys wore fine spun
tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil,
the girls were crowned with a
bloom of fresh garlands,
the boys swung golden daggers
hung on silver belts.
And now they would run in
rings on their skilled feet,
nimbly, quick as a crouching
potter spins his wheel,
palming it smoothly, giving
it practice twirls
to see it run, and now they
would run in rows,
in rows crisscrossing rows –
rapturous dancing.
A breathless crowd stood
round them stuck with joy
and through them a pair of
tumblers dashed and sprang,
whirling in leaping handsprings,
leading on the dance.” (Book 18:689-707)
This is the final scene in
one of many etched on Achilles’ shield by the god Hephaestus. All the scenes described depict some form of
human life – agriculture, city life, battles – with the same beautiful detail. Homer is able to capture the richness of
human existence with radically precise and yet sweeping depictions like these
and it is here that he finds meaning.
The world is beautiful not because it follows some grand order, or
because some creative force calls it good, but because even in the midst of
pain, despair, random destruction and strife there is the striving and
sacrifice of human beings longing for connection to one another. The battlefield and the perilous journey mark
so much of our lives but for Homer they represent a grand quest that leads
people to the true beauty and joy that can only come in flourishing human
civilization.
The quest for order is
especially evident in the sequel. The
Odyssey pits the wily and cunning hero Odysseus against a series of disasters,
misadventures, and plots as he strives to return home to his wife and his
home. Odysseus suffers throughout the
story due to the fury of the god Poseidon and is guided by Athena. In this story “earth-shaking” Poseidon
represents the ocean and all the forces of stormy chaos and confusion while
Athena represents order and civilization.
The strife in Odysseus’s journey is matched only by the strife in his
home. After conquering both Odysseus
enters the stability of his home and the love of his family – the places that
make him complete and allow him to find the rest he sorely needs.
Just as Odysseus triumphs
over chaos to find order as the hero of the Iliad Achilles makes a similar
transition. But for Achilles the
disorder he battles is not external it is internal. Homer opens the entire poem with a word that
even in English we might recognize – mania.
“Sing O Muse of the mania, the accursed mania that brought down so many
sorrows on the Achaeans” Mania in Homer’s Greek denotes not only human frenzy
and rage but something more like wrath.
It is an emotion rarely found in human beings. It is more likely to be found in gods. Achilles throughout the story suffers from a
unique affliction. He is angry as only
the gods can be angry. The wrath of
Achilles causes awful things for Greeks and Trojans alike but the worst part of
it is what it does to Achilles. The
wrath he feels makes him feel simultaneously more and less than a human being –
combining the frenzy of beasts and the unchained and terrifying wrath of gods.
It all starts when Achilles’s
camp girl is taken by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek armies, who was forced
to give back his own camp girl to a priest of Apollo who called down a plague
on the assembled armies. Women were war
prizes back then – a terrible and sad fact.
Less for love of the girl and more for the bruise that Agamemnon
inflicted upon his ego Achilles stays back in his tents and sulks with his
companion Patroclus. As Achilles is
considered by far the best warrior among the Greeks the Greek army suffers
terrible set-backs as he sits It out.
Eventually Patroclus decides to set out into the battlefield and is
killed in valiant combat by the Trojan champion Hector.
It is after the death of
Patroclus that Achilles is drawn into a grief that takes his “mania” to new
heights. Rising up to battle Achilles
cuts massive holes through the Trojan ranks and even fights the river Xanthus
(anthropomorphized as a god). Homer
takes great pains to describe Achilles as an almost super-human force as his
rage and grief combine until he sacks the greatest prize of all – killing his
arch-rival Hector in single combat. His
bloodlust and rage not sated he drags the corpse of Hector around the walls of
Troy in front of the entire city, flaunting the religious codes and most basic
rules of human decency. Achilles fights
against that universe that so cruelly took the life of his friend, not by
shaking his fist at the sky, but acting out in desecrating sacrilege against
his fellow human beings. Alienated from
his fellow soldiers and denying dignity to his enemies Achilles is estranged
from the human race.
Clint made an excellent point
in the original blog post. Priam, the
father of Hector, is almost like the prodigal father in Jesus’s parable. It is Priam who welcomes Achilles back to the
human race by coming to Achilles tent to make a desperate plea for the body of
his son. As King Priam kisses his hand
Achilles is moved with compassion:
“Those words stirred within Achilles
a deep desire
to grieve his own
father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him
back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to
grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector,
throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as
Achilles wept himself,
now for his father and now
for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and
fell throughout the house.” (Book 24:592-599)
Achilles has his grief which
has risen to god-like “mania” cured by the presence of sincere human
sorrow. It is in sharing pain together
that Priam gifts Achilles the gift of his humanity back. Through tears Achilles once again is able to
make a connection. Achilles is made
whole by becoming human again.
Here is Homer’s gospel. Human life may be cruel and awful but there
is an immense grace to it whenever people find their way to each other in the
same way Odysseus strives to go home or when Achilles sees the pain of others
as his own pain. Just like the joyful
movement of the men and women in the dancing lines on Achilles’ shield there is
a power to human connection that war, disaster, misery, and all the chaos in
the world cannot break apart. It is not
in some subservience to imagined higher principles, in the logic of some system
of laws, but in the way that human beings live and love one another that a true
order and beauty arises. It is not
blinking in the overpowering light of truth as you emerge from the cave, or
patterning yourself after the story you tell yourself about yourself, or even
in chasing after some phantom of the holy that you find beauty, truth, and
meaning.
We get to be humans – even in
an awful world this is good news. In Homer’s
world it means seeing and embracing life in the people around you, being
sustained in the connections about you, and joining in that beautiful dance of
the human race or just standing on the side taking the sheer energy and joy of
it in. The beauty of the world is in the
life of concrete human beings as long as we remain open to them and dare to be
rescued from our chaotic thoughts and pains that threaten to cut us off. I find the power of those connections every
day as a hospice chaplain in the way that people stay by the side of those they
love and honor them by daring to grieve for them. Homer’s poems present a beautiful world in
which the lives that human beings are able to create finding refuge from the
chaos if they can’t conquer it completely.
It is a human world worth living and loving in. A certain God of Israelite extraction could
not help agreeing and joining in. Homer,
without intending it at all, might just give you some rich clues as to where to
find him. It is so much better than
anything a philosopher and even a few theologians might tell you. Trust a poet.
While searching for an image for this blog post, I found this:
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