The Return of Literature to the Public Square

 

How is it that a new telling of a story dating back sixteen centuries is garnering such attention these days?  Forget asking how it is possible.  How is it even conceivable that a story told as a poem is lighting up the Internet?  It may just be that the author is on to something.

The Story

Malcolm Guite is, according to his Wikipedia entry, a poet, a singer-songwriter, an Anglican priest, and an academic.  The pipe-smoking man of letters has nearly two hundred thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel, which is quite something, since his videos are mostly about the true, the good, and the beautiful, a trinity we seem committed to doing our dead level best to live without these days.  In what will be an epic retelling of the King Arthur story in four volumes, an Arthuriad, Guite has set about to bring the tales of valor into the modern world, and in the first volume, Galahad and the Grail, he launches his epic in a way sure to seize and hold the attention of all readers.

malcolmguite.com

My wife and I both love Vergil's Aeneid, the Latin epic poem of the first century B.C. that tells the tale of Aeneas, the refugee from the Trojan War who labors against gods and men to found a new home in Italy for his fellow Trojans.  Part of what we love about it and a key feature we try each year to help our high school Latin students discover and love with us is the story, and in Vergil it is a rollicking, good one.  Too often the academic study of literature in school settings kills our joy of reading.  No author crafted a story merely as an exercise to demonstrate alliteration or allusion.  While we touch on such things only insofar as they illuminate the story, it is the story itself that matters, and it is in storytelling that Guite excels.

In her foreward, Susanna Clarke writes of this first volume, "It is full of jewel-like colours.  The knights and ladies pass from the emerald-green of woods to the peridot-green of meadows, from grey-walled hermit's cells to the white walls of castles and abbeys, from yellow strand to sparkling blue sea.  The whole poem has the mesmerising brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts -- and that is before we even get to all the banners and heraldry."  A good story is not merely a series of actions, although there are great and powerful actions throughout Guite's poem.  Yet think of the films that have moved you the most.  Quite often it was because, in addition to the actions, the activities of the characters, the scenes were filmed in a particular way.  You don't think about lighting and camera angles and costuming while watching the film, but they work together to create a feeling, and Guite is master of all of it, from portraying the actions of the characters, such as

                                                But Lionel was like one possessed

                                                by hatred and disdain,

                                                and rode his charger at Sir Bors

                                                and smote him down with heavy force

                                                and trampled him beneath his horse --

                                                he fainted with the pain.

Book Two, Stave V, 323-328

to showing us the setting of it all, as in this scene.

                                                At length they saw her place of prayer

                                                built up from mossy stone --

                                                the holy hermit's humble cell

                                                where she had long been wont to dwell

                                                with garden green and deep clear well,

                                                guarded by many a prayer and spell.

                                                Yet in her vigils in that vale

                                                she never prayed alone.

Book Three, Stave I, 226-233

The Poetry

Malcolm Guite is also the musical director of this epic story, for he has chosen to sing it in ballad stanza.  Many of us think of ballad strictly hewing to the form of something like "Sir Patrick Spens," with its stanzas of a four-foot line, followed by a three, then a four, and then a three, and in a rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B.

                                            The king sits in Dumferling toune,

                                            Drinking the blude-reid wine:

                                            "O whar will I get a guid sailor,

                                            To sail this schip of mine?"

What Malcolm Guite has done in his Galahad and the Grail is to expand that and play with it. Consider these three consecutive bits from Book Two, Stave IV.

                                                They saw within the glade a cell

                                                all roughly hewn of stone --

                                                the cell maybe of some recluse

                                                who lived and prayed alone.

These lines, 92-95, follow the Patrick Spens model with the A-B-C-B rhyme scheme.

                                                But ere the two knights could dismount,

                                                they heard a sudden sound

                                                of bridle reins all ringing out

                                                and hoofbeats on the ground.

Lines 96-99 maintain the Patrick Spens meter. The rhyme scheme, however, borders on A-A-A-A, but for the final consonant sound of "t" in lines 96 and 98 and the final consonant sound of "d" in 97 and 99 leading it toward A-B-A-B.

                                                And even as a hermitess

                                                stepped out to greet them there,

                                                a third knight rode into the glade

                                                and cried out, bold and unafraid:

                                                "No man rides past me here!" (lines 100-104)

These last five lines expand the form and call to mind Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius."

                                                By the Nine Gods he swore it,

                                                And named a trysting day,

                                                And bade his messengers ride forth,

                                                East and West and South and North,

                                                To summon his array. (lines 3-6)

The rhythms rise and fall to support and add atmosphere to the story, and with such variations he is able to create genuine music and not a monotonous soundtrack. And as for the rhymes, let us say a bit more about the sonorous versus the monotonous.

