Theodicy

Why does an all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing God allow sin and evil in His creation? Why does He allow bad things to happen even to good people? This is the famous problem of evil, and a theodicy is an attempt to explain it. I was curious to learn what explanations early thinkers had to offer and turned to the first book ever written on the topic, simply and aptly named Theodicy. Since it predates Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s invention of the term by more than two thousand years, the title shows the incredible foresight of its author, Greek theologian Homer, whose last name is lost to history.

This trailblazing marvel of a book asks the question of theodicy in a riveting, but at times quite wordy way. Not in prose, and not in a single sentence about God, but in the form of an epic poem of 12,109 verses in 24 books, laying out the human condition in its entirety and doing so not in the abstract, which would make for a bad piece of poetry, but in a story about a single man. Man is thus the book’s first word, though in the English translation by Pope Alexander - I couldn’t figure out the number, but Claude says that based on style it’s likely Alexander VII or VIII - it cedes that spot to the no less poetic "the":

The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound; ^[1]

That man, the hero of the story, showed his valor countless times in a war of ten years, ended that war single-handedly using nothing but his wits, and virtuously slaughtered the enemies of his people in their sleep. But not only is he not favored by the gods, no, they force him to suffer for ten more years until he gets home, and his journey is a trail of hardships: the sea, man-eating monsters, hunger, bereavement, separation, and sex. That man’s name is Odysseus, in what must be a clever pun on Theodicy in ancient Greek, though one lost on me. It is his journey home that Homer uses as a metaphor for human suffering.

Before I continue, let me note that I chose this translation more because of the Pope's theological authority than because of his skills as a translator. Neither Fabio Chigi nor Pietro Vito Ottoboni were renowned for their Greek or English skills. As a fellow non-native, I bow anyway to my half-known translator, who managed quite an impressive feat working under such linguistic constraints. Yet, I fear that he might have distorted a few things in his translation. It is quite possible that some mistakes he made ^[2] have also found their way into this review.

Polytheism

As can be guessed from the word gods with a small g and a plural suffix s I used above, Theodicy, the book, takes a rather archaic approach to theodicy: polytheism. There is more than one god in this story, and if you have several, meaningfully distinct gods, they cannot all be all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. The book posits many gods, who have superhuman, but not unlimited, powers and knowledge, much like superheroes today. Regarding their character, these gods act like humans, and often like complete assholes ^[3] at that. They are haughty, vengeful, horny, at times quite ignorant, and often at odds with each other. Some gods are quite weak. At one point, four men surprise and physically overpower sea god Proteus. It is apparent that the gods' awareness, even of their immediate surroundings, is rather lacking. What distinguishes Proteus from mortals are his shape-shifting abilities, which seem commonplace among gods, and his old age, unusual in a world where only one in two people reached adulthood.

Other gods are more powerful. Odysseus’ greatest adversary is Poseidon, “monarch of the main” and also the god of the sea ^[4]. It takes the powers of many other gods combined to counteract his attempts to harm Odysseus. Important gods helping Odysseus are Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Zeus, god of thunder and apparently the Demiurge, since he is called “Father of gods and men”. He mostly just talks and lets others do the work.

Why does Poseidon hate Odysseus? The backstory of this begins before the events of Theodicy, with that war of ten years, in which the Greeks fought a city called Troy over a woman named Helen. Odysseus, as king of the Greek island-state Ithaca, was bound by a treaty to join the war. The whole thing is very important to Homer, who even wrote a prequel about it, titled Theiliad, whatever that’s supposed to mean. All we need to know is that the gods participated in this war, some siding with the Greeks and others with the Trojans ^[5]. After the Greeks win thanks to a brilliant plan by our hero, they sack Troy and to nobody’s-except-the-gods-who-sided-with-them surprise loot all the temples. Now Poseidon and the rest of the gods are mad at the Greeks. Odysseus is among the lucky ones who do not get killed in the tempest that the gods send when the Greeks want to sail home, but he does get lost along with his twelve ships.

While trying to find his way back home to his wife and family, he visits many different lands, and on one of his first stops, he really draws Poseidon’s ire upon himself. That land is inhabited by a certain Polyphemus, a man-eating, one-eyed giant and son of Poseidon. Before continuing, let me clarify, because this is just confusing, that although both are the sons of (a) god, Polyphemus and Jesus Christ are not supposed to be the same person! It is, in fact, quite common in Homer’s religion for gods or goddesses to have children, even with mortals, and no big deal at all.

