Upstanding fellows in Ancient Greece welcomed any uncomely stranger out of respect for the divine. Homer’s Odyssey opens with this virtue of welcome, xenia, when Telemachus encounters the goddess Athena in the form of a stranger. While “brooding” on his father’s absence, Telemachus glimpses the loitering goddess-in-disguise and grows “vexed” at his own household’s inhospitality. Ashamed, he invites his guest in to receive rest and nourishment before requiring any explanation.
This virtue of unconditional welcome does not dwell in us, we who mill around in a culture of curtness, walking past each other, hurrying in and out of any foyers for fellowship. These days, my suburban neighborhood walk includes mere grimaces of greeting, accompanied occasionally by that too-typical nod of half-acknowledgment. On Sundays at my hometown’s community church, I walk into an atrium resembling a theater lobby, perhaps pass by a few familiar faces, and file into an auditorium before hurrying out again in pursuit of lunch. Even on a Christian college campus, my automatic posture is to stroll and sup with those who think like me, while the class Communist or charismatic merits, at best, a passing greeting.
We carry a spirit of curtness into our churches, communities, and cultural arena alike: we passerby people rarely enact or encounter the xenia prized by the Greeks.
Such spirits sprout from pride. A neglected stranger could not vex a prideful Telemachus: he would deem the guest unworthy and the duty of hospitality not his. A prideful Telemachus would offer a shrug to the disguised divinity. Such pride bypasses the opportunity to serve, to learn, to look one’s error in the eye — hence Paul’s command in Romans 12: “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.”
Pride opposes association and harmony, thereby breeding foolishness and “severing relationship,” according to Cherie Harder, president of the Trinity Forum. Pride prohibits the “epistemological modesty” necessary for fellowship — as Harder shared in her September 30th talk on wisdom at Grove City College, each individual must be willing to admit that he could be wrong to learn from and live among others. To cultivate epistemological modesty and therefore reinforce fellowship, each individual must “tolerate ambiguity.”
Tolerating ambiguity, Harder holds, is not to embrace “squishiness” about Truth but to be “open to the possibility that one’s own interpretation is open to question and can be further honed and enhanced by the input of others.” Modesty of this sort renders a readiness to hear and slowness to speak like that of James 1.
After her talk, Harder lingered on the steps of Grove City’s Harbison Chapel. She did not flit away but spoke with students, holding the gaze of each with a gracious smile. Harder imaged intellectual hospitality, which she defined in a Comment Magazine article as an invitation to engage with new ideas. In Harbison, she declared the virtue lately quite “underrated.”
Intellectual inhospitality echoes the past year’s literal closing of doors — a sound which seems to reverberate through the hallways of our shared life. Inhospitality is the new norm, if not its own new virtue — hence the all-too-common guilt-tripping and holier-than-thou bickering over initial stay-home orders, mask mandates, and now vaccines. Hence what Harder recognizes as a culturally advocated “rise of conspiracy thinking, muddled thinking, political and philosophical incoherence.” Hence our tendency not to welcome or dialogue but to “cancel” and close doors and hearts in all areas of our cultural arena.
Harder offers that an understanding of “loving disagreement” may remedy this spirit of curtness and inhospitality. Dialogue with disparate ideas (but without disrespect) displays hospitality. Harder cited the examples of the Inklings Society and Dorothy Sayers’ similar “Mutual Admiration Society” to show that disagreement can uplift.
She shared, too, of her own experience at Harvard, where she roomed with the President of CRU and the President of the Harvard Civil Liberties Union. All three loved and dialogued with each other, Harder shared: “We would go at it, saying, ‘Why is it that you think that?’ Because it was a wonderful way of learning to discover: is there something that I’ve missed? And is there something in her argument that I can learn from?” Harder’s “enriching” experience testifies that college can be a place for loving disagreement, not mere canceling. Even at a Christian institution like Grove City, we often-prideful students must uphold such modesty and hospitality in our pursuit of Truth.
Pride makes us passerby people, but grace-filled dialogue invites fellowship with that ancient virtue, xenia. As Homer and Hebrews 13:2 suggest, we may encounter divinity in disguise through xenia, “entertaining angels unawares.”
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
