Roger Scruton, wise man of England, writes on a famous speech from 1968. Its subject was immigration, and it cost its author his career.
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T. S. Eliot. It is not one of his best lines, but he used it twice—in Murder in the Cathedral and in Four Quartets—and in both places its prosaic rhythmlessness reinforces its sense, reminding us that our exaltations are invented things, and that we prefer inspiring fantasies to sobering facts. Enoch Powell was no different, and his inspiring fantasy of England caused him to address his countrymen as though they still enjoyed the benefits of a classical education and an imperial culture. How absurd, in retrospect, to end a speech warning against the effects of uncontrolled immigration with a concealed quotation from Virgil. “As I look ahead,” Powell said, “I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” These words were addressed to an England that had forgotten the story of the Aeneid, along with every other story woven into its former identity as the “sweet, just, boyish master” of the world—to borrow Santayana’s luminous phrase. It is hardly surprising that Powell’s words were instantly converted to “rivers of blood,” and their speaker dismissed as a dangerous madman.Scruton is right that the old stories are no longer remembered by most. Yet how to speak of these matters at all without invoking them? All the lessons of the ages are encoded in them.
Lacking common stories, misunderstanding is certain. What is left, but to try to teach your stories to those who misunderstand? And yet Aristotle warns us that without that common understanding, ethical discussions are doomed to failure.
H/t Arts & Letters Daily.
That was an excellent post and an excellent link.
I agree that the lessons of the ages are encoded in the old stories, both mythic and historical, and that it's difficult to have useful discussions on vital and painful matters without a shared stock of them.
When, at the peak of the cartoon jihad many people said that the right thing to do was to publish them because "I am Spartacus!" they showed in a veery concise way that they had learned something vital from an old story.
Too many of the vital stories are forgotten, and I don't know what to do about it.
We should probably invite Victor Davis Hanson into this thread to make a gesture at what he thinks went wrong in the teaching of classics and what he thinks should be put right.
How do you give important new stories to people who don't have a sound context, who may know nothing of Spartacus but a great deal about the "grassy knoll" and the second gun in the JFK conspiracy, people whose sense of what is reasonable and whose methods of interpretation are corrupt?
You could try writing what you have to say in poetry, and hope people will latch onto the rhymes and pick up the sense later. Enoch Powell tried that, and did a good, accessible job on the poetry. It didn't work. It was just one more piece of his archaism.
J.R.R. Tolkien got a much better response by luck with tales he wrote to indulge his hobby of inventing languages, and C.S. Lewis also did better with his moral tales of rehashed classical mythology for English Christian children. (I'm certainly a warm admirer of them both.) But to do that seems to require rare talent, rare education (which Enoch Powell had too) and a huge slice of fortune.
Without that luck, you can do a bald recitation of what just happened in front of everybody's eyes and not be believed. Paul Greengrass did a great job on United 93 (2006), but its IMDb discussion board is choked with conspiracy theories anyway.
As someone with a PhD in English (probably as close as it gets to a classic education these days), this is a subject near to my heart. One problem is that thanks to postmodern academic leftism, the received wisdom in the university departments that should be teaching these stories is that the very idea of a common stock of stories is oppressive. Whose stories do we tell? Ancient Greek and other dead white males? What about women's stories? Minorities? Those stories are either included--which crowds out the classic stories--ignored--which arouses protests and complaints of "oppression" and "exclusion"--or included when they fit with the classic stories--which arouses protest about "coercion" and depriving women and minorities of their identity yada yada yada. Until that received wisdom changes (and I don't see it happening in my lifetime) the best we can do is read those stories ourselves and teach them to our children.
Not to speak for VDH, should he wish to say something here, but I think what went wrong with classical education is that we stopped doing it.
