Odysseus, Washington, and the Psyche That Has No One to Imitate

Taylor Swift, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Elon Musk ranked among the most-searched people on earth in 2024. Each commands audiences in the hundreds of millions. Consuming, subscribing, watching: that is the manufactured experience, and the transaction is economic and emotional rather than moral or formative.

A recent commentary in the National Catholic Register by Alberto Fernandez, occasioned by Christopher Nolan's new film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, took up figures as different as George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte to ask why our cynical era struggles so acutely with heroism.[^5] The piece is careful to note that we do not live in a fully post-heroic age, but that modernity has genuine difficulty receiving heroic figures, whether sacred or secular. The substitute for true heroes is a supply of idols who offer entertainment or the appearance of prestige. The more demanding question is what, precisely, is lost when a culture loses the capacity to receive heroes, and why that loss is not merely an aesthetic inconvenience but a disorder in the formation of the person.

What the classical hero actually demanded

Fernandez's piece opens with Bonnie Tyler's 1984 lyric, "Where have all the good men gone?", and moves quickly to Nolan's Matt Damon as a morose, regret-filled Odysseus.[^5] Scholar Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer Nolan used, observed that the film "has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory."[^5] That loss of interest in glory is the diagnostic moment.

The classical hero was defined by arete, excellence of character and deed that invited imitation. Homer's Odysseus does weep for the fall of Troy, but his endurance across 20 years of temptation and hardship was offered to ancient audiences as a moral weight to be picked up and carried. Washington's decision to inoculate his Continental Army against smallpox, ordered in February 1777 and repeated at Valley Forge the following winter, accepting short-term risk for long-term capacity, was readable to his contemporaries as practical wisdom under real cost.[^6] These figures were presented to be weighed morally, not simply felt emotionally.

Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, situated this in the moral psychology of the passions. The Summa Theologiae distinguishes between movements of the soul that orient it toward genuine goods and the mere enjoyment of spectacle, which leaves the appetites unchanged.[^1] Admiration, in Aquinas's sense, moves the soul and disposes the will. Spectatorship, organized around consumption, does not.

What Nolan's film reveals

Fernandez notes that Hollywood films are populated with weary, doubting protagonists: Nolan's Oppenheimer and his Odysseus are related figures, both tormented by the weapons they unleashed.[^5] This is a real artistic tendency, and Fernandez is fair to observe that Homer's Odysseus is not a pagan Rambo; the original text includes moral complexity. But there is a difference between a hero whose complexity is part of what makes him worth imitating and a protagonist whose remorse clouds every act of virtue and valor.

Jordan Peterson, working within a Jungian framework, argues that heroic myths encode culturally transmitted maps of meaning that orient individuals toward order and purpose.[^2] The concern is not that Nolan's Odysseus feels shame. Homer's does too. The concern is whether the figure, as presented, can still function as a template for action, whether encountering him demands something of the person watching.

The test for any candidate exemplar is whether encountering them requires the observer's own will to engage. A hero whose suffering calls the observer to reckon with what they themselves might be capable of bearing functions formatively. A protagonist whose suffering is presented primarily as spectacle (curated, immersive, emotionally saturating) exhausts attention without orienting it.

The formation problem this produces

Paul Vitz's account of modern psychology's turn toward what he calls "selfism" describes a closely related dynamic: therapeutic culture increasingly locates the good within the individual's own affective states, displacing older, transcendent models of the self, including the kind heroic exemplars once provided, with a self-referential standard of authenticity.[^3] This is not cultural nostalgia: it carries a specific anthropological claim, that persons form their characters by habituation toward imitable exemplars, and when those exemplars disappear or become aesthetically inert, formation stalls at the level of appetite.

Within the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person developed by Craig Steven Titus, Vitz, and William Nordling, the human person grows toward genuine goods by means of the cardinal virtues, shaped through the ongoing habituation of reason and will, a process that requires encountering something worth imitating, something that costs the imitator something.[^4] Celebrity spectatorship, as a cultural default, arrests that process. It provides the emotional register of admiration without the formative friction genuine admiration requires.

