Hospitality’s ancient origins

When we hear the word ‘hospitality’, we might think of the welcome shown to guests or even the ‘hospitality industry’, but interrogating its meaning brings us to the very foundation of ethics. That, for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, is the encounter with ‘the face of the other’ that says ‘do not kill me’. When our nomadic ancestors encountered the face of the stranger, the foreigner, the exile, what did they see? A potential friend or ally? An enemy come to do them harm? Or a demon or god in disguise? When the stranger asked for food and shelter, did our ancestors provide? Or did they drive him away, perhaps even kill him before he could kill them?

The tension in the encounter is borne by the word hospitality itself. The word ‘host’ shares its root with the word ‘guest’. Both can be traced back to the Latin ‘hostes’, which also lends us ‘hostility’. These tangled meanings suggest not only the difficulty of the act of hospitality itself, but the possibility that roles may be swiftly reversed. When the stranger is welcomed in, the host says ‘my house is your house’ and generously provides for his guest. The lord of the house, in other words, becomes the servant. But what if this inversion became permanent? What if the homeless wanderer supplants the lord?

That is the danger. Yet the Greek and biblical traditions exhort us to accept the stranger. The Greeks even had a word for the ritualised custom of hospitality. ‘Xenia’, which means ‘guest-friendship’. When individuals were bonded under its auspices, they divided a clay tablet, each taking half. When an individual appeared years, or even generations, later at the other’s door as a stranger, they had only to produce their half as proof of the bond. The Greek word ‘symbolon’, from which we derive ‘symbol’, means ‘thrown together’, and is derived precisely from this custom. Its antonym, by contrast, ‘diabolon’, meaning ‘one who throws across’, is the name given, in the Greek New Testament, to Satan. But if the devil divides, it is, in the biblical tradition, the Logos – the Word of God – that gathers the broken together.

The early life of the biblical patriarch Abraham was uneventful. Until he was 75, he dwelled in Ur of the Chaldeans, part of Mesopotamia. Then he was called by God to leave home for Canaan, land that would be promised to his descendants, the Israelites. If Abraham was to become ‘father of nations’, he would first have to become a stranger. Unless he could depend upon the hospitality of strangers as he drove his flocks through foreign lands, he surely could not provide a dwelling-place for his people. He was an old man, sitting outside his tent, watering his flocks beneath the oaks of Mamre – an oasis he loved – when three men appeared on the horizon, silhouettes under the desert sun. Abraham did not hesitate. He addressed them as God and welcomed them into his tent where he and his wife, Sarah, hurriedly prepared a meal. These men, angels as it turns out, bestow on the couple the extraordinary news that Sarah will conceive their first child. A miracle, given their advanced age.

Hospitality, as practised by Abraham, manifests the impossible belief that the stranger who knocks might be God in disguise. This idea is cross-cultural. The Upanishads, for instance – part of the Hindu Vedas – teach that the guest is God. Ovid, moreover, tells the story of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travellers, knocking on doors at night, rewarding the hospitable and cursing those who were not. Indeed, all travellers in ancient Greece fell under the protection of Zeus, god of gods. In Plato’s dialogues, moreover, Socrates identifies the stranger – the guest-friend – with the divine.

Socrates typically occupies the role of the stranger himself, consistently baffled by the customs and conventions of his native Athens. On trial for corrupting the minds of the Athenian youth, he announces he is a ‘stranger’ to the language of the courts, emphasising his otherness at a moment of danger to his life. In Plato’s dialogue, The Sophist, however, it is a character called The Stranger – a visitor from the Greek city of Elea – who occupies the position of the guest-friend. The Stranger is a disciple of the influential Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, who he reverently calls ‘our father’, but he will shortly challenge his master’s theories of being and non-being, asking those present not to accuse him of ‘parricide’. Plato was also influenced by Parmenides’ theories; that he should give this iconoclastic stranger a central role in his dialogue while Socrates keeps silent is a measure of his hospitality. The philosopher, we might say, is one who gives hospitality to strange and new ways of thinking.

The story of this parricidal stranger is reminiscent of the mythical King Oedipus, another wanderer from abroad, cursed to kill his father and marry his mother. In the second of Sophocles’ Theban tragedies, we find Oedipus – now aged and blind – arriving in the village of Colonus, near Athens, with his daughter Antigone. The pair rest in a grove sacred to the Furies, goddesses of revenge, where an offended villager tells them to leave. Oedipus, however, is reminded of a prophecy delivered by Apollo that he will die in such a place, and demands to speak to Theseus, King of Athens, the village’s ruler. When Theseus arrives, Oedipus offers him, as a gift, his ‘wretched body’. It is the hospitality of Theseus to accept this infamous stranger’s request. At the end of the play, with Oedipus honourably buried in the grove, Theseus receives a boon in return. The grave ensures the future protection of his kingdom. Oedipus, the tragic hero cursed beyond earthly measure, now becomes a heavenly blessing to Athens, a foreign city.

The Bible tells a strikingly similar story. In his old age Abraham, another wanderer, albeit uncommonly blessed, requests that the Hittites, the inhabitants of Canaan, the land promised to him by God, grant him land for a family tomb. ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying-place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight’. The Hittites agree. A cave is purchased at Abraham’s insistence where Sarah and later Abraham are buried. The story not only gives the Israelites an historic claim to the land, but reminds them that they were once strangers in need of hospitality. Liberated from servitude in Egypt, the Bible instructs the Israelites to pay the hospitality of the stranger back in kind. ‘The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ The Torah, in various permutations, asks this repeatedly. In fact, no other commandment is made more often. Judaism’s ethic of hospitality finds fullest expression in the mouths of the prophets for whom the wrath of God waxes hottest against those who ‘have oppressed the stranger wrongfully’.

This is surely the origin of Christ’s greatest commandment: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In the Gospels, Christ is the stranger par excellence, an outsider from Galilee, a prophet unwelcome even in his own country. He has, he says in Luke, ‘no place to rest his head’, but relies instead upon the hospitality of the other. In Matthew, he identifies himself with all foreigners: ‘I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ But like Oedipus he was burdened with a guilt beyond earthly measure.

The corpses of crucified criminals were typically thrown to dogs, but according to John, one Joseph of Arimathea – a rich man and member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council that condemned Christ to death, and a secret disciple – asked Pilate, the Roman governor ‘that he might take away the body’. On the evening of that Friday, with the Sabbath approaching, the burial was swift and unceremonious. It was the greatness of Joseph’s hospitality that, at risk to his own life, he gave up the room that was to be his final resting-place to this homeless wanderer. It is hospitality’s crazy expectation that the other, wretched and in need, might just be our salvation.