You can read the roots of the conflict that stole classical education in the works of G.K. Chesterton. Reading Heretics and Orthodoxy, you get a sense of where the successful attempt to undermine the West as an ideal arose. Unsurprisingly, they prove to be the predecessors of the worst aspects of the 20th century: an attempt to develop the Marxist "New Soviet Man," an attempt to develop the superman (then without Nazi connotations, as there were not yet any Nazis), an attempt to find 'the inner light' (which means, Chesterton correctly noted, 'that Jones shall worship Jones'), and the Romantic movement to replace reason with feeling as a guide to the right.
These causes played in with what Fred discusses above: multiculturalism, and its allies, as a theory of what should be taught. I went to a school that still offered Latin as an elective -- no one now thinks of it as a requirement -- but what you were encouraged to take instead was modern languages.
French or Spanish can be very useful, of course, and I have nothing against either or any other such study. Yet, even in my mother's day, rural schools in Tennessee required some Latin -- and you read some of the classics in the original, in high school. 'Every schoolboy' knew of Xenophon, which indeed every schoolboy should know -- it's a fine, fine story, just the sort of thing boys like to read. And so boys did read, more and better than they now do. In the Grim's Hall comment thread on "When Peace Comes," boy scout leader Ron Fox notes that he sometimes reads the old manuals I mentioned to the boys -- but they can't handle the quality of the writing, and so cannot read them themselves, nor understand the language when it is read to them.
If you read newspaper or other 'low culture' accounts of the Alamo dating to the 19th century, they always compare it to Thermopylae. When I was taking my intro history courses in college, not one of the students had ever heard the word Thermopylae. They knew the word Spartan, but it only meant that you didn't have a lot of furniture.
We've got a lot of work to do.
The problem is less so a matter of teaching the classics than it is disseminating them as a lingua franca of cultural imagery. It is a top down sort of operation, but the problem is that, even where they are taught, they are not circulated among the people as a commonality. A hundred years ago, the community was narrow and common, most of all. Most people’s cultural heritage were the classics taught in school and, because of that narrow foundation, it was in that common heritage that the forms of the only available culture were expressed.
The Bible is probably the best classical artifact (in terms of utility,) because it not only allowed philosophical and moral foundation, but it also was a treasure of Proper Identification: the story of Job, for example, is one that virtually everyone at some point or another has identified with, either personally (how alike are my circumstances to Job’s) or by contrast (how much better my circumstances are than Job’s,) and it is in the identification and, some cases, imitation, of those roles that the most common of people absorb and respond to a classical heritage, even if they themselves are illiterate; it is a classical heritage disseminated from pulpits everywhere. Which means it is a classical foundation to everyone in earshot. It is that common and that is where the absolute utility of these cultural foundations lies: not in the professors and the students in higher education but circulated among common people.
But for the most part, these common people have become the most mobile generation of workers in human history, starting with the automobile factories, and then, because of the automobile culture, following where the jobs were, and in this a cultural heritage can find no root. Movies and radio and television most of all became our popular culture and, because it is aimed (by the market) to the lowest common denominator, it isn’t given to the depth of interpretation or imitation by those it is to sustain in the same way the classics were so well suited for.
DB, I certainly can't argue with the proposition that much of our popular culture is debased and stupid. However, there are important exceptions. The Harry Potter books, for example, are heavily allusive to Latin and to Roman history and mythology. Severus Snape, for example, is named for the emperor who conducted the last great persecution of the Christians and told his sons (in effect) "Don't worry about the people; take care of the army. That's where your power comes from." The new Battlestar Galactica also makes use of classical allusions. Gaius Baltar, the traitor, takes his name from the real name of the mad emperor Caligula. The Beatles are still listened to (as witnessed by sales of the album "1" a few years ago). Paul McCartney was listening to Bach during the recording of the Sgt Pepper album. Bob Dylan (who I admit is old and appeals mainly to baby boomers) read Faulkner and histories of the Civil War makes extensive use of mythological and Biblical allusion in his lyrics. So the situation may not be as hopeless as it seems.
