Towards Religious Mystery: Man’s Duplicitous Nature and Development of Religion in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid

My trusty Random House College Dictionary defines “duplicity” as “deceitfulness in speech or conduct,” which is the usual meaning of that word.  But duplicity can also mean “a twofold or double state or quality,” from the Latin duplicitas,[1] which, literally speaking, has no moral judgment attached to this word.  But in the realm of human nature, the usual, or connotative, and literal, or denotative, meanings of “duplicity” come together in the human being.  One can see duplicity in human nature in the main protagonists of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aenied: Achilles is the mortal Greek who has a personal vendetta against the Greeks because they do not treat him like an immortal hero.  Odysseus is the king who lies as well as any vicious braggart and returns to his home, only to have to leave again.  Aeneas is the dispassionate ruler who becomes overwhelmed with passion.  Duplicity is the norm, or, perhaps, even the root of human nature, as seen in these men.  But why have a human nature which is duplicitous, i.e., is an ontological paradox?

In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the poet speaks of “Zeus’s …will.”[2]  Zeus’s will seems to cause the overturning of past rule, creation of new rule, separation of gods, creation of mortals, and separation of mortals from gods.  One can see this latter project, the separation of mortals from gods, when one sees The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid together, in which as the heroes gradually lose intimate knowledge of the gods, who were their forefathers and lovers.  But in place of this intimate, familial knowledge is a relationship based on faith and mystery, i.e., religion.  The unintelligibility of the gods arise when man realizes that he cannot resolve the paradox that is his human nature, a paradox, or conflict, that he, as a rational creature, cannot resolve in his lifetime.  Unable to resolve this conflict, which causes man to suffer (Hesiod’s “strife”[3]), man turns to the gods for solace, if not necessarily for remedy.  Thus, the more man realizes that his own nature is complex and, at times, unintelligible, the more the gods become unintelligible and, therefore, mysterious.  Man’s duplicitous human nature, henceforth, creates the necessary prerequisite for a religion based on faith and not on human intellect.  In the three epics, the three men who encounter the duplicity in human nature are Achilles, who encounters conflict between mortality and immortality, Odysseus, who encounters conflict between being and becoming, and Aeneas, who encounters conflict between private and public life.

First, Achilles is a mortal hero who wishes he were immortal.  The anger he feels for Agamemnon and, therefore, the Greeks under Agamemnon’s leadership is like the wrath of a god, which causes “devastation”[4]  For Achilles, Greek gods and Greek heroes are the same, and therefore, he recognizes them easily, e.g., Athene and his mother Thetis.[5]  Also, when Achilles appeals to Thetis, it is like Thetis appealing to Zeus.[6]  But Achilles is not a god; he is mortal, as his mother reminds him with the prophecy that if he continues to fight in the war, his life will be brief.[7]  Heroes wish to be immortal, but since they are not, they gain immortality through fame, by acting nobly in war, dying, and staying alive in the memories of others. Achilles’ only choice to be immortal as a hero is fame.  But the mortal human in him may wonder if this is a good choice, as he sits in his tent, singing a song about famous men: “Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. / We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings. /  A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.”[8]  But even with this human knowledge, the immortal in Achilles, the hero descended from a goddess, still yearns for fame in battle.  When he says “now I am unwilling to fight against brilliant Hektor”[9] he is lying to himself as much as he is lying to Agamemnon’s embassy.  Achilles cannot resolve living a long life and gaining fame with his early death, i.e., he cannot resolve his mortality and his immortality.  In sending Patrokles out to frustrate the prophecy of Achilles’ death, he is lying to himself and Patrokles and, in doing so, causes Zeus to right this moral wrong by partially answering Achilles’ prayer for Patrokles’ glory and his safe return.[10]  Achilles, in his duplicity, still thinks he can supplicate Zeus like a lesser god, like his mother.  With Patrokles’ death, Achilles realizes that he, Achilles, is not immortal, and he embraces his mortality and re-enters the war. But in re-entering the war, Achilles gains great immortal fame for himself: “So I likewise, if such is the fate which has been wrought for me, shall lie still, when I am dead.  Now I must win excellent glory.”[11]  This immortal glory again causes Achilles to forget that he is mortal; he fights as if we were a machine or a god, armed with immortal armour[12] and fed with immortal ambrosia and nectar.[13]  Acting like a god, Achilles seems to be less human and more like a god-beast, as unnatural as his talking horse Xanthos.[14]  But his rage and grief are human feelings, which is why he does not realize that his lack of hunger is due to gods’ work – he has not asked for it, unlike the earlier Achilles, who asked for Thetis’ help. Thus, it is human feeling – pity -- for another human being, old Priam, which redeems Achillles’ humanity.[15]  Achilles never resolves this conflict of mortality and immortality, but he is able to live with it, until his death, which is the final resolution, a resolution which, ironically, never comes in The Iliad itself.

