Toward the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Matt Damon’s Odysseus has a despairing line clearly influenced by an aphorism from the Talmud memorably quoted in Schindler’s List: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” The Talmud also sees absolute significance in the destruction of one life; this is more the sense of Odysseus’s lamentation.
Giving a pagan Greek hero a line adapted from later Jewish wisdom is an interesting choice; more centrally, Nolan reinterprets a key theme in Homer’s work in terms overtly drawn from one of the most revered of Jesus’ sayings. The ancient Greek precept of hospitality or xenia, here called “Zeus’s law,” is repeatedly summarized as treating strangers and others “as you would be treated.” Yes: “Zeus’s law” is equated with the Golden Rule, first recorded in this positive form in the Gospels.
Nolan is almost the last filmmaker working in Hollywood today whose very name establishes any new release as a global cultural event, and he has tackled one of Western civilization’s most culturally significant narratives (and most spectacular and cinema-ready) in the grandest possible style. The Odyssey is the first feature film ever shot entirely in IMAX 70mm, and was filmed in eight countries and territories with the largest marquee ensemble cast of Nolan’s career. Given the director’s preference for minimizing reliance on computer effects, the physical scale of the production was immense.
Nolan chose this, by his own account, out of his own affinity for this story: the tale of King Odysseus of Ithaca’s harrowing voyage home from the Trojan war; his belated reunion with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus; and his deadly reckoning with the horde of suitors plaguing his household in his absence and seeking Penelope’s hand and the throne. Nolan has called Homer’s epic “a very strong foundational text for me,” since, in his words, “I’ve been telling this story in all my films for years. It’s a family story, a love story, a revenge story, a war story, a coming-of-age story.”
Nolan’s film is also about a theme that he’s previously circled but seldom engaged with such directness: what his Odysseus calls “the fragile bonds between men”; the moral codes that hold societies and civilizations together. Perhaps the nearest precedent in the director’s work is The Dark Knight’s climactic set piece: the Joker’s memorable ferry-boat social experiment, in which stranded civilians and convicted criminals must each decide whether to destroy the other or be destroyed themselves.
Heath Ledger’s Joker believes that people are “only as good as the world allows them to be,” and that, “when the chips are down, these civilized people” will “eat each other.” The Joker’s experiment fails, if barely; the verdict of Nolan’s Odyssey is both grimmer and more high-minded. Like the filmmaker’s last work, Oppenheimer, The Odyssey has a downbeat, apocalyptic bent—but, unlike Oppenheimer, or any previous Nolan film, the new film is also centrally about what human beings owe one another.
As the American Christian Right plunges headlong into an antichrist Nietzschean cult of money, pleasure, and nihilist power fueled by naked racism and contempt for the weak, it is fascinating to watch the liberal democratic order that still lives and breathes in people like Nolan grapple with the real results of what happens when a social order really and truly abandons the gospel as MAGA is doing. Nietzsche called the English “flatheads” for thinking a Christian view of the human person and the moral order would just keep going once you rejected the supernatural revelation at its core. Now, ironically, the MAGA cult is showing us what that truly antichrist post-Christian moral order looks like (while retaining a few sentimental attachments to smells and bells and Precious Moments figurines as they refashion the cross into the swastika).
My hope is that more people will, like historian Tom Holland, begin to think seriously about the folly of rejecting the gospel (the supernatural character of which has never really been disproven) and take a long hard look at Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, realizing that he still saves, even now. There is still a chance that post-Christian democratic liberalism, with its genuine love of human dignity and human rights may find its way back to Jesus as the source of the moral order it longs to see restored and saved, even as the anti-Christ MAGA cult loudly brays its KKKhristianity while making war on the gospel. There is precedent for such paradoxes:
“What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” (Mt 21:28–31)
At the same time, I also note that while a love of human rights and human dignity can be a doorway back to a fully Christian faith in Christ, there will have to be a moment of choice between clinging to merely earthly goods and abandoning ourselves to Jesus completely.
I say that because, while Nietzsche is right that Christian morals depend on belief in Christ, it is not sufficient to say “We need to believe in Christ so we can restore the Christian moral order.” It doesn’t work that way. Jesus says, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and everything else will be added as well.” Seeking Christ so that we can have earthly things like a healthy political order is really just the attempt to make Jesus our genie to grant us wishes. He is Lord, not a vending machine for our desires. He calls us to surrender our will to his and not keep playing the game of “I will obey so long as you do exactly what I demand.”
As Uncle Screwtape says:
About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
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