I'm also not so sure that an elite familiar with our cultural heritage is not at least somewhat of a bulwark against barbarism. The fact that that elite is no longer trained in such things I find worrisome since they are the ones who will wield the most power and most influence the culture.
Very interesting subject! You are indeed hitting the head of the nail. Classical culture is a sign of identity of the entire Western World, and should be taught, I am afraid against the will of pretty much of the Left.
These words were addressed to an England that had forgotten the story of the Aeneid
Worse it is Spain, which has forgotten the story of El Cid, though G.K. Chesterton did not.
Its hard for me to read about Powell and not think that he longed for a certain Gentlemanly order in which the leaders of tomorrow met and shared the same curriculum at Eton and other public schools. And in the 19th century, the Gentlemen worried about the claptrap the newly literate were reading -- the romances and gothics.
So it seems to me that at least three factors need to be considered before bowing to our ancestors. One is the changing literacy rate -- not everybody read, let alone read what they ought. Two is the dominance of the literate class in the public debate -- Powell was misunderstood in part because those reporting on him were not like him. Third is increasing choice. Virgil is not merely competing today with movies and game systems, he's competing with novels, something that did not exist by some accounts until 400 years ago. I haven't read the Aeneid, but I have read Dostoevski, Carroll, Kafka, Dickens, Melville, Twain, Garcia Marquez, etc. Could Thomas Jefferson say that? ;)
Fred,
I don’t know if I was making the point that popular culture is devoid of classicism or stupid either one; it is what it is. The problem is its efficacy in large and your examples are pretty indicative as well: these things are left allusions and have no greater significance than allusions because the larger ground is no more fertile than it is.
The phenomenon when it works is more circulatory than anything else: classicism, as a living force, is both the ground (the foundation) and the ceiling aspired as well, and is nourished both above and below. The problem is, for the common people, like I said, their culture is a pop culture that has no illusions of being anything other than that, which means that the ground in this case cannot sustain the efficacy of a cultural system, classical or otherwise. All the “shots from above” of allusions in popular culture are left just that: occasional (if resonant, briefly) intrusions into an empty status quo, that rarely take root anywhere.
But what a classical culturalism used to do was maintain an “authoritative” range of subject and reference which was, while effective, at the same time, rather narrow as well. The exclusionary nature of that was, while deep enough to be interpreted by those capable of such a thing, it was also all the material one had to work with. As such, in a constant state of dissemination and reconsideration, from above and from below, it was the circulatory nature of a living culture, a culture able to adapt by those cultural artifacts instead of simply enshrine them.
What I think you are rather wistfully wishing to do (and I certainly catch myself feeling the same way on occasion) is to enshrine these classical cultural artifacts in a world that has no particular use for them any more; a world that has drifted in such a direction and for so long there is no real means of rectifying it, because these things grow with us, and cut off from that, they become what they always were, relics with no power. They were instilled of that power by us, at both the higher and lower levels of our society.
The problem is that there is no reason to maintain them outside the “educated” culture unless they can be made relevant to the whole. But for them to be relevant on the ground, that would mean narrowing, rather than widening, the artifacts in our culture, which is probably more than most people (outside the church) are willing to do. By now the horse is already out of the barn. I’m not any happier about than most things in this disassociated world, but it is what it is.
DB,
I'm still not sure I agree. The classical allusions I alluded to above are more than just "window dressing" or "shrines" to antiquarian relics. Understanding Latin words or Roman history deepens one's understanding of Harry Potter and vice versa. Before I read Harry Potter, I had never heard of Septimus Severus. I did research and learned who he was. As a result I better understood the character of Snape and the relevance of Roman history. True, most readers of Harry Potter won't do that, but the potential is always there. In other words, the power still exists waiting to be unlocked by those with the interest and the gray matter to do so. The same is true of the other examples I used.
I'm also not sure I agree with you about the world having no use for the old stories. I taught the Odyssey for years, and my students truly enjoyed the stories. Many of them understood and identified with many of the characters. In other cases, they gained insight into themselves from differences with the characters, women, for example, who wondered at Penelope's self sacrifice and devotion or stupidity depending on their point of view. My point is that the common people have been robbed by the elite of stories that, if still known, would still retain their power. An elite that still knew and disseminated those stories would help.