In Book Two, Stave VI, lines 174-179, we find this.

                                                And lo! as he sank back in pain

                                                the chapel filled with light.

                                                Lancelot saw a shimmering door

                                                which he had not perceived before,

                                                and as he gazed in fear and awe

                                                it opened on the night.

Alexander Pope was famous for his tightly controlled iambic couplets, which I love, and he rarely admitted any metrical substitutions. Milton, on the other hand, did, and this leant variety to his basically iambic meter much as spondaic substitutions allowed the music to swell and fade in Homer’s and Vergil’s dactylic verse.

The third line of the stanza above opens with a trochee, which Guite not infrequently employs, but the truly interesting part is the anapest of “…mering door,” whose rhythm beautifully captures the movement of the light-filled door.

Yet even more fascinating is his rhyming of “awe” with “door” and “before.” I doubt many would have thought of a rhyme like this, but pay attention to the position of your lips as you say each of those words aloud slowly. You will notice that your mouth forms the same way for each word. They are rhymes, but not as one might expect.

The Faith

In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite tells us how he came to love the legends of Arthur from the telling of his mother when he was a boy.  He writes that the stories that first moved him "were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing:  haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws.  At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself:  the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories."

As with the rising and falling rhythms of this poem and the variegated landscapes he describes, Malcolm Guite weaves both bold and subtle Christian elements throughout the work.  There are hints toward biblical stories that will only be grasped by those who know the Scriptures, there are references to key moments in the liturgical year and to various aspects of orthodox Christian theology, and there are appearances of Jesus Christ Himself as He actively takes part in this story of kings and knights and maidens.  It is possible that in a world that seems ever more biblically illiterate, such Christian elements may be jarring to some.  The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not known quite what to do with the divine in their most common form of storytelling, the cinematic film.  There are, of course, depictions of the Norse gods in the Marvel Comics movies, but these are superheroes at best, and there is certainly nothing in those films of the haunting and the numinous that formed the fabric of the Arthurian tales.  Other movies set in the ancient world are largely content to ignore the gods entirely, which is akin to operating a school with blank-faced clocks and books without a table of contents because you have chosen to pretend that numbers do not exist.  Guite is not so pretentious as to pretend such things, but, as one who painstakingly restores masterworks of art, he gives us back a mythical reality filled with Christ and His "unbearably beautiful light."

Awakening Remembrance

How, then, is it possible for a book like this to be garnering so much praise and attention and, by all indications in reviews and fan sites, actual reading of the thing in an age in which evidence and anecdotes suggest that we do not read serious literature and would be incapable of doing so even if we desired to do it?  In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite explains how, when at Cambridge he rediscovered the original sources, he "became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalise or even erase the deep Christian impluse that had formed their original telling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptise the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in 'the immanent frame' and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel."  As I said at the beginning, the author is on to something.  He has sensed that in our dehumanized and dehumanizing world there is still a flicker of light, a trickle of living water beneath the surface of our lives, and rather than wring his hands and decry our sad state, he has simply lit his pipe and set to work in order to present the true, the good, and the beautiful.  In the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett wrote, "[I]f Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions..., like the distant remembrance of youth before the delighted eyes of mankind."  Guite does this with his Galahad and the Grail, and people are eagerly responding because they are finding what they did not realize was missing.

AI Aristotle

 

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of AI
Created by Google Gemini in imitation of Rembrandt

A friend emailed me a blog post from tech CEO Matt Shumer titled "Something Big Is Happening."  If more than 82 million views on X means that something has gone viral, then this post has gone viral.  Based on the recent ability of artificial intelligence to write its own code, in other words, for AI to start producing AI, Shumer argues that a seismic shift in how humans work is coming sooner rather than later, and he is not talking about getting ChatGPT to write your history paper.  He outlines fundamental shifts in the fields of law, medicine, and more.  You really should read his post.  In this post, however, I want to share what I replied to my friend and go a bit further.  To my friend, I wrote,

What I want to say is that we must resist this at all costs, but that is ridiculous.  The horse is already out of the barn.  We have given birth to this, just as we did to writing, electronics, and atomic energy.  We have to learn what do with it.  We must learn from our mistakes with many of our past advancements, among which is not to use faith and philosophy, history and literature and music and art to grapple with ethical issues.  Perhaps the most important acknowledgment by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation was that we sallied forth into smartphones and social media with not a care in the world.  We simply never took the time to consider the effects on children, including their social and emotional development, their patterns of behavior, their intellectual development, and more.  Can we learn from the disaster that is the current intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual landscape of far too many of our young people?  This is a time for philosophers and psychologists and sociologists.  It is a time for theologians.  It is a time for church leaders.  We need deep thinkers now as never before.  We need the age of when the university was a branch of the Church, when theology was called the queen of the sciences.  We need a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, and an Aquinas as never before.  Let this article be inspiration for churches and schools, especially those schools grounded in the liberal arts and Classical learning, to equip those new thinkers that God even now is raising up among us.

