Whatsoever Things Are Beautiful: Christianity’s Trojan Horse
“Leaving the remnant, the companions of famous Odysseus, enclosed in the heart of Troy-town, in the meeting-place, hidden within the horse which the Trojans themselves had dragged up to their citadel. There the horse stood while the people hung about it arguing this way and that, uncertainly.”
—Homer’s The Odyssey, Book VIII
Ours is something of a de facto illiterate culture. In practice, people know how to read; the issue is that they don’t read. And if they do, they certainly don’t read well. Thus, somewhat predictably, it wasn’t until Christopher Nolan’s recent film adaptation of The Odyssey that many people began to realize, perhaps for the first time—“Wait a minute! The Odyssey is mythological? It didn’t actually happen?”
Indeed, who would have thought that a story brimming with such fantastical elements as a sheep-tending cyclops, swine-keeping she-witches who turn men into swine, and a man-eating sea monster with six heads was myth rather than historical fact? Perhaps more people were caught up in the poem’s massive cultural and historical zeitgeist than were readers of the story itself.
Around this point, folks also began to discover that the Trojan Horse is just as fictional as Homer’s famous one-eyed monster, Polyphemus. Indeed, to some degree, fictional to both Homer and history alike. In The Odyssey, for example, the Trojan Horse appears for only a few lines, either seen through the mists of various flashbacks or heard in the fleeting verse of some song. It isn’t even mentioned in The Iliad. Though Troy was indeed a real ancient city, little to no evidence exists suggesting that its walls fell how Homer described—and much less that a giant wooden horse was involved.
There’s something ironic about the fact that one of the things people ‘remember’ most about The Odyssey—the sacking of Troy via the Trojan Horse—doesn’t even occur in either The Iliad or The Odyssey in the way most people think it does. The famous scene as folks commonly understand it is actually from Virgil’s Aeneid, written some 700 years after Homer’s epic. And the ancient adage, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”—is also owing to Virgil rather than Homer.
And yet, irrespective of whether they’ve even read Homer or Virgil, nearly everyone is aware of the story of the Trojan Horse and what it symbolizes: deceit, trickery, and subversion. Much like how the Greeks breached the once-impenetrable walls of Troy by hiding in the ‘gift’ of a wooden horse, with time the phrase ‘Trojan Horse’ has since become something of a subtle colloquialism in itself, laden with hidden meaning, now synonymous with masking malicious intent under the guise of a benign, even beautiful, exterior. Indeed, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
There is, however, a breed of Trojan Horse which abides in our world to this very day, one that I do not think malicious or deceitful in the slightest—for indeed, it cannot be. Its voice can always be heard; its loveliness ever on display; whether in the soft music of lapping ocean waves, not to mention the transcendent beauty of music itself; or the pale light of a cloudless night over rolling hills, a baby’s coos and laughter and twinkling smile, a homecooked meal, the warmth of a mother’s embrace, or simply the charm of a good book. Cunning, compelling, and powerful though it may be, this Horse possesses nothing so much as even approaches lies or wickedness, for it rests in the very heart of all that which can be said to be good, true, and beautiful, for it is Beauty itself.
We’re talking about true beauty: the variety which stems, not from the eye of any mere beholder, but from the Lord God Himself, who is Himself the seat of all things lovely. True beauty is not subjective, but objective. Goodness, truth, and beauty adorn the eternal, holy One. When a man dismisses outright the glory of the setting sun or a piece of soul-piercing music, it has everything to do with his disordered affections—and perhaps his need for new glasses, a hearing aid, or a new heart entirely—rather than with the beauty itself.
In Philippians 4:8, Paul implores believers to meditate on whatsoever things are beautiful. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Before coming to Christ, we had, at best, but a dim concept of what true beauty was. Paul is well aware of this, and so he encourages his flock to make it a regular practice of quite literally rewiring their patterns of thought with those things closest to the heart of God. In this way, those things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and the like, become the melody of this divine dance we have been taken up into. By thinking on “these things,” the believer’s mind, heart, and affections are being transformed, like an out-of-tune piano in the presence of a tuning fork, to God’s standard of beauty—which is to say, the only standard there is.
