Simon Weil calls Iliad “purest and loveliest of mirrors.” In this mirror one can see the terrifying nature of force of the age-old human drive that turns others into realities that will never disappear. The fundamental challenge of human development is to reconcile and integrate those opposing forces of Eros and Thanatos in ourselves and in our relationships, which is possible only if we firmly believe that love is more powerful than hate and life more powerful than the corruption and destruction of death. This great evil, where does it come from? How does it still enter the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? “A day comes,” Weil writes, “when fear, defeat, the death of beloved comrades make the soul of the warrior succumb to necessity.” Achilles, who wields the power of life and death even at a distance, is stopped by only one event: the death of his dear friend, Patroklos, whom Achilles has allowed to go into war to hold the Trojan’s back in his absence. Thus, the death of Patroklos ends Achilles’ belief in the controllability of his own force. Achilles recognizes that he has received everything he asked for, but laments that there is no pleasure in this “since my dear companion has perished, Patroklos, whom I loved beyond all other companions as well as my own life.” War ceases to be a game, an expression of intention, a way to inflict his revenge. War becomes a reality and force. In Achilles’ case, the warrior realizes he must die avenging Patroklos’s death.

The  radical depletion of energy in his confrontation with necessity is what Weil refers to as affliction: “A simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold.” In this “uprooting of life,” Achilles plunges into darkness, because “there is nothing to love.” “Scorn, revulsion and hatred” became his mode of being. Achilles defiles himself, mourns inconsolably in isolation, refuses to eat or drink, rages uncontrollably, and kills without distinction, mercy, or even a purpose. He simply takes on the attributes of his universe: cold, indifferent, violent, lethal. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave. He circled ten times around the city of Troy with dead body of Hector tied to his chariot.

No one saw the great Priam enter. He stopped and clasped the knees of Achilles, kissed his hands. The sight of a human being pushed to such an extreme of  suffering chills us like the sight of a dead body. These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them – they too will bow the neck in their turn. The most beautiful friendship of all, the friendship between comrades-in-arms, is the final theme of the Epic. But the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war, is the friendship that floods the hearts of mortal enemies.

As Simone writes in her essay: “Attic tragedy, or at any rate the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is the true continuation of the epic.” The Iliad is not about war, it is about love. We are capable of creating tragedies, we also live in illusions of power and Eros, the church is no exception. If we believe there is no hate in us, we delude ourselves. It takes lot of graces for victors and the vanquished are brought equally near us; under the same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener as well. This needs humility and receptive ears to listen. The sense of human misery gives the Gospels that accent of simplicity that is the mark of the Greek genius, and that endows Greek tragedy and the Iliad with all their value. Well considered the two principal sources of corruption in Christianity: the “terrible violence” of Yahweh the God of Israel and the unfettered power-lust of imperial Rome. Waiting for God Simon Weil writes: “To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the centre of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centres and that the true centre is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the centre of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbour.”