Movies: Troy | The Gospel and the Religious Mind

An article in the Washington Post by Mark Berman and Marwa Eltagouri, entitled “Parkland suspect detailed plans in chilling videos: ‘I’m going to be the next school shooter’” caught my ear. Two excerpts from it are contrasted below:

He announced plans to become a school shooter, detailed how many people he hoped to murder and gloated about the infamy he would gain from such a massacre.

“When you see me on the news, you’ll all know who I am,” he says before laughing. “You’re all going to die!”

Yet even as it emerged after the massacre that he was a troubled young man with a pattern of disturbing behavior and alleged violence, what motivated him to open fire remains unanswered.

Though the journalists’ apparent deafness, whether real or feigned, to the shooter’s own words aroused my curiosity, it’s not really the subject of this essay. I want to consider the persistence of ancient heroic areté in the contemporary world.

In Homer the word applied to men capable of fighting—able warriors. They had to possess the best weapons, and their wealth guaranteed the quality of these weapons. The [men] capable of effectively defending the group united in themselves strength, courage, good birth, and martial skills. Moral or spiritual values were rarely mentioned. Areté primarily meant the strength and skill of a warrior or wrestler, and especially heroic virtue. It was inseparable from a spirit of competition and pride that involved a feeling of duty and responsibility toward the idea of areté. Over time the concept of areté was extended to prudence and cunning, advantageous traits in war. The desire to win the crown of areté is the essence of heroism.

Zbigniew Pańpuch’s definition of heroic areté above may not seem at first to describe a school shooter’s psyche unless one considers the question: “effectively defending the group” from whom? I’m starting here because I think his brief treatise on the ethical problems of areté through time, though otherwise quite able and compelling, misses one key element—the desire (will) that animates it: glory, honor and immortality. “The probable cause affidavit,” of another school shooter arrested recently, “says he told an investigator he spared people he liked because he wanted his story told.”^[1]

Mr. Pańpuch has given me a fresh appreciation for Wolfgang Petersen’s and David Benioff’s Troy. This desire to be remembered is cited in the opening narration of the movie:

Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we’re gone and wonder who we were…

Though the film was criticized for not adhering to the standard myths it does an excellent job of exploring the ethical issues of areté in dramatic form. I think Homer may have approved. Surely, the poets of a later epoch would have understood.

The movie begins in Thessaly. Agamemnon’s (Brian Cox) will to power over the Greek city states has led him to confront Triopas (Julian Glover), the last free king of Thessaly. “I brought all the Greek kingdoms together,” Agamemnon extols his own areté later in the film. “I created a nation out of fire worshippers and snake eaters! I build the future.” He proposes a battle of champions to Triopas, but his own champion Achilles (Brad Pitt) is AWOL.

A boy finds Achilles back in camp, sleeping off a drunken orgy with two beautiful naked women. “I want what all men want,” Achilles admits later in the film. “I just want it more.”

As Achilles prepares to leave for battle, the boy says, “The Thessalonian you’re fighting, he’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t want to fight him.”

“That’s why no one will remember your name,” Achilles replies.

When Achilles arrives at the front Agamemnon doesn’t honor him as he feels he deserves. He turns to leave. But Nestor (John Shrapnel), full of “prudence and cunning,” knows how to manipulate him.

“Achilles, Achilles,” Nestor calls his name to salve his wounded pride, “Look at the men’s faces. You can save hundreds of them. You can end this war with a swing of your sword. Let them go home to their wives.” And Achilles obeys Nestor.

After Paris (Orlando Bloom) takes Helen (Diane Kruger) with him back to Troy, her husband Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) asks his brother Agamemnon for help to regain his honor. “I want her back,” he says, “so I can kill her with my own two hands. I won’t rest till I’ve burned Troy to the ground.”

“I thought you wanted peace with Troy,” Agamemnon says.

“I should have listened to you.”

“Peace is for the women and the weak,” Agamemnon consoles his brother.

Thus Mr. Pańpuch described the “Areté of mores…the mores and culture of the ordinary life, mentality, and way of life of ‘the best people’—’αριστοι [aristoi].”^[2]

They were aware of their privileged and exclusive position. They had refined manners and knew how to act in every situation. They showed great hospitality, composure in their response to unexpected situations, and were natural in ordinary life. They typically acted with irreproachable courtesy toward those who acted wickedly. Forbearance and admonitions always came before the meting out of just punishment. The role of the woman and the womanly areté was an essential element of their mores. Beauty was part of feminine areté, just as a man was judged according to his intellectual and physical virtues. A woman’s areté was also measured by the purity of her manners, and provident economic management. This was connected with the social and legal status of women as mistresses of the home, the guardians of every good custom, and the teachers of tradition and culture.

The woman with her specific areté had a moderating influence on the ways of men.

“Old King Priam thinks he’s untouchable behind his high walls,” Agamemnon argues with his counselor Nestor. “He thinks the sun god will protect him. But the gods protect only the strong! If Troy falls I will control the Aegean.” When he cannot dissuade him from attacking Troy Nestor encourages Agamemnon to call on Achilles and his Myrmidons. “He can’t be controlled,” Agamemnon laments. “He’s as likely to fight us as the Trojans.”

“We don’t need to control him, we need to unleash him. That man was born to end lives.”

