How to Reconcile Modern-day Morality with a Bloodthirsty Desire for Vengeance
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.' Romans 12:19
No one needs another critical takedown of the blockbuster movie of the summer. The Odyssey has been criticized from every possible angle, from casting, to costumes, to historical accuracy and fidelity to the source material. A modern day cinematic adaptation of the ancient Greek poem written around the same time as the book of Isaiah is not without its challenges.
But it is a worthy endeavour, the story is as powerful and entertaining as it has ever been in 2,700 years since Homer wrote it. It is a classic epic, which explores the timeless themes of home, love, and revenge, and it is all infused with adventure and combat and monsters. And in fairness, the Odyssey’s newly adapted screenplay of the ancient story holds up. Christopher Nolan’s new movie delivers on all the themes and thrills of the epic. But the biggest problem to solve in the adaptation was not about special effects, casting, or set building. The most challenging problem to overcome for the screenplay writer was the problem of morality.
The morality of the 8th Century BC, as it is reflected in Homer’s poem, is far from palatable to a modern-day western audience. Sure, a modern day movie hero can seek revenge, but he cannot behave in the way Odysseus does in the poem. Odysseus wreaks vengeance on a large number of characters who betrayed him during his decade-long absence, but he does not merely kill them, Odysseus savagely mutilates and tortures them to death. This treatment is equally poured out on men and women. The only antagonists who are spared the Odysseus’ furious vengeance are those whose gory fate he delegates to his son Telemachus to deliver. Telemachus is no less savage, his treatment of Melanthius for example, includes slicing off his ears, nose, hands, feet, and genitals. He feeds the latter to stray dogs as Melanthius watches on.
It is hard to stomach.
So the question looming over the movie for me as I took my seat in the IMAX theater was not about casting or special effects… The biggest question in my mind was how the film maker would adapt the screenplay? How would Christopher Nolan manage to re-write the character of Odysseus to remake him into a 21st century hero?
Whatever you think of the movie, it is clear that Nolan is as good a screenwriter as he is a director. He managed to pull off the adaptation in a way that is quite elegant, in that it manages to update Odysseus’ morality without changing the substance of the story…
How did he accomplish this? He inserted a plot device he calls Zeus’ Law. The movie injects a moral law into the ancient story as a cinematic prop. To be clear: There is no ancient Greek religious moral law. There are no religious scriptures, no priests or prophets, no commandments… Just stories. Poems. These stories are more like Marvel comic books than anything else, where huge casts of gods and demi-gods with powers to control the weather, to shape-shift, or to fly, all battle each other, form alliances and betray each other, and have all sorts of sordid sexual affairs with each other… Lost in all the chaos of these epic narratives is humanity. Humans are relegated to the status of mere onlookers in the drama of the gods. Mankind is given the same treatment as the citizens of Gotham City in the showdowns between Batman and the Joker, or as the people of Tokyo in the midst of Godzilla’s rampages. We mortals are dismissed by the central characters as completely inconsequential.
So Zeus’ Law is inserted into the screenplay to inject morality into an amoral story… a story which lacks any sense of morality at all. That being said, Zeus’ Law is not made up, it is not a brand new concept… It is certainly not original to the movie. The most gracious way to put it would be to say it was borrowed. Specifically, it is borrowed from the Christian Bible.
The so called Zeus’ Law is quoted in the movie as: “Treat the stranger as you would wish to be treated, for any humble traveler may be a god in disguise.”
This is transparently lifted from two New Testament Bible verses:
Matthew 7:12: ”“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
Hebrews 13:2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
The concept of the Golden Rule that Jesus delivers in the Sermon on the Mount is completely incompatible with ancient Greek morality. It is egregious to insert this moral law into the story of the Odyssey, and yet it is the only possible way to make the ancient Greek poem compatible with western modern-day morality. That is because the teachings of Jesus Christ are the single most significant influence on western modern-day morality.
As Glenn Scrivener argues in his book The Air We Breathe, the revolution of Jesus’ teachings infuses and permeates our society in every aspect of its value system. He writes: “equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress… none of these values are self-evident, nor are they widespread among the civilizations of the world. So where did they come from, and how did they get to become “the air we breathe”?” Scrivener makes a very convincing apologetic that the answer to his questions is: It all came from Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament. The secular historian Tom Holland comes to a very similar conclusion in his chef-d'œuvre Dominion.
The Greek civilization in which Homer wrote the Odyssey was enveloped by a different atmosphere, which would be akin to landing on an alien planet for any of us. In order for the movie-going audience to recognize Odysseus as human, he had to be transposed into our atmosphere. And the only way the filmmaker could accomplish that was by infusing the Odyssey with the air of Jesus’ teaching on treating others the way you wish to be treated and to love your enemies.
By this maneuver then, the hero Odysseus is transformed from a blood-thirsty, fearsome warrior who boasts about killing his enemies in the most gruesome possible ways, into a true modern-day hero who wrestles with the ways he violated a moral code that was grafted onto the story directly from Jesus’ lips… Odysseus is torn by the conflicting moral imperatives of obedience to an immoral commander.
Inserting Zeus’ Law as a plot device has the effect of shifting the responsibility for Odysseus’ immoral actions off of his own shoulders and placing that responsibility squarely at the feet of his commander, Agamemnon. Which is why Agamemnon is portrayed as a Darth Vader-like villain, so Odysseus can become an imperfect but generally good man who is haunted by his sins, which were committed only out of obedience. That is a hero for our day and age: An Odysseus who struggles to live out his own morality in a largely immoral world.
Jesus flipped the world upside down. The commands to love your enemies, to forgo retaliation, to pursue purity, to show hospitality, to submit to authority are all 180 degrees in the wrong direction for an ancient Greek setting, but they infuse the air we breathe in the western society of 2026. And like Odysseus, we are a conflicted civilization. As much as we know that the values we proclaim are good, our flesh is very much at war within us.
There was a fascinating illustration of this conflicted sense of morality in the audience’s reaction to the movie. I do not want to spoil any surprises (Nor am I inclined to issue a spoiler alert on a 2,700 year old poem), but the story culminates in Odysseus inflicting vengeance on a large crowd of opponents. In the movie, this violent climax is preceded by the character’s clearest and most explicit expression of regret over his past. The transition from repentance to diving right back into an avenging bloodbath was greeted by an audible audience cheer! The flesh of the congregated audience would not be satiated by a confession, its demand for blood would not be denied.
Christ rebukes our fleshly impulses in the very words that the movie awkwardly attributes to Zeus. His rebuke is as controversial today as it was the day he delivered the Sermon on the Mount. His call on you is to repent and to love your enemies, not because the wicked will be left unpunished, but because vengeance belongs to Him.