GUIDANCE NOTES FOR THIRD TALK ON HOMER, TO BE GIVEN AT 3 PM ON 7TH OF MAY 2026 ON THE X PLATFORM
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A fundamental problem of Greek and Western culture appears, it might be argued, in the very first lines of the Iliad
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
μῆνιν οὐλομένην : this construction reminds that a moment of the manic and the destructive that is there at the etymological core of the God Apollo and of that “Apollonian principle” which is still, even in the irrationalist Nietzsche, the principle of reason and reasoned aesthetic construction.
The etymology of the name “Apollo” that links it to the verb for destroying
ὄλλῡμῐ or άππoλλῡμῐ
is, admittedly, a “popular etymology” more resonant among the Greeks themselves than among those who, in their posterity, have undertaken a more scientific study of their language.
(It has something of the status of the etymologies assembled by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae)
But it is certainly the case that, in the early lines of the Iliad, this key phoneme ὄλ(λ)- weaves together, in a sort of tapestry, the god Apollo and the concrete practice of violence and destruction.
The ὀλέκω that occurs a little later to describe the effects of the plague that Apollo sends on the Greeks strikes this note as well
νοῦσον ἀνὰ στρατὸν ὄρσε κακήν, ὀλέκοντο δὲ λαοί,
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This presence of the brutal and destructive in the “Apollonian” might be an apt opportunity to take up again the much-discussed theme of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy.
But I do not want, here, to seize this opportunity.
I want, in this talk, to use this feature of the opening lines of the Iliad to develop a critique that I’ve been advancing, on X, of what is emerging as a dismayingly widely-shared view of the nature of the Greek gods, and of the Greeks’ relation to them, on the Online Right.
Offence is being taken, by an immensely broad swathe of people on X, at the director Christopher Nolan’s decision to make
“no one, not even the gods, can stop me from returning home”.
The argument is constantly being put and re-put that such a thought and speech is fundamentally un-Greek, that Nolan here is – likely consciously and deliberately – carrying out a violent assimilation of Homer’s world to our modern, liberal world.
“The Greeks were filled and moved by their gods”, unlike us, etc.
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Now, this attitude, expressed by so many people on X – and uniting, tellingly, the Right with many on the Left – is one that I viscerally and instinctively react against.
(Contrary to what is often said about me, my “takes” really do mostly come from the gut, not from the head).
There seems, to me, to be something altogether too numinous in this portrait of the classical Greeks as “god-drunken men” – to borrow the phrase that Novalis applied to Spinoza – that is being so heavily pushed on the Right just now.
In order to explain my objections to this ideology of numinosity that is gaining ground on the Right I will have to sketch quite a broad portrait of what seems to me to be at stake here.
The word “numinous” does, in fact, have a very interesting history.
It is telling, I think, in the context of the problem we’re addressing here that it seems like a very archaic word but is in fact a very modern one.
In its present usage it is in fact a creation of the last century.
The German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto, writing around the time of the First World War, is the first to give to this term the meaning of
“a relation to the divine that pervades and informs and shakes the beings of mortals”
That we are seeing evoked so often on RW X right now (with the charge that Nolan is a Nietzschean “letzter Mensch” because his Odysseus displays nothing of this)
Now, certainly, the Latin root of this word, numen, had existed since the time of Virgil and Cicero.
But the term is used in these authors in a way which is far, far less pathos-laden than the way in which Otto begins, very late, to use it.
It refers to “divinities”, yes, but to divinities that leave mortals much more to themselves and to their own devices than any “numinous” being that is evoked by Otto.
The experience of the “numinous” that is evoked by Otto is almost the experience of an ecstatic rape by the divinity: one that shakes the mortal to his very core, as is indicated by Otto’s key term tremendum.
But numen as Cicero and Virgil use the term suggests a much more formal and distant relation, a meaning underpinned by the fact that the term’s other meaning in Classical Latin is “a nod of the head”.
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My negative reaction to this propagation, on the Right, of a notion of the Greeks’ relation to their gods that recalls Otto’s “noumenal” theology may indeed be fed, besides by my viscera, by one point, at least, of scholarly reference:
One of the greatest scholars of antiquity, Nietzsche, permitted – many will be surprised to learn – no element at all of the ‘numinous’ in Otto’s sense to enter into his understanding of the Greeks’ relation to their gods.
