The philosopher Paul Tillich defined faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned.” This is another way of saying that whatever is of utmost importance in your life, whatever holds the primacy and dominion over your mind and heart, over your thoughts and actions is tantamount to your god—it’s what you worship. However, reason dictates, and human experience painfully demonstrates, that whenever our “ultimate concern” is anything beside the true God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) we are left disappointed. A question then arises, if happiness can only be found in knowing the true God, how does one do this? The answer is found in the Cross of Jesus Christ, the answer is found in the kenosis of humbling oneself, you must, as Saint Augustine says, “come down so that you can ascend, and make your assent to God” (Confessions, page 64).
This is the quest every human from birth to death is engaged in. Today we know that the solution to the deepest longings of the human soul is found in Christ, but, this means that for those who lived before the time of Jesus the problem was manifest but the cure was not totally clear. However, since human beings are creatures endowed with reason and capable of possessing natural virtue, the pre-Christian world was able to see glimpses of what it takes to journey out from the darkness of self-destruction and toward the light of blissful peace. This eureka of the human mind and spirit is displayed potently in what is perhaps the genesis of all western literature and its protagonist, I am speaking of course of Homer’s Iliad and the character of Achilles.
Contrary to popular imagination, the Iliad is not about the Trojan War. Though the struggle between Trojan and Achaian warriors is certainly the backdrop of the Poem, the Iliad is really about the Greek hero Achilles a man who obtains everything he has ever desired, achieving what should have fulfilled his purpose in life and yet finding himself hopelessly unfulfilled and tortuously heartbroken. Upon the opening cry of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles is commemorated with lamentation. Achilles is presented as a supreme paradox, a walking contradiction. He is simultaneously self-aware of the evils his rage caused, yet he cannot stop himself from bringing about more disastrous effects of his uncontrolled wrath. However, what was once unhinged anger subsides into compassionate sentiments that demonstrate his humanity in which he is no longer subject to his disordered passions but is capable of prudential judgment.
In Book I, Achilles appears as a man obsessed with his own greatness. His infamous rage begins here after Agamemnon humiliates him in front of all the Achaian chieftains. As compensation for giving Chryses back to her father, Agamemnon takes for himself Achilles’ hard earned war prize, Briseis. However, the girl is not the real cause of his rage. What truly infuriates Achilles is when Agamemnon says this:
“Go home then with your own ships and your own companions
be king over the Myrmidons. I care nothing about you.
I take no account of your anger.” (1.179-181)
This is the height of injustice in a culture where a man’s honor is dictated by the respect of his peers. This rebuke cut to Achilles’ heart, and he almost killed Agamemnon for such contempt, stopped only by Hera and Athena. His pride was so wounded that he beseeched his mother to carry out an ungodly scheme of spite and vengeance, namely, begging Zeus to propagate Trojan victories so that Agamemnon would regret dishonoring “the best of the Achaians” (1. 412).
As the Poem progressed, Achilles’ rage rendered him frozen in a prideful stupor, unwilling to leave his abode and join the war due to his wounded ego. When his comrades attempted to bribe and convince him to rejoin the fight, Achilles rebuked them. In his time away from war, he had lost the zeal for honor and glory, finding it to be a fruitless endeavor in the grand scheme of fate, given that all men are destined to die no matter what worldly glory he obtained. He stated:
“There was no gratitude given
for fighting incessantly forever against your enemies….
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.” (9. 316-317, 320)
However, at this point, Achilles is not a nihilist; he treasures his mortality as he says, “I detest the doorways of death” (9. 312) and no amount of riches Agamemnon could use to bribe him were “worth the value of my [his] life” (9. 400-401). For Achilles, if he were to choose a short life of fame and glory it would be for a glorious struggle where his excellence would be properly honored. Clearly, Agamemnon’s disrespect made this war an unfit setting for him to gain the glory he deserved; it wasn’t worth a short life. Therefore, after being internally conflicted about his fate for so long, Achilles was ready to sail home and live a life of peace in Phthia.
However, this was not the destiny fate had planned for the swift-footed champion. Patroklos’ death at the hands of Hector replenished Achilles’ battle-lust, though it is for the sake of revenge, not primarily glory which drives him to arms. It was in this moment that Achilles accepted the brevity of his own life. Thetis reminded him that after he killed Hector, his death would soon follow and though disturbed, Achilles comes to grips with his impending doom. This is in stark contrast to Hector who could not fully accept his future death at the hands of Achilles out of fear when Patroklos told him he would soon follow him down to Hades.
