The Hero 25
The existence of Yahweh in his sublime otherness is an ongoing
statement about the limitations (and the inadequacy) of mankind.
Men and women are made in his image, but he far exceeds them in
every other way. Yahweh is not diff erent from men in degree but in
kind. When the Jewish believer meditates on God he must invari-
ably feel the distance between what he is and what a being can be.
Achilles and his fellow warriors feel little of such sentiment. The
gods of the Greeks are not always kind or generous or just, but they
are comprehensible. Their existence makes the world luminous,
its meanings clear. “Happy are those ages,” Georg Lukács writes,
“when the starry sky is the map of all possi ble paths— ages whose
paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such
ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The
world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fi re that burns in the
soul is of the same essential nature as the stars” (29).
Warriors since Homer have sought to live in a similar state of
f ullness. Fighters tend to think of themselves as beings who live with
primary, natu ral values. They embody qualities— courage, endur-
ance, strength— that Nature endorses. Though their lives may be
harsh and short, they feel at home in the world. They are (or believe
themselves to be) primary men and women. This is no less true now
than it was when Homer wrote—at least for those few who believe
in the warrior ethos. But their kind may be dying out. They are
being replaced by middle- class men and women whose central
aspiration is to endure and who seek not honor but res pect, not as-
cendancy but stable existence.
Homer reinforces the symmetry between the heroic worldview
and the world of Nature through many of the poem’s similes. The
men coming to muster are like bees fl ying ’round and around their
hive. The generations of men who breed on the earth are like leaves.
They burst into green life in the spring, but by autumn are dead and