Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:
In 1940, that great and idiosyncratic French philosopher Simone Weil published an essay on the Iliad as “the poem of force”. Despite a grating and drastically misconceived couple of paragraphs contrasting it with the imaginative world of Hebrew scripture, the essay has a good claim to be the most penetrating reflection on Homer’s masterpiece written in the 20th century, and still conveys an exceptional sense of moral and intellectual concentration.
What Weil argues is that the poem is about the actions and processes that reduce persons to things. Not only are we ourselves helpless in the face of fate, we are active in reducing others to greater levels of helplessness; and in so doing, we simply show ourselves to be unfree at a deeper and deeper level. Homer’s unsparing description of human conflict (not just battle and bloodshed but malice, rivalry and terror) shows us a world in which mechanism triumphs over grace – “grace” being understood by Weil as anything that leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence.
more here.