... among some of the great Greek and Latin Fathers, men, like him, steeped in the Greek and Roman cultural inheritance, there were those who, like him, observing the mast and its sail-yard, pondered the matter deeper. They saw that the ship, the mast, the voyagings, the odysseys and argosies, the perils and ordeals that were part and parcel of the classical tradition, could and should be taken as typic of the Church's voyaging. They had a perception of the vessel of the ecclesia, her heavy scend in the troughs of the world-waters, drenched with inboard seas, to starboard Scylla, to larb'rd Charybdis, lured by persistent Siren calls, but secure because to the transomed stauros of the mast was made fast the Incarnate Word.

All this: the barque, the tall mast, the hoisted yard, the ordeals of the voyage, has in various ways filtered down through the centuries. It could not very well be otherwise for, after all, there is but one voyager's yarn to tell.

True, many, I suppose most, of the formative theologians and pastoral figures in the Church appear to have had a decided disinclination to admit or at least to employ the foreshadowings and analogies other than those found in the sacred Hebrew deposits.

But in the long run and certainly for us today it is impossible not to see the validity and rightness of Gregory of Nazianzus, of Basil of Caesarea, of Gregory of Nyssa, of Clement of Alexandria, of Ambrose of Milan and of various other less known figures in perceiving that much in the Odysseus saga (and other classical deposits) had correspondences in the voyaging of the Christian soul and in the argosy of the Son of God.

... saw, none the less, amidships the image of the same salvific Wood. And not the yarded mast only, but the planking and timbers composing the vessel, so of the chief timber, the Keel.

- David Jones, An Introduction to The Ancient Mariner in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings