Feature
A Divine Gift of the Muses
The Great Epics Are Theological & Mark the Hard Path to Beatitude
Some years ago I got into a rather tense conversation with a couple of students in the office of the English department. We were talking about The Lord of the Rings, and I remarked that nothing like it could be written now, because our culture—for want of a better word, I must use the word "culture" to describe our mass habits, after the reality of culture has withered away—no longer possesses a vision of the world and of man that would sustain such a work. Tolkien himself could write his trilogy only because he was something of an anachronism, as he was steeped in the medieval epics—the sagas of Snorri Sturluson, the Finnish Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, and so forth—and was a devout Catholic, seeing all things by the light of revelation and three thousand years of meditation upon the ways of God to man.
The students resisted. No youngster likes to hear that he lives in an age of decline and decrepitude. But over the years I've grown more convinced that my hunch was correct. Not only about the decrepitude—the palsy of the soul that mistakes cynicism for sophistication, and cold-hearted lust for love. Consider the ringing verse from Isaiah: "For my ways are not your ways, nor are my thoughts your thoughts, saith the Lord. For as high as the heavens are above the sea, so far are my ways from your ways, and my thoughts from your thoughts."
That's a verse that would set Homer himself to thinking. It expresses the vast distance between the divine and the human. But it is also addressed to man: it is a clarion call for man to set out on a journey to cross that distance, even as God reaches out to man in the events of human life. The sentiment on the part of the prophet is not despair but fear and wonder, and the appeal of an adventure in being itself.
The Inner & Outer Adventures
This sense of adventure is everywhere in the Jewish wisdom writers. "As the deer longs for the running stream, so my soul longs for you, my God," says the psalmist, and there we have the inner adventure of the spirit. Nor need we confine ourselves to the Scriptures. We have the farmer Hesiod stretching his mind to sing of the birth of the gods. We have Pierre in his tattered clothes, retreating with his fellow Russians from the Battle of Borodino, given a vision of the meaning of human life by the simplicity of a large-hearted peasant.
But elsewhere in the psalms it is written, "The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes," and there we have the outer adventure of history, seen not as one damned thing after another, as Henry Ford put it, but as providentially led, with real surprises that finally make sense.
We have the Chosen People, that small and otherwise unremarkable nation, becoming a blessing to all the world. We have St. Peter, in Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis?, conquering the Rome that crucified him. I daresay even an agnostic must admit the possibility that someday a photograph of Mother Teresa, standing in Missouri between a cad and a hag, will cause people to say, "Yes, they never suspected it at the time, but the really important and revolutionary figure in this scene was the little nun from Albania, and not the president—which one was he now?—and his wife."
So I suggest that the inner and the outer adventures, in the epic, are one; or rather that the world-crossing adventure of an Aeneas or an Odysseus is dependent upon, and is expressive of, the spirit-soaring adventure of the human heart answering the call of what transcends it. The epic is then essentially theological. The epic is vast, and requires a vast field; as vast as the seas sailed by Ahab, that tormented theologian and captain of despair; as vast as heaven and the deep tract of hell; as vast as the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Invoking the Muse
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on literature from the online archives
24.1—January/February 2011
Ruminations on the Monstrous Envy of the Soul-Devouring State by Anthony Esolen
20.6—July/August 2007
The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
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