A note before the essay
The best expositions I know of the Odyssey as an ascent of the soul come from Dr. Scott Masson and Jonathan Pageau, who read the poem with a learning and a reverence I admire and largely share. I should say plainly that this symbolic, literary way of reading — the search for the perennial pattern beneath the story — is also my own preferred mode. The essay that follows is therefore a disagreement between people who love the same thing and read it in the same key. Where I part from Dr. Masson is not over what the poem is, but over what our own age has become
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For Masson, the modern condition — what Charles Taylor called the immanent frame, the sense that meaning arises from within the world rather than descending into it from beyond — is something close to a catastrophe. For me it is not. Settling into the immanent frame is no tragedy, and no prison. The good, the true, and the beautiful are still present within it, still recognizable, still there to be loved; and the Christian life and the Christian faith remain fully livable inside it. To speak from within the immanent frame is not to be severed from the transcendent. It is only to reach for it from where we now stand.
That is why I do not chafe at a voice like Nolan’s. He and I inhabit the same immanent frame; we differ only in what we can carry into it. I can hold that frame together with the Christian faith. Nolan, I suspect, cannot — or not as easily. But the ground beneath us is the same, and so is the age we speak from. Masson hears that voice as a desecration. I hear it as a neighbor’s. That, in the end, is the difference between Masson and me.
A word, finally, about the film itself and the posture of what follows. In my first essay I called Nolan’s Odyssey a good film, though not a great one. Having now sat with it longer, and read a good deal of what others — Dr. Masson among them — have made of it, I find myself inclined to revise that judgment upward, to very good, if still short of great. The essay ahead, I should be candid, speaks in a higher register even than that: it takes the posture that the film is a great achievement of the ascent of the soul. I adopt that posture partly because it lets me make the argument I most want to make, and partly because I believe the achievement is really there in the final third of the picture. But my original reservation still stands. That last-act ascent seems to me insufficiently prepared across the first two-thirds, and the imbalance remains a genuine weakness. I hold open the possibility that a second viewing will close that gap — that what now looks like a faltering first movement will prove to be groundwork — and carry me the rest of the way from good, through very good, toward great. That reckoning is for another day.
What follows is not, in the end, a review. It is an argument about what Nolan achieved, and about why his most serious critic cannot see it.
Masson’s Case Against Nolan
The reviews of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey from the religious and traditionalist Right have been fascinating in their range. Some have been warm — Jonathan Pageau, Spencer Klavan — and many have been hostile, Eric Metaxas and Paul Anleitner among them, as I have taken up in earlier posts. Dr. Scott Masson is a distinctive entry in that field, and a more demanding one. Rather than press the now-familiar complaint about the film’s woke elements, he sets that framing aside and turns to a deeper concern.
Masson is a literary scholar of real depth — Associate Professor of English Literature at Tyndale University, and a close, capable reader who articulates what he finds with unusual skill. A few weeks before he turned to the film, he released an account of Homer’s Odyssey that is academic criticism of the best kind and generous to the poem: he reads it as a psychagogy, a leading of the soul upward, the ascent of a ladder of trial and wisdom toward the home that wisdom earns. It is because he comes to the film from that reading, and not from the culture war, that his verdict is worth attending to. And the verdict is severe. What Nolan has done, he says, is worse than woke.
The charge deserves to be stated at full strength, because it is the strongest version of the objection this whole series has been circling, and because the way it fails is more instructive than the way the cruder objections fail.
The case runs like this. Homer gave Greece its first and greatest image of the noble man: Odysseus, renowned for wisdom and virtue, whose wanderings are a psychagogy, a leading of the soul upward through temptation toward the home that wisdom earns. Nolan has taken this figure and laid him on the bed of Procrustes — the false host who bound his guests and cut or stretched them to fit an iron frame. What does not fit the preconceived pattern is amputated; what is missing is stretched to fill it. In plain terms, the accusation is one about adaptation: that Nolan does not so much translate Homer as force the poem to fit a shape chosen in advance, keeping whatever serves that shape and cutting away whatever will not.