Fred, (I apologize; I swore I had posted this last night)
The question of efficacy is relative. The Iliad was perceived as a religious text while Homer’s means of severing the prevailing Orientialism down to an absolute profile would be the guiding principle of all classical Greek culture for hundreds of years. And that is just a poem. This was its absolute efficacy, at that moment, when it became a foundation for Greek society at the highest and the lowest levels of that society. The Gospels had a similar effect, as did the Koran. And far from simple references and allusions, these cultural artifacts literally bent societies through the prisms of their sensibilities. This is an awfully effective cultural classicism.
Greek mythology would fall in and out of favor in Western society as time went on, but its resurrection was, while nowhere near its original power, powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that. Until it was finally integrated into classical canon that it reemerged to counter to begin with. Only Nietzsche would be able to energize it with even remotely the same glamour it used to exercise on the imagination.
Compared to that—and in the relative curve of its efficacy—no matter how resonant the Iliad is to college students now, it is only resonant because we tell them it is so. (In this way it is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere caused a riot. Fond as I am of it, I never feel compelled to pummel someone while listening to it. But this is the difference, now, between the truly resonant and the canonical resonant. No one had to tell those people to riot. Someone had to tell me this was the reaction, though, at the premiere.) This is the value of authoritative texts (These are Important) but this value is not necessarily intrinsic, and this is no more apparent when the choices for our social value are so wide open with movies and the internet and the plethora of cultural objects of lesser and greater value—how many people, with all these things, can manage to identify with the classics anything other than superficially at best?
Some, certainly, but those are very likely the same number as would always take to them. But beyond that, most of these classical artifacts, regardless of their value are little more than raw material for popular culture, whose only valuation is popularity. And there is nothing more fleeting than popularity. It is voracious.
"...powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that."
Would you expand on that comment? I understand you to mean, "Because it was an alternative to the Biblically-based culture that was the main form of expression at the time of the early Renaissance (and other periods when the Greek myths became popular)."
However, it could also mean, "because the values it teaches are anti-social," which is literally true if you draw from the Iliad the lesson that Achilles is the model of a great man.
I'd like to know which of those you mean, or if it was something else you wanted to say. It seems like an interesting point, but I'd like to be clear about it.
"...it is only resonant because we tell them it is so..."
There's certainly some truth to that. On the other hand, I have a copy of the Fitzgerald translation as an Audio CD collection. I've probably listened to it a dozen times -- and it's a LONG piece, the unabridged Iliad, when read out loud.
I can't imagine I'd have read and re-read the Iliad that many times. Listened to as an oral poem, however -- that is, presented as it was intended to be -- it is gripping. I wonder if part of the problem has been that we've tried to teach the great oral poets as if they were meant to be read. Students have plenty to read (so long as they read the right things); but providing them with the occasion to hear it would be a real change from what they think scholarship is about. They'd need a printed copy to which to refer, for the purposes of writing papers etc., but it might be a good way to introduce them to the real power of the poet.
DB, Once again we're in disagreement, though not totally. True, the Iliad and the Odyssey and even (outside the Deep South) the Bible do not have the compelling resonance they once had. They are, with the partial exception of the Bible, no longer religious texts. However, I seriously doubt Powell worshipped the ancient Roman gods or thought of the Aeneid as a religious text. But the stories still resonated for him. And I think you misunderstood my Odyssey example. I didn't need to tell my students that the story and characters had resonance. I merely needed to help them appply techniques of reading that allowed them to understand the story and the characters. The resonance took care of itself. As for your Stravinsky example, I may not riot when I hear the piece, but that doesn't mean I can't feel at least some of the power that caused that riot. In addition, rioting over music has continued to happen. There were riots in America and Britain at the film "Blackboard Jungle" when the theme song "Rock Around the Clock" first played. Even more recently, violence at Rap concerts was quite common. Knowing the history of "Rites of Spring" and hearing its power can provide insight into the "Rock Around the Clock" and rap riots. Those riots, in turn, demonstrate the continued relevance of "Rites of Spring" and its history. The point being that while "Rites of Spring" or "Rock around the Clock" may seem innocuous now, music qua music can and does still cause riots.
