Over this past year, I helped lead a reading group on The Odyssey at the local Veterans’ Affairs office. Building on the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s books Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam, the group is part of a program that gets veterans to reflect on Odysseus’s troubled homecoming as a way of processing their own.
Serendipitously, Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation came out a few weeks after my reading group finished. For critics like Homer translator Emily Wilson, the movie fails as an adaptation because its “relentlessly didactic” antiwar message and anachronistic depiction of Odysseus as a guilt-ridden sufferer of PTSD are twenty-first century impositions on a nearly 3,000-year-old poem. But these were exactly the themes that the men in my group, coming to the text with no background knowledge but their own experience of war, saw in The Odyssey. These themes of guilt, civilizational bankruptcy, and opposition to war have also been picked up by readers of Homer from Euripides to Simone Weil. In Weil’s characteristically idiosyncratic reading, this is what marks Homer as having had an “intimation of Christianity” nearly a century before Christ. Despite its flaws, Nolan’s movie belongs to this long tradition of antiwar readings of Homer that stretches through Euripides, Weil, and the veterans in my reading group.
Where the movie fails as an adaptation of Homer isn’t its relentless antiwar message, but that its hostility to war, and its insistence that to wage war is at least as bad for the soul as to suffer war, aren’t relentless enough. Nolan is right that Homer has something to say to us about our own “civilization’s” moral bankruptcy and self-destructive spiral of warmaking. But he sells Homer short. A more authentically Homeric reading of our American present would be even more pessimistic about America’s past and future, and would welcome its collapse as perhaps the only path forward for humanity. And as Weil suggests, Christian theology can always learn more from returning to Homer and his treatment of war.
