Homer's Women

The Journey to God

Nigel Bruce

Jul 31, 2023 • 1 min read

Warwick Goble: Jack and the Beanstalk, from "The Fairy Book" (1913)

Pantheistic worlds like the one in the Odyssey barely survive today beyond India -- the Hindu religion has many gods (albeit manifestations of Brahman) and many fables. The Jewish religion’s distinctive difference was in installing just the One God, which suited a people who wished to differentiate themselves from the others around them.

But with the creation of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, the distance between God and humans was reinforced, not diminished. Perhaps to compensate, that distant One God was redefined in more human terms through intermediaries, the prophets and disciples.

Jacopo Bassano's "The Last Supper" (early 1540's), in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. Interestingly, Jesus here seems pushed to the center-back.

Like the Greek heroes before them who made it all the way to Olympus, like Heracles, the prophets became divine. In these new “expansionist” religions, we all became the children of God and the prophets became the way, the truth and the light, the journey linking us to God.