Beyond Fate

Many people today are afflicted with a sense that they cannot change things for the better. They feel helpless, constrained, caught ? in a word, fatalistic. Beyond Fate examines why. In her characteristically lively prose, Margaret Visser investigates what fate means to us, and where the propensity to believe in it and accept it comes from. She takes an ancient metaphor where time is "seen" and spoken of as though it were space and examines how this way of picturing reality can be a useful tool to think with - or, on the other hand, how it may lead people into disastrous misunderstandings. By observing how fatalism expresses itself in one's daily life, in everything from table manners to shopping to sport, the book proposes ways to limit its influence. Beyond Fate provides a timely and provocative perspective on modern life, both personal and social.

Beyond Fate is the story of Tim Storey, a teacher from Port Washington who suddenly receives intuitive information that he believes may lead him to the whereabouts of four people who mysteriously disappeared. A college coed fails to return home in Green Bay where her car is later found in a parking lot. A commercial fishing boat out of Port Washington, manned by three men, fails to return to port on a clear day in December after fishing on Lake Michigan. Tim becomes obsessed with the information he seems to have been chosen to receive when he and a friend mistakenly wander onto the Clam Lake military base in Northern Wisconsin while deer hunting. The interrogation they endure doesnt seem to fit the error of trespassing, leading Tim to believe there is more to the base than appearances allow. Unsure if the random clues refer to the coed or the fishing boat, he begins an investigation that leads him to the upper peninsula of Michigan and several startling discoveries. Tim meets the enigmatic Palmer, a conspiracy theorist and paranormal investigator who teams with him to solve the riddle of the missing in a journey that will change Tims life forever.

The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths explores and compares the most influential sets of divine myths in Western culture: the Homeric pantheon and Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Heath argues that not only does the God of the Old Testament bear a striking resemblance to the Olympians, but also that the Homeric system rejected by the Judeo-Christian tradition offers a better model for the human condition. The universe depicted by Homer and populated by his gods is one that creates a unique and powerful responsibility – almost directly counter to that evoked by the Bible—for humans to discover ethical norms, accept death as a necessary human limit, develop compassion to mitigate a tragic existence, appreciate frankly both the glory and dangers of sex, and embrace and respond courageously to an indifferent universe that was clearly not designed for human dominion. Heath builds on recent work in biblical and classical studies to examine the contemporary value of mythical deities. Judeo-Christian theologians over the millennia have tried to explain away Yahweh’s Olympian nature while dismissing the Homeric deities for the same reason Greek philosophers abandoned them: they don’t live up to preconceptions of what a deity should be. In particular, the Homeric gods are disappointingly plural, anthropomorphic, and amoral (at best). But Heath argues that Homer’s polytheistic apparatus challenges us to live meaningfully without any help from the divine. In other words, to live well in Homer’s tragic world – an insight gleaned by Achilles, the hero of the Iliad – one must live as if there were no gods at all. The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths should change the conversation academics in classics, biblical studies, theology and philosophy have – especially between disciplines – about the gods of early Greek epic, while reframing on a more popular level the discussion of the role of ancient myth in shaping a thoughtful life.

The words, Religion and Philosophy, perhaps suggest to most people two distinct provinces of thought, between which, if (like the Greeks) we include Science under Philosophy, there is commonly held to be some sort of border warfare. It is, however, also possible to think of them as two successive phases, or modes, of the expression of man’s feelings and beliefs about the world; and the title of this book implies that our attention will be fixed on that period, in the history of the western mind, which marks the passage from the one to the other. It is generally agreed that the decisive step was taken by the Greeks about six centuries before our era. At that moment, a new spirit of rational inquiry asserted its claim to pronounce upon ultimate things which had hitherto been objects of traditional belief. What I wish to prove, however, is that the advent of this spirit did not mean a sudden and complete breach with the older ways of thought. There is a real continuity between the earliest rational speculation and the religious representation that lay behind it; and this is no mere matter of superficial analogies, such as the allegorical equation of the elements with the Gods of popular belief. Philosophy inherited from religion certain great conceptions—for instance, the ideas of ‘God,’ ‘Soul,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘Law’—which continued to circumscribe the movements of rational thought and to determine their main directions. Religion expresses itself in poetical symbols and in terms of mythical personalities; Philosophy prefers the language of dry abstraction, and speaks of substance, cause, matter, and so forth. But the outward difference only disguises an inward and substantial affinity between these two successive products of the same consciousness. The modes of thought that attain to clear definition and explicit statement in philosophy were already implicit in the unreasoned intuitions of mythology.

This book is the first in-depth examination of revenge in the Odyssey. The principal revenge plot of the Odyssey --Odysseus' surprise return to Ithaca after twenty away and his vengeance on Penelope's suitors -- is the act for which he is most celebrated. This story forms the backbone of the Odyssey. But is Odysseus' triumph over the suitors as univocally celebratory as is often assumed? Does the poem contain and even suggest other, darker interpretations of Odysseus' greatest achievement? This book offers a careful analysis of several other revenge plots in the Odyssey -- those of Orestes, Poseidon, Zeus, and the suitors' relatives. It shows how these revenge stories color one another with allusions (explicit and implicit) that connect them and invite audiences to interpret them in light of one another. These stories -- especially Odysseus' revenge upon the suitors -- inevitably turn out to have multiple meanings. One plot of revenge slips into another as the offender in one story becomes a victim to be avenged in the next. As a result, Odysseus turns out to be a much more ambivalent hero than has been commonly accepted. And in the Odyssey's portrayal, revenge is an unstable foundation for a community. Revenge also ends up being a tenuous narrative structure for an epic poem, as a natural end to cycles of vengeance proves elusive. This book offers a radical new reading of the seemingly happy ending of the poem.

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