Ok, Homer once more. When The Odyssey opens, King Odysseus has been away from home for nearly twenty years. For ten, he fought at Troy. For the remaining time, he’s been trying to get home. His wife Penelope is besieged by suitors, all the young men of the region, princes and kings, who admire her beauty and want to marry her. They’re constantly trying to convince her that her husband is dead and so she should move on. She has done everything she can to delay the day when, for the sake of her son, she should indeed remarry and move out with a new husband, allowing her son to have the palace, grounds, and crops and herds he is to inherit. The suitors are crowding into the house every day, feasting constantly, and eating up a lot of the boy’s inheritance.
Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, is of course now twenty years old. He has the genetic endowment of his heroic father and smart, beautiful, and resourceful mother, but he has grown up without his father’s influence and, instead, surrounded by anxiety as to the welfare of Odysseus, and then the grief of all who loved him that he might indeed be dead.
Telemachus is in despair that the suitors constantly harass his mother and blatantly consume the family’s resources on a massive scale, day after day. And he is not yet old enough, strong enough, or bold enough to do anything about it. He feels helpless, and despondent that no one knows for sure whether his father is dead or alive. But at this point, he and his mother have emotionally had to accept the worst and assume that he’s gone and never coming home.
Early on in the story, there’s a puzzle. The Goddess Athena, a great friend to Odysseus, comes to Ithaca and the family home of Penelope and Telemachus disguised as an old friend. She greets Telemachus and speaks with him. She tells him that his father is alive somewhere out there in the world, but he doesn’t believe her. As a top goddess, she has the power to make him accept her words, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t put him into a hypnotic state to elicit assent, or do any of the other things she could have done to change his mind, which she thinks is important to do. And this is puzzling. Instead, she suggests that he go on a voyage, a quest to learn if anyone has word of his father, as to whether he’s still living or may have perished in his efforts to get home. She urges him to visit King Nestor and Menelaus, old friends of Odysseus who fought with him at Troy.
Now the problem, the conundrum for the careful reader who may have learned from the Iliad and other mythology what Athena was capable of, is why she didn’t just change the boy’s beliefs on the spot, so that he would have the hope of awaiting his father, and the courage to do what might be necessary to prepare for his arrival home to end the scourge of the suitors. Why didn’t she just implant in his brain the crucial information he needed to accept?
And the answer is as simple as it is revelatory. Athena knew that what Telemachus most needed was not just information but transformation. She had to send him on a quest that would grow his sense of self, his self knowledge, and the self esteem that would be required for the courage he would need in the coming days. It would be hard, and risky, but it was also necessary.
And that’s a lesson for all of us. In a summer seminar for school teachers long ago on meaning in life, one of the participants actually became angry because he thought, a week or two into the seminar, that I was playing a game and withholding a crucial piece of information, a sentence or statement that, if I would just share it with the group, would clarify his questions about the meaning of life. He had been left by his young wife, with nothing more than a goodbye note on the table when he got home from work, a day before he was to come to my seminar. He was in a tailspin. He wanted information.
But I, like Homer, and like Jesus, understood that there are matters where what’s needed isn’t propositional information but personal transformation. And before those deep changes, it may not even be possible to know what we most want to know. In the story, it turns out that Athena was right. Telemachus goes on his adventure and returns changed and ready, even though he’s not aware of how ready he is until Odysseus shows up and they join together to do what needs to be done.
Oh. And the student. I went to his dorm room and sat with him for two hours, listening at first to a tirade, and then a dirge, and then I worked hard to explain to him the limited role of propositional knowledge in wisdom and existential understanding, and how we need to be formed in order to see certain things and be certain things, and how it's our struggles and sorrows that deepen us the most. And in the end, he understood. He and I, like Telemachus and his dad, were able together to slay the philosophical suitors who had besieged the home of his heart.
