Thinking Out LoudSo, you’ve watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and read about how ‘Christian’ it is, from its guilt-ridden hero (Homer’s Odysseus didn’t have PTSD) to how it rebrands Jesus’ ‘golden rule’ (‘do to others as you would have them do unto you’) into ‘Zeus’ law’ of hospitality to strangers.
In its Christian revisionism, Nolan’s The Odyssey is no different from other modern retellings of Homer. See, for instance, Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker and Circe by Madeleine Miller.
In Circe, the witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs is a marginalised divinity, bullied by gods who are as powerful as they are cruel and petty, and who despise humans for their weakness. Human limitation had zero appeal for the ancient imagination. As one mortal describes the human condition: ‘Every hour some new bruise upon me, some new ache, always weary, always burdened and weak’.
So why would a god trade in their divinity? No spoilers, but Circe’s value system bears traces of Christian claims that God, in Jesus, made the ultimate move in downward mobility: by becoming human for the sake of humans.
Ancient audiences would find this grotesque.
They’d also be baffled by Silence of the Girls, where the Trojan War is told from the minority perspective of captive Trojan women turned sex slaves to Greek soldiers. Think #MeToo meets The Iliad.
The ancients assumed powerful men had unrestricted sexual access to slaves. But Christianity’s insistence on female dignity, says historian Tom Holland, invented the category of ‘male sexual misconduct’ and socialised (guilted?) men into adopting male sexual restraint. Otherwise, Holland writes in Dominion, ‘#MeToo would have had no force.’
Church pews aren’t exactly packed, but Christian assumptions continue to saturate our moral horizon, shaping everything we see, including the ancient world. We just struggle to see it.
This week’s Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.
Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda Sue Gordon – © Universal Studios.