Grim, I couldn't agree more. When I taught TS Eliot's The Wasteland, I never had their attention more than when I read the "Lil" section with the cockney accent in which it was written. And reading Flannery O'Connors "Good Country People" with the characters' Southern accents brought that story alive for the students more than simply reading words on the page.
An interesting discussion, but I don't know whether Fred or DB have answered one of the questions I think is presented in Grim's post. How acceptable would it be to teach the story of the Odyssey though not with Homer's words. A retelling.
Powell would probably be aghast and his literary allusions would probably still be mistaken. But if the stories have independent value, as Grim argues, as sources of ethics or common culture or truth, then the plot has a value beyond the precise words used. I've told my four-year old a simplified version of the Odyssey at bedtime over several nights. She enjoyed it a lot and BTW recognized that the story of Circes was "stolen" from the movie Spirited Away. Its an adventure story that probably doesn't deserve to wait until the skills and patience to read Homer exist. But if the stories are to be stripped down, why not simply subsitute the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, both books that I feel are ethical, true and possibly more part of the overt common culture than dead Greeks?
There's nothing wrong with providing simplified versions to introduce children to the stories and the poets. Illustrations can be quite helpful in that regard -- one of my great treasures, as a boy, was an illustrated, simplified version of the Beowulf (just the dragon-slaying-and-death-of-the-king part).
There are good reasons not to substitute Homer out in favor of retellings, whether simplified versions or "Harry Potter" style writings. Here are a few:
1) There has never been an equal to Homer. No one writing in his tradition has quite managed the power and unity of the Iliad. Other traditions have their own glories, and may excel in certain areas, but in the type of work that Homer made, there has never been a better.
2) Part of the power of the Iliad is that it shows us that we are part of an ancient line. "The West" means something, something real. Reading Plato's earlier works, anyone raised in America can see how similar the ancients are to us.
That leads to another benefit:
3) Having that sense of location can help you judge a bad "new" idea when it is presented.
Imagine waking up in a forest, which you've never seen before, and having no idea where you were or how you got there. You are given a teacher, though, to explain things. He introduces you to several storytellers. One says, "You are in the forest of Kent." The other, "This is a forest in Colorado." Another tells you that you are really in France.
You could sort out which (or if any) of these was right, perhaps, but only with some real cleverness and effort. Many might not be capable, and end up believing they were somewhere they never were -- and therefore that the road "home" lay in exactly the wrong direction.
Now let us say your teacher has instead a balloon, and can take you up out of the forest so that you can see the land and the rivers and mountains. You've got the stories, but now you can test them against the actual lay of the land. You can see which of the storyteller correctly told you were the river would lie, and where the mountains would be.
This is like teaching the tradition, versus teaching only modern versions of the stories. In the latter case, you offer students a stripped down Homer, or even the real Tolkien, alongside writers with Marxist or utlitarian visions of ethics, and other writers who propose an amoral vision. The student can only with difficulty sort out which one is right.
Showing him the ancients, though, locating these things in time, is like showing him the lay of the land. The Catholic Church says of utilitarianism, for example, that it is the modern form of hedonism. If you don't know of the ancient hedonists, you may take that statement at its pop-culture value, i.e., as an empty slam against utilitarians.
If you do have the tradition to draw on, you can evaluate the argument. Is utilitarianism really a form of hedonism? I think the answer is that the Catholics are right here, but students can see for themselves.
