Pregledni rad
The Role of Divinity in Telemachus' Maturing
Marko Pranjić
; Hrvatski studiji Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
The theme of the author’s research mostly concerns the Telemachy, the first four books of the Odyssey which are entirely attributed to Homer. The attention is focused to the place and role of divinity in the maturing of a young person – Telemachus. He is beloved son of the world voyager, king of Ithaca, Odyssey, and his faithful wife Penelope. Already as the newborn he was deprived of his father who was unable to avoid the Trojan War. Therefore Telemachus was growing up without his father’s warm but strict guiding hand. His mother didn’t have enough time for him since she was ruthlessly courted by man that thought they could marry her and take over Odysseys’ estate and royalty. In this difficult situation for Telemachus’ education, the author of the Odyssey tries to find the light of hope for this ‘orphan of war’ and the child of broken family, that was besides all this exposed to death threats whenever courters felt that his quest to find his father, endangered their plans of their marrying his own mother and usurpation of the estate. For the author of the Odyssey this situation was so difficult, risky and unpromising that he could not let people resolve it, no matter how powerful, wise, clever and resourceful they were, but he called upon Gods for their resourcefulness and ingenuity which were very well known among the Old Greeks in the similar situations. Old Greeks considered certain gods to be good allies, while the other were a part of the opposite group and brought troubles. Besides evil people, the gods were also the source of the evil. People prayed to the good gods, and avoided the evil ones. The first ones were asked to be their allies in order to liberate oneself from the evil people and gods, or at least to relieve their revengeful attack. With casual mentioning of Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Had and Hermes in the paper, the most mentioned characters are impersonations of Athena – Mentes and Mentor, Odysses’ friends of many years, from who Telemachus, strained by life problems, asks help and advice in order to save his life and act properly in extremely difficult situations. On the contrary to modern, secularized man, the Greek didn’t think about separate profiling of the sacral and profane, i.e. they didn’t pathologically divide the spiritual from the worldly. Both are constantly and equally represented in his life, and consequently it was unthinkable to his consciousness to think about two sides of the same reality, without making their faces and reverse mutually assume each other, encourage, overlap, cause and upgrade each other. Besides, it is very conspicuous that ‘the spiritual’ relationship towards divinity has no specific time or specific occasion. It is simply part of the everyday life, integral part of the fullness of life. The man without divine assistance would be utterly exposed and would find himself in the great uncertainty of being a human in its fullness, because life is to complicated, demanding, challenging, compelling in order to function just as an immanence. Constant and intensive connection to divinity is its existential attitude from which it derived, grew, matured in all aspects and created life in all his levels. The author of Odyssey talked in this way about divinity probably from his own experience and convictions, so he didn’t see a reason for thinking about it in any other way, feeling and experiencing its central character to whom he refers- Telemachus and that he completely wants to ‘socialize’ into the environment where he should function faultlessly and through him send a message to next generations.
Ključne riječi
Odyssey; Telemachus; Mentes; Mentor; Athena; education; educational values
Hrčak ID:
86482
URI
Datum izdavanja:
27.9.2012.
Posjeta: 1.594 *