Beyond ‘The Odyssey’: The Love That Moves the Sun and Stars

National Catholic Register, 26 August 2026

Which account of the divine is more compelling — Christopher Nolan’s Homer or Pope Leo’s Dante?

Hollywood brought us Homer this summer; Rimini gave us Dante.

Both poets speak about the things of God — or of the gods. Which one has more wisdom? Homer writing of the Bronze Age, or Dante some two millennia later, formed by the Catholic scholastics?

Homer gave us great epic poetry — The Iliad and The Odyssey. Dante — literally taking as his guide Virgil, the author of another great epic, The Aeneid — offered his own grand epic. The Divine Comedy is the story of a long journey home, complete with misadventures along the way.

One of this summer’s blockbuster movies, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, brought to the big screen his interpretation of Homer’s poem, telling the story of the long, maladventurous journey home of Odysseus after the Trojan War. The ancient world of which Homer wrote was full of religion, full of gods. But not of the Christian kind. Their gods were powerful, locked in rivalries with each other and with man, capricious, and needing to be placated.

Pope Leo XIV traveled last Saturday to the Rimini “Meeting” — formally called the “Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples” — organized each August by Communion and Liberation in the Italian coastal town. This year’s theme was taken from Dante, the last line of the Paradiso: “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Dante concludes each part of his Divine Comedy with the stars. In the ancient world, the stars were portents of the divine, if not divine themselves. Dante, steeped in Christian philosophy and theology, writes of them as being moved by Love, a personal Love, a divine Love — God who is Love (cf. 1 John 4:8).

Which account of the divine is more compelling? Homer or Dante, as interpreted by Nolan and Leo?

“‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars,’ has not disappeared; it has lost neither its vigor nor its intensity,” Leo said at Rimini on Saturday. “Yet it is a love that willingly remains silent, unlike those clamorous forces that shake the earth, the heavens and all creatures.”

“Clamorous” is an apt description of Nolan’s Odyssey. The battle scenes are deafening; the sea rages; the monsters roar; the screams of dying men are piercing. The gods of the ancient world are loud gods, all the better to draw attention to their power, to assert their position.

The ancient gods were present — meddling even — in human affairs, but also remained distant. They had their own realm, and it was difficult to reach them, to know what they desired, to gain their favor, to pacify their anger. In Nolan’s movie, the gods recede even further, appearing almost as figments of Odysseus’ imagination. Homer lifted the curtain on the gods; Nolan leaves it largely closed.

Dante’s God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ is not distant. He does not need to be pacified, as much as he brings peace. Poseidon stirred up the sea to wreak havoc; Jesus calms the storms and stills the waters. In the end, upon the Cross, God is not loud. Indeed, Jesus struggles even to speak.

“Yes, love moves!” Pope Leo continued at Rimini. But how does it move? Toward what does it move?

To follow Jesus Christ in the wake of the tragedies and new beginnings of the twentieth century indeed requires a clear awareness that evil is not overcome by evil. As in heaven, so on earth, love is the law of life and the means of redemption — the way of the crucified Messiah.

Today, Catholic culture must counter the false realism that rearms minds, words and nations, with the realism of mercy which recognizes that there can be no enemies, and that everyone, even those who oppose us, is a brother or sister to be looked in the eye and encountered in truth. Sin exists, of course, but stronger still is the redeeming love of Christ.

Rejecting a “culture of power,” an apt description of the world of the ancient gods, the Holy Father spoke instead of a sacrificial love at Rimini and the power of mercy. Is that what is most real in the universe, as Dante claims, the very force that moves even the sun and the stars?

Though Nolan’s Odyssey is set in the ancient world long before the Christian gospel, it is produced today, in a world long shaped by Christian thinking about God. Even among secular audiences, the prevailing view would be that God is more likely to be love, rather than power, much less domination.

There are glimpses in Nolan’s Odyssey of intuitions that come to fulfillment in the Christian gospel.

“The power of the sacrifice is in the cost of the person making it,” the narrator tells us, as a warrior sacrifices his own daughter so that the gods might grant “favorable winds” on the way to Troy for battle. Odysseus comes to reject this way of thinking: “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices.”

The human sacrifices of the pagan world intuited that an ultimate sacrifice was somehow necessary; the Christian gospel revealed that God would not demand this of man, but would offer the ultimate sacrifice: himself. “Don’t look for gods in men,” Nolan’s film tells us. “You’ll always be disappointed.”

The ancient search for gods in men was not entirely wrong; it was wrong about the gods and the men. Yet inchoately it pointed toward a god who could be found in creation, the God-made-man, Emmanuel.

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