"Homer
and the Power of Men That Have Chests"
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College in Annapolis
Welcome to the class of 2007, to those beginning their
studies in the Graduate Institute, to parents and
friends, and all members of the college community.
One
of the many things I love about this college is that
everyone must begin with Homer — and not only
Homer, but the Iliad. It’s not just that this
happens to have been my favorite book for most of
my life. It is a collection of things, all of which
have something to do with your initiation into this
community of learning, something to do with the liberal
education you are about to begin here.
Homer,
the blind poet with guide
Homer
is arguably both the first and the best of poets and
we want you to read the best and most original of
books at this college. Montaigne, another author you
will meet here in your sophomore year, wrote this
about Homer:
Homer
There
is also something glorious about undertaking your
studies at this particular beginning, because the
Iliad takes hold of the imagination from its first
line, when it sweeps the reader into the Achaean camps,
to face the towering figure of Achilles: “Rage
--- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless
losses…” The images and the pace of the
poetry appear to be artless, yet commanding.
Achilles
The
Iliad has a kind of immediacy you will find nowhere
else. It has irresistible momentum. It grabs you in
the middle, somewhere in the vicinity of the chest
or the heart, and it demands the attention of your
sensibility.
Consider
the size of the heroes and the size of the themes.
Who is this godlike Achilles and what is his glory?
What is the rage that has power over him? Where does
it come from? What are the consequences of unleashing
it upon others? Is it purely a destructive force?
Can it be directed or controlled? What does it take
to dissolve this rage?
Why
are these men fighting? Who or what drove them to
it? What is the price of defending illicit love? Can
one ever exercise control over the forces of nature,
change fate, or fight the gods?
Look
at the great battle-armies. What propels these heroes
to action, especially when they have knowledge of
the risks, dangers and dreadful consequences of battle?
What is courage? What good is honor, and what does
it mean to die honorably? What is virtue and excellence
of character, and can you find these in the poem?
Well,
here is your chance to read about the bold and to
talk about the question of character.
C.
S. Lewis wrote a little book that perhaps you have
read, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued that
modern education (he was writing in 1955) was failing
to help the young develop a sense of morality. In
man, Lewis said,
C.
S. Lewis may have had cause to complain, but you do
not — not now. Surely there is not a more powerful
book anywhere than the Iliad with which to examine
the virtues and vices, the beauty and terrible power
for good or ill, of men with chests. So the Iliad,
and later, the Odyssey form a good beginning to philosophy;
they ask you to confront powerful aspects of your
nature on your first day at the college — aspects
that often function independently of your rational
capacity. You are asked to face the spirited element
within you and to wonder whether it can or should
be shaped and tempered by your reason.
I’ve
been referring to a “spirited” element
within man. You’ll be reading a lot about this
in your freshman year, first in Homer, then in Herodotus
and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word
is thumos. It is variously used to mean the
breath of life, the principle that animates life,
the soul, the heart, the spirit, an attitude that
inspires action, a capacity for vigor, courage, mettle,
liveliness, indignation, anger, righteousness or pride.
It is a word used of men and women both; it is what
moves individual men and women from thought to action.
So, while the Iliad is a stage for the display and
destruction of thumos among warrior men,
you will have ample opportunity during the years for
recognizing its place in the breasts of women too.
If you look hard, you may even find it used to describe
Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.
Name
a theme in the realm of human activity that is not
dealt with in the Iliad and you are likely to find
it in the Odyssey. There, our hero learns what it
means to trade the offer of immortality for the possibility
of returning home, the need to face one’s demons
and overcome one’s weaknesses before deserving
the right to return, the importance of taking life’s
journey and facing its dangers and temptations in
order to grow, the necessity for leaving home in order
to discover the bedrock that was there all along.
There, we find wisdom in survival, truth in lies,
and strength in weakness. And always is our hero’s
happiness bound up with the need to search —
to search at any price. This too sounds a lot like
the kind of question that you might need to examine
to understand why you even decided to come to St.
John’s.
We
meet the glorious Penelope, Odysseus’ match
in every sense. How well has she raised their son
to manhood in his father’s 20-year absence?
How has she maintained home, family and kingdom all
on her own? How should she treat her returning husband
and gain mastery over this wayward stranger of a man,
to test his love and confirm that he is fit to return
to his place beside her and his seat of power in Ithaca?
It is in the Odyssey that we see the strength of Homer’s
women and goddesses who serve as Odysseus’ protectors
and saviors as well as his reason for returning —
they become both the means and the end of his journey
from the world of Troy to home in Ithaca.
Last,
you get the experience of beauty in Homer’s
unforgettable images. I still wake up to dawn’s
rosy fingers stretching across the waters of the Chesapeake.
I see the father’s unbound joy as he tosses
his young boy about in his arms, kissing him lovingly,
before heading back out to the field of honor for
his final battle. I watch the wise and lovely Penelope
at her spinning wheel, weaving the web that makes
Odysseus’s homecoming possible.
Consider
now this new beginning to your education: you get
the beautiful, the great, the first and the last;
you get to start with the issues of the heart and
the spirit, those things that move you to action.
You will talk about honor and courage, beauty and
glory, gods’ laws and man’s, mortality
and death, community and friendship, family and love,
and the inevitable longing for the next challenge,
the search for an answer, the way to human happiness.
With
these first two books, you are diving into the greatest
project of your education, which is to consider how
to compose your character, to figure out what is necessary
to live life well — your life — the one
you are building for yourselves. In other words, you
are not being told to love or admire Achilles or Odysseus
or Helen or Penelope — only to let them into
your lives so that you may engage with them. Incidentally,
it is another fine quality of these poems that Homer
doesn’t try to tell you what to think; he lets
the story act upon you without intervention. You get
to think for yourselves about what is fitting and
what is not. But please listen to your classmates
too; you might actually learn something from them.
Our
job, your tutors’ job, is to listen and to ask;
yours is to read the books and wrestle with the questions.
You will experience no more liberating an activity
than this, for a question is a door opening wide,
inviting you to explore and discover what’s
inside. Trust yourselves to take advantage of this
invitation; we do. We believe in the power of your
rational capacity. We believe in your power to become
your own teachers. Walk through this door, and you
will soon find yourselves exercising those intellectual
muscles that will allow you to transform a little
of what you read here and something of what you hear
there into a work that is all your own. We call this
work “your judgment.” And we suspect strongly
that you’ll find that a little injection of
the spirited element right at the beginning will be
just what you need to get your project going.
If
you are now worried, however, that the classroom is
the only place you may exercise the spirited element
within you, have no fear. There are many other opportunities
around this campus, among your friends or on your
own, on the playing fields or upon the stage, in community
activities or choral groups, in competing for glory
or singing to the gods:
“Sing,
Goddess, the wrath of Achilles . . .”
Statue of Achilles
May
the poet inspire each and every one of you to love
your learning with us and move you to shape a life
that is worthy of living.
Thank
you. And enjoy. [reprinted here with the kind permission
of the author]
