The Odyssey: Character Development is a Christian Invention*
Why Nolan’s Odyssey is more St. Augustine than Homer
Author’s note: Last week I released the most important thing I’ve ever written. Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning is available NOW pretty much anywhere you order books or listen to audiobooks. The first few weeks of sales are incredibly important for a number of reasons, including the way the algorithm works to recommend successful books to those who would otherwise be unaware that it existed.
If you’ve got the book and liked it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. That helps steer the Algo too.
Now enjoy this week’s entry in Reading the Zeitgeist:
In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Odysseus’ quest to return home brings with it the trials and tribulations necessary for Matt Damon’s character to experience a character transformation. At every cruel and unusual pitstop, Odysseus learns something about himself, and by the time he has reached home, he has gone through enough growth to process the final character lesson with his wife Penelope.
We’re all familiar with these kinds of character arcs. After all, character development and transformation are what odysseys like this are all about, right?
Well, it wasn’t for Homer who wrote the book 2,800 years ago.
Open up Homer’s Odyssey and search for this kind of “character development” in Odysseus. You won’t find it. Odysseus is introduced in the first line as “polytropos”— the man of many turns, of twists, of cunning. That’s not a knock either in Homer’s mind. These are signs of a wise and noble king who is competent enough to lead a people well.
Twelve thousand lines later, having outlasted Calypso, the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the suitors, he is exactly that: the man of many turns and the cunning, noble king of Ithaca. Homer’s epic is not the story of Odysseus becoming a better version of himself. It is the story of Odysseus being recognized—by a dog, a nurse, a swineherd, a son, a father, a wife, and even you the reader or hearer of his tale—as the wise and noble king he always was. Every episode is another unveiling of character disguised to others who cannot see it.
It is not a forge for Odysseus’ character to undergo a transformation. That way of thinking about a person was completely foreign to Homer.
Even in the Aristotle’s Poetics, written around 450 years after Homer, Aristotle explains how the hinge of a tragedy is “anagnorisis”—recognition or revelation— a change in knowledge, not a change in the state one’s soul.
Plutarch’s ancient biography of Julius Caesar isn’t about how Caesar’s battles in Gaul produced in him the kind of leadership qualities necessary to one day lead Rome. It’s about showing the audience how Caesar was set apart by divine destiny since birth to lead Rome. No, character is a fixed thing that you detect through signs along the journey.
As an interesting aside— the Gospels as a genre of literature are structured much more like Plutarch’s “biography” of Julius Caesar than our modern notions of a biography where we expect some transformation of character. Their purpose isn’t to show a transformation of Jesus’ character to become the Messiah and Son of God. Their point is similar to what Homer, Aristotle, and Plutarch are doing. They are seeking to disclose what was always there in Jesus. Just a helpful hermeneutic tip.
Our obsession with the transformation of character on a journey of becoming, like what Nolan does in his version of The Odyssey, is much more St. Paul and Augustine than it is Homer. Sure, it is not completely absent from the pre-Christian world. Plato has periagoge, the turning of the whole soul toward the good; the Stoics have prokopē, moral progress; Confucian self-cultivation is an entire civilizational program of formation in the East.
Ancient people plainly believed persons could be improved (hence the asterisk in my title). But what about a picture of a God who interrupts your intended journey and alters your destiny, like Paul and the road to Damascus? What about the conversion of your soul from a state of disorder and brokenness into something new and beautiful, like Augustine’s conversion story in Confessions?
This is something entirely different.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Athena isn’t the voice of conscience and conviction transforming the inner world of Odysseus. She is the goddess that’s on his side while the fickle god Poseidon messes with him and while Zeus vacillates on how to treat Ithaca’s lost king. Plato’s periagoge turns the soul toward the Good, but the Good doesn’t come get you; the Symposium‘s ladder is climbed from below. Aristotle’s unmoved mover moves things by being desired, never by acting. Stoic prokopē is the sage’s own labor, aligning with a logos that is impersonal and static.
But what about a God who is both author of history and your own story, present from within and without, who transforms our desires and our character in the journey of our lives? What about God who is neither fickle Zeus in Homer’s Odyssey or merely the symbolic manifestation of conscience in Nolan’s Athena?
We’ve become so accustomed to the notions of that kind of hero’s journey where who you are is not being revealed, but transformed by a power beyond your control, that we’ve forgotten how Christian it is.
In the crisis of meaning that’s gripped our culture over these last few decades, we’ve been quietly aching for that kind of story again. Nolan’s The Odyssey is aching for that too, grasping for the hope of personal and civilizational transformation. As I explain in my full review below, his story comes up short and is more post-Christian than Christian, but it is a true ache nonetheless.
The hero’s journey, our longings for transformation, and the hope that the story of our lives could be significant, is the longing to live in what C.S. Lewis called the “True Myth.”
I explain more of what that means, what is happening in our cultural moment as we long for a “homecoming” after our culture wide experience of “domicide,” and so much more in my brand new book.
So if any of this lands with you, go grab a copy here
Interestingly, it seems like a lot of more-modern stories written from an atheistic or post-religious viewpoint hark back to the Homeric idea that everyone has a fundamental nature, and that their actions are meant to illuminate that nature rather than changing it in any way. For instance, the characters in Thomas Hardy's tragic novels remain essentially the same people from beginning to end. Even the Harry Potter series alludes to this worldview with its commentary about how our choices are what "show who we truly are." It makes me wonder if, perhaps, the idea of fixed character is the "natural" way of understanding the world, and the sense that someone can improve on their character in a lasting way was something specifically introduced by Christianity (or perhaps the Bible more generally).
This is yet another attempt to steal something and claim it for Christianity. Be it solstice holidays, the US Constitution, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, morality or even human consciousness itself, these recurring arguments that everything ultimately is Christian, foretells Christianity, validates Christianity or owes its existence to Christianity is nonsense. The author even admits as much, explaining his asterisk, yet still can’t help himself.
Whether the hero is forged through trials or the trials reveal their heroism is semantic, in my opinion, but if you want to frame it as the former, a god is not necessary for the transformation. Even if you want to assert that one is, how is it that it’s your god and not Wakantanka or Ahuru Mazda? Oh, right, because yours is the only real one.