They can also then see where hedonism led, and if they decide the comparison is valid, accurately predict the problems for utilitarian philosophers. Chesterton's works -- mentioned earlier -- were remarkably prescient about where the philosophical trends arising in the modern age were going. I don't know of anyone else writing in his era who so correctly predicted, a hundred years out, where the various philosophies we think of as "modern" would end up (even into the age of "postmodernism").
He could do that because of his firm grounding in the Western tradition. He saw how similar these "new" movements were to old ones, and could tell you where they would end.
He could do that because he knew the lay of the land. You can only get that sense by learning history with your literature. The images in the stories encode the lessons, but if you don't know where each lesson goes, you are still not all the way home.
It is good to be able to see the landscape, and to know where the poets were when they made their tales. You can see what lay behind you that way, and therefore discern false trails. If you can do that, you may also find the true path -- if there is one.
Grim and Fred both (let’s see if I man enough for this one)
Grim, its interesting your assumption that the Greek renaissance was necessarily based on a matter of “teaching values” which is hardly something anyone could expect from the Greek gods, would raped and incited and abandoned mankind without restraint. Most of the resurrections of Greek mythology were anti-social in a very literal sense: a reaction to the blanket morality that came from Christianity and, before that, hard as it is to believe, Roman nationalism’s own morality. It was this anti-social nature (naked girls on the halfshell, midnight orgies, Dionysus on the rampage) that re-energized these myths in the West.
In fact, it is classical canonism that sought to change the very anti-social nature of these things by drawing them into itself and, to make them “valuable and worthwhile,” stripped away all the pagan essence of them; they themselves stole a considerable amount of these things’ power in the process. I have an old textbook from the turn of the century somewhere around here that positively shines at overlooking the rather.. unfortunate… means that Zeus went about begetting his many children on the earth. And we are extolled to celebrate the virtuousness of Zeus cutting his father’s testicles off with a sickle. This was a textbook for schoolgirls, I might add.
Which brings us back to Fred and my point about rioting about music: it is not that it doesn’t occur any more, but that our response to those same things now are not the same. No one riots to “The Blackboard Jungle” any more. The purpose of including a great many works of art in the classical canon is the effect they had at the time—regardless of any particular moral or philosophical value (the flap over Whistler’s The White Girl and Nocturne in Black and Gold are pretty good examples, no matter what they may have meant in the future of art. I love Whistler’s paintings, but if you are looking for anything other than what is right there on the canvas in it, you look in vain)— but by enshrining (that word again) them, we seem to want to think we can make people react to them as they were. And you simply can’t. You can’t make people react to something they don't react to. And in a free society, even less so.
And I’m not sure that is necessarily a teacher’s job. It is an artist’s job. War Music by Christopher Logue, the rather uneven and, to my mind, half successful “translation” of the Iliad, for all its faults, is probably without peer in presenting the tense and brutal action (in GBH, in particular) in the poem itself. Logue is not screwing around; he is bringing the poem to the people, as it were, but by very artistic means; he takes liberties as he will and risks enormously in the process. But the distinction between Logue’s Iliad and Lattimore’s is everything, even though Lattimore works straight from the script. This is about as good a contrast between canonical resonance and true resonance as I can think of.
And in this, a classical education may not be as necessary as we would think. Nietzsche was enormously influenced by the Dionysiaca, a text long excluded from the classical canon that he ran across covered in dust in the library. He found in its true resonance and from it would give Greek mythology its last (for now) big shot in the arm. It is in the value we find now and instill in these things now that is what is important, and someone telling you This is Important is hardly effective.
I realize I am taking shots at some sacred cows, and I’ll be the first to admit they are my sacred cows as well. But, recognizing that, and the circumstances they exist in now, makes them easier to use. Because they are meant to be used. And if they are not used then they have no value at all.
Like PD, I have told my child the stories of the Odyssey and Beowulf (he particularly liked the Dragon part). I have also read to him the Harry Potter series and The Hobbit. So I see no harm and lots of benefit to simplifications and popular literature, especially at a young age. Having said that, though, I agree with everything Grim said. I would just add that reading the original stories produces an appreciation of and facility with language that simplifications simply cannot provide. I realize that most of us will read translations, but even a high quality translation of a work in a foreign language can facilitate verbal ability better than a simplification or popular rendition.