The man of words becomes a grunt who fights the Cyclops with his hands. The resister of temptation becomes a trauma case dulling his conscience on Calypso’s lotus. Circe the witch becomes a frightened woman; the sorcery becomes psychology; the gods, when they appear at all, dwindle to a face of conscience that Odysseus slowly loses the power to hear. And at the center Nolan installs a figure Homer never wrote — Sinon, the deceiver of the Aeneid, the human Trojan Horse — but inverts him: no longer the master of ruinous rhetoric, but a sincere, powerless innocent whom Odysseus betrays and must spend the rest of the film atoning for. The homecoming that follows is therefore not the return of the just king but the settling of a twenty-year moral debt. It is vengeance wearing the mask of justice, a Dark Knight cleansing a house he is barely better than. Our hearts do not sing when he arrives. And the reason they do not sing, Masson argues, is that Nolan has performed on the poem a secular transvaluation — Nietzsche’s inversion inverted, the strong man’s victory re-read as the little man’s wound — and has done so without any principled account of good and evil to stand on. He sees the corruption of power; he cannot name the good it offends. He aches for a redeemer he does not believe in.
I think much of this is right. That is the point worth dwelling on.
Almost every descriptive claim in the indictment is accurate. Nolan does psychologize the poem. The interior life he gives Odysseus — the guilt that ruminates, the conscience that will not close — is fully modern, and in the strict sense anachronistic; nothing in Homer asks us to turn inward and find a wound. He does turn the sack of Troy into a crime with a named victim and make Odysseus carry it. The westward sail at the end does belong to the tradition of penitential exile — Dante’s Ulysses and Tennyson’s — rather than to Homer, whose Odysseus dies quietly at home. The final reckoning does read more as the discharge of a debt than as the descent of divine justice. One can accept the reading of the Sinon device — the black lot, the transferred shame, the token forced back into the mouth that denied it — as genuinely ingenious, the best account of the film’s architecture I have seen, and still find that nothing in it convicts Nolan of the crime Masson charges.
Because the crime is not in the reading. It is in the frame around the reading — and the frame is what this essay sets out to examine. Nearly every observation Masson makes can be granted; the verdict he draws from them cannot. And the argument will end where he would least expect it to: with the claim that Nolan has told the very story Masson most reveres — the ascent of the soul up its ladder toward a home set right — only secularized. And that is what angers Masson: he cannot tolerate the seizure of what he takes to be his own sacred possession by a modern materialist usurper, the incarnation of the post-Christian which is, for him, the deepest evil of the present age.
The bed cuts both ways
Consider the language Masson reaches for to characterize Nolan’s adaptation: Procrustean bed. Skin suit for the director’s own views. Not even an interpretation. Fed to us. Every one of these depends on a single buried premise: that there exists a Homer of fixed and natural dimensions, a body with a true length, against which Nolan’s cutting and stretching can be measured as mutilation. Remove that premise and the whole charge dissolves, because there is no crime of distortion where there is no undistorted original to consult.
And there is none. The un-interpreted Homer is a phantom. The poem has been the property of its rival receptions since before philosophy had a name for the problem. Sophocles made Odysseus a slippery cynic; Plato wanted him censored and rewrote his afterlife into a choice for the quiet private life; Virgil built a whole Roman counter-epic on the rubble of his victory; Dante damned him; the Stoic and Neoplatonic allegorists dissolved the entire poem into a coded manual for the ascent of the soul. That last tradition deserves naming precisely, because it is Masson’s own. His Odysseus — the exemplar of wisdom and virtue, the wanderer whose every trial is a rung on the soul’s ladder home — is not Homer plain. It is Homer read through the ancient allegorists who took every monster and shipwreck as a hidden lesson in wisdom and virtue, and through the long Christian-Platonist habit that inherited their method and turned the poet into a schoolmaster. That way of reading arrived roughly seven centuries after the poem itself — a reception, not a recovery. It is a magnificent reading. It is also no less a Procrustean bed than Nolan’s. He has laid the poem on the frame of paideia — of education, of the poem as teacher — and trimmed away everything that will not serve instruction, and he has done it so thoroughly that he no longer feels the frame beneath the text.
