Homer and Plato, together again...

     'The real culprits, and the only ones, are the gods, who live "exempt from care," while men are consumed with sorrow. The curse which turns beauty into destructive fatality does not originate in the human heart. The diffuse guilt of Becoming pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the Immortals,' Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad.

     Here we find a key, perhaps, to Plato's decree of exile for the poetes who would thus sow corruption not simply by the unworthy mimetic rendering of unworthy gods, but also by the displacement of responsibility from the human heart to the whimsy of those unworthy immortals. 

     Here too we find a theological crux that remains alive to this day. More about that anon - for now, note that Plato offers a radically new vision of virtue and the formation of the soul inclined to the Good. There may, for all that, be a way through the thicket, one which will allow us to have our Homer and keep some fellowship with Plato. 

     To find that way, we need Augustine as revealed by James Wetzel. We also need Paul. 

     It's a tangle, no?