Why the Odyssey Still Hits Home: Homer's Poem and Human Longing

Raymond Hain, a philosopher at Providence College, recently argued in an interview with the National Catholic Register that the most important thing Homer's Odyssey shows us is "the importance of home, of the challenges and gifts bestowed on us by the permanent and stable things in life."[^1] The interview is brief, but Hain's claim opens onto a question that neither literary scholars nor psychologists have settled: why does a Bronze Age poem about a Greek king trying to get back to his island keep finding readers across every subsequent civilization?

The answer has less to do with narrative craft than with anthropology.

What the poem actually depicts

Odysseus spends ten years fighting at Troy and another ten trying to return to Ithaca. He refuses the immortality Calypso offers him. He passes through the land of the dead. He withstands the Sirens, survives Scylla and Charybdis, and watches every one of his men die. At the end of all of it, he arrives home disguised as a beggar, finds his house occupied by men competing for his wife, and has to reclaim it by force. Lovis Corinth's 1913 painting Odysseus in the Battle With the Suitors captures that final confrontation: the hero standing in his own hall, drawing a bow against men who had made themselves at home in his absence.

Odysseus is trying to return to something specific: a wife who has waited, a son who has grown up without him, a father who has withdrawn in grief, a bed he built himself around a rooted olive tree. The poem insists, with unusual stubbornness, that none of these can be substituted. Calypso is more beautiful than Penelope. Her island is more pleasant than Ithaca. The offer is objectively better by every hedonic measure. Odysseus refuses it anyway, and Homer presents this refusal as the poem's moral center.

The structure of the longing

Catholic philosophical anthropology supplies the vocabulary for what Homer depicts but does not theorize. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, argued that the human will is ordered by nature toward a final end: beatitude, understood as complete possession of the good the intellect recognizes as the highest good.[^2] This ordering is not optional. The will cannot be at rest in anything less than what it was made for, and it registers every partial satisfaction as partial, which is to say as insufficient. The restlessness Odysseus feels on Calypso's island reflects the will's structural refusal to mistake a lesser good for the final one.

Hain's observation about "the permanent and stable things in life" maps directly onto this Thomistic framework. Home, in the Odyssey, is not a pleasant location. It is the place where Odysseus's relationships, duties, and identity are real rather than simulated. The suitors have filled the palace with noise, consumption, and competition. They have occupied the form of domestic life while gutting its substance. What Odysseus comes home to reclaim is not the building but the order of loves that the building is meant to house.

Why this is a psychological argument, not only a literary one

Paul Vitz, whose work in Catholic critical psychology challenged the therapeutic culture's habit of centering the self as its own reference point, argued that healthy personhood requires the person to be ordered toward goods that transcend the self.[^3] The Odyssey dramatizes what happens when that ordering holds under extreme pressure. Odysseus is tempted repeatedly by versions of selfhood that would be easier: the lotus-eaters offer oblivion, Circe offers pleasure, Calypso offers permanence without obligation. Each temptation is, at its core, an offer to stop being ordered toward home and to settle into something more immediately comfortable.

The poem's psychology is, in this sense, relentlessly realist. The losses are real, not incidental to an otherwise enriching journey: his ships, his crew, years of his son's childhood, the trust of his kingdom. Homer is making a claim about what genuine fidelity to one's proper end actually costs, and he refuses to soften it. Vitz's critique of what he called "self-worship" in modern psychology finds its ancient mirror here: the self that organizes everything around its own comfort will be available for every temptation the Odyssey describes, and will eventually accept one of them.

The suitors as a counter-image

What makes the suitors failures is not vice, which some of them genuinely display, but disorder: they have mistaken Ithaca for a place where their appetites can be satisfied indefinitely. They eat Odysseus's cattle, drink his wine, occupy his hall, and compete for his wife's hand with no intention of actually governing the kingdom or caring for its people. They are, in Aquinas's terms, men whose appetitive powers have overrun their rational ones, men who have allowed concupiscence to substitute for deliberate choice about what they are actually for.[^2]

The contrast Homer draws is between a man who knows what he is ordered toward and men who do not. Odysseus suffers. The suitors feast. And yet the poem's moral logic is entirely on Odysseus's side, because suffering in the service of a genuine end is a different kind of experience than pleasure in the service of no end at all.

What endures

Hain's reading in the National Catholic Register points toward something that Catholic mental health practitioners and formation directors encounter in concrete ways. The people who struggle most persistently are often those who have lost, or never found, a stable account of what they are ordered toward. Anxiety, in its clinical presentation, frequently has this character: the person is not simply fearful of specific threats but is disoriented about where they belong and what their life is for. The Odyssey gives that disorientation a name and a counter-image simultaneously.

The counter-image is a man who has been at sea for twenty years, who has made serious errors, who arrives home filthy and unrecognized, and who still knows, without hesitation, whose bow he has the right to draw. That certainty about one's proper place and proper claim is what the poem presents as the fruit of the long journey. It costs everything. It produces a man who cannot be replaced by a simulation of himself.

The Odyssey has survived three thousand years of readers because it depicts, with the candor that only great narrative achieves, the one problem every human generation has to solve: how to remain ordered toward a true home when the alternatives are more immediately comfortable, when the journey is longer than expected, and when the people who should have waited are running out of patience. That problem needs what Hain calls "the permanent and stable things in life," not a therapeutic technique or a self-help program — the things the poem refuses to let Odysseus abandon, even when abandoning them would have been easier.

The question Homer poses to every era that reads him is whether the reader can say, as clearly as Odysseus does, where home actually is.

References

[^1]: Hain, R. (2026, July 20). 'The Odyssey': What the classic reminds us about our true home. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/interview/the-odyssey-raymond-hain-interview

[^2]: Aquinas, T. (1948). Summa Theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. I-II, Q. 1–5 (on the final end and beatitude); I-II, Q. 77 (on concupiscence and the overrunning of reason by appetite).

[^3]: Vitz, P. C. (1977). Psychology as religion: The cult of self-worship. Eerdmans.