So the accusation, turned over, accuses the accuser. To call Nolan a Procrustes is to imagine oneself in possession of the sleeper’s true proportions. No one possesses them. We have only beds.
The poem fits no one’s frame
This would be a cheap point if the poem quietly fit Masson’s frame and merely failed to fit Nolan’s. But his whole objection rests on a claim he has not earned: that his reading recovers the real Homer while Nolan’s distorts it. Both are frames. Neither is the poem. And the poem, looked at squarely, is stranger and more violent than either man’s reading can hold. Set beside the exemplar of wisdom and virtue, the actual text will not sit still. The Trojan Horse that he elsewhere reads as cunning is the corruption of the very hospitality the war was fought to avenge — the guest-gift turned into an engine of slaughter, the sacred form of xenia weaponized by the man the poem calls its hero. The escape from the Cyclops ends not in wisdom but in a boast that cannot hold its tongue, and the boast kills his companions. The homecoming Masson wants us to sing at includes the hanging of twelve women. The peace that ends the poem is not earned by any virtue Odysseus has acquired; it is imposed from the sky, a literal deus ex machina, by a god who cancels a cycle of vengeance the killing has only set loose — the plain implication being that left to Odysseus and his own restored order, the bloodshed would go on. And the Phaeacians, who keep the law of hospitality more perfectly than anyone in the epic, are turned to stone for their trouble.
A poem that contains these things is not a manual of virtue rewarded. It is something harder, and better, than that. It resists the schoolmaster exactly as it resists the therapist. Masson’s Homer and Nolan’s Homer are both simplifications; they simply simplify in opposite directions, one toward the lesson, the other toward the wound. Neither is the desecration of a text that was sitting there pure. Both are what everyone who has ever loved this poem has done to it.
Why the charge is made with heat
It is worth asking why Masson’s charge is delivered with such vehemence. The heat is not incidental to the argument. It runs through nearly all of the cultural right’s complaints about this film, and while Masson’s academic composure keeps his own better controlled, it comes through the polish plainly enough — the learned version of a fury the cruder critics wear on the surface.
One does not grow angry at an interpretation; one grows angry at a trespass. The heat is the sensation of the sacred being handled without permission. And it tells us that for Masson the poem has stopped being an inheritance to be received again in each generation and has become a relic to be guarded — a body with a true length, which Nolan has violated. If adaptation is always reception, there is nothing here to be scandalized by, and the scandal is the tell.
The calm one might wish for in these debates is not merely a matter of manners. Masson’s anger is not an opinion; it is a revelation. It betrays, first, how much more the poem holds than any single frame can — a text that could not provoke such heat if it did not so plainly exceed the reading laid over it. And it betrays something in Masson himself: the almost cultic reverence he pays his chosen revision of Homer, which must serve as bedrock precisely because, beneath it, he half-suspects there is none — only, in Nietzsche’s phrase, no facts but interpretations. The heat is the defense of a fixed Homer against the vertigo of a poem that has never existed apart from its receptions.