I have used AI, even for the creative acts that I so often say are the special province of the human heart and mind.  For example, I have begun using Suno to create the music for song lyrics I have written.  Would I prefer to be in band or at least to run in the circles of musicians who could record my songs?  I most certainly would, but that is not my world at the moment, and I am, perhaps naively, convinced that my songs can touch people and encourage them in their faith.  And so I have resorted to AI for the music.

What I want to start here is a different conversation.  I can envision a course for high school students in which they read selections from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Montaigne, along with works by Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton.  It would be a course that would involve Michelangelo and Mozart, and of course, all these names are but a start, an indication of what the foundation for such a course would be.  And the bedrock of that foundation would be the Bible, the printed word God has graciously given the world.  From their reading and engagement with such authors and works, the students would explore how to think about what should and should not be in the worlds of technology, including but not limited to AI, medicine, government, economics, education, and more.  It would be a course first to introduce young minds to the idea that there are various ways to consider what should and should not be and how to develop and use the things that should.  It would help them explore the best, the time-tested and proven, approaches that we have used throughout the centuries.  It would give them a chance to begin applying those approaches as well as their own based upon and drawn from those lines of thinking to contemporary issues.

There is much talk by parents, educators, and legislators about personal devices and the use of AI in schools, but we are at a wonderful moment in history when can go beyond that discussion.  With carefully considered intention and purpose, we can take seriously the admonition to "train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6, KJV) and help produce not employees or those whose aim is a fulfilling and high-paying job, but the great and deep thinkers that we need.  Perhaps the next Aristotle is a student in a school near you.

Minor Keys and Melancholy Mists

 

The Voyage of Life: Childhood, Thomas Cole, 1840

While listening recently to the 1973 Dobie Gray classic "Drift Away," I realized something, or rather, something came back to me that I had not considered in a long time.  I have always been drawn to music in a minor key and to melancholy stories that seem to be wrapped in mist.  Such are the songs and stories that have touched that indefinable place in me and have constituted much of the literature I have memorized over the years.

16th Century Grade School Choir

I first realized how much more deeply a minor key affected me than did a major key when the two were presented to us in music class somewhere around the second or third grade.  When our music teacher played one against the other, I knew instantly which touched me more, and it was sometime around fifth grade that I first encountered the sixteenth century English ballad "Greensleeves."  Clearly, there is nothing about the lyrics to which a boy of eleven could relate, and yet that song took me somewhere that I seemed to know as if through a dream, a place long lost and to which I yearned to return.

It was also during those early years that I discovered "One Tin Soldier" by Coven and "Beth" by KISS.  Although the themes of both are somewhat beyond the reckoning of a child, they both moved me deeply, and from those days until now I am incapable of hearing the Coven piece without weeping.  Clearly, something was afoot.

Non-Pandering Kiddy Lit

There are many books aimed at children that cater and even pander to their immature instincts, often by falling back on bathroom humor.  Two books from my elementary years that not only did not hold up a mirror to my childish self but took me out of that self into remembered places where I had never been, were Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell and My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.  Nearly fifty years after first reading both of those books, they remain in my mind and in my heart.  A few years ago, I re-read Island of the Blue Dolphins for my own pleasure, and I recall reading My Side of the Mountain to our son when he was a boy.

My mother respected children.  Many, if not most, will say they like children, but my mother genuinely respected their feelings and views of the world.  She affirmed their emotions and never wrote them off as stemming merely from the experience of a child.  She knew what the authors of the best children's literature have known, that young ones, while not always able to articulate their feelings as adults would, nevertheless feel deeply.  Of course, we adults know that some of the deepest feelings arise from the minor keys of life, those moments of longing or loss or the indefinable mists of mystery, and these are the elements that make for truly memorable literature.

The quiet, reflective soul will always, I think, be drawn to the minor keys and melancholy mists of life, whether through music or art or literature, or, for the truly fortunate ones, through all three.  Those of us who work with children do well to have the perspective my mother had, one that respects the deep and ineffable feelings of young people.  When we do, we may just be led to introduce them to those minor keys and melancholy mists to which their souls will return often in the years to come.