Patroklos’ death played a key role in the development of Achilles’ character, for it was then that Achilles began to regret his feud with Agamemnon. Overwhelmed with grief and spiteful rage, Achilles was left wishing he had never been born, and the only reason he desired to live was in order to avenge Patroklos by killing Hector. The death of Patroklos led Achilles to profound introspection into the nature of his own passions. No character in the Poem expressed more honesty about his own life than Achilles in Book 18. Astonishingly, Achilles had become fully aware that his disordered attachment to rage and wrath had a grip over his life that was all encompassing. He lamented the horrors of war to Thetis, but at the same time, he spoke of his fury as “a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping honey” (18. 110). There are few definitions of vice that are as cogent as these words.
In killing Hector, Achilles’ previous lust for honor and glory were granted, and the wrongs of Agamemnon were made right. The gods could not have drawn up a better scheme for Achilles to showcase his excellence; this was his great moment of “aristeia”, for poets would sing of his battle-brilliance forever. However, Achilles was still left unsatisfied because killing Hector did not bring about any consolation for him; his wrath was still acute. Hector’s death only caused more heartache for others, such as Priam, Hecuba and Andromache. Desecrating Hector’s body for days on end did not alleviate Achilles’ grief either. Patroklos’ death had rendered martial glory and honor meaningless for Achilles, as he says:
“What pleasure is this to me, since my dear companion has perished,
Patroklos, whom I loved beyond all other companions,
as well as my own life.” (18. 80-83)
Finally, it was not the sword of a Trojan nor the threat of a god which quelled Achilles’ anger, but the pitiful sobbing of an old man simply seeking to bury his son. Priam, in beseeching Achilles to grant him Hector’s body, reminds him of his own father, who he imagined was back in Phthia crying “a soft tear for bereavement of such a son” (19. 323-324). Achilles knew that his father, Peleus, would never see him again given his approaching demise (see 19. 336-337). That fact, along with the sting Patroklos’ death, is what caused Achilles to sympathize with Priam and grieve alongside him (see 24.511). It was as if all Achilles’ anguish and futile rage boiled over into copious tears of empathy. Priam’s great act of paternal love enabled Achilles to identify his own losses with those of his enemies. It is compassion, not ruthless compensation, that brought Achilles “full satisfaction in sorrow” (24. 513). In granting Priam’s request, Achilles became a redemptive character and finally possessed the emotional maturity to make a selfless choice.
In the final analysis, Achilles serves as a cautionary tale. He is a man who worshiped the wrong things, namely glory, and paid the price for it. For the ancient Greeks, he was the paragon of everything glorious and calamitous in humanity. Achilles never thought his stubborn self-conceit would have precipitated the death of his beloved comrade. The pre-Christian Greeks had a term for this kind of miscalculation; it’s called “hamartia.” It was a character’s central flaw which brought about terrible and unanticipated consequences. In Achilles’ case, his hamartia was rage. It is no coincidence that “hamartia” is the same term that the Greek New Testament uses for sin. That is what sin is, isn’t it? It’s awful turning in upon oneself where we overvalue some lower good or disordered passion–thinking that it will fulfill us, when in reality it only brings about pain and devastation in our life and the lives of those around us. However, in his interaction with Priam, Achilles came to realize even more powerfully than before the brevity of life and the evils caused by his own disordered passions. Though not a complete “metanoia”, or turning around, it was this realization which induced him to make a great act of magnaminty for once in his tragic life.
Thus, in the Iliad Homer is really showing us the evil that can be brought about by sin. The Greek sage recognized the predicament of the human condition. Although Homer was able to intuit that in some sense man’s consolation is found in emptying himself of pride, he was unable to grasp what the full manifestation of kenosis unto bliss would actually look like. Homer’s intuition was not fully realized until Pontius Pilate proclaimed Jesus Christ before the people of Israel and all the world saying, “ecce homo” (behold the man) and finally when the Lord Jesus Himself announced His victory upon the cross in His last breath “It is finished.”
Paul Tillich, 1957b, p. 1, From Truth And Faith In Paul Tillich’s Thought: The Criteria And Values Of Ultimacy* Stanley Grean, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, U.S.A.
Saint Augustine, and Henry Chadwick. Confessions. Oxford University Press; 1st edition (February 15, 2009)
Homer, and Richmond Lattimore. The Iliad of Homer. University of Chicago Press, 2011.