Second, Odysseus wrestles between being, or stasis, and becoming, or flux.  Another way to phrase this statement is:  Odysseus, the wanderer, does not seem to want his own homecoming.  He does give up a stasis that is immortality on Calypso’s island,[16] and in doing so, he gives up divine knowledge for human knowledge, i.e., what he himself can learn with his intellect.  But even though he says to Calypso, “Yet even so I am wishing and longing all my days / To go home and to see the day of my return”[17] – i.e., a return to stasis before he left for Troy -- his need to sate his curiosity, to “s[ee] the cities of many men, and… kn[o]w their thought”,[18] to wander, to remain in flux, conflict with his desire to go home to his wife and his rule.  The traditional view of Odysseus sees him as the suffering hero who returns to right the suitors’ injustices, to continue his faithful marriage to Penelope, to show Telemachos what it means to be a man, and to continue his just rule.  But Odysseus’ nature is not simplistic like this view; his nature is duplicitous, as seen the recurrent phrase applied to him, “He spoke many falsehoods and made them seem like the truth.”[19] In giving up divine knowledge, Odysseus opens himself to ontological flux such that at times he seems more like a god (he asserts his knowledge), like when Athene beautifully recreates him before Penelope,[20] even when he mistrusts knowledge from the gods, like when he resides at Calypso’s island.  Also, in being suspicious of “easy” knowledge, i.e., knowledge that he did not test himself, Odysseus opens himself to the possibility of ignorance, especially ignorance of the gods, since a man limited to his own intellectual devices cannot know everything.  Thus it is apt that Odysseus, who strives to know and is a natural philosopher but realizes that he cannot know the gods by his own natural mind, becomes the harbinger for a new religion based on mystery, as instructed by Tiresias:

But when you have killed the suitors in your own halls,

Whether by guile or openly with the sharp sword,

Thereupon take a well-fitted oar and go on

Till you arrive at the place of men who do not know

The sea and eat a food that has not been mixed with salt,

And where  they do not know about ships with purple cheeks,

Or about well-fitted oars that are the wings for ships.

I will tell you a very plain token; do not forget it:

When another wayfarer has confronted you

And says you have a winnowing fan on your gleaming shoulder,

Then set you well-fitted oar fast in the earth

And carry out fine sacrifices to Lord Poseidon,

A ram, a bull, and a boar, the mounter of sows.

Then go back home and sacrifice sacred hecatombs

To the immortal gods who possess broad heaven,

To all of them in order.  Far from the sea will death come,

Ever so gently to your person and slay you

When you are worn out with sleek old age.  And the people about you

Will be happy.  I tell you this unerringly.[21]

Thus, even when Odysseus returns home, he cannot  remain in stasis; he upsets the political order of Ithaka by starting a civil war, which only the intervention of Athene stops.[22]  Once he stabilizes the political order based on laws, instead of familial custom (being) he must leave and wander the world again (becoming).  Only the establishment of a religion based on mystery and then Odysseus’ own death will resolve his duplicitous nature of being and becoming.