In a way which, once again, should give us cause to examine and re-assess ourselves, Nietzsche surprises and shocks the Right in this regard for the same reason as he surprises and shocks the “Left Nietzscheans” of today:
Namely, by being a much cruder and simpler thinker than he is, especially today on the Left, made out to be.
A faint bad odour arises from the sort of philological cleverer-than-thou-ness that is being displayed by big BAP-adjacent RW accounts on X right now in their analyses and critiques of Nolan’s “Odyssey”.
This inasmuch as this philological cleverer-than-thouness strongly recalls the hyper-historically-informed, and thereby radically anti-empiricist, approach most associated with great leftist intellectual ideologues like Jean-Pierre Vernant and the historians of the Annales School:
“the Greeks did not think like us, feel like us, see like us…”
Nietzsche, however, adopts a position on this question which is remarkably like that of the dumb, common-sensical guy on the street.
He writes toward the end of the second essay of the “Genealogy”:
There are nobler ways of making use of the invention of gods than man’s self-crucifixion and self-abuse, ways in which Europe excelled during the last millennia, This can fortunately be deduced from any glance at the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and proud men in whom the animal in man felt deified, did not tear itself apart and did not rage against itself! These Greeks, for most of the time, used their gods expressly to keep ‘bad conscience’ at bay so that they could carry on enjoying their freedom of soul: therefore, the opposite of the way Christendom made use of its God.
What this basically says, I would argue, is that
“no intelligent man believed in God or gods in 900 BC any more than any intelligent man believed in God or gods in 1900 AD”
(it should be noted, by the way, what a position at once crude and radical Nietzsche also adopted in respect of the issue of religious piety in his own mid-19th century. He had no interest in entering into any debate on the nuances of “religious questions”. In Ecce Homo he states that he has never wasted, even as a child, a moment’s thought on them).
Nietzsche’s understanding of the nature of the Greek gods and of how Greeks conceived of this nature is a very simple-minded, “positivistic”, even unhistorical one:
An Odysseus knew that the “Poseidon” he was contending against was merely the heavenly projection of the forces, natural and social, that resisted his will.
This counterforce, then, needed to be reckoned with – but not “feared” in any sense of Otto’s numinous tremendum.
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It could be that I am overstating the case somewhat here – “bending the stick”, in Lenin’s phrase – by stating that piety and “godfearing-ness” were as entirely absent from the Greeks as they were from the child Nietzsche.
But I think any serious reading of Homer must at least cast deeply into question the idea that the Greeks’ relation to their gods was numinous in Otto’s sense.
Contrary to what is being said by so many “right-wingers” on X now, it was by no means so very exceptional for the Homeric heroes to enter into the sort of antagonistic and even directly violent relation that Odysseus enters into with Poseidon.
Book Five of the Iliad contains several examples of Diomedes entering into direct martial combat with, and even physically wounding, gods.
(It will be objected, of course, that Homer has this “power to strive with gods” infused into Diomedes precisely by a god, or goddess. But we touch here on a problem which is open to infinite dialectical disputation. It anticipates the debate to be had, for example, about the ideas about the relation between the divine and the human that were thrashed out between Leibniz and Arnauld in their long correspondence over the former’s notion that a certain notio completa human omnipotence was placed in Man by God: is the omnipotent notio thus rendered present in Man thereby “a notion of God” or “a notion of Man”).
It is massively questionable, then, that the Greeks’ relation to their gods was the numinous one – the one involving “fear and trembling”, to use Kierkegaard’s phrase – that the Right seems presently so insistent that it must have been.
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My objection to this “right-wing” numinosization of the Greeks’ relation to their gods cannot be understood except where we consider all that is stored away as “hidden cargo” in this over-stressing of the ancient Greek experience of “hubris”.
As I have also said in my X posts, it is striking how many of these paeans to the pagan “godfearingness” of the Iliad and the Odyssey – that Nolan supposedly misses – come from Christian conservative accounts, for which the Bible, Old and New Testament, is the key point of reference.
But the difference between the Homeric God-Man relation and the God-Man relation that was growing up around the same time in Old Testament culture is quite striking.
The tendency in the Judaic God-concept is precisely to eliminate the mercenary element in divine-mortal relations.