I'm thinking about writing a book for teens based around the life of Alexander. It wont be exploits of his glory, but a more balanced look at what was good and bad about his character by spotlighting critical moments in his life. For instance one chapter describing the fascinating siege of Tyre to demonstrate perseverance, and another describing his army's sit down revolts in India to demonstrate obsession.
As much as modern society claims to teach kids more realism instead of romanticism these days, its shocking how little actual history is taught, even the really cool stuff involving catapults and elephants. I think kids respond better to examples like 'look what X did and look what happened to him, why do you think that is?' instead of 'how do you think x felt when that happened?'. Feelings are mushy, events are quantifiable.
DB,
Very manfully done. However, I think we have a fundamental disagreement about the nature of "canon resonance" and the meaning of tradition. I don't think the only choices are a dichotomy of effete antiquarianism and amoral paganism. I'm no fan of Nietzche, though I appreciate some of his insights. But great a phiolosopher as he might have been (a debate we might have later) I don't think he had the last word on mythology or tradition. As I pointed out in my first comment, we learn as much from our differences from the ancients as from our similarities, and paradoxical as it may sound, many myths embody both at the same time. We may regard castrating our father as barbaric (so, incidentally did the Greeks. Gods were gods, not men. They to a large degree transcended the moral order binding on men), but the capacity for that kind of barbarism still exists in each of us and in societies as a whole. So despite your rather chronocentric dismissal of that century-old textbook, there is a moral lesson in that story. And I, for one, do not believe that educated people in that era were too stupid to recognize the barbarism of the story or necessarily felt a squeamish need to "strip away" its essence. That, to me, is where Nietzche falls down. He can think of the textbook case only as a suppression or exclusion of a barbarism that should be freed (the Ubermenshch) when to me it is a frank staring in the face of a dark part of myself, my history, and my culture in order to turn from the darkness (as you may be able to tell here, I simply do not accept Nietzche's take on morality).
DB:
As re: "values":
I gather it was, then, that you find the Greek myths themselves to be anti-social. I agree they were pagan, and filled with things upon which Christian morality frowns. There are still values -- Herodotus, whom VDH has chosen to honor with the name of his blog, explained what he saw as the values of the gods' experiences in the Theogony. Still, they were quite different values (and different still in the Norse mythos).
I think the classical move to harmonize them with Christian values is interesting in itself. One of the things that is interesting is how little work it required: the Greeks seem not to have expected gods to conform to human morality, and more often drew lessons on human behavior from heroes (who were seen as sort of standing in between men and gods, I think it's fair, if simplified, to say). The Jews seem to have felt almost the same way: the Old Testament God is not moral in a human sense, and is not expected to be. He asserts, indeed, that his morality is not to be questioned -- whatever he does is moral. This is made explicit in the book of Job, and elsewhere.
In spite of their pure paganism, though, Aristotle's ethics could be Christian ethics with very few revisions. What Greeks found heroic in men was not very different from what Christendom would praise in later years.
That suggests to me that the myths about gods weren't meant to explain human morality. Their function lay elsewhere. This seems to me to be true for both Christianity and the pagans.
As re: "anti-social":
I just wanted to clarify, because I'm not sure "anti-social" is exactly the word I would have chosen to express the concept. I agree with your basic thrust here -- that the Greek gods were vehicles for people, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, who wished to escape from Christian morality to a certain degree. It just seems to me that the sort of person who wrote odes to "King Bacchus and Lady Venus" probably enjoyed his society quite a bit.
As re: bringing it forward:
You make a good point. In the book Autumn Lightning, Dave Lowry talks about learning Kenjutsu from a Japanese teacher. At one point, the teacher explains to him why it is important to get everything exactly right:
Yet, of course, that is wrong.
