Patrick Deneen’s reflects on the Odyssey for the Daily Wire.
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 seemingly 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.
