From ‘The Odyssey’ To ‘A Christmas Carol’: Remembering The Way Home
(ANALYSIS) There is a moment in “The Odyssey” — the film with which Christopher Nolan has brought Homer back to the big screen — when Matt Damon, playing Odysseus, does something bewildering. He wants to hear the song of the Sirens, which no man before him has heard and survived.
He asks his companions to plug their ears with wax and orders them to tie him to the mast. And he gives them an even more extraordinary command: When he begins begging them to untie him, they must not obey. The more he pleads, the tighter they must hold him.
The old Odysseus distrusts the Odysseus he is about to become.
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There is a formidable intuition about freedom here. The man who still knows where he is going makes a decision designed to prevent the seduced man of a few minutes later from destroying his journey. His present freedom protects his future freedom.
The sirens sing. And Odysseus discovers that what he had wanted to protect himself against was not merely an external threat: It was also within him.
Nolan introduces into that encounter the memory of what has been lost, of what Odysseus could not preserve, the guilt, and the terrible temptation to abandon the journey before what seems irretrievable. But the Odysseus who is listening is no longer in command. The earlier Odysseus was. The ropes preserve the memory of a decision that the desire of the moment would erase. His companions keep rowing.
Perhaps nothing has ever portrayed more clearly something an examination of conscience ought to teach us: It is not enough to discover that we fall. It is not even enough to discover why we fall. While we can still see clearly, we must decide what ropes we are going to put in place — and who will hold them when we can no longer see with the same clarity.
Because there is an Ithaca. “The Odyssey” is, above all, the story of a return. The Greeks had a word for it: Nostos, the homecoming, a word that the Homeric tradition also associates with a return to light and life. Odysseus comes precisely out of darkness: he has descended into Hades, spoken with the dead and passed through monsters, shipwrecks and loss.
But Ithaca was still there. Sometimes, however, the greatest danger is not that Ithaca disappears. It is that we forget it.
The Lotus-Eaters constitute one of Homer's most disturbing warnings. Those who taste the lotus cease to want to return. They are neither killed nor chained. No one needs to take their home away from them. They simply stop remembering it.
When the sense of return is lost in our consciousness, there comes a point when we no longer know what it was that we once wanted to return to.
There is also a contemporary way of eating lotus. It consists in settling in. At first we live off our reserves: Convictions, habits and certainties acquired when we still remembered where we were going. Then we compromise. Finally, we learn to live with what we once believed we could never live with. We have not solemnly renounced Ithaca. We have simply stopped thinking about it.
And now another story that our culture insists on retelling reminds us of something similar: Johnny Depp will be Ebenezer Scrooge in a new film adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” the story Charles Dickens published in 1843. The film “Ebenezer” will be released in theaters Nov. 13.
Homer and Dickens. Two beloved stories returning to us from very different places in our cultural memory. One has spent almost three millennia asking whether man still remembers the way home. The other has spent almost two centuries asking him what he has done with his life. Perhaps we return to them precisely because both understand that, in order to move forward, sometimes we must go back.
Scrooge has lost Ithaca too. But unlike Odysseus, he does not know it.
The Ghost of Christmas Past begins his journey in a way that ought to unsettle anyone accustomed to making an examination of conscience.
He does not begin with Scrooge's sins. He begins with his wound. He shows him an empty school. The other boys have gone home for Christmas, and one child remains there alone. Scrooge recognizes him. It is himself. Dickens calls him “his poor forgotten self.” And Scrooge weeps.
Then something remarkable happens. He remembers the boy who had sung a Christmas carol at his door shortly before, and whom he had sent away. Suddenly he wishes he had given him something. Remembering his own pain enables him to recognize the pain he has just caused. Here his conversion begins.
And perhaps an examination of conscience should begin here, too. We ask ourselves: What have I done? Good. But another question is missing: Why did I do it? Why do I hurt others when I feel threatened? Why do I return to the same place after promising that I would never go back? Scrooge needs to find the child in order to begin to understand the old man.
But discovering the reasons is not enough either. We can acquire an extraordinary psychological understanding of our miseries and continue practicing them for another thirty years. One final question is needed: What am I going to do now with what I already know?
The spirit then takes Scrooge to Fezziwig, his former employer. He remembers the joy that man was able to create among those who worked for him. And when the ghost dismisses it as something that cost only a few pounds, Scrooge protests. He thinks then of Bob Cratchit. The memory of the good he received has just revealed to him the good he himself has ceased to do.
Then Belle appears. And here memory ceases to be sweet. The woman he loved shows him how another idol gradually took her place as his nobler aspirations disappeared. Dickens puts a terrible sentence on her lips: “Another idol has displaced me.” It was a golden idol.
Then Scrooge sees the family that might have been his. And he weeps. He is no longer looking only at his past. He is contemplating a future that died in the past. And this brings us to the need to cultivate a memory of the future.
We cannot remember events that have not yet happened. But we can recognize that toward which we are called. True desire contains a kind of anticipatory contemplation. Whoever pursues a genuine good does not merely imagine it: somehow he tastes the harbor while still on the open sea. That is what makes it possible to endure the crossing.
