With the release of this summer’s blockbuster film The Odyssey, based on Homer’s ancient epic poem, suddenly — and perhaps improbably — everyone seems to want to talk about what the tale of Odysseus’ 10-year journey home from the Trojan War means for us today.
For Raymond Hain, professor of philosophy and humanities and associate director of the Development of Western Civilization Program at Providence College, a Catholic and Dominican university, in Providence, Rhode Island, it’s about time the rest of the world caught on.
“Homer never gets old!” Hain told the Register.
Beginning their freshman year, students at Providence take a required four-semester-long series of classes, taught by professors from history, theology, philosophy and literature, covering antiquity to contemporary thought, with readings from the Bible, St. Augustine, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Milton, Marx and St. John Paul II, among others. Students in the program read either The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War, or The Odyssey.
The Register asked Hain what students — and the rest of us — can get out of The Odyssey and why it is important to study classical texts as part of a Catholic liberal arts education.
Do you think The Odyssey should be essential reading for those seeking a liberal arts education at a Catholic university? Why or why not?
I’m convinced reading Homer is essential for a rich Catholic liberal arts education. I teach at Providence College (the East Coast college of the Dominican friars), where over 1,000 freshmen read Homer every September. It’s an extraordinary experience for the students as well as for us teachers. Some years we read Homer’s Odyssey, and some years we read Homer’s Iliad. Each poem is uniquely compelling as a profound exploration of the human condition.
True Catholic liberal arts education explores with students the great riches of pagan accomplishment, partly because Christian revelation builds on preexisting human realities and partly because Christian hope contrasts sharply with the glorious sadness of paganism.
Sometimes it seems to me that The Iliad is the better poem and sometimes, instead, The Odyssey. I usually think the poem I am currently teaching is clearly the best — this fall, I’ll be teaching The Odyssey.
How do you teach The Odyssey? Are you primarily plumbing it for truths about the human condition, or do you use it as a launching pad for discussing Christian conceptions of virtue, sacrifice and morality?
Every successful exploration of a classic text must try first to understand it on its own terms. What is the author trying to show us? What is the intended audience? How is this representative of an entire culture?
The Odyssey tells us a great deal about pagan Greek culture, one of the three great cultures (along with Rome and Jerusalem) that came together “in the fullness of time” at Christ’s birth. Homer was important for the Greeks and then the Romans for hundreds of years, long before Christianity, because it spoke to the desires, fears, hopes and joys of human life in all its pre-Christian dimensions. Even just a few lines from the over 12,000 that make up The Odyssey, especially when understood in light of the story as a whole, can be deeply moving.
So I teach The Odyssey first as a story that does indeed show us truths about the human condition. But one should never stop there — how, for example, should we understand the great battle with the suitors waged by Odysseus and his son at the end of The Odyssey in light of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount?
How does Odysseus’ journey challenge the way students today think about their own lives and futures?
The Odyssey speaks to us in so many ways, but I think the most important thing it shows all of us today is the importance of home, of the challenges and gifts bestowed on us by the permanent and stable things in life.
Our students today (and we ourselves!) face a very fragmented and fragmenting culture. In the 20th century, it was easy and natural for young adults to move often, to leave their hometowns and never return, and then to move as frequently as careers demanded. In the 21st century, we still face those centrifugal forces, but we have added to them the fragmentation of our very attention, making it difficult not only to stay in one place but even to think about one thing for any real length of time.
Odysseus, the “man of twists and turns,” is searching in The Odyssey for that still, small point at the center of his life. It is ultimately symbolized by his marriage bed, carved from an olive tree still rooted in the ground. The immovability of that bed, symbolizing the permanence of home, of marriage and family, of country, is an invitation to all of us today to recover a life of committed rootedness.
Beyond The Odyssey, are there other pagan authors or works you think every Catholic student should read? What makes them worth studying?
Yes, there are many: Virgil’s Aeneid, the plays of Sophocles, the speeches of Cicero, the stories of Herodotus, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics — and that’s just focusing on the Greeks and Romans. Christianity is a global and not just a Western religion, and, ultimately, we Christians must understand and sift and integrate into salvation history all great pagan texts.
But if you are searching for something to read after Homer, it would be hard to recommend a better follow-up than the Dialogues of Plato. It was Plato, that great literary and philosophical mind, who prepared so much of the intellectual ground for Christianity. It was “the books of the Platonists” that led St. Augustine to Christianity, and it is still Plato’s masterful combination of imagery, philosophical depth and theological yearning that captures hearts and minds the world over.
Just this summer I taught Plato’s allegory of the cave to a group of high-school students participating in a special summer program here at Providence College. They couldn’t stop talking about it for the rest of their time with us.
Can you explain how the theme of nostalgia in The Odyssey relates to our Catholic understanding of longing for our true home?
This is a very rich theme. Just consider, for example, how one’s experience of St. Augustine’s Confessions, anchored in his justly famous statement — that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee” — is enlivened against the backdrop of Odysseus’ own restless yearning to return home. All forms of nostalgia, all desires for “return,” are echoes of our longing for Eden, for the days when we walked with our Maker in the cool of the evening, and ultimately of our primordial longing to return to our God from whom we sprang.
St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized through his work the fundamental “exitus/reditus” movement of the universe: All that springs forth from the Creator is ultimately seeking to return to him. (The director Terrence Malick has given us a beautiful contemporary cinematic expression of this longing in his film The Tree of Life.)
“Nostalgia” for some has come to mean a melancholic longing for what cannot be recovered, especially the past. But for the Christian, the promise of eternal life is also a promise of recovery, for all our temporal life will be spread before us in heaven as we share, as much as we are able, in God’s eternal “now.”