Insofar as you are trying to preserve a system, you are nothing like the warriors of ancient Japan. They were constantly trying to change and improve the training system. Innovation in technique was a necessary part of the key business of their lives -- winning wars.
Yet there is a tremendous value in what the sensei is doing. There is a real and tremendous power that comes from having an antique that is living. It is not like the samurai's undertaking, but like the priest's -- though the Japanese warrior monk, like the Templar, was capable of both fighting and prayer.
The best kind of man can do both. He can innovate and also preserve, as he can both fight and pray. Even though the sensei's careful keeping of the traditions did not make him 'like the samurai,' it made him a better man. So it is with us.
Interesting that J.R.R. Tolkien regarded mythology as an inherent good, even entirely divorced from any historical or specifically cultural context. Hence his impressive effort to create a completely fabricated mythology. And interesting to compare it to a similar effort by H.P. Lovecraft, with very different results. Traditional literary critics like Edmund Wilson hated both, of course. Tolkien was for children, and Lovecraft was full of "invisible whistling octopuses".
Modern sensibility, which is run by illiterate people with expensive hair, hates everything classical. Homer is a welter of violence and testosterone, the old historians were ignoramuses, and the philosophers write as if they've never attended a sensitivity training seminar.
As Virgil would say, lacrimae rerum sunt - these are the tears of things.
I think in this thread, it might help a little if when people first used the term "paganism" or "pagan" they said what they meant by it.
"Pagan" is a "hot" word. People have strong reactions to it and associations with it. But we may not be all on the same page with what they are. It can be hard to tell what someone is saying, except that they think whatever pint they are making is a strong one.
While I recognize that there are times when that can be true, I'm not sure I see how "pagan" should be a 'hot word' for this discussion. Insofar as we're talking about ancient literature, we're applying it in what seems to me an unobjectionable way. Surely it won't be confusing to anyone to say that Aristotle was a pagan, or that Homer was?
#22 from Grim: "While I recognize that there are times when that can be true, I'm not sure I see how "pagan" should be a 'hot word' for this discussion. Insofar as we're talking about ancient literature, we're applying it in what seems to me an unobjectionable way. Surely it won't be confusing to anyone to say that Aristotle was a pagan, or that Homer was?"
Not at all. That's straightforward.
I found this harder to understand:
#15 from D.B Little: "In fact, it is classical canonism that sought to change the very anti-social nature of these things by drawing them into itself and, to make them “valuable and worthwhile,” stripped away all the pagan essence of them; they themselves stole a considerable amount of these things’ power in the process."
What is a pagan essence? Does it reside in being shocking and anti-social? Maybe not. The idea of stolen power suggests that something important is in play, but it wasn't clear to me what was meant.
#18 from Fred: "However, I think we have a fundamental disagreement about the nature of "canon resonance" and the meaning of tradition. I don't think the only choices are a dichotomy of effete antiquarianism and amoral paganism."
Again, something is meant here, but what? Aristotle does not strike me as a poster boy for amorality.
#19 from Grim: "As re: "values":
I gather it was, then, that you find the Greek myths themselves to be anti-social. I agree they were pagan, and filled with things upon which Christian morality frowns."
This one I can now figure out. You meant nothing other than "I agree that the Greek myths were [not Christian or Jewish], and filled with things upon which Christian morality frowns." Which of course is true.
That's all I wanted: to know what the person using the term meant by it. It's not a big deal.
Tolkien wrote of the lotus-eaters: "...in lotus-isles of economic bliss / forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss / (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced / bogus seduction of the twice-seduced)." Now I think this conversation is based on the false premise that the lotus-eaters want to wake up. Perhaps speaking to each other here would be more fruitful than speaking to the sleeping many. If you like writing, perhaps transform all the legends into a form that will fit in the dreams of the sleepers.
For example, although I winced at every scene in the movie 300, afterward I realized that having a movie about Thermopylae was better than not having one.