Sing For Our Time Too! The Divine Song Of The Odyssey

The spiritual way was the original way of reading Homer's tale of homecoming

Odysseus Deriding Polyphemus, print after J.W.M. Turner

The Odyssey movie is brilliant. The combination of spectacle and seriousness that characterises Christopher Nolan’s film-making makes this one a must-see. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

However, this telling is Nolan's telling. The opening title reads: “A time of apparent magic”, which is a clear signal. Throughout a psychological option is offered for the presence of gods, sorcery and monsters and, quite explicitly, a moral imperative provides coherence to the meandering story.

There are also, inevitably, elements from Homer’s original that are absent in the cinema epic and that gives me an entrée. For these parts of the tale matter if the theological and anthropological are your interests as, indeed, they were for its first hearers, the Ancient Greeks: who are we, the story asks, not merely, how should we behave? They loved the story for many reasons, one of which was its theme of nostos, or spiritual homecoming: the Odyssey not as moral but cosmological mythology. So, here are three details not in Nolan considered: a spoiler-free way into the great tale’s subtler appeal.

The first concerns the peoples to whom Odysseus speaks about his journey: the Phaeacians. In the original, Odysseus relates the tale of his twisting journey in the magical palace of these ankhithoei, or people “close to the gods”. They then lend to Odysseus their remarkable ships as secure transport to Ithaca, speeding across the seas because guided by thought itself. Technological cunning is a pale imitation of real insight, the Phaeacians might say.

That said, they have a mode of cunning: the erotic. Love matters because it is such a key part of the question of how, like them, we humans might live close to the gods. Love is a perennial theme in surely all spiritual traditions.

One way its presence in Homer is signalled is by the Phaeacian queen, Arete, whose name means “virtuous excellence”, and her daughter, Nausicaa. The latter is repeatedly said to be available for marriage to Odysseus, which is a temptation, given the decade-long war against the Trojans and the subsequent decade lost at sea. But there is a fundamental lesson here, as well - a clue to which is found in the name, Nausicaa. It means “burner of ships”.

Had Odysseus followed eros undiscerningly and wed Nausicaa, he would indeed have burnt his ships; he would not have found the way back to his spiritual home, on Ithaca with Queen Penelope.

To put it another way: the erotic is a great guide but is equal to the cunning of Odysseus himself. He must learn to be faithful to its yearnings, even when they seem impossible to attain, and not to settle for anything less. Such wisdom, typically arising from a recognition of personal limits, is sought by the great hero as much as other kinds of brilliance, a “hero” also being a figure working out what it means to be close to the gods.

The presence of Arete and Nausicaa raises another big theme from the get-go: the role of women, alongside men. Their centrality across the whole story is often noted. Penelope is there, of course. She is not only the wife of Odysseus, but also the mistress of kairos. One of the Greek words for time, this one is appropriate to her not only for the manner of her patient waiting for the return of her husband, but also as a feature that is integral to her character, for the word “kairos” in Homer’s story describes a detail about Penelope’s spinning craft. She knows just the right moment, or kairos, to throw the shuttle through the loom and, in general, her sense of timing is perfect: aligned with the gods. And there’s more to be inferred in that of the human-divine connection.

The Odyssey can be celebrated for the way Homer highlights the labours of women, which is quite right. But, in the ancient world, gender was not only of social interest, but spiritual. The frame to perceive this other dimension has been called “the great chain of being”, referring to the hierarchy between the divine world and the material. Human beings are positioned at the bridge-point between the two realms, as the temporal creatures with a sense of the eternal, the finite beings who know of the infinite.

I should say that referring to a hierarchy is anachronistic in relation to Homer, as the word itself was not coined until the 6th century AD. But cosmology, meaning ordering, is a key concern for Homer and so central to the theme of nostos. In short, part of the spiritual role of human beings, women and men, which is thus a guide to their place in the world of becoming, is to facilitate movement across realms of being. Humans are not just puppets of the gods, as is sometimes said, but can become collaborators with the gods and fate. Hence, a constant question in Homer is how movement across the chain of being might be negotiated well, with men and women playing different roles at different times, as indeed do the gendered gods.

The case in point here is Athena, goddess of wisdom, who guides Odysseus throughout. She is his patron and their ontological difference - he mortal, she immortal - suggests possibilities beyond the complementary framing of the relationship between women and men which is the default today, hinging on questions of equality.

I tread carefully now but a world without equality, such as Homer’s, has something imaginatively to offer. It might help, today, to conceive of dynamic relationships between men and women who dwell in a cosmology that is not rigidly structured, or flattened by the constraining imperatives of power and competition, but instead is shaped by flows of mutual participation. That must be discerned.

What I have in mind is how, in the story, Athena guides Odysseus because his mind mirrors hers: they mingle in one another’s life, exchanging gifts not only of sacrifice but delight. She is to him as artist is to masterpiece, Homer tells us, a satisfaction not found if divine life lacked mortal manifestation. Similarly the closeness of mortals to the immortals is, in part, about incarnation.

