Odysseus Sails Again

New York City — The success of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey reveals an irony as bitter as any Greek tragedy. An ancient story about honor, piety, and devotion to family is being celebrated at a cultural moment when those ideals — and the civilization they helped to create — have been largely rejected in educated circles.

Outside of Columbia University, for example, where all undergraduates are required to read The Odyssey, most elite institutions have excised Homer from the curricula. Indeed, a study by the National Association of Scholars found that none of America’s top colleges and universities had a required course in Western civilization. The degradation of the humanities in American higher education coincides with the secular, leftist rage against “the West” that matches the fury of Achilles.

The most important institutions teaching the classic texts of Western civilization, in fact, are rooted in conservative religious communities: Jews and Christians who are launching and leading academic organizations to teach the virtues of ancient Greece and Rome.

The Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education, an initiative of the Tikvah Fund in Manhattan, develops classical curricula for K–12 schools around the country. It also works closely with Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, which trains Orthodox leaders to be “well versed in both Torah and the Western Canon.” As Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, the Straus Center’s director, explains, the story of the Jewish people is embedded in the history of the West. “The Ten Commandments,” he writes, “are central to Jewish faith and ethics — but they are also something more: the very wellspring of the moral and political ideas that shaped Western civilization.”

It is a view shared by educators at the Geneva School of Manhattan — the only classical Christian school in New York City — where works such as The Odyssey are taught alongside the Bible and form the core curriculum. At the Geneva School, all students are grounded in the classic trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

“Classical training in literature, Latin, history, and rhetoric was the norm until the twentieth century,” explains Rim Hinckley, head of school. “Over time, however, a gradual shift toward progressive education moved many schools away from this rich tradition, which is why we are committed to recovering the time-tested principles of classical Christian education.”

These institutions are part of a larger K–12 educational movement, led mostly by conservative Christians, to reinvigorate this tradition. Groups such as the Association of Classical Christian Schools, the Great Hearts Academies, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, and the Society for Classical Learning are introducing generations of young people to the classical-Christian inheritance of Western civilization. Data from Arcadia Education show that classical-school enrollment has reached more than 677,500 students, spread among 1,551 schools. (And those numbers do not include the thousands of students in home-school classical education.)

In this endeavor, religious communities are walking in the footsteps of their ancestors. In his philosophical masterpiece The Guide of the Perplexed, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (a.d. 1138–1204) sought to synthesize ancient Greek and Jewish thought. Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas (a.d. 1225–1274) took on a similar quest in his Summa Theologica, combining Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology.

Ever since the Enlightenment, however, educated elites have regarded religious belief as the enemy of reason and an obstacle to human progress. Tertullian’s famous taunt — “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” — is held out as proof of Christianity’s disregard for the life of the mind.

Yet Tertullian was an outlier. The Christian outlook that can rationally engage with the ideals of the classical world has a long pedigree. When the apostle Paul found himself among the pagan philosophers of Athens, he was distressed by the city’s idols. But he challenged the philosophers on their own intellectual turf, quoting their own poets to point them to the God of Genesis. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands,” Paul explained. “As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” (Acts 17: 24, 28).

Likewise, Augustine, the bishop of Hippo (a.d. 354–430), famously argued that Christians, like the ancient Hebrews, must shun the false teachings of the pagan world but are nonetheless free to “plunder from the Egyptians” those resources that serve noble ends. These works, Augustine wrote in On Christian Doctrine, contain intimations of divine truth that can be “adapted” to advance the gospel. “Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God’s providence which are everywhere scattered abroad.”

Nolan’s film is an expedition into one of these treasure troves. His portrayal of Odysseus remains true to Homer’s moral vision: The heroic ideal is retrieved for the modern mind. The Odyssey is therefore a rebuke to the prejudice that there are no Great Books, no moral and spiritual truths that speak to us, universally, across the centuries.

Herein lies one of the most important tasks of the educator — and the filmmaker — for our benighted era: to remind us of these truths, to plant them in the soil of our minds and imaginations.

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “but to irrigate deserts.” Like so much of our political life, the imaginative life of the West has become morally desiccated. We are starved for moral beauty. The Great Books reveal to us that our longings are not in vain: They are signposts to “the far-off country.”