Odysseus and the Sirens

When I was writing about the notion of exile as a kind of ideal, I posted here about Christian appropriations of the story of Odysseus/Ulysses and I mentioned an essay by Hugo Rahner on this topic. I've recently been looking at Rahner's book, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery and, as a result, I'm becoming more and more interested in the Odyssey and its interpreters. It seems that the legend of Odysseus' encounter with the sirens is particularly important in this context. This did emerge in the paragraph from Gerhart Ladner's article that I quoted in the earlier post:

[T]he Christian stranger on earth, the peregrinus, could be said to travel through strange and awesome seas in a ship, which is the Church, affixed to the mast of the Cross, absorbing the sweet and far from meaningless Siren songs of the world, without being deflected from the right course.

But Ladner's comment misses out one very significant aspect of the story: the fact that Odysseus had his men fill their ears with wax so that they couldn't hear the voices of the sirens, whereas he himself chose to experience their voices while having himself tied to the mast so that he could not act upon his desire to succumb to them. Rahner cites Clement of Alexandria as an example of someone who places importance on this aspect of the myth:

There is a passage in the writings of Clement that has considerable relevance here and is indeed of the utmost importance for the whole history of Christian humanism. In it the writer seeks to defend his own breadth and generosity of mind against the more narrow-minded Christians of the day and his conviction that Greek culture should in no wise be denied a place within the Christian scheme. The incident of Odysseus and the Sirens proves an apt text for his discourse. Certain kinds of petty and hypercritical Christians, he avers, are like the companions of Odysseus who stop their ears with wax in order not to succumb to the sweet peril of the Sirens. Odysseus had been a different kind of man. Knowingly and with his ears open, he had approached the Siren's isle without yielding to its temptation.

There is something about this that I like. Indeed, from our perspective, I really LOVE the fact that this is a myth about VOICES and how we might respond to them.