An animal finds extraordinary paths through instinct. The salmon swims upstream to the waters from which it came. We can know which river is ours and decide not to swim back up it. We can forget Ithaca. And we can also remember it.
For the Christian, I would venture to say that there is in this capacity something of the image of God inscribed in our spiritual nature: We recognize as good something we do not yet possess, and that anticipatory memory sustains the effort required to reach it. That is why desire needs virtus: The fortitude to persevere in the good we have recognized.
Homer’s Sirens do not simply offer pleasure. They offer knowledge — not merely new facts about Troy, but the promise that Odysseus will contemplate the whole story that he was able to experience only in fragments. He knows his war; they offer him the totality: What Achaeans and Trojans suffered, and all that happens upon the earth.
This temptation is strangely ancient. In Genesis, too, man is not offered something apparently contemptible.
“You will be like God, knowing good and evil,” the serpent tells our first parents.
From the beginning, one of the great human temptations has been to appropriate a good without limit until we make it absolute and reign over others within its domain. There lies the danger. Not because knowledge is evil. But because no partial good can take the place of our destination.
If Odysseus remains forever listening to the stories of Troy, he will never reach Ithaca. There is a difference between having lived a story and knowing the story. Odysseus wants to contemplate from the outside the story he experienced from within. Scrooge is forced to do exactly that. One desires this contemplation; the other initially flees from it. But both discover that having lived a story does not mean having understood its meaning.
“The Iliad” is the war. “The Odyssey” is the return. There are moments in life when continuing to contemplate our wars—even our victories, even our knowledge, even what we once were — can prevent us from returning. The men who succumbed to the Sirens died there. Odysseus was attempting something almost impossible: To receive the knowledge without sacrificing the return.
He possessed one decisive piece of wisdom: He did not trust himself alone, and he asked for ropes. He asked others to remember for him the decision that he himself would soon want to betray. And here the examination of conscience finally leaves the realm of good intentions.
We return to Troy in order to understand, but we understand in order to return to Ithaca. What have I done? Why? What am I going to do? What must I repair? Whom must I ask for help? To what mast will I ask to be tied?
St. Josemaría Escrivá wrote something in “Furrow” that has always struck me: “When it is a matter of ‘breaking off,’ don't forget that the ‘last time’ must be the one before, the one that has already passed.”
Not the next time. The previous one. The moral decision changes tense. I do not say: When the Sirens return, I will resist better. I say the last time has already happened. And then I build now the conditions that will later protect what I recognize now.
Freedom does not always consist in being able to untie ourselves. Sometimes it consists in having had the lucidity to demand that we not be untied. Scrooge did not possess that lucidity. He prepared no ropes. He sought no companions. He did not foresee his fall.
That is why his grace comes another way. It breaks in. The ghosts enter his house and shatter the narrative he had spent years constructing about himself.
There is something remotely Pauline about that night. Saul did not ask to be stopped on the road to Damascus either. A voice breaks in: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Odysseus needs to be held fast; Scrooge, shaken and Saul, struck down. Three different paths toward a truth none of them could reach by remaining exactly where he was. And when Scrooge finally stands before his own grave, he utters an extraordinary sentence: “I am not the man I was.” He can still change, still make amends. There is still a future.
Dickens has Scrooge express his awakening with an almost childlike joy: The time before him is his “to make amends.” To repair.
That is where the examination of conscience culminates. Not in guilt. Not even in understanding the cause of guilt. In reparation.
Then past, present, and future cease fighting one another. Memory no longer serves to torture us. It serves to orient us. The past reminds me who I was. The present reveals who I am. The future asks me who I am still willing to become.
And perhaps that is why Ithaca is much more than an island. Ithaca is a memory of the future.
Odysseus knows it and needs not to forget it. Scrooge had forgotten it and needs to rediscover it. The Lotus-Eaters warn us that we can become comfortable enough to forget that we ever had a home. The Sirens warn us that even something good can seduce us into abandoning the return.
Odysseus descended into the underworld during his long journey to Ithaca. And he returned. After years at sea, he finally reaches Ithaca asleep, in a slumber resembling death. Dawn comes. And he wakes at home. Perhaps that is the ultimate hope of every examination of conscience.
Ithaca was given to us before we knew how to recognize it. We can forget it, exchange it for lotus, mistake the song of a Siren for the voice that leads us home. But as long as there is still a road, there is still a way back.
Perhaps our deepest freedom does not consist in proving that we can resist alone, but in recognizing Ithaca while we can still see it and, when the moment comes, looking at those who are rowing beside us and asking them: “Tie me. And when I beg you to set me free, you remember where I wanted to return.”
One question still remains: Why does the man who wants to be free voluntarily ask to be bound?
Maybe it’s because some ropes enslave us, while others keep us from becoming slaves.
Jordi Picazo is a Spanish journalist, author and columnist whose work focuses on religion, culture, education and institutional accountability. He writes for El Nacional and has reported and written extensively on the Catholic Church, religious life and the intersection of faith with contemporary culture.