The witness for the prosecution
And then, near the end of his own argument, Masson gives the case away. Searching for the source of Nolan’s sympathy — the tenderness toward the underdog, the disadvantaged, the one whom power uses and discards — he locates it exactly: it comes, he says, from the influence of Christianity, culturally inherited and now secularized. He means this as a diagnosis of decadence: a Christian instinct cut from its Christian root, floating free, mistaking itself for a discovery. But read it the other way and it is a confession. The compassion the film extends to its Sinon, the moral weight it shifts onto the powerful, the insistence that the victory story has a victim inside it — these are not alien impositions on the Western inheritance. They are that inheritance, working in the only idiom our moment still speaks. What he calls Nietzsche’s inversion inverted is, seen without alarm, simply the older pattern reasserting itself: the raising of the low, the stone the builders rejected, the peripheral and used-up figure who turns out to carry the meaning of the whole. This is the pattern the tradition has never stopped telling. Nolan tells it again, in secular dress, and Masson, hearing it, calls it a betrayal of the tradition it belongs to.
The ladder he cannot see
The compassion is only half of it. The thing Masson most prizes in Homer is the psychagogy — the ascent of the soul, the ladder climbed rung by rung through trial toward the home that wisdom earns. His charge is that Nolan has thrown the ladder away. But look again at what Nolan actually built. A man carries a crime he cannot set down. He ruminates; he is haunted; he confesses; he disguises himself and takes on the name and the shame of the man he wronged; he goes into a penitential exile westward across the water; and at the far end of it the house is set right and the order restored. That is not the abolition of the soul’s ascent. It is the soul’s ascent, performed in the only interior our age still credits as real. The rungs have new names — guilt, rumination, confession, penance, categories he is uneasy with and some he plainly disdains, the guilt of the victor for his war, the tender attention to the used and the discarded, which he is quick to code as politics smuggled in — but they are rungs, and they climb, and they arrive.
And the names are not even new. The interiorized ascent — the soul that mounts toward its restoration by way of remembered sin, penance, and the long westward pilgrimage of exile — is precisely the Christian refinement of the classical ladder, deepened over centuries and brought to its height in Dante. This is not a connection Masson would resist. It is one he makes himself. Reaching for the words to describe Nolan’s cruelest invention — the token forced back into the mouth that denied it — he calls it, in so many words, a Dantean contrapasso, calls it symbolically exact, calls the device that carries it superb. He reads the westward voyage through Dante’s Ulysses without being asked. He has, that is, already recognized that Nolan is working in the Dantean register, the penitential and interior Christian development of the soul’s ascent — the very tradition he honors above the rest. He recognizes the hand and still calls the work a forgery.
Which exposes what the objection has been about all along. It was never truly that Nolan destroyed the journey of the soul. Nolan made the journey of the soul, in something close to its highest Christian form. The complaint is that he made it inside the wrong frame. The guilt is there, but attached to no divine law that is metaphysically real; the penance is there, but answers to no God who is ontologically present; the ascent is there, but climbs within what Charles Taylor called the immanent frame — the secular, post-Christian enclosure Masson finds distasteful in the marrow. And so he is left in a position more painful than the one he admits to. The values he loves, the form he loves, the whole shape of a Dantean ascent toward restored order, are standing in front of him in this film — dressed in the modern, secular clothes of the age. He cannot bring himself to greet them. He would sooner call the living continuation of his own tradition a desecration than receive it from a modern unbeliever like Nolan.
He is defending the ladder against a man climbing it.
And the climb arrives somewhere. Nolan does not leave us in the wound; he keeps the restoration. Ithaca is cleansed, the household set right, the succession passed to a son who stands taller for it, the order re-founded — re-founded now on a basis that has looked its own victim in the face. That is not the dissolution of the moral world but its repair on humbler ground. Nor is it, in the end, foreign to Homer, whose own Odysseus comes home stripped of every name and disguised as a beggar — the rightful king who must be beaten and mocked at his own door, kind to the swineherd and the loyal poor, before he is known and the house made whole. The seed of mercy was already in the poem. Nolan planted it in modern soil and let it grow.
The hearts that do not sing
There remains the complaint that our hearts do not sing. It is the truest thing Masson says, and the least damaging, because it measures the film against an experience no longer available to anyone. Homer’s audience did not sit alone in the dark; they were a people gathered, and the poem gave them their own world back in the communal voice that was theirs to receive it in. We are not that people. We have been given interior lives instead — selves that carry their dramas inward — and a story that means to reach such an audience must reach it where it now lives, one soul at a time, in the register of conscience rather than chorus.
