The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

One of the features of Homer’s Odyssey that few commentators mention is the play of hospitality and its opposite number, which is savaging the stranger. No less important a personage than Zeus was the patron god of hospitality in Bronze Age Greece, which is an indication of its importance to that culture. In fact, throughout the text Odysseus is warned that if he stays away from Ithaca too long his fate might resemble that of Agamemnon, murdered at a banquet to which he was lured, in a crass violation of the principle of hospitality. The Phaeacians treat Odysseus extremely well—and then are punished for it by Poseidon, the nemesis of Odysseus and his people. A son of Poseidon is Polyphemus, who, far from making a meal for Odysseus and his men, makes a meal of a number of them.

Meanwhile, the suitors—actually usurpers—in Odysseus’s court violate the principle of hospitality by helping themselves to vast amounts of the king’s food and wine in his banquet hall, and when Odysseus returns and wipes them out, he anticipates Beowulf’s cleansing of the mead hall many centuries later.

The theme of hospitality runs strongly through Hebrew culture as well. God sternly instructs his people to treat the stranger within their gates kindly because they were treated so badly by the Egyptians. Sodom is seemingly destroyed as much for the crime of failing to meet the needs of the poor as for that of intended homosexual rape (Ezekiel 16:49-50). The theme then runs strongly through the New Testament as well. The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia, which literally means “brotherly love for the stranger.”

Taking the world’s ancient literature as a whole, we might be justified in considering hospitality to be the very foundation stone of civilization. It seems just as clear, though, that the next building block is communion. Going back to the travails of Odysseus, we find that the best moments of his ten-year voyage of return are spent in the company of his hosts, eating, drinking and sharing the sort of stories that we pass around on the internet today. Our word symposium comes from the Classical practice of sitting around after a meal to drink and enjoy one another’s company. For their part, the Hebrews made the Passover meal an essential ceremony of their communal life, and significantly, that practice continues to this day. Furthermore, just as the great act of redemption depicted in the Hebrew Scriptures is commemorated by a meal, the great ceremony associated with the New Testament act of redemption is the Eucharist, which Jesus insisted his followers celebrate until his return.

Still there would appear to be one more step along the path to modern civilization, one more building block in its edifice. Beyond communion is the principle of dialogue, which is closely associated with Socrates as depicted in Plato’s writings, his Dialogues. The point is to allow the proponents of both sides of an issue to present their best arguments in the hope that in this way thoughts that might otherwise be missed, and thus cause trouble, will be brought out. The early experiment in democracy in Periclean Athens incorporated this principle, and the Roman Senate, as long as it lasted, attempted to abide by it as well. It was no coincidence, then, that the United States form of government was formed in the neoclassical era, when those ideas were being revived. Our checks and balances are supposed to function by way of dialogue across the aisles of the two houses of Congress, between those houses, and between the Congress and the executive and judicial branches of the government.

So where does the issue of those three building blocks of civilization stand at present? We have built our homes without those old front porches where people used to sit and expect their neighbors, out for an evening stroll, to join them for conversation and a glass of lemonade. Often our hospitality isn’t even extended to our own parents as we shove them into institutionalized living quarters because we’re simply too busy with our own lives to attend to them. In place of communion we have parties where social interaction often has less than ideal interpersonal overtones. Sometimes too we don’t arrive at dialogue because any disagreement is viewed as a threat to our self-esteem. We are expected to be so self-assertive that our goal becomes that of steamrolling over anyone else’s viewpoint. One of Robert F. Kennedy’s best points, as I understand it, was his practice of listening very intently to what people said to him.

I was appalled as I began offering what university catalogs list as graduate seminars, so-called because they were developed in a day when students were expected to have arrived at a level of scholarship where they could share and debate their developing opinions about a topic at hand. In my case that topic always had to do with the interpretation of a major work of Hispanic literature. I was appalled because I found my students terrified that they might express an opinion in a paper that was different from mine. I nearly tore my hair out trying to get across to them that if they could support their opinion it certainly did not have to correspond to mine. These Spanish masterpieces are all ambiguous, as is the case with all great literature for that matter, and I wanted them to know I was not so arrogant as to believe I had the final word of truth on them. Still, they insisted on attempting to parrot back what I had said. That is the state of dialogue in much of academia.

In the world’s epic literature, a hero emerges in the nick of time to save his or her civilization from the forces of chaos. That hero often begins by re-establishing hospitality, as in the case of Beowulf in the Danes’ mead hall, and that at least sets in motion the move to communion and dialogue. Perhaps we collectively need to be our own hero now.

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