The Iliad and human destiny

I'm rereading the Iliad. The first time I came upon this marvelous poem I was fourteen years old. Eleven years have passed since that great moment where I picked, without knowledge of anything, to read the most human and spectacular work offered by the Ancient world. I did not understand most of it, but I remember that I felt in love with its content. Today I picked it again and now, that I have a deeper understanding of the poem, I cannot help but be touched and inspired by this tragedy.

Many things we can learn from the Iliad, but I would like to focus on one of them which I consider to be essential: destiny. The Ancient world had a deeper and more inwardly felt understanding of that thing called destiny which terrifies the Western mind. The Iliad opens like this:

"Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

"And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Zeus and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people..."

It is a God, Apollo, who initiates the chain of events that leads toward the end of the whole tragedy, and the Gods presence is prominent from beginning to end. Every time the heroes try to free themselves from their destiny, the Gods bring them back to the course they cannot avoid. In Shakespeare's brilliant words; "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport" (King Lear, 4.1.36). The Ancients had a profound faith in destiny, the reason of why oracles where so important in their cults. The idea of deciphering what the Gods had prepared for men was pervasive in their culture, and key to understand their role, not only in society, but in the cosmos as a whole. The Iliad is the greatest achievement, I believe, in this world-feeling.

The West, however, and since the discovery of free will by St. Paul, resists the idea of a destiny. It is unbearable for a Western to admit that his future is sealed by doom. There must be a way out of it, or otherwise he would not deal with the tragic reality of the human condition. He must believe that he is in control of his own destiny. I think that this world-feeling is stronger than anything else in the United States, with its creed of the American Dream. But it took a more radical form in Europe, where Communism (and Hegelianism) became the banner of a promised realm where human individuals will free themselves, at last, from the curse of historical determinism. Liberals from the other side (from Kant and Mill to recently Rawls) want to settle the conditions from which then individuals will become self-fulfilled. The Western project and its progress is a restless struggle to free itself from the unbearable burden of doom.

I must admit that in this particular world-outlook of the Western mind I have departed to rest in the tragic interpretation of the Ancients, at least as well as I remain alive in this world. It is my impression that destiny is a reality that transcends human endeavors. But destiny must be understood properly and we must avoid the simplistic understanding that most people have of it. Destiny is not about a pre-written book that says that you are going to take a step toward the left instead than toward the right on a particular moment. First of all destiny is impossible to defeat in the reality of death. This is the reason why the Ancients cared so much about glory and transcendence in a world of terrifying oblivion; the reason of why the heroes of the Iliad don't fight for mere power and wealth, but for glory and honor, the only possible way to stay alive. In this sense the Ancients can be considered to be much more individualistic than their Western counterparts.

Christianity offered a way out: the Kingdom of God, the prize gained by those that set in the journey to follow Jesus. The only way death can be defeated is by faith in the Kingdom of God and the Final Judgement. Because of that any attempt to transcend death in this life became folly and stupid. The doom of death was inevitable, but the possibility of eternal life was offered; hence the individual can be free in choosing the path toward that eternal life, and finally having control of his destiny at least after the time of its death. But Modernity and its obsession to take charge of human destiny became so ambitious that denied the promise offered by Jesus, and set on the quest to find freedom and salvation on this earth. The consequence was the greatest defeat our civilization had received. However the dream remains alive in pop culture, when we see all these movies and read all these bestsellers where the heroes manage to triumph over the forces of their environment, and rebel against the Gods in the most contemptuous way without fear of retribution. It is then when I realize how naive and arrogant our society is. The delusion of the man that controls its destiny is one of our greatest weakness, and now that Communism and Capitalism have failed in delivering the promised freedom to us all, we have turn toward technology, a destiny controlled by machines that are dead as rocks; that impress us with their fancy shapes and glittering lights, so that we remain in a state of sopor at our tragic ending: that we never had control of our lives and destinies, and we are already in a world where machines control our movements and our interaction with other human beings, without possibility of return but through holocaust/Apocalypse.

In this future visage of desolation where humans become an appendage of technology I have returned to the Iliad as my personal retirement to find repose in times of heroes and conquerors when I'm surrounded by noise, concrete, metal, electricity and waves.