A remarkable outburst of interest in Western civilization has marked this extraordinary month. We began July with a celebration of America’s 250th birthday and a special focus on the history, principles, and people who launched this singular nation a quarter-millennium ago. As the month concludes, we witnessed a flood of commentary on Homer’s ancient epic the “Odyssey.” Discussions have centered not only on Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, but on the meaning and teachings that ancient text inspires. As we revel in this outpouring of interest in Western civilization, both ancient and American, we should also reflect on the connection between these two seeming coincidental events.
After all, America is a culminating expression of the ancient Western tradition that was inaugurated by the epics of Homer. The many ships that sailed from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean brought not only settlers to the New World, but also the fullness and complexity of that Western tradition. If one wishes to see the course of that tradition in its most intensely realized form, one need only to look for its evidence on our own shores. To slightly alter a famous line by Bishop George Berkeley, “westward the course of Western civilization takes its way.”
I would point to two specific ideals that the “Odyssey” inaugurated, and which have become embedded as part of our own civilizational inheritance in the West generally, and in America specifically. The first of these elements was the ideal of human beings as consummate explorers. The second of these elements was to affirm the concrete human longing for home. While seemingly contradictory impulses, they are both deeply constitutive elements of Odysseus as a character, and of the American people as a nation.
The “Odyssey” is the first great work that describes the wonders of exploring. Odysseus encounters the utter limits of both the known and the unknown world. While the Christopher Nolan film emphasized the horrors that the explorer can encounter — monsters such as the Cyclops, enchantresses like Circe, and perils like the Scylla and Charybdis — the original epic also described a number of the wonders, attractions, and temptations that the undiscovered world offers to the adventurer.
The islands of Circe and Calypso are described as places of great natural beauty, and Odysseus is charmed (to the point of seduction) by both beautiful demi-goddesses, spending lengthy time with each. The Sirens’ song offers to Odysseus the prospect of knowledge of all things, a temptation that impels Odysseus to strain against the ropes that bind him to the mast. His diversion to the island of the Cyclops is inspired by his desire to know the minds and ways of different kinds of creatures — a curiosity that proves deadly, in this case. Throughout Odysseus’s 10-year journey, he demonstrates the quality of exploration, adventurousness, curiosity, and the willingness to challenge limits both natural and divine. This quality of the explorer has come to define a core dimension of the American spirit.
The adventurous and exploratory aspect of Odysseus became so engrained in the social imagination of the West that it came to be seen as the paradigm by which later explorers were described and understood. As Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci made their ways westward across the Atlantic Ocean, contemporary authors across Europe regularly described their explorations as a new kind of odyssey, and these sailors as the embodiment of a contemporary Ulysses. In the minds of these European thinkers, America was metaphorically discovered by Odysseus, and his spirit of exploration and discovery came to predominate a major dimension of American self-understanding.
Yet, in a seeming contradiction, the “Odyssey“ is simultaneously the foundational Western text that valorizes homecoming. Though Odysseus tarries and strays, the unwavering object of his journey remains his homecoming to Ithaca — and to his wife, his son, his father, and his countrymen. His is not only the voyage of a single man toward a homeward destination, but the journey of the human soul that is tempted at all sides to be more or less than a human. He is offered both an endless hedonistic torpor by the Lotus-Eaters and the life of godlike immortality by Calypso. However, in these and every other instance, Odysseus remains resolute in his aim of reaching home. To return home is thus to affirm his humanity, a condition that accepts the limits and rewards of our unique state — mortal and needy, but also inventive and reflective.
Many, if not most, of the same Americans who traveled to the New World, or once arrived here, who pulled up stakes to move farther west, at the same time were compelled by the desire for home. While, in contrast to Odysseus, these wayfarers to the New World were not seeking to “return,” nevertheless like him, they journeyed for the sake of homecoming. Many of the same people who came to be described as “pioneers” were also “settlers,” a people who pushed past existing boundaries in the mission to make a good home. Among the earliest wayfarers to the New World was John Winthrop, who in 1630 told his fellow Puritans that they would be erecting “a city on a hill.” It was for the sake of those new homes, new cities, and ultimately a great nation that these adventurous people would wander toward and beyond the edges of civilization.
These twin Odyssean themes remain at the very heart of American memory, experience, and storytelling. Our own literary and cinematic tradition is laced through with this most ancient of Western tensions first articulated in the “Odyssey” and expressed in much more recent American stories from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Huckleberry Finn,” from “The Great Gatsby” to “Apollo 13,” from “Little House on the Prairie” to “Field of Dreams” (which features the iconic American sport that one wins by going home). Dorothy Gale longs at once for “somewhere over the rainbow,” and — journeying past that rainbow to Oz — afterward intones, “there’s no place like home.” Gatsby longs for the “green light,” symbolizing a distant desire and the possibility of a home with Daisy. And, in the portrayal of astronaut Jim Lovell of Apollo 13, we recognize both his yearning to cast off the earth’s gravity and his desperate hope to return to his earthbound family.
As we move toward the conclusion of an eventful July, let us both acknowledge and celebrate the American inheritance of a Western tradition that has been a major topic of conversation and debate this month. As heirs of that tradition, we remain both explorers and home-seekers, pioneers and people with roots, a nation that seeks to “go where no man has gone before” and eternal kids who make sure to head home when Mom rings the dinner bell.
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Patrick Deneen is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls.”
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