Appetite repeatedly stimulated without being ordered upward toward reason and will does not remain neutral: it habituates the person toward passivity, toward expecting that meaning arrives from outside as a sensation rather than being constructed through choices that cost something. The clinical consequences of that arrested formation include depression, anxiety, and the existential emptiness Vitz has associated with narcissistic burnout, the self turned inward, expecting satisfaction it has no means of generating.

Ignatius: the passions ordered, not erased

Iñigo López de Loyola spent his twenties chasing exactly the kind of glory celebrity culture now manufactures on demand: courtly ambition, military renown, and the romantic conquests he read about in chivalric fiction. A cannonball shattered his leg at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, and during the long convalescence that followed, he asked for more of the same romances to pass the time. The household had none on hand. What it had instead was a life of Christ and a book on the lives of the saints, and boredom made him read them.[^7]

Daydreaming about winning a noblewoman's favor left him excited while he indulged it and dry once he stopped. Daydreaming about imitating the saints left him consoled, and the consolation lasted.[^7] The passions themselves had not changed; only their target had.

Ignatius did not become less ambitious: he founded the Society of Jesus and became, by any honest accounting, one of the most consequential men of the last five centuries, not because he suppressed his desire for greatness but because Christ, encountered as the exemplar worth imitating, took that desire and did something with it no chivalric romance or algorithm could.

Beyond emotions

Fernandez's commentary is right that the problem is not simply cynicism about heroes but a structural difficulty in receiving them.[^5] He traces that difficulty through cinema and historiography without naming its distinct cause. Catholic Christian anthropology can name the mechanism more precisely.

Heroes function formatively only when a culture presents them as figures to be weighed morally, not just consumed emotionally. The same dynamic applies to Nolan's Odysseus: the question is not whether the film is conservative or liberal in its subtext, Fernandez notes that both sides have claimed it, but whether the Odysseus it presents can still call the viewer to something.[^5] If shame has displaced valor entirely, the figure may be fascinating without being instructive.

The framework offered by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus treats the person as someone whose appetites are ordered, through habituation, toward goods that reason can recognize and the will can choose.[^4] A person who has encountered no figure whose choices cost them something, who has consumed admiration without being moved to imitate anything, has missed one of the primary mechanisms by which the will is trained to pursue genuine goods rather than merely feel positively toward them.

The heroes available to any given culture are the culture's answer to the question every person eventually faces: what does it look like to bear difficulty well, to choose at cost, to become something? As entertaining as Taylor Swift and Cristiano Ronaldo are, they do not have the full answer. The saints, and perhaps the virtuous pagan, do.

References

[^1]: Aquinas, T. (1981). Summa theologiae (English Dominican Province, Trans.). Westminster, MD: Christian Classics. (Original work composed 1265-1273). See I-II, qq. 22-48 on the passions in general, and q. 32, a. 8 specifically on wonder (admiratio) as a movement of the soul oriented toward knowledge, distinct from mere sensory pleasure.

[^2]: Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge. See chapters 2-5 on heroic myth as culturally transmitted orientation toward order and meaning.

[^3]: Vitz, P. C. (1977). Psychology as religion: The cult of self-worship. Eerdmans. See the discussion of "selfism," the location of the good within the individual's own affective states, and the displacement of transcendent models of the self by a self-referential standard of authenticity.

[^4]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Rational. In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 371-407). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^5]: Fernandez, A. M. (2026, July 22). Odysseus, Washington, Napoleon and heroes in an unheroic age. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/features/odysseus-washington-napoleon-and-heroes-in-an-unheroic-age

[^6]: American Battlefield Trust. Washington inoculates an army. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/washington-inoculates-army

[^7]: Ignatius of Loyola. The autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola (chs. 1-3). Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://ccel.org/ccel/ignatius/autobiography/autobiography.v.html