Learning to Read Homer

(The second reflection in a series)

If Paul opened the door, the early Church Fathers walked through it.

The first Christians did not inherit a world in which the choice was between reading the Bible or reading Homer. They inherited a culture in which Homer was the beginning of nearly every education. Greek children learned to read from Homer. They memorized Homer. They absorbed their moral imagination through Homer.

The question, therefore, was unavoidable.

What should Christians do with this inheritance?

Some argued that pagan literature should simply be abandoned. After all, Homer's world is filled with many gods, heroic vengeance, and values that often stand in sharp tension with the gospel.

Others recognized that rejecting everything Greek would also mean rejecting much of the language and culture through which the Christian faith itself was being proclaimed.

The Church gradually discovered a third way.

Justin Martyr gave it one of its most memorable expressions. He argued that before the eternal Word became flesh in Jesus Christ, the Word was already active in creation. Wherever human beings sought truth sincerely, they might catch glimpses of that divine light. Justin called these logoi spermatikoi—"seeds of the Word."

A seed, however, is not the same thing as the full-grown plant.

The Fathers never confused Homer with Scripture. The Odyssey was not another Gospel. Yet they believed that the same God who created the world had not left the nations entirely without witness. People everywhere could discover fragments of truth.

Clement of Alexandria compared Greek philosophy to the Law given to Israel. Just as the Law prepared God's covenant people for Christ, philosophy and classical learning could prepare the Gentile world to receive the gospel. Basil the Great encouraged young Christians to read the Greek classics carefully, gathering what was noble and true while leaving behind what was false. Wisdom, he believed, should never be rejected simply because it appeared outside explicitly Christian writings.

That confidence is worth having.

Our age often swings between two temptations. Some are too quick to dismiss works outside the Christian tradition. Others are too quick to embrace them enthusiastically. The Fathers modeled another posture: neither fear nor naïveté, but discernment.

They read generously because they believed all truth belongs to God.

They read critically because they knew not every truth is the whole truth.

That is why The Odyssey continued to occupy a place in Christian education for centuries. Christians did not preserve Homer merely because he was a literary genius. They preserved him because he had seen something true about the human condition. He understood courage and pride, suffering and endurance, justice and injustice, longing and loss.

As I returned to The Odyssey after seeing Nolan's film, I found myself asking the same question the Fathers once asked.

Where are the seeds?

Where does Homer glimpse something that Christians can recognize?

Before Homer teaches us about kings or battles or monsters, he teaches us how a civilization receives the stranger. That theme runs through the entire poem, and it became one of the moral insights that Christians found most readily recognizable.

An unexpected traveler knocks on the door and the future of a household (and perhaps a kingdom) depends upon whether anyone opens it.