And this is precisely where Masson has it backwards. He treats the secular, psychological, inward turn as the film’s betrayal, when it is the film’s achievement — the one move that lets the ascent of the soul, the very meaning he prizes, reach the only audience there is. The interior is not where Nolan loses Homer’s meaning; it is where he delivers it. Address this generation in the communal, mythic key Masson longs for and you speak past it. Address it inwardly — in the language of guilt, conscience, and hard-won repair — and the ancient pattern lands with all its weight. Nolan has not drained the story of what Masson loves. He has done the harder thing: he has made what Masson loves reach us at all.
Which leaves the complaint where it truly belongs — not with Nolan, but with Masson’s own exile from the present age. For the singing is not gone. Nolan has done the harder and more honoring thing: he has kept the chorus alive by carrying it across, out of the gathered voice of Homer’s world and into the inner voice of ours — so that we sing the old song still, only now in the soul, each viewer alone in the dark and, precisely there, in common. This is the communion available to us: not one voice in a shared square, but one ache in a shared interior, which is the truest zeitgeist we possess. Masson calls it silence because he is still listening outward, for a unison no longer credible, recoverable by no Muse. But the song is being sung. Nolan is the one who found the register in which we could still sing it.
The living tradition
Masson came to prove a desecration. What he proved instead — without meaning to — is that the thing he loves is still alive, and still moving. He read the Odyssey as an ascent of the soul, a ladder of trial climbed toward a home set right. Then he watched Nolan build that very ladder, rung for rung — guilt for hubris, penance for wandering, confession for recognition, a restored house at the summit — and called it a betrayal, because the ladder now stands in modern ground. But a tradition is not a relic, kept intact by being kept still. It is a way of telling that survives only by being told again, into rooms its makers never saw. Homer’s song became Virgil’s, and Virgil’s became Dante’s, and each translation was also a loss and a daring — and none of them was desecration. They were the tradition doing the one thing that keeps it from dying: arriving somewhere new.
Nolan has done it once more. He has carried the oldest pattern in the West — the king brought low, the long suffering, the return that sets the world right — across the last and hardest border, into a secular age that no longer gathers to sing together out loud, and he has made it land there, in the only place we still receive such things: the interior, the conscience, the single soul in the dark. That is not the immanent frame swallowing the sacred. It is the sacred proving it can still be spoken inside the immanent frame — which is the only frame we have left to be spoken to in.
There is one thing, in the end, that Masson cannot abide in Nolan’s retelling: the missing God — the guarantor who, for him, makes the ascent metaphysically sure. Beneath the argument, and revealed through its heat, is an anxiety about that guarantor: a half-admitted fear that the old certainty can no longer simply be assumed. So Masson lashes out at Nolan as an avatar of the age, the sensibility he blames for dissolving it. But the fury is a reflection thrown back on himself — on his own buried recognition that we have in fact crossed over into a new world, and that in this world the guarantor can no longer be taken for granted. That is what he feels but will not let himself see. And so he cannot see the other thing: that Nolan’s retelling is not a demolition. The shape of the ascent is intact. The mercy is intact. The homecoming is intact. What Nolan withholds is not the ladder but the guarantee — and a ladder offered without a guarantee, to an age that has lost its certainties and knows it, may be the most honest form the old story can now take. It lets us feel, in our own idiom, the something deeply universal the poem carried all along. There is a final irony Masson cannot bear to hold: that the secular age he resents was born, in no small part, of the very Christian and Protestant tradition he cherishes — that his own inheritance produced the world he is grieving. And so he stands at the foot of the ladder, seething at the history that brought us here, unwilling to set foot on it. Nolan has simply climbed — and reaching back, offers the rest of us a hand up.