The Christian monotheists noticed as much, for all their wariness of polytheism. Gregory of Nazianzus was one church father favourably to cite Homer's Odyssey. The long, agonizing, and turbulent journey of return to Odysseus’s homeland was, for Gregory, the ultimate literary representation of the human soul’s difficult, earthly pilgrimage back to God.

So: the weave of Phaeacians, erotic longings, and the dynamic relationship between women and men, mortals and gods. Any account of nostos worthy of human beings will feature these matters. And a second omission from Nolan’s wonderful film adds further nuance.

This detail has to do with the encounter with the Cyclops and the blinding of Polyphemus. The devastating moment was a hugely popular subject in Greek art, resonating powerfully, and further, as Jeremy Naydler puts it, offers tremendous material for reflecting on the in-between status of human beings and their relationship to technology and to the gods.

Odysseus is a crafty character - or complicated, wandering, or however you want to translate polytropos. Richly-voiced Polyphemus, as the meaning of his name implies, is a member of a race who live close to nature. Theirs is a brutal existence, though perhaps due to their divine father, Poseidon, seems to have included clairvoyant abilities, or seeing in depth, symbolised by the Cyclopes’s single eye.

So, when Odysseus twists the rod of hot olive wood into it, the wanderer inflicts an existential blow on Polyphemus and himself crosses a dire threshold.

There is an awakening: human craftiness need no longer be tied to spiritual craft. Instead, human understanding can follow paths of its own, as the Bronze Age became Iron, and there are consequences: homelessness and wandering. The Odyssey is a Greek version of the Hebrew Fall. Like the Genesis story of Eden, it is about origins in the sense of source, and the loss of that connection, which is why the story inspires yearning, wisdom and the spirit needed for the spiritual journey back: the divine nostos.

In the original story, not in Nolan, Odysseus flees blinded Polyphemus and escapes by naming himself Outis: “Nobody”. The upshot is that when the Cyclops calls out, “Outis is killing me!”, nobody comes to his aid: a dramatic joke missing in Nolan. And that is a loss because the pseudonym is also bitterly ironic. Odysseus constantly risks losing his name. He forgets who he is because his cunning, or metis, can make him me tis: “no one”. Therein lies a fall.

That said, Odysseus cannot simply revert and call himself by his real name either. The bind is caught in the moment when, free of Polyphemus, he calls back in glee: “Say that Odysseus, the sacker of cities, blinded you, the son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.” Haughty vanity: a self-blinding, we suspect. And yes: the called-out name carries across the waters to Poseidon who, thereafter, attempts to thwart Odysseus's nostos. Such is the rotten fruit of pride.

Becoming no-one, and the link to nostos, is another major theme, again threaded through many wisdom traditions. And it returns in the Odyssey at the seeming end of Odysseus’s journey.

Eventually, he lands on Ithaca, where Athena then tells him a strange thing: be a homeless beggar, for putting his kingly pride to one side, becoming a nobody, is now wise. The palace is overrun by loutish, cruel suitors, seeking Penelope’s hand as well as the death of Odysseus’s son, Telemachus. The king must discard concern for his royal person and become slave-like. Then, he can enter and claim the palace in which his soul can dwell.

The change enables him to draw on the virtue of xenia, or hospitality, another key theme for Homer - and the moral message with which Nolan is most comfortable. A stranger must be cared for, that is the sacred law, which the suitors variously violate. Always assume you are entertaining gods. Tramp-like, though, Odysseus has the freedom to scout and await the moment when nostos can marry Penelope’s kairos. The denouement unfolds. The multifaceted meanings of the story can be seen without reserve and so its culmination finally be told.

That is all summarised in a third section missing from the film which, if you follow one of the earliest surviving written commentaries on the story, is definitive. The Neoplatonic philosopher, Porphyry, wrote a short piece that focuses on the place where Odysseus lands on Ithaca. The precise spot was said to be by a cave sacred to the nymphs called Naiads.

The cave is strange, at once lovely and murky, and having two entrances, one for mortals, another for gods. Bees live in it, filling stone kraters with honey. Inside, too, are large stone looms, upon which the Naiads weave sea-purple cloth. Water flows through the cave without ceasing.

Porphyry interprets the details. The cave is the place of becoming, which is to say, the realm of ever-flowing mortals. It is lovely insofar as it reflects divine life; it is murky because that reflection is not always easy to see. Bees or souls live here, working at their task of making divine honey in stony containers - or, as the other feature of the cave relates, forging lives within the cloth of their flesh.

Porphyry’s observations are much debated but I suspect Homer has Odysseus landing by the cave because the place tells him who he is. The water-drenched, honey-filled, stony location is a microcosm which reflects the macrocosm. Here, then, Odysseus can consider his proper relationship to the gods; he can remember his name. It is a dwelling alongside which to contemplate homecoming. And that is what he does.

The theme of homecoming is in Nolan, for sure, but it is heavily overlaid by a different concern: modern anxieties about civilisational decline coupled to the psychological assumption that Odysseus is traumatised from war. But that begs a question. “Tell me, Muse, of the man,” the Ancient Greek epic famously begins. If the matter of who we are were better addressed, as creatures close to the gods, then other matters might be better resolved. The basics, theological and anthropological, are central to Homer. Spiritual nostos is perceived afresh in the retelling.