That man! Tell me, Goddess,
about that man of many charms and adventures,
who looted the sacred citadel of Troy.
(Author’s translation)
So begins Homer’s Odyssey. Film buffs, classicists, political pundits—almost everyone—has been talking about this summer’s Big Movie and the epic poem upon which it is based. The term “Odyssey” has long been applied to many journeys, from Gilgamesh and the Exploits of Xenophon, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Star Trek. Indeed, it would seem that, for as long as there has been recorded history, humanity has embarked on odysseys of one form or another.
Political philosopher Patrick Deneen now presents us with American Odyssey, a brief (148 pages) meditation on Homer’s Odyssey as the paradigmatic story of America. “No ancient story is as well-matched to our American souls as the Odyssey,” he writes. He claims further that even the founders of New England were inspired by the Odyssey. I thought that was a bit of stretch, but upon looking up the complete list of titles in John Harvard’s library, I found a listing for Homer’s Whole Works translated by George Chapman, published in 1616 or 1620. Chapman’s Homer: good enough for Keats, good enough for the Puritans.
I enjoyed Deneen’s philosophical meditations in a mellow mood as he explicates America through his reading of the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz and Field of Dreams, among others. Along the way he brings in Aristotle, Tocqueville, Wendell Berry, Salman Rushdie, Walt Whitman and Piero Boitani, a contemporary Italian scholar hitherto unknown to me. In the best of all possible worlds, every humanities professor would be afforded such a plum assignment. Opportunities for America’s university-based intelligentsia to address the general public are entirely too few. The result of Deneen’s effort at writing his latest popular-level book is not so much a critique, as in his famous Why Liberalism Failed, but a tribute—Deneen even has a good word for liberality as a virtue between the poles of profligacy and stinginess—to the American character and a plea for us to find a golden mean between our tendencies to seek adventure and to enjoy some quiet days at home.
I reviewed Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Post-Liberal Future for Providence a few years ago, a book that got a lot of attention both inside of academe and out. Appropriately for a book that can be fairly characterized as a scathing critique, the jacket photo made him appear to be as steamed up about all things liberal as a Fox News commentator. The photo for his new book now presents him as if he were Odysseus himself freshly rescued from the sea, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. After a warm bath and a massage, in a fresh white shirt with the sleeves partly rolled, he is ready to tell his story.
Americans! Tell us, Professor,
about that teeming nation of nations,
who have brought all things under their feet.
Tell us, by reference to your favorite books,
motion pictures and fellow pundits.
The urge to adventure, balanced, sometimes, by the urge to return home is a universal trait which Americans have no shortage of. This is especially true for the millions of wanderers who commute hours back and forth five or even six days per week and suffer a lifelong odyssey from one insecure post after another until they settle down for retirement far from their place of birth. American intellectuals perhaps suffer this dislocation more than anyone else: a secular odyssey without transcendence yet replete with capricious deities.
Yet, as I read Deneen’s description of the American character, I wondered: Are we Americans on an odyssey as much as a mission, a progress (as in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), an errand, a pilgrimage, or an exodus? What is our purpose—our final telos as articulated by Aristotle? As Perry Miller asked in his famous Errand into the Wilderness: Are we on a journey for ourselves or for the edification of others?
I suggest the latter. We are on a mission, or rather an exodus, more than an odyssey, with the Judeo-Christian tradition as the source of our American archetypes, especially as embodied in Jacob as well as Saul of Tarsus, later known as Saint Paul. The Bible remains much more the archetypal American book, even for those who know little of it and are uninterested in religious services based thereon. Surely the Exodus narrative was, more than any other story, on the minds of the New England puritans and the founders of the revolutionary era. Benjamin Franklin, though not the most religious man in the 13 Colonies, wanted a national seal featuring Moses parting the Red Sea and the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
Professor Deneen, like most university professors, gives the ancient Greeks their due, but what about the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek of the New Testament? The mix of stories in Hebrew and Greek is what gave shape to Christian thought, not to mention Judaism (good luck removing “Greek” thinking from Judaism at this point) and Islam (you will not rid Greek thinking from Islam either). Underneath it all, we are still the descendants of Jacob, the “wandering Aramean” (Deuteronomy 26:5), a trickster to rival Odysseus, and of Moses, the lawgiver to rival Solon. No less a luminary than Reinhold Niebuhr urged the embrace of a more Hebraic perspective, something certainly worth consideration, especially from a professor at Notre Dame who takes his Roman Catholicism seriously.
The Greek New Testament is just as important. The Acts of the Apostles features the ministry of Saint Paul, who traveled the Mediterranean on foot and by boat, was blown off course, survived shipwreck before finally reaching his destination. The stories of both St. Paul and Odysseus end inconclusively with both travelers having completed their respective journeys, though with uncertainty remaining about what comes next.
Americans have inherited the legacy of a chosen people; chosen not for our superiority but because we are on a mission. Whether we believe in God or not, whether we have read the Bible or not, we Americans still consider ourselves as a new Israel, a people who wrestle with God and strive with one another to achieve, in brief, a world where there is freedom to pursue happiness.
David Fromkin concludes his magisterial history of 20th Century American leadership, In the Time of the Americans:
“The United States was to win wealth and power in the wars against the dictators, but it was not for that reason (though some historians believe otherwise) that it enlisted in the cause. Like Rick [the archetypal American pragmatist hero played by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca], who stopped putting himself first, FDR and his associates and immediate successors turned the country away from its excessive concern with self: the historic isolationism that was its preferred course. They did that, and committed the United States instead to play an active role in world affairs, because they thought it was the right thing to do.”