See Psalm 51:
For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
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We see here a marvellous example of the dialectic inherent in the Jewish God-concept: one that is significantly absent from the Greek one.
It is the absence of this dialectic that renders the Greeks, in the end, the source of the death of God just as the Jews are the source of this God-idea’s persistence.
On the one hand, the substitution, in the way of sacrifice, of “a broken and a contrite heart” for “the thigh-bones of bulls and goats” has much about it that contributes to what Pico della Mirandola, much later, was to call “the dignity of Man”.
The former seems a much more “humane” business than the latter.
Yet, if one stops and thinks, there is something greatly more cruel, sadistic and anti-human in the Jewish God-Man relation than in the pagan relation of “sacrifices to win the favour of the gods” that it replaces.
The commerce with God, on the Jewish model, penetrates – precisely because it is no longer really a “commerce” – into an inner sanctum of the self that really ought to be sacrosanct if true human dignity is to be maintained.
Is there not a sadistic horror in the Psalmist’s idea of a “broken heart” that is not at all there in the pagan “sacrificer of bulls”’ mercenary considerations?
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This relates, clearly, to those radical differences between the Homeric-Greek and the Old Testament notions of Man in his relation to the divine that I pointed to in the first and second talks:
The contrast between Man as “but dust and ashes” in the face of God and the Achillean conception of Man having a certain weight vis-à-vis the divinity that is the earth:
ἄχθος ἀρούρης
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I have seen a microcosmic reflection of this deeply sinister development in my own lifetime.
Philosophy has also proven useful in illuminating this: specifically the otherwise untrustworthy philosophy of Foucault.
The late work of Foucault involved reflection on the new forms of “employment interview technique” that were growing up in the 1970s and on the “Japanese corporate culture” that went hand in hand with them.
I myself experienced how, in this period, the mercenary distance that one could thitherto maintain in an employer-employee was slowly eaten away in the 1970s and 80s.
What had earlier been a sacrifice of one’s time and energy much like the sacrifice of a “fat bull or goat” became, in this period, precisely something like the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart.
The corporation came to demand a definitely intimate commitment.
This very contemporary development reflects, in a strange way, the historically much more protracted development of the replacement of a pre-Abrahamic by an Abrahamic Man-God relation.
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Now the human God-relation established by the first book of the Iliad preserves human dignity in just this sense, since no “broken heart and contrite spirit” are really involved in it.
The deal made by Chryses with Apollo remains, even though he is a priest, a very mercenary, material affair.
Chryses argues a debt incurred by Apollo to him through the material fact of many sacrifices.
“Hear me,” he cried, “O god of the silver bow, that protectest Chryse and holy Cilla and rulest Tenedos with thy might, hear me oh thou of Sminthe. If I have ever decked your temple with garlands, or burned your thigh-bones in fat of bulls or goats, grant my prayer, and let your arrows avenge these my tears upon the Danaans.”
The relation reminds me of the relation evoked in a “one-hit wonder” faux-punk song of my youth: “Jilted John”
“I ought to smash his face in. But he’s bigger than me, innit? I know, I’ll get my mate Barry to hit him”.
Now this sort of relation to the gods renders them, as I say, certainly forces to be reckoned with – but not numinous forces as a certain Christian Right – aiming to smuggle Judaeo-Christianity in under the guise of classicism, modernity in under the guise of antiquity, slave morality in under the guise of master morality – want to convince us they are.
(Additional points in the opening pages of the Greek text)
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An interesting point of contact between the language of poetry and the language of philosophy is:
φέρων τ’ ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα
rendered by Butler simply as a “great ransom” but in fact much stronger:
a limitless ransom, apeiron being the term for the limitless, indeterminate arche used by certain Pre-Socratics.
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Notable use of the term “cosmatore laoon”, orderers of the people
Ἀτρείδα δὲ μάλιστα δύω, κοσμήτορε λαῶν
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μή σε γέρον κοίλῃσιν ἐγὼ παρὰ νηυσὶ κιχείω
not you, old one, hollow I by the ships encounter
Let me not find you, old one, again by the hollow ships
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δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο:
οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπῴχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς,
terrible became the twanging of the silver bow
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κύνας ἀργούς,
This phrase is interesting because it raises the same problem of radically different “mentalités”