But what of the man who does not know Christ? Beauty is among the unbeliever’s great enemies, whether or not he yet realizes it. For though he should chase beauty all his days, so much so that he be haunted by it, the enemy of God must at some point come to terms with the fact that beauty should not and cannot exist in the godless, homemade cosmos he has so carefully crafted for himself. His soul, made in the image of God, longs for the beauty that his fallen mind so ardently rejects in the knowledge of Christ. He wants beauty; but he hates God. And if he refuses to repent, he shall have neither. The beauty will betray him in the end.
In a universe without God, the fountain and source of all that which is lovely, there is no beauty, and certainly no goodness or truth. How can there be? These three need, like all other things, an eternal foothold in an infinite personality to possess any actual meaning. In a purely materialistic worldview, like the one inhabited by the atheist, there exists no language to describe such things, much less contemplate them.
In our age, beauty, much like the Trojan Horse, has been hauled helter-skelter into the city square as though it were an artifact of antiquity. No one knows whence it came or what to do with it, though it holds their eyes and hearts in a vice-grip. As Homer writes of the beguiled Trojans, “There the horse stood while the people hung about it arguing this way and that, uncertainly.” The issue isn’t that people don’t want beauty: they simply want it without God. Only, as everyone discovers in the end, there is no such thing.
In his memoir, A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken explains how it was beauty that eventually led him, even as an atheist, not only to his wife, but to God Himself. He writes,
“And of course [there was] beauty: the beauty that was for him the link between the ships and the woods and the poems. He remembered as though it were but a few days ago that winter night, himself too young to even know the meaning of beauty, when he had looked up at a delicate tracery of bare black branches against the icy glittering stars: suddenly something that was, all at once, pain and longing and adoring had welled up in him, almost choking him. He had wanted to tell someone, but he had no words, inarticulate in the pain and glory. It was long afterwards that he realised that it had been his first aesthetic experience. That nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty.”
For the believer and unbeliever alike, both made in God’s image, true beauty is, as C.S. Lewis once observed, that whisper from a far-off country we have never visited, though longed for all our lives. In the end, however, it is only the one found in Christ who knows where the whisper comes from, from whose lips the very words themselves proceed.
Augustine famously said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God—how very true. Years later, after having found their rest in Christ, Sheldon writes how he and his wife, Davy, moved from being mere onlookers to stepping into the beauty itself: “We wished to know, to savour, to sink in—into the heart of the experience—to possess it wholly.” Now that they were both wholly in the possession of Christ, all the beauty they had for so long pursued was being thrown in as well. Even as the Greeks stepped into their wooden horse, Sheldon and Davy stepped right into the Beauty: into Christ, having been united with Him through faith.
Should the unbeliever never in his life find the beauty his heart longs for, he is driven mad; and, perhaps far worse yet, should he taste true beauty, he is driven to despair by the lie that it is meaningless. And yet, deep down in the soul that his mind darkened by naturalist lies must itself deny the very existence of, he knows and is terrified by the reality that true beauty—and its Author—very much does exist.
The unbeliever can go on hating the good that he may continue in his evil, and even deny that which is true to justify the false—beauty, on the other hand, is a hard passion to dispose of. Where would we be without it? We cannot but be held transfixed by beauty because we were made to behold the beauty of the Lord. Beauty is Christianity’s Trojan Horse—not because it smuggles falsehood and violence into the heart of men, but because it wheels into his affections that which is ultimately and utterly true. The Horse stands resplendent in the midst of us all, day to day pouring forth speech, confronting its onlookers with the pressing decision to either repent, be made clean through faith, and live, or else refuse and perish forevermore.
“Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:10-12).
It matters not whether the walls of Troy fell as Homer described. What does matter is that the wicked will fall on that last Day precisely as the word of God has declared long ago.
For there is coming a day, that Great Day, when the Horse standing still shall at last be split. Pouring forth from its riven sides will thunder both terrible beauty and Divinity upon those who wished for beauty only. Crouching within this Horse is no horse at all, but a roaring Lion—the Lion of Judah—whose sword is presently drawn and glistening in the light of His glory, poised to strike, devour, and consume all workers of unrighteousness once and for all at the very moment the signalling trumpet sounds. Indeed, “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
All photos are the property of Universal Pictures, in partnership with Syncopy Inc. The Odyssey (2026) was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema.
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