Homecoming and Why It Matters
(Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2017)
Part One: Does Not Wisdom Call Out?
Enough with Critical Theory run amuck! Let’s have something like a spirit week, a homecoming for the home team, for the Best of the West. Though the players play for the West, they come from all over the world, and they play for people of all colors, races, religions, ages, genders, sizes, and abilities. Homecoming is a notion with deep roots in all culture. Because our nation wasn’t founded on tribal loyalties, however, our homecoming celebrates the play of human beings in the world.
Homecoming is a big part of playing: it’s home base, a goal, and pay-dirt; it’s boisterous, joyful, embracing, and popular. From wide experience, careful study, and those awful moments when they fumble and let down the team, though, all our all stars understand that homecoming also addresses the experience everyone has from time to time of alienation, of being cast out in a cold, pointless universe which tends toward entropy. Science makes a strong argument for this vision of things as the final say on how the real world works, but my books on a comic vision propose, as Solomon did, that Wisdom is “from everlasting” and still lives among us as a potent life saving power:
Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
At the highest point along the way,
where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
beside the gate leading into the city,
at the entrance, she cries aloud:
“To you, O people, I call out;
I raise my voice to all mankind.”
Wisdom calls out when and where we need her the most. She calls us home to the city where she lives.
The essays of my second book, A Comic Vision of Self-Government, maintain that Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Paul Johnson have heard wisdom’s call and that their political ideas can be better understood and appreciated when we see that they have been shaped and can be illuminated by the stories that make up our canon of wisdom literature. That literature is firmly grounded in homecoming, the ingredient that appears to be missing in our civic life.
Part Two: The Presence of a Moral Order
When read as a whole narrative, the theme of exile and return functions as a unifying structural device for both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible. The Odyssey, one of the earliest and still one of greatest works of Western literature, also is structured entirely around the theme of homecoming. For thousands of years people listening to or reading the story of Odysseus anticipated and celebrated the moment when he came home to his wife and son on the island of Ithaca after a twenty year absence.
Who is Odysseus? He’s a mythical king empowered by the gods to restore order in his kingdom after being away so long. While he was gone, ambitious opportunists, suitors of the beautiful queen, usurped his government and laid waste the nation’s wealth in pointless, extravagant feasting.
Where has he been? He has been at war in a world of objects, matter in motion as Marx would say.
How does he get home? Mortals and immortals help him. Initially Odysseus thinks he can do it on his own, but a misjudgment of his own gets in the way. It leads to the Cyclops’s curse on his name. Odysseus’s trials come to a climax when the lightning bolt of Zeus destroys his ship, and he loses all the outward trappings of his kingship as a naked man adrift on a vast ocean. By transforming the great Odysseus into a nobody, though, the gods have readied him for true power. Athene guides him to the Phaeacians, a race of people whose ships transcend time and space to move with the speed of thought. The Phaeacians bring him home—exhausted, secure, and sound asleep in a bed on the stern of their ship. Then, too, once a scar on his thigh proves his identity to Penelope, she brings him home (to the bed he built with his own hands) for a night of love.
Why does his return matter? In his person Odysseus embodies the fact that a moral order exists, and this is the theme that A Comic Vision of Self-Government develops. For a time the moral order undoes him, but this readies him to be its representative to his people. Even before all this, though, Odysseus has one overriding purpose: he wants to return home. It’s his chief characteristic, and it’s why the gods (and Homer) single him out for special attention. By returning to take up his duties as a husband, father, and guardian of his people, he achieves the goal of a good life. Hundreds of years later, Aristotle called it eudaemonia, or in English happiness.
Part Three: On Looking for a Moral Order
I’ve put Claude Lorrain’s painting on the cover of my book mainly because it’s beautiful. (You can view it on the Home Page.) I hoped it would arrest a reader’s attention as it did mine. I originally found it online with the title “The Return of Odysseus.” Much later, I discovered that the Louvre Museum, which owns the painting, lists the title for it as “Odysseus Returns Chryseis to her Father,” referring to the incident in Book One of the Iliad when Odysseus, as ambassador of the Greeks, returns Chryseis to her father after she had been awarded to Agamemnon as a trophy of war. I wondered how the internet of things got it wrong. Maybe it’s marketing. The title used in online sites, “The Return of Odysseus,” directs the viewer to the fulfillment of Odysseus’s quest in the Odyssey when he returns to Ithaca, an incident which is more widely known than the one in the Iliad.
