https://fantasyvreality.com/wccollier/
If you ever read Tom Holland’s “Dominion,” in which he makes the case that the pre-Christian human mind is so alien to any mind infected by the ideas of Christ as to be wholly unintelligible, which he does by surveying the sheer depth and breadth of ideas which we take for granted and assume are just “human” which are in fact uniquely Christian, then you might come away thinking, “Well that’s a great catalogue of all the ways we now irrevocably think like Christians, but where can I find a book that illustrates how /they/ thought? The ancient pagans? I want to see the alien.”
The answer is simply to do what Holland did. Read those ancient works. Read the Greek epics. Read the Odyssey.
But don’t apply your own standards to it. For instance, when the hero rapes a woman, or tortures or mutilates someone helpless and begging for mercy, or kills a small child, don’t try to figure out why it was actually justified according to your way of thinking, and don’t even think about why it needs to be condemned according to your way of thinking. Rather, just sit there and wrap your mind around the fact that no one thought it needed to be justified or condemned when it was written. It was self-evidently, to them, a heroic act, part of what it means to be a hero.
Once you manage this, most of the modern controversies even over events like Oct 7 and the Holocaust will melt away. You will realize there isn’t any trouble in believing a man raped a girl with a nailgun until she died and then called his grandma to brag about it, nor that Germany and Russia created entire industrial systems of labor camps which had as their objective to ensure that no laborer survived the labor (and entire industrial systems to dispose of the bodies as the laborers died), or that Saladin’s biographer boasts—boasts, because it is a point of pride and honor for Saladin—about “miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty … and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered … and happy ones made to weep!”
It will not be hard to imagine these things done, it will be easy to believe the stories of the holocaust and all the rest, because you will come to understand, by reading pre-Christian heroic stories, that all of this is just normal human behavior. It’s what you would do, would proudly participate in, but you happen to have been born in a Christian land in a Christian time, even if you yourself are not Christian. And where lands become un-Christian, “nature heals.” Human beings return to what they naturally are: the kind of thing that considers this behavior not horrific but heroic, and to be lauded.
Indeed. One of the points holland is making which a lot of people seem to miss (you can see it in the replies who disagree with me) is that it’s not so much that Christianity made people good, but that it rewired our understanding of good and evil so thoroughly that even when people are evil, they today do their evil in Christian terms. And when they justify themselves, they use Christian language and concepts.
We’re seeing this even in my line of work of law enforcement. LE is discovering that organized crime, as in the classic days of the Irish and Italian mob, is impossible outside a Christian framework. Their organizations depended on fundamental concepts of professionalism, of loyalty to an idea, and other subtle notions which are explicitly and originally Christian, and as society apostatizes, the mob can’t recruit, because young criminals don’t have a schema even to understand what the old school mafia organization is trying to accomplish and why anyone should bother. It was a form of evil that could only exist resting on Christian assumptions.
"..pre-Christian human mind is so alien to any mind infected by the ideas of Christ.."
By infected you meant HEALED.
Reading the Old Testament brings one to this same conclusion, btw.
Humans are reverting back to demonic animals without Christ.
Indeed so. I use the term for its rhetorical effect, to make the point that the nature of man, as far as human beings are concerned, is his fallen nature. As things stand today, that is our default, and will be until the remaking of the heavens and earth, and the general resurrection. Humanists want to believe that the default of human nature is good, and we can say that that was the intent behind our making, but that ship has sailed beyond all human effort to reclaim it. Without the active work of the Holy Spirit, any reversion in man is toward a state of depravity.
It is well expressed. But what would you say to Stephen Pinker, who in Better Angels of Our Nature, argues persuasively that we remain on a trajectory towards more peaceful societies, even as they are post-Christian?
That might not be the only way to judge the absence of purpose and faith, the hollowness of materialism etc. of course.
But the very fact that Nolan’s Odyssey will likely go easy on the pagan indifference to cruelty and rape, the lust for vengeance etc, suggests we are not back sliding into that world?
The worst thing about Nolan’s Odyssey hasn’t even been discussed yet. Odysseus convinces the Greeks to throw Hector’s infant son off the walls of Troy. Odysseus raids a city on his way home and kills all the men and enslaves the women. Odysseus kills an unarmed suitor who clings to his knees begging for his life. Odysseus tortures a goatherd who sided with the suitors by slicing off his ears and nose, chopping off his hands and feet, and ripping off his genitals and feeding them to dogs. Odysseus has his son brutally hang twelve of his slave girls who slept with the suitors. I remind you of all this because Nolan’s Odysseus will instead have the same moral values as the 2025 median voter.
Odysseus did not torture the goatherd, and Telemakhos’s hanging of the girls was entirely his own idea. The Suitors must die because they violate xenia, a principle over which Zeus himself presides. Read the text carefully, and in its own terms.
Same problems as the 2004 "Troy" movie. Just a mess.
What I would do: turn the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid into a series of roughly 10 episodes each, with each book a different season, in that order.
Follow the books exactly. Capture the philosophy, mentality, and brutality exactly. Don't care at all about how shocking "modern audiences" would find it.
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