Leaving the Theater

(Part 1 in a multipart series on Nolan’s The Odyssey)

When the lights came up after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I found myself thinking about how some might be tempted to dismiss Homer because he is a pagan poet whose world is populated by quarrelsome gods and heroic violence, or tempted merely to celebrate him as one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time, leaving much that might be noted unexamined.

Neither response to Homer has ever satisfied the Christian tradition.

From the beginning, Christians have lived in conversation with cultures they did not create. The first believers inherited the Scriptures of Israel, but they also lived in the cities of the Roman Empire, spoke Greek, read Greek authors, and educated their children in the classics—either intentionally or unintentionally. They could, therefore, neither ignore that world nor simply baptize it.

So they learned another way.

They listened.

They asked where truth might already be shimmering beneath the surface of a pagan story.

That instinct is older than the Church Fathers. It is already present in the New Testament.

When Paul stands before the philosophers in Athens, he does something remarkable. He does not begin with condemnation. He begins with recognition.

“I see how extremely religious you are in every way.”

He points to an altar dedicated “To an Unknown God.” He quotes Greek poets. He acknowledges that they have genuinely grasped something about the God they do not yet fully know: “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Paul neither rejects Greek culture nor accepts it uncritically. Instead, he receives what is true, names what is incomplete, and bears witness to the One in whom every fragment finds its fulfillment.

That strikes me as a profoundly Christian way of reading not only philosophy but literature.

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey has endured for nearly three millennia. It continues to ask questions that refuse to disappear.

What makes a civilization flourish—or decay?

What do we owe the stranger?

Why does pride destroy us?

How are we changed by suffering?

What does it mean to long for home?

These are not uniquely Christian questions. Homer was asking them centuries before the birth of Christ. Yet they are questions to which Christianity has its own distinctive thoughts.

Christians need not fear recognizing truth wherever it appears. If, as John’s Gospel proclaims, the eternal Word is the light that enlightens everyone, then it should not surprise us to find rays of that light appearing in unexpected places.

The task is to take note of the rays.

I suspect I am about to revisit The Odyssey not expecting to discover Christ secretly hidden on every page, but asking why generations of Christians have continued to read Homer with gratitude and discernment. Along the way, I expect to encounter hospitality and justice, pride and endurance, politics and homecoming. Above all, I expect to rediscover that some of the deepest questions of the ancient world remain our own.

Such a conversation did not begin with Christopher Nolan.

Nor did it begin with Homer.

The conversation began with the God who is Truth itself and who has never been left without witness.