Lorrain painted many pictures that employed much the same composition; the titles, referring to incidents from classical myths, provided the difference. He was drawn, I believe, to the theme of a safe harbor just as I was. Though the situations in the Iliad and the Odyssey are quite different and they take place at different stages in Odysseus’s life, the painting captures, for both narratives, the return of a moral order to a kingdom rocked by its absence. In the Iliad the gods have decreed that Chryseis must be returned to her father, and in The Odyssey the gods have decreed that Odysseus himself must be returned to his wife and son on Ithaca. These actions end the disorder. In line with what the incidents have in common, Lorrain has painted the goal of good government which is why it serves as a window on the theme of my book. It’s a vision of civil peace. The sea is calm and expansive; like the harbor, it invites opportunities for commerce and the enrichment of the town. The people gather at the place where sea-paths and land-paths meet. From the shapes of the buildings, the waterfront, and from the ease of the people we sense the presence of wisdom.
If you look for Odysseus in the painting, however, you won’t find him. The title has given us a purpose for looking at the picture, but at the same time it frustrates that purpose. Nevertheless, our original impression of a great peace settling over the sea, the sky, and the people in the foreground of the town still holds. In the space where we set out to see Odysseus we’re struck instead with the light, which infuses the buildings (especially the columns), the trees, the people, and the animals with a blessed, unstrained uprightness. The orderliness and firmness of these things is softened by the light even as it acts to reveal them, and we realize that this is what we have been seeking. Furthermore, we’re not alone. We’re looking through the eyes of Claude Lorrain at something that matters a great deal to us. He has acted to realize the light and all that it reveals, and so can we. For me, the painting and the title serve as a kind of parable. Without the title we wouldn’t look for Odysseus in the picture; similarly, without the possibility that a moral order exists in the world, we wouldn’t go looking for it.
Sometimes when my wife and I are watching TV, we notice that our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel is watching the objects moving on the screen. If she would look at the picture Claude Lorrain has painted, though, she would never go looking for Odysseus. She can’t. The title is nowhere in the picture. Only persons, capable of thought—and conscious of themselves and their own history, the history of their families, their nation, and their culture—would go looking for him in the painting. The meaning of Lorrain’s composition, the return of a moral order to the kingdom, doesn’t exist in a world of objects; it comes to life in the interactions of conscious subjects. The life we live is something other than matter in motion.
Homer was a poet, not a political scientist, but for thousands of years the Odyssey has been preserved and translated all over the world so people could reflect on Odysseus’s pride, the school of hard knocks through which he learns self-government, and the comic conclusion made possible by the strictness of this school. A Comic Vision of Self-Government argues that Homer’s great poem and other timeless comic works still have that value, for the vexation they address is a constant in human life. In these stories the main character falls, as human beings have for millennia, into a world where it appears that he is just an object, buffeted about like the plaything of the gods, but he doesn’t give up. Instead of drowning in that unfriendly sea, he strives for air and light, the human world where he has a place, even in the hearts of others. These stories give us heart and intelligence of a great power; they teach us to recognize the voice of wisdom when it calls to us in the affairs of everyday life.
The ideas of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Paul Johnson, and the examples of wisdom literature are all priceless records of human beings who have expressed what they found when they went looking for true government or, as so often happens, it went looking for them. The seers, poets, artists, and architects of the West are the Phaeacians who bring us home with the speed of thought. Along with much else in our culture that’s no longer taught in schools or colleges, people have forgotten Odysseus, just as ambitious men in Ithaca assumed he was dead in order to usurp his place as husband of Penelope and as king of the island. We need a homecoming; we need to turn once more to the models of good government that have been passed down from pre-history. I confess that, since I was an English teacher, I have a bias in favor of my subject as a vehicle for this project, for literature discovers the root of true government, which is self-government, in the everyday interactions of Everyman.