Nestor’s plot to use Achilles to achieve Agamemnon’s dream of a unified Greece dramatizes the evolution of areté as described by Mr. Pańpuch, a further moderation of the heroic areté of the sons of disobedience (ἀπειθείας, a form of ἀπείθεια) :

The fight for heroic areté earlier was a fight for personal glory, but with time it was replaced by the motive of heroic love of the fatherland. Fortitude understood as military skill became areté. The πολις and what was of benefit or harm to it was the measure of true areté. It was shameful and blameworthy for a man to refuse to sacrifice his health, property, or life for the fatherland. The ethics of the state replaced aristocratic ethics. This process became clearer yet as the conception of justice and the ideal of the state under the rule of law took shape.

This definition mirrors an argument which attempts to wrest Nietzsche’s will to power from Nazis: “Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche’s distinction between Kraft (force) and Macht (power).^[2] Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche’s philosophy, closely tied to sublimation and ‘self-overcoming’, the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes.”

Odysseus (Sean Bean), the “one man he’ll listen to,” is dispatched to channel Achilles’ Kraft for Agamemnon’s creative purposes. “Let Achilles fight for honor,” Odysseus pleads. “Let Agamemnon fight for power. And let the gods decide which man to glorify…We’re sending the largest fleet that ever sailed, a thousand ships…This war will never be forgotten. Nor will the heroes who fight in it.”

As he considers whether to swallow his contempt for Agamemnon’s Macht, Achilles’ mother, the sea nymph Thetis (Julie Christie), prophesies his fate:

If you stay in Larisa you will find peace. You will find a wonderful woman. You will have sons and daughters, and they will have children. And they will love you. When you are gone, they will remember you. But when your children are dead and their children after them your name will be lost.

If you go to Troy glory will be yours. They will write stories about your victories for thousands of years. The world will remember your name. But if you go to Troy you will never come home. For your glory walks hand in hand with your doom. And I shall never see you again.

“Everyone dies,” Achilles’ expresses his own attitude toward death—and life—later in the film, “today or fifty years from now. What does it matter?” And so he encourages his Myrmidons as they approach the beach of Troy with the words, “You know what’s there, waiting, beyond that beach—immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”

Hector (Eric Bana) confronts Achilles in the Trojan temple of Apollo over the dead bodies of his priests. “These priests weren’t armed,” he shouts. “Fight me!”

“Why kill you now, prince of Troy,” Achilles smirks, “with no one here to see you fall?”

“Why did you come here?”

“They’ll be talking about this war for a thousand years.”

“In a thousand years the dust from our bones will be gone.”

“Yes, prince, but our names will remain.”

Over time areté took on a more moral, even a religious, meaning. Zbigniew Pańpuch wrote this of “Areté in realization”:

A man’s conscious efforts play an essential role in his achievement of areté. By nature we are capable of acquiring permanent dispositions and developing them in ourselves by habituation. These dispositions are not innate. We only possess predispositions to acquire them because natural operations are not subject to change by habituation, “we acquire the virtues by first having actually practiced them, just as we do the arts”…

Aristotle also stated that there was a converse dependence: there is no prudence without areté. The idea that happiness can only become fully real in the presence of the transcendent good, God, was revolutionary compared to the ancient conception of happiness. St. Thomas Aquinas created a great synthesis of the ancient conception of areté and Christian doctrine. He incorporated into his system the inheritance of great ancient conceptions (Aristotelian, Stoic, and neo-Platonic) and the content of Christian revelation.

Areté it seems has always been a religious attempt to tame the will, to rechannel the desires, of the sons of disobedience. Paul wrote (Ephesians 2:1-3 NET Table):

And although you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly lived according to this world’s present path, according to the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the ruler of the spirit that is now energizing the sons of disobedience, among whom all of us also formerly lived out our lives in the cravings of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest…

Ancient “heroic” areté persists because the ruler of the kingdom of the air still whispers sweetly to the deceitful heart of the old human in virile young men, “glory, honor, immortality.” Clint Eastwood proposed an alternative to the willful self-aggrandizing pursuit of chimeric areté in his movie The 15:17 to Paris.

Young Spencer Stone (William Jennings) gets in a lot of trouble at his smug religious school. His fiercely loyal mother Joyce Erskel (Judy Greer) confronts him in his bedroom after a report that he toilet-papered a neighbors’ house. “I am mortified, Spencer. Mortified,” she repeats after he acknowledges it. “What am I gonna tell Anthony’s father?”

“I don’t think you should tell…”

“No, you don’t think. The constant calls from the principal, all the trouble you’ve been causing, it’s too much. It’s too much Spencer.”

“Mom, I’m sorry.”

“And it is getting harder and harder to come in here because every time I do, I just leave disappointed.” She slams his bedroom door as she leaves.

That night Spencer prayed what apparently became his life-long prayer, a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assissi:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is darkness, light. And where there is sadness, joy. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are born into eternal life. Amen.

My own bungled lifetime, seeking any and every other remedy, caused me to marvel at the boy. “Where? How? Such genius,” I sputtered in amazement. The Holy Spirit’s answer was immediate, and came in the form of Jesus’ couplet on ἑλκύω, which both exalts… (John 6:44a NET)