            Third,  Aeneas is a private man who must sacrifice his individuality for the public, common good.  As with The Odyssey, there is a traditional view of The Aeneid, which sees Aeneas, the passionate Trojan leader, learning to be a dispassionate Roman ruler.  For most of the poem, this view holds, especially when he reluctantly leaves Dido out of duty for his people, at the command of the gods.[23]  Two incidents in the poem, however,  make this view problematic: The first is Aeneas’ visit to Hades and the second is the  ending of the poem itself.

            Aeneas goes down to Hades at the bequest of Anchises, his father, lead by the Sibyl.  At Elysium, he sees the process of how the soul goes into the body, that the soul has to forget about the sufferings of being alive in order to go back into the body.[24]  This necessary part of forgetting implies that man’s passion, which can lead to great suffering, can never be controlled completely, that a truly dispassionate man, and thus a truly dispassionate ruler, does not exist.  When Aeneas also sees the pageant of Roman history, he sees at the end of it the hope of Rome, young Marcellus; but Marcellus dies young.[25]  This untimely death of the greatest hope of Rome implies that true, peaceful rule on earth also cannot exist.  With such grim knowledge, Aeneas is only able to return to earth by forgetting what he has learned:  Aeneas leaves the Underworld through the gate of ivory, through which false dreams are sent out.[26]   In other words, the truth of the true condition of mankind, that in life man is duplicitous, becomes hidden to Aeneas when returns to life.

            The realization of Aeneas duplicity occurs when he encounters Turnus at the end of the poem.  Aeneas has defeated the Rutuli, and other Latins have assented to Aeneas right to marry Lavinia and, thus, establish a rule in Italy.  The one-on-one fight between Aeneas and Turnus has resulted in Turnus on his knees, supplicating Aeneas for mercy.  In other words, Turnus has acknowledged Aeneas’ rule, and according to law (not blood revenge), Aeneas, as dispassionate ruler, can allow law to handle Turnus.  Instead Aeneas sees the sword-buckle of Pallas, his beloved friend whom Turnus killed earlier.  Aeneas becomes filled “with fury and anger” and murders Turnus, whose “villainous blood” is “penalty” for Pallas’ death.[27]  Aeneas has learned for himself what he has forgotten; as long as he is alive, passion will always get in the way of dispassionate rule of other people because passion will always get in the way of dispassionate rule of the self.  Individual liberty will always get in the way of common security.  But as Turnus says to Aeneas before his death, “Your hot words do not frighten me, fierce though you are. / The gods frighten me and Jupiter hostile.”[28]  Thus, we learn what will keep men’s passions in check as they live together in political societies: a religion so mysterious that the reaction to the gods is not intellectual inquiry but fear and awe.

            Thus, as seen in Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, man’s duplicitous nature becomes the necessary prerequisite for religion, based on faith and not on human intellect, which is the turning to the gods for resolution of the conflict within man’s soul.  The more man realizes that his own nature is complex and, at times, unintelligible, the more the gods become unintelligible and, therefore, mysterious.  In other words, as the conflict becomes more acute, i.e., no intelligibility on the part of man’s rational mind can resolve the problem of his duplicitous nature, then the gods become more and more unintelligible to man such that the gods become mysterious, and man’s proper reaction to them is fear and awe.  In the viewpoint of the gods, this religion of mystery is the result of Zeus’ divine plan, the carrying out of his will.  In the viewpoint of man, this religion of mystery is the result of their own need to resolve the mystery that is suffering in the world.  Religion, therefore, becomes the necessary foundation on which all men can live and conduct their lives under political rule. 

Bibliography

Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. Trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ Press, 1983.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1951.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1967.

The Random House College Dictionary. Ed. Laurence Urdang. New York: Random House, 1973.

Vergil. The Aeneid. Trans. L.R. Lind. Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 1962.

© 2000 Rufel F. Ramos

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