Greek mythology confuses me. I have the feeling that there is a mysterious treasure there, but each time I delve into it, I get lost in this teeming gallery where gods, demigods and larger than life humans rub shoulders and clash. I would have liked to receive an initiation into this world at school. I often feel that, as they say, my culture misses it.
Would I have been receptive, as a teenager, to such an educational offer? I want to believe so, but I’m not sure. Our modern societies, in fact, no longer value such knowledge. So I might have been absent, like the students of Réjean Bergeron, if I had been invited to such an experience.
A long time professor of philosophy in college, Bergeron, a few years ago, proposed, as an extracurricular activity, a reading and reflection workshop on Homer and Greek mythology. On the scheduled day of the first meeting, no student showed up. The disappointment of the professor, who discovered the work of Homer as an autodidact after his college studies, is painful.
“Knowing and observing year after year that these young adults are deprived of such a cultural background and of this precious heritage saddens me to the highest degree”, he writes in Homer, life and nothing else! (The blue hours, 2022, 280 pages), the beautiful essay he devotes to the Greek bard to console himself for his educational disappointment.
Bergeron settled in Greece, on the island of Sifnos, for a few months, to get in the mood. He reads theIliad and theOdyssey, two texts by Homer written around 750 BC. J.-C., and comments on them freely to bring out timeless meanings. Along the way, he mixes autobiographical fragments with his philosophical meditation that show the resonances of the Homeric work in the life of a Quebecer 2800 years later.
When Ulysses, after twenty years of warrior and seafaring wanderings, finally returns to Ithaca and sees his old father, Laertes, bent under the weight of the hard years, he cries. Bergeron, then, continues with the touching account of the last moments of his own father, a retired worker from the Chicoutimi foundry. It’s nice.
The essayist never imposes a lesson; rather, he seeks to say, gently and testifying to his admiration for the Homeric work, that “the fact of being in contact with this great literature allows young and old to develop a rich inner life, full of subtleties and finesse, which will allow them to better grasp the complexity of the world in which they have or will have to live, instead of believing, as is often the case these days, that everything can be reduced and understood from a few stereotypes gleaned here and there from the market of opinions”.
L’Iliad recounts a final episode of the Trojan War, in which combatants — mainly Achille and Hector — settle accounts. The work, which depicts heroes “tormented, torn, inhabited by a certain number of contradictions”, insists on the quest for a beautiful death, which must be glorious to nourish fame and to inspire poets.
In L’Odyssey, Odysseus, one of the warriors of Troy, wants to return home to find his wife and son, to move from chaos to harmony, but he comes up against a host of obstacles. For Luc Ferry, who talks about it beautifully in The wisdom of myths (Plon, 2008) and in Greek mythology from A to Z for dummies (First, 2020), this work is “the matrix of the whole history of Western philosophy” because it poses the philosophical question par excellence: “what is a good life for the mortals that we are? ? »
On the path to wisdom, notes Ferry, two pitfalls await Ulysses: the temptation of immortality and the forgetting of his world, of his identity. The nymph Calypso will offer him immortality, but Ulysses will refuse it since, as a philosopher, he has understood, summarizes Ferry, “that a successful mortal life is far superior to a failed immortal life”, that is to say say lived in exile from oneself. L’Odyssey no longer sings of the beautiful, glorious death, but of the beautiful life, in the consciousness of being mortal.
A supporter of a humanist approach to education, Bergeron, for years, has been one of the most convincing advocates of general education — literature and philosophy — at school and in CEGEP. This cultural education, he explains in a series of texts first published in newspapers and reproduced here at the end of the book, allows students “to get out of their tribe, to get away from their simplistic and naive vision of the world , to get up “. Discovering the great texts in class is a bit like going back today, like Ulysses, on a journey to the land of the human condition.
I am happy, finally, to have followed Professor Bergeron’s workshop.