In the famous opening chapter of his landmark study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, literary critic Erich Auerbach reflects on the stark difference between the lifeworlds of the Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible. Homer’s great epics, Auerbach notes, are not populated by tragic or tormented heroes. They depict worlds of immanence, physicality, and reactivity. For all their brilliance, the Iliad and Odyssey “are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings, and no less so in their relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us.”[1]
The Hebrew Bible, by contrast, offers a quite different picture of its protagonists: “How fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David?”[2] These figures have depth, conflict, internal agonies. Not mere circumstance, but “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena” drive their actions. Unlike Homer, argues Auerbach, the Bible’s “Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.”[3]
The major differences don’t stop there. In Homer’s world, Auerbach submits, phenomenon and noumenon coincide. To the Greeks of the classical age, the world is simply all there in its thereness, a field for human actions. But in a biblical cosmology, reality is always more than it appears to be. The world of the Scriptures is “fraught with ‘background’ and mysterious”—the theater of a transcendent God.[4] And that God is the Author of a capital-H History beyond all local histories: in the end, all stories, and indeed “the history of all mankind, will be given…due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it.”[5]
Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey dares to blur the line between the two world-pictures that Auerbach describes, offering a retelling of the ancient epic that reframes its most basic metaphysical assumptions. That very subversion is both the film’s strangeness and its genius.
For much of The Odyssey’s lengthy runtime, Odysseus (a stoic Matt Damon) perfectly exemplifies the Homeric ethos, at least as Auerbach sees it. This Odysseus says little but is handy with a sword and bow. He is grave, even cold, in the face of trial and danger. He makes hard choices in the midst of war without much recrimination. He longs to return home, especially while sojourning on Calypso’s isle, but he does not seem to ruminate over it.
All throughout Odysseus’ wanderings, Nolan punctuates the film with periodic flashbacks to the sack of Troy—most notably, a high-octane battle scene as the Greeks struggle to escape the horse and open the gates. For the most part, though, these are easily interpreted as just necessary context for the audience, given the film’s asynchronous structure. True to the Homeric vision, they do not seem to stand for much beyond themselves.
To be sure, The Odyssey would be an excellent, if dour, film if it simply chose to remain on this level. The cast is uniformly strong, and the practical effects and staging are superb (though some costuming choices leave a bit to be desired). But Nolan is not content to settle for faithfully adapting his source material. This film is, in fact, quite revisionary, and yet it is only in the film’s third act, as Odysseus begins to reveal himself to Penelope, that the movie’s real intention starts to become clear.
From the start of Nolan’s Odyssey, recurrent appeals to “Zeus’ law”—here meaning ξενία, the moral imperative of guest-right or hospitality—echo through the film’s script. Ξενία is the principle that prevents Telemachus from taking up arms against the rowdy suitors filling his mother’s halls and, accordingly, prevents the suitors from killing him. Ξενία is also the principle that permits a disguised Odysseus, in the garb of a beggar, to find a place in those same halls before he unleashes his own vengeance. Ξενία is, in short, a moral foundation for group behavior, a lodestar for right conduct at the level of the political, one that prohibits subterfuge, stealthy violence, or harm toward guests.
And crucially, ξενία is the very principle that Odysseus himself, famously, has betrayed at Troy. The Trojan Horse, Odysseus’ brainchild, was a great deception that only worked because ξενία could be assumed. The Trojans brought the horse into their walls as an offering to Athena, and the Greeks ruthlessly exploited that trust: Odysseus and his followers stealthily infiltrated the walls of an enemy’s stronghold and took up arms against them. That, far more than eating the sun god’s cattle or attacking Poseidon’s cyclopean son, is the true violation of divine law that propels Nolan’s Odyssey.
Of course, Nolan is not the first storyteller to depict the Trojan Horse stratagem as sin per se. Dante, after all, consigns Odysseus to the eighth circle of hell for perpetrating “[t]he ambush of the horse, which made the door whence issued forth the Romans’ gentle seed.”[6] What makes Nolan’s retelling unique is not that the misdeed happened but that Odysseus is haunted by it.
Against that backdrop, all of Odysseus’ oceanic misadventures take on a different cast. The great predators that slaughter his men and cast Odysseus adrift—the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Laestrygonian giants, the witch Circe, the devouring Scylla and Charybdis—stand for a greater world that is no longer hospitable to the stranger, that has followed Odysseus’ lead and abandoned ξενία. Willfully betraying ξενία at Troy broke the cosmos and ushered in a new age of violence and calamity.
Time-consciousness of this sort—a belief that one plays a part in a linear cosmological drama—is decidedly not an ancient Greek idea. As Mircea Eliade explains, the man of the classical age was always “free to annul his own history through periodic abolition of time and collective regeneration.”[7] By performance of expiatory rites, or appeasement of the gods, harms could be undone and a new era inaugurated.