It would be hard for you to imagine anything as brutal as the encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus. With a dozen of his men, Odysseus wants to visit the inhabitants of this land and exchange gifts (hospitality and reciprocal gift giving are super important in his culture). Polyphemus does not give any gifts to Odysseus. On the contrary, he traps them in his cave and eats two of his men for dinner, even devouring the bones. The visitors cannot kill him, as they wouldn’t be able to move the massive boulder which Polyphemus uses as a door to his abode. The next morning, after the giant has two more men for breakfast and then leaves with his herd of sheep, Odysseus comes up with a cunning plan: He takes the trunk of an olive tree that Polyphemus has in his cave in order to rework it into a club (often even the simplest objects have a backstory in Theodicy), and sharpens it. After Polyphemus comes home, Odysseus offers him the wine that he brought in the expectation of exchanging it for other gifts. Polyphemus gets drunk and asks Odysseus his name. Odysseus answers that he is called “noman”. It's not clear at this moment why he gives this answer, but, spoiler, it will pay off soon in an unexpected way. Polyphemus is now so inebriated that he passes out quickly. Odysseus and his men lift their tree trunk and poke it deep into his single eye. The now blinded giant wakes screaming, so his neighbouring brothers come running, asking what's the matter. Polyphemus replies:

‘Friends, Noman kills me; Noman in the hour
Of sleep, oppresses me with fraudful power.’
‘If no man hurt thee, but the hand divine
Inflict disease, it fits thee to resign:
To Jove (=Zeus ^[6]) or to thy father Neptune (=Poseidon) pray.’
The brethren cried, and instant strode away.

The Ithacans now have a real shot at survival. When Polyphemus needs to release his herd the next morning and only has his sense of touch to control that no human escapes with them, they hide underneath the rams’ bellies - a plan which only works because Polyphemus does not have a dog. Back on his ship, Odysseus does something uncharacteristically stupid and taunts the Cyclops:

Cyclop! if any, pitying thy disgrace.
Ask, who disfigured thus that eyeless face?
Say ’twas Ulysses (=Odysseus): ’twas his deed declare,
Laertes’ son, of Ithaca the fair;

This not only alerts Polyphemus to the escape and prompts him to throw rocks in the caller's direction - all of which miss their aim - but also tells him who attacked him, which he passes on to his dad. Hence the animosity I set out to explain. This episode has famously been interpreted like so:

He acknowledges himself to be himself by denying himself under the name Nobody; he saves his life by losing himself.

I think it is much simpler. The primary purpose of the episode in the larger context of a work titled Theodicy, not Conformity, is to explain Poseidon’s wrath, not a parable about the preservation of the self. The sentence “my name is nobody” and the confusion it causes the cyclops was meant as a joke to lighten an otherwise rather serious story ^[7], and it aged well.

Poseidon is not the only needlessly cruel god. Odysseus and the men of his last ship later get trapped by a terrible storm on an island where the only food is beeves - according to our translator, this is a word -, which are sacred to Helios, the sun god. Odysseus tells the others not to slaughter these animals, as he has been warned accordingly by Circe and Tiresias. Wait, I haven’t introduced these. To make it short: Circe is a witch goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea. With poisoned food and wine, she turns the scouts that Odysseus sends to explore the island into pigs. One man escapes and warns those who remained at the ship. Odysseus arms himself and goes to Circe’s palace to demand the retransformation of his men. On his way, Hermes, the god of having really good ^[8] shoes, appears to him and gives him a herb that grants immunity to Circe’s magic. When she is surprised that he is not growing a squiggly tail and a snout, he brandishes his sword at her. She has turned his friends into pigs; he has threatened to kill her - it need not be said that they soon find themselves in love with each other, so Circe restores Odysseus’ men to their human form. Their affair lasts for a whole year until the crew wants to go home. Circe agrees to let them go, but warns Odysseus that his toils are not yet over and that he needs to visit the spirit of famed seer Tiresias in the land of the dead if he wants to know how to get home. They safely reach the land of the dead, and with a sacrifice of milk, honey, wine, flour and sheep blood attract the dead spirits, most importantly Tiresias, who, after drinking sheep blood, tells Odysseus how he can appease Poseidon, but only after his return to Ithaca, and only if he meets an impossible condition:

… a people far from sea explore,
Who ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar,
Or saw gay ^[9] vessel stem the watery plain,
A painted wonder flying on the main!
Bear on thy back an oar: with strange amaze
A shepherd meeting thee, the oar surveys,
And names a van: there fix it on the plain,
To calm the god that holds the watery reign;
A threefold offering to his altar bring,
A bull, a ram, a boar; and hail the ocean king.

