{"id":7959,"date":"2019-09-30T04:48:09","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/the-difference-between-odysseus-and-the-apostle-paul\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:48:09","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:48:09","slug":"the-difference-between-odysseus-and-the-apostle-paul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/the-difference-between-odysseus-and-the-apostle-paul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Difference Between Odysseus and The Apostle Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re, in his book &#8220;The Kingdom,&#8221; writes about the episode in the Odyssey when Odysseus has to decide between staying on Calypso\u2019s paradisal island (where he has spent seven years) or returning home to Ithaca.  Calypso\u2019s charms are intense: she offers eternal pleasures, and she reminds our hero that Penelope, his wife back home, cannot possibly rival the beauty of an immortal goddess.  Odysseus concedes as much, but still he chooses to go home; he chooses the mortal and the mutable over the deathless and the eternal.  Carr\u00e8re reminds us that this decision is often seen as a pinnacle of ancient wisdom: \u201cThe life of a man is better than that of a god, for the simple reason that it\u2019s real.  Authentic suffering is better than deceptive bliss.  Eternity is not desirable because it\u2019s not part of our common lot.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Against this, there is the radical eschatological mysticism of Jesus and, especially, of Paul, who \u201csays that the only thing to expect from this life is to be delivered from it, and to go to where Christ reigns.\u201d  There is \u201can unsolvable difference,\u201d Carr\u00e8re says, between Paul\u2019s ideal and that of Odysseus.  \u201cEach one calls the only true good what the other condemns as baneful illusion.  Odysseus says that wisdom always consists in turning your attention to the human condition and life on earth, Paul says it consists in tearing yourself away.  Odysseus says that, regardless of how beautiful it is, paradise is a fiction, and Paul says that\u2019s the only reality.  Paul, carried away, goes as far as congratulating God for having chosen  what is not  to invalidate what is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re, in his book &#8220;The Kingdom,&#8221; writes about the episode in the Odyssey when Odysseus has to decide between staying on Calypso\u2019s paradisal island (where he has spent seven years) or returning home to Ithaca. Calypso\u2019s charms are intense: she offers eternal pleasures, and she reminds our hero that Penelope, his wife [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[996,86,997,999,998],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}