Nolan denies his Odysseus any such relief. This Odysseus finds himself thrust headlong into something like the Jewish, and later Christian, consciousness of the irreversibility of History: an awareness of cosmic order in which “[h]istorical facts…become ‘situations’ of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer upon them.”[8] Crucially, Nolan’s ξενία is not a suggestion or an ethical code; it is a transcendental claim which Odysseus has violated. That is the “situation” in which Odysseus must now dwell and so suffer.
Nolan’s Odysseus is not only racked by his own inner conflict over this, which the Greeks would have found strange and inexplicable in its own right. He is similarly devastated by the knowledge of the part he has played in a broader History, a transcendental frame with a standard of judgment not reducible to one parochial preference or another. What Nolan has accomplished is not adaptation so much as theological reconstruction.
What is Odysseus to do about this, though? After all, he does not die upon the face of the deep. He lives, and returns to Ithaca, to find a palace overrun by decadence.
Only bloodshed awaits. Having so flagrantly violated ξενία at Troy and unmade the moral world, Odysseus stands outside the divine law. Now, as an agent fully gone over to transgression, there is nothing to stop him from doubling down on his ξενία-violation and slaughtering the suitors who fill his home. Telemachus looks on but does not join in the carnage; the one man he kills, he kills in self-defense. None of this makes for a triumphant homecoming for Odysseus. It is a dark return to violent form, more akin to Unforgiven or Logan or John Wick. And it lays the groundwork for the audacious change that Nolan makes to the story’s ending.
In the original epic, Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors amounts to a restoration of sacral kingship and a reestablishment of public order. The ensuing rage of the suitors’ families—a genuine threat to little Ithaca—is, in the epic, assuaged by a literal deus ex machina: Athena appears between the combatants, directing them to “part the sooner, and without bloodshed.”[9] The goddess even helps broker a “sworn treaty for time to come” between both sides.[10] Odysseus faces no true consequences for his violation of ξενία; the story simply ends there. Peace has been restored, and—pace Eliade—a collective regeneration has occurred. History begins anew.
No such escape for Nolan’s Odysseus. Alongside Penelope, he takes to his ship and departs Ithaca for the unknown west, where he plans to make atoning sacrifices for his fallen comrades. He leaves Telemachus—the rightful king, with a conscience unstained by violation of ξενία—to rule in his stead.
Viewed in perspective, this coda is completely unsurprising. Over and over again, Nolan returns in his films to this Girardian motif: a man bearing the guilt of a whole civilizational order on his back, departing from society in an effort to prevent violence and further collapse. It’s true of Nolan’s Batman in both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, true of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, arguably true of Nolan’s troubled astronaut Cooper in Interstellar, and probably true of others. Sin and tragedy cannot fester or be excused; they must be assigned to a perpetrator, and a penalty must be levied. Anything else would sunder the world anew.
In the end, Nolan’s Odyssey rests on a tacitly Christian metaphysical foundation, anchoring its vision in a thought-world remote from anything “classical.” Odysseus thinks and feels and acts as a man beneath the shadow of an Unknown God, Creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. Odysseus’ misdeeds are not merely errors, but sins. His transgressions are not excusable or ameliorable; they are world-historical.
A director like Robert Eggers—of Nosferatu, The Northman, and The Witch, among others—would no doubt have made a very different sort of film, one that would attempt to take the ancient world on its own alien moral terms. Nolan’s film does not do this. And for some, that will be a reason to critique it.
But it seems to me that, in the end, Nolan’s film is compelling because it suggests that the moral categories of the classical world logically invite the crisis that is depicted onscreen. And in that very instant of collapse, those categories open up onto the transcendental horizon of later Christian thought. If our violent deeds have violent ends, how then shall we live in this world? Who will save us? That question is not unintelligible even on classical terms—even if, within an imminent horizon, it might have been unanswerable.
Or, at least, mostlyunanswerable.As the film’s second act draws to a close with Odysseus preparing to set sail from Calypso’s isle aboard a ramshackle raft, the sea nymph (Charlize Theron) offers him a few words of gnomic advice. He has no crew, no ship, no way to control his return to Ithaca. After all Odysseus’ striving, after all his defiance of the gods and shattering of ξενία, now, and only now, he must commit himself utterly to the unknown. In the face of that ineffable abyss, all Odysseus can do is trust.
It is a trust that, curiously enough, is vindicated. Odysseus is brought safe to shore. And with that comes a flicker of hope against hope, beyond anything that classical thought might have conceived, that blind Fate might be something more like Providence—a power finally capable of bringing good from evil. A power that is, perhaps, capable of grace.
John Ehrett is an attorney and writer in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Civitas political theology group. He teaches government at Patrick Henry College.
NOTES
[1] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2003), 13.
[2] Auerbach, Mimesis, 12.
[3] Auerbach, Mimesis, 13.
[4] Auerbach, Mimesis, 15.
[5] Auerbach, Mimesis, 15.
[6] Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XXVI (Longfellow trans.).
[7] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 2005), 157.
[8] Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 104.
[9] Peter Green trans., The Odyssey (University of California Press, 2018), 373.
[10] Green trans., The Odyssey, 374.