Conclusion

In an essay entitled “Existentialists and mystics,’’ published in 1970, Iris Murdoch, a scholar of philosophy trained as a classicist, and also a distinguished novelist and literary critic, made a distinction (p. 225) between two types of modern novel: the “existentialist,” which ‘‘shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of will,” and the ‘‘mystical,’’ which ‘‘shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the Good.’’ The first is

The story of the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him.

In this context she mentions the works of D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Camus, and Sartre. On the other hand, the characteristic of the ‘‘mystical’’ novel is that

It keeps in being, by one means or another, the conception of God. Man is still pictured as being divided, but divided in a new way, between a fallen nature and a spiritual world. I call these novels mystical, not of course as a term of praise, but because they are attempts to express a religious consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion.

The existentialist response, she suggests, is ‘‘the first and immediate expression of a consciousness without God,’’ and ‘‘the mystical attitude is a second response, a second thought about the matter, and reflects the uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not God’’ (p. 226). Further, ‘‘Whereas the existentialist hero is an anxious man trying to impose or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself’’ (p. 227).

Though Murdoch does not mention Homer, Achilles, or Odysseus, the differences between the two types of novel she describes have much in common with those between the two Homeric poems and their respective heroes. From the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles becomes isolated, an outsider: robbed of the prize of honor given him by the army, he sits alone on the seashore (1.348-50,488-92); his peers visit him only to convey the words of his enemy Agamemnon (9.308-429); he returns to fight only to avenge the loss ofhis friend, though he knows that will mean his own death is close (18.95-9); and at the poem’s conclusion he sends home the king of the enemy city and the body of its slain leader, with a promise of a truce for the funeral, entirely as his own decision, ignoring the will ofhis commander-in-chief (24.650-8). When told what the gods want him to do, he decides (in a few unenthusiastic words) to follow their advice, but is hardly intimidated into the decision (1.216-18, 24.139-40, cf. 22.15-20). He is the ideal of freedom and independent judgment.

On the other hand, the first thing we hear of Odysseus (in the Odyssey) is that he strove to save the lives of his companions, but fails in this because of their own criminal folly (in antagonizing a god); then in his loneliness he thinks only of returning to his wife and his home (Od. 1.5-13). Then we hear at considerable length of the care the gods have for him, and how they set about arranging his homecoming (1.48-95). Similarly, the suitors are constantly presented as wrongdoers and violators of the laws of hospitality (as well as planning the murder of Telemachus, the son of their unwilling host and hostess). At the time of their destruction Athena provides much assistance to Odysseus and his small band (22.273, 397-8), as indeed Odysseus had predicted to his son (16.267-9). The divine world ensures that human wickedness is punished and human virtue rewarded - which is close to Murdoch’s division ‘‘between a fallen nature and a spiritual world.’’

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey came into being at a time of rapid change in the Greek world, as prosperity and populations increased, city-states developed, and better communications fostered - and were fostered by - Panhellenic religious festivals. It is not surprising that in such circumstances different ideals, as well as a certain amount of archaizing and inconsistency in detail, appear in the two poems we still have. What is, perhaps, surprising is that the universal qualities of both should appear so clearly and should have been valued for so long.