Chrisopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings to the giant screen a recreation of the ancient Greek world of Homer, but what he really puts on display is a psychological drama about the way in which war precipitates the wreckage of the self.
It is impossible to say exactly what the ancient world was like, but Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey1 have given us some significant clues to begin to tease it out. Ancient peoples’ worldview was a three-tiered universe, and, more significantly and less obviously, the ancient personality was dyadic. Both characteristics were missing in action in Nolan’s The Odyssey.
In a three-tiered universe, gods were not distant beings but more like modern viruses. You couldn't really see them, but you felt their effects. They could make you gravely ill, or they might bless you with wealth, or they could decide that you should engage in war. They might tell you, by oracle, to beware of a certain day or a certain activity or a certain journey. You might make a sacrifice to some to request their guardianship. Gods acted and interacted with you. They were dynamic, present, and frequently deadly.
The Greeks had a pantheon of gods, so they could pull out different gods for different occasions. The gods did things like send rain, throw thunderbolts, take you to the underworld, visit you with sickness, or ensure the fame of your child. Depending on your fate, you needed to appeal to the god involved.
For a monotheistic tradition like Judaism, God was one big universal deity, but God still had to act like one of the gods. The one God had to act out all these different qualities as a single being, yet still had multiple names reflecting a polytheistic past. One of those names, elohim, is a plural, while another, YHWH, is so powerful as to be unpronounceable. In the Bible we do have a God who is sometimes an agricultural deity (Ps 65:9) and sometimes a warrior (Ex15:3). God can announce the birth of a great one (Isa 7:14) as well as visit people with sickness or death (Num 12:9–10). God can also cast out demons, who are semi-gods, and sometimes use demons, as with Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:15), to show off power. In the ancient world, gods are forces, not imaginary but very real.
In antiquity a person’s identity is tied up in relationships that place or locate the person in society. The dyadic personality is determined by these exterior relationships, not a personal internal identity. So, in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is Laertes’ son (this names his ancestry); he is Penelope’s husband (this names his household); he is the father of Telemachus (this names his success); and he is king of Ithaca (this names his honor). In antiquity, it is the last item that stands out the most. Holding honor means holding your social place with dignity. Exile is a severe form of punishment because it concerns robbing the individual of dignity, rendering them a nobody. Crucifixion, of course, is a horrible way to die, but it was augmented by the fact that it was an act of public shame.
We modern Westerners rarely think about life today in this dyadic way, although in large parts of Africa and Asia the dyadic personality is still the default. For example, when inquiring about my identity, no one asks me who my father is. When I introduce a public speaker, I never recount the speaker’s ancestry (and if I did, I’m sure the speaker would be highly embarrassed or else mystified). Yet, in the Bible genealogies are important. Jesus is the new Adam, and Luke takes the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam. Jesus is the Son of David, and Matthew takes the genealogy of Jesus from Abraham through David. Herodotus, in his Histories, introduces new characters with ancestral references. This is typical in antiquity because ancestry is social location and personal destiny; it is not genealogical curiosity.
In a modern film, like Nolan’s The Odyssey, while we can witness ancient scenery recreated impressively, we do not, and cannot, recreate the ancient way of being in the world. Our modern quest is psychological. We ask, who am I? What is my authentic self? The ancient question is, whose son are you; whose daughter? It’s not a question about your authenticity but about your social standing. The latter signifies the dyadic character of the ancient social world.
In the movie The Odyssey, Odysseus is a hero. He is on a quest. He is a psychological being, and the god Athena is both his conscience and psychologist. Homer’s world is not reproduced; rather, the modern self as a quest for being is played out in front of ancient world props. We can almost feel like we are there, in the ancient Greek world, as the IMAX theatre overwhelms our senses, but we are not really experiencing the Greek world. We are experiencing ourselves, our own story of challenge and triumph despite all odds, as we overcome our lost self to reclaim our true self. Nolan’s Odysseus is wracked with guilt for his part in the sack of Troy, suffering PTSD. That is a very attractive theme for us, but we need to be honest. Athena is not really a god anymore, neither for us nor for Nolan’s hero depicted by Matt Damon. She is not a god of dignity who knows our fate but rather a counselor who turns out to be our own conscience.
In the film The Odyssey, Athena is present, but she is dead, that is, devoid of her dyadic reality and sunken into self actualization. Gods do not work for us anymore like they used to, and we can’t really show them in a theatre. At best, they are fantasies from the Marvel universe, but we know they are fantasies. We no longer have a dyadic relationship with them. I am not me because of what I believe or because of which god or God claims my identity. Not even the big God of Western culture makes such a claim anymore. We have turned God into a salvation trick, which is not about social reality but about personal triumph. We want a service from God, or perhaps a power, but not words about social responsibility or warnings about disrespecting honor (whether of others or of the earth).
Inasmuch as we have advanced psychologically in personal understanding, in modernity we have also retreated sociologically into our privacy. While Nolan’s movie is highly entertaining, it does not allow us to move beyond our modern self but is a story of our modern self in ancient clothing.
1 Bruce J. Malina andJerome J. Neyrey, Portraits of Paul; An Archaeology of Ancient Personality.Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996.
Thumbnail Image: Mary Harrsch, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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