All posts tagged The Iliad

  • June 21, 2017

    Saved from Rage

    Iliad
    Saved from Rage
    Brian Zahnd

    Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
    murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
    hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…
    What god drove them to fight with such fury?
    –The Iliad

    Homer’s Iliad — the closest thing the pagan world had to a Bible — is a five-hundred page war poem. Homer doesn’t sing his song in praise of war, though courage and valor are given their due; rather Homer alerts the world — then and now — to the senseless carnage that can be wrought once rage is let loose in the world of arrogant humans. It’s no accident that the first word of the ancient world’s greatest epic is Rage. And it’s noteworthy that in just the ninth line of the poem Homer asks, What god drove them to fight with such fury? Indeed, what god?

    The ancient world saw rage not as a mere human emotion, but as a kind of malevolent entity, a demon, a monster that if let loose could not easily be brought under control, and in its chaos could lay waste entire civilizations. The Iliad is Homer’s beautiful, but bitter testament to the destructive potential of unchecked Rage.
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    No Comments / America, Peace /

  • July 18, 2011

    Manhood Is Not Brutality

    domotorfi

    Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
    murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
    hurling down to the House of the Death so many sturdy souls,
    great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
    feasts for the dogs and birds,
    and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
    Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
    Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
    —The Iliad

    Western civilization has always had two competing sacred texts: The Iliad and the Bible. We have long pretended we can form a nice synthesis of the two—that Homer’s Achilles and Isaiah’s Immanuel are somehow compatible ideals, but they are not. The rage of Achilles and the peace of Immanuel are fundamentally contradictory visions for the ideal of humanity in general and of manhood in particular. Those who derive their ideal of manhood from the pagan vision personified in Achilles will never be able to reconcile it with the ideal of manhood depicted in Christ. Achilles or Christ? Who is our model of manhood? We must choose. We must choose between the brutal way of Achilles and the peaceable way of Christ. And if you feel compelled to appeal to the whip-wielding Christ in the temple as an attempt to synthesize the two, let me simply say that Christ cleansing the temple is a world away from the violence of The Iliad that dominates imaginations from Homer to Hollywood; i.e. Jesus’ prophetic protest against religious exploitation is no endorsement of a “Walker, Texas Ranger” version of Messiah! Read more

    2 Comments / Violence /