So Odysseus needs to find someone who confuses an oar with a van. No-one would ever do that, particularly not some three millennia before the invention of the automobile, such is the cynicism of the gods! Naturally, Odysseus won’t even attempt to do that in the end.

At least Tiresias warns him about the beeves, but the crew is not impressed by that. When their provisions run out, they slaughter and eat the sacred animals. Odysseus alone does not partake in that. Now, I said that the gods are not all-knowing, but the problem with Helios is that he is probably the god who knows the most. As he is traveling with the sun across the sky each day and has very good eyes (the distance from the sun to Earth measures 150 million kilometers or equivalently a large number of miles), he can see everything that happens in the open. So he also notices that his precious beeves have been decimated. Helios apparently cannot directly punish Odysseus’ crew for unclear reasons (maybe he cannot move away from the sun?), so he blackmails Zeus instead:

Vengeance, ye powers (he cries), and then whose hand
Aims the red bolt, and hurls the writhen brand! ^[10]
Slain are those herds which I with pride survey,
When through the ports of heaven I pour the day,
Or deep in ocean plunge the burning ray.
Vengeance, ye gods! or I the skies forego,
And bear the lamp of heaven to shades below.

When the storm ends, and the Ithacans set sail, Zeus soon sends the next storm, strikes the ship with lightning and sinks it. Only Odysseus survives, and after a few days of floating around on a few pieces of wood he could tie together, he eventually strands on the island of the nymph Calypso, goddess of nothing in particular. At this point, Homer has almost run out of ideas, so he just lets Odysseus stay with her for the next seven years. Calypso is very much in love with him, but although the feeling is not at all mutual, she does not let him go. Then, while Poseidon is off partying with the Ethiopians, the other gods have a meeting and decide it is time for Odysseus to go home. Athena is going to Ithaca and sends Telemachus on a side quest to gather news about his father; Zeus sends Hermes to Calypso and commands her to let him leave. Calypso complies and helps Odysseus equip a raft, so finally he sets sail again. Poseidon comes back, gets up to speed, and sends a storm to destroy the raft. Leucothea, another sea goddess, gives Odysseus a protective veil, so he can swim to shore. There dwell, for a change, a normal, hospitable people, the Phaeacians, who receive him, give him many gifts and a ship that is steered by thought to carry him home.

Viewed through this lens, theodicy is not just solved; it’s not even a problem to begin with. People, good and bad alike, suffer because the gods hate them. If you are getting eaten by a giant and wonder why, the answer is that he is a demigod and hungry. If I sit in boring meetings all day, the explanation might not be as obvious, but it could be something like that I disrespected my Physics teacher in tenth grade, who was the great-great-great-great-great-grandson or something of a god (probably Hypnos, the god of sleep).

This is a neat argument, but is it true? Are there really many gods instead of one single God? It is not sufficient that polytheism better matches the theodicial evidence, we need to ask what verifiable predictions the book makes that could increase our confidence in its theology.

For one thing, shapeshifting is a very common ability among the gods and we would have to see more beings turning unexpectedly into others. This would not be a rare occurrence and would not be limited to just the initiated members of mystery cults: at one point, Athena turns from the shape of a man into an eagle in front of a large crowd. As a city-dwelling software developer, I spend most of my time indoors and little of it among others, so I am admittedly not in the best position to ascertain the prevalence of shapeshifting. I have only seen eagles in documentaries or zoos, but I have not interacted with them closely enough to exclude with confidence the possibility that some of them are in fact disguised goddesses. Still, frequent shapeshifting does not match my experience.

It should also be possible to see the spirits of the dead and talk to them. That possibility should again not be limited to a few select individuals, like mediums, but to anybody who makes the correct offering of sheep blood in the right place. Sadly, I was unable to test this prediction either. The smallest obstacle is that I don’t know where to buy live sheep. The far greater one is that I don’t know the location. Homer says it’s a place in the land of the Cimmerians, which scholars identify with parts of modern Southern Russia and Ukraine. Not only do I not want to travel somewhere where a war is being waged, without knowing the exact spot Odysseus is directed to by Circe, I would have to cover the whole region in sheep blood, which would make for a dangerous sojourn even in times of peace, never mind the logistical difficulties. Soon the locals would be at war with me!

There was, however, one thing I was able to test: There is a river right where I live, and rivers, according to Theodicy, are gods too. There is a scene where Odysseus, trying to swim to the Phaeacian shore, prays to a river to soften its current and that works. So I tried the same. I went to the bank and prayed. Then I prayed in verse. Then I bought a bottle of wine and emptied it into the river because the gods like offerings of wine. Then I tried beer and all sorts of liquor, but all to no avail, its current remained as strong as ever.

Free Will

Frustrated with my failure, I was prompted to re-examine the theological claims of Theodicy and found that the book provides more explanations than just “The gods suck and not in a good way”, although this is the most salient. Homer lets none other than Zeus state that

Perverse mankind! whose wills, created free,
Charge all their woes on absolute degree;
All to the dooming gods their guilt translate,
And follies are miscall’d the crimes of fate.

Even if Zeus had been an otherwise well-meaning creator, which seems highly doubtful, giving humans free will meant enabling them to do evil.

Should you need an example of human-made suffering, Theodicy provides many. When we last left Odysseus, he was being brought back home to Ithaca in a magical ship, but that is not how the story ends. During his absence, his family has had a miserable time. His wife Penelope has been besieged by suitors, who, convinced of her husband’s death, want to marry her. She refused every single one of them, but instead of respecting her decision and going home, the suitors stayed and started living off her and Odysseus’ estate. There are 108 of them, plus servants, so this is really bad financially. They also plot to kill Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, so when Odysseus comes home and finds out about this, he gets understandably mad and kills all of them, and that is where the story ends. The suffering of Odysseus’ family is caused by the evil suitors, whose suffering in turn is nothing but an entirely deserved punishment.

You may have noticed that the number of his ships sometime between the beginning of the story and their arrival on the cursed beeves island got reduced from twelve to one. For this loss of life, humans are entirely to blame. After his ill-fated visit to Polyphemus, Odysseus comes to the floating island of a man called Aeolus. Aeolus is a friend of the gods, who was made custodian of the winds by Zeus. At first, he has pity on the Ithacans and puts the winds into a bag, except the one which should carry them straight home. He hands the bag to Odysseus and tells him to release the winds again once they have reached Ithaca. This almost works, but when they can already see their native shore, the crew unties the silver thong with which Aeolus sealed the wind bag, because, not having been told about its true content, they suppose that it contains some great treasure that Odysseus wants to keep all for himself. The unleashed winds bring them to Aeolus anew, but he refuses to help again, saying:

Vile wretch, begone! this instant I command
Thy fleet accursed to leave our hallow’d land.
His baneful suit pollutes these bless’d abodes,
Whose fate proclaims him hateful to the gods.

Despite being a friend of the gods, we must not take Aeolus’ verdict at face value here. Not only is he a filthy pervert who sealed a gift with his underwear, he is also an incest-peddler who married his sons to his daughters. That man cannot claim any moral authority whatsoever. I believe Homer added this episode as a cautionary tale not only about the importance of communication in a king-subjects relationship, but also about the danger of guessing the will of the gods. With his decision, Aeolus prolongs the Ithacans’ dreadful journey and indirectly condemns all of them (except Odysseus) to an untimely death. For most of them, that death strikes soon, already at the next place they visit. Odysseus, having learnt from his visit to Polyphemus, does not go ashore himself this time, but sends three of his men. This proves to be very wise, as the inhabitants are yet another people of man-eating giants. Homer does not explicitly mention the number of eyes they have, but they certainly seem to have unimpaired stereoscopic vision as they sink almost the whole fleet once they start pelting the ships with rocks, after which they spearfish their crews. Only Odysseus’ vessel escapes.

Unlike polytheism, free will is a popular explanation for the existence of evil also in Christian theology, proposed, among others, by Augustine of Hippo, yet it too has its critics. What about evils that are not man-made? And even when humans sin, couldn’t God intervene in ways that prevent the bad consequences of someone’s freely chosen bad actions on others (e.g., killing the suitors the instant they resolve to live like parasites off another man’s property, instead of letting them carry out their intent)? We don’t need to look at these arguments, however, as the real problem of free will is that people, at least in Theodicy, clearly do not have it. Yes, Zeus claims they do, but this is nothing but the classic “Stop hitting yourself” of a schoolyard bully. The gods constantly intervene in the “free” decision-making process of the mortals. Telemachus decides to go on his side quest to find out if anyone knows the whereabouts of his father? Athena tells him to. The suitor Amphinomus realizes that planning the murder of his love interest’s son is sort of rude? Athena changes his heart. But what then is Homer’s explanation for evil, and why does he deliberately include a false one?

The Best of All Possible Worlds

There is a third theory that can be constructed from the story. It is striking how Odysseus’ suffering is transient. In the end, he gets home safely, his family is reunited, father and son kill the suitors, recreating the childhood they never had together. On the way, he has been given more gold by the Phaeacians than he carried from the temples of Troy and Athena rejuvenates his and Penelope’s bodies. Maybe suffering isn’t that bad after all? This again is also a position brought forward in Christian theology and was, in particular, held by Leibniz who claimed that evil serves a purpose, and is necessary for some greater good. What is that good?

Gold and beauty never were the true treasure for Odysseus, nor, I dare to posit, was it the family waiting for him at home nor the friends he lost along the way, but knowledge. Odysseus, his glory and his virtue are defined by knowledge. His knowledge enables his special relationship to the goddess of wisdom, and his knowledge he expands by “Wandering from clime to clime, observant”. Telemachus, too, travels in search of his father and is beginning to grow up to be like him.

There are countless examples of the importance of knowledge, not least in all the scenes where people are telling stories, thereby sharing their knowledge with others, and the scenes on Ithaca where Odysseus’ loved ones recognize him one by one. The most touching of these is when his dog Argus dies from the sheer joy of knowing that his master has returned to Ithaca. His death might have been for the best though, as he was, at more than twenty years of age, very old for a dog. Argus cannot have been of a small breed either, since he had already gone on hunts with his master where they “pursued the goat or fawn”. So he wasn’t a Chihuahua hunting rats or a Dachshund hunting badgers, and as a medium or large breed, he was, as it were, a dog supercentenarian. But I am getting distracted. I wanted to say that knowledge is important. You could even say that it is the ultimate good in Theodicy, a belief which certainly seems to serve the author Homer, whose existence as a scholar revolves around the conservation, sharing and creation of knowledge.

But again I find myself dissatisfied: Can this really be true? Aren’t the other people people too? Even if knowledge was the ultimate good, even if it all ends well for Odysseus and his family, all his men die, and in death they forget what little knowledge they gained before, such as what it feels like to be eaten alive.

And then there are the stories that don’t fit the knowledge-as-the-greatest-good narrative. First, the story with the lotus-eaters, which comes even before the encounter with the Cyclopes. The lotus-eaters are called lotus-eaters because they eat lotus, and from eating lotus, they forget. When Odysseus sends three men to explore the land, they eat lotus, forget who they are, where they were coming from and going to, so they have to be dragged back to the ship. Understandably, this seems terrible to the crew, but as they will learn, they are not going home; they are going to die. By regaining their knowledge, they are doomed. Secondly, the story of the sirens, creatures half woman, half bird, whose song lures passing sailors to their deaths. Again, only ignorance brings salvation. And here is what Odysseus has to say to Telemachus when his son wonders why the house shines like fire in the night before the suitors’ murder:

Be calm (replies the sire); to none impart,
But oft revolve the vision in thy heart:
Celestials, mantled in excess of light,
Can visit unapproach’d by mortal sight.

In other words, the gods are what cannot, must not be known.

Into this pattern also fit the episode with Aeolus, as well as the fake, conflicting theodicies. Finally, if you think about it, you realize that Odysseus doesn’t even have true knowledge. He shows no awareness that he is just a persona to illustrate a theological problem, although there are hints: He hears lots of stories about others like him, tells lots of stories (many of them lies) about himself, but never does he consider the option that he might be a story told to someone. Admittedly, the hints are not very concrete and it would have been hard for him to reach this conclusion - I’m not sure I could do it either -, but it can be expected of Odysseus, the wisest man alive, who has done the impossible before. If even he does not have true knowledge, mankind cannot have it either. Homer’s true point is thus that any attempt at a theodicy is ultimately futile.

Conclusion

I certainly did not hope to end up with the lamest possible conclusion, a non-answer instead of an answer, but here I am, and I cannot, in good faith, defend any other interpretation. The many contradictions we have seen make it impossible to pin any specific theodicy on the work. Nonetheless, I can warmly recommend Theodicy. Not only is knowledge of the primary sources of great importance in theodicy, but this book, which blurs the line between philosophical essay and fiction, can almost be regarded as a piece of art in its own right.