Students Still Read Good Books

To be fair, the headline that caused the typical dustup on social media had a wee hint of clickbait to it.  People were despairingly/gleefully sharing across the Internet that a high school in Ontario, Canada, had removed books from its library that had been published prior to 2008.  The news originated with this piece, and as you can see from the school board's statement, it is not completely accurate to say the school had purged all books that had been published more than fifteen years ago.

"Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data (are not being checked out by students) are removed," said the board in its statement.

If damaged books have strong circulation the board says they can be replaced regardless of publication date, and older titles can stay in the collection if they are "accurate, serve the curriculum, align with board initiatives and are responsive to student interest and engagement."

For all that, I have proof that students still read good, classic books, and do so of their own accord.

A Student Shares a Book

My Latin I students were recently discussing a bit of the life of Julius Caesar.  We had been talking about the fact that he had invaded Britain in the 50s B.C., but had not conquered it, and at the end of class, one of my freshman students brought out his backpack to show me G.A. Henty's Beric the Briton:  A Story of the Roman Invasion.

When I asked him where he had acquired it, he said he had checked it out of our school's library.  It was published in 1892.

Although not every student today reads books published in the 19th century, many do read classic books of their own accord.  Many years ago I noticed one of my students reading Tolstoy after she had turned in her quiz.  When I asked if she were reading it for class, she replied that she was reading for her own pleasure, for, in her words, she figured she would not have time as an adult.  My hunch is that any young person who developed such good reading habits at an early age would have a better than fighting chance to retain them in adulthood.  Only recently another of my students eagerly showed me a delightful edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula published by Chiltern, and this ultimately led to my own purchase of Chiltern's handsome volume of Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad.

 

Books, Time, and Space

Once upon a time I had this shirt and ultimately wore it out.  Not only is there not enough time to read all the books we want, there isn't enough space in any library to house them.  Decisions must be made, but using what criteria?  Whether I choose to feed my mind with the equivalent of junk food or a rich, steak dinner, is entirely up to me, but decisions on which books to make available in a library must address broader concerns.  One way to approach the decision is by choosing in which direction to walk.  As the old saying puts it, if you don't know where you're going, any road out of town will do.

Where do parents and teachers want young people to go?  Do we want them only to travel down the roads most familiar to them, ones that are smooth and without any bumps?  Would we like for them to take the road less traveled, as Robert Frost put it?  Do we want them to take the old road, one that has been traversed by those who came before us, those who left clues for how to follow the paths of our own lives?

Many will quickly say that they do not want young people merely to read the easy, the simple, and the unchallenging.  If that is so, then we must make sure they have access to the greatest literature that human beings have created, and they created quite a bit before 2008.

 

In Defense of the Unnecessary

There is a great focus on what is necessary and unnecessary...in school, in government, in life.  Yes, barnacles can grow on a ship and must be scraped off, but if we really tried to live all aspects of life with the bare necessities, our lives would look much different, and I do not think we would like them very much, nor should we.

Art Is The Signature of Man

Aeneas and Dido in Carthage, Claude Lorrain, 1675

In his 1925 book The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Art is the signature of man."  I have spoken and written many times about the scene in Book 1 of Vergil's epic poem the Aeneid in which Aeneas and his friend stand on a hill and overlook the building of the city of Carthage.  Vergil describes what they see in the chronological order of a developing society.  First, they notice the physical construction of buildings and roads, next the establishment of government and laws, and finally the establishment of a theatre.  As I always point out to my students, had the Carthaginians stopped before they built a theatre, theirs would have been an abbreviated society.  Creating things is what we human beings do.  Although some see it so, the artistic act is not an unnecessary one.  It is vital to who we are.

Art For a Purpose

Art, and by that I mean graphic art, musical art, and dramatic art, serves many purposes, but for the purpose of this article, let's focus on its purpose in education.  We all know people, and perhaps are those people ourselves, who come alive when given a creativity opportunity.  In school these are the students who want to draw or write.  They would prefer to act out a story rather than take an exam over it.  It is band or orchestra or choir that helps them get through algebra and history and P.E.

Woodburning of the Colosseum by one of my students

We must provide as many such opportunities for young people as we can, and to do so, we may need to take money from elsewhere, even from areas whose superiority goes unquestioned however much it may go unacknowledged, such as the STEM subjects and sports.  Surely no one would be so monstrous as to say that the needs of one child are less important than those of another or that the abilities of one are insignificant when compared with others, and if we do indeed believe that it would be monstrous to say this, we must put time and money behind our words.  Yet there is more, far more, to the role of art in human life.

Ars Gratia Artis

MGM Logo from 1928-1956

Although the lion has changed over the years, the motto of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, movie studio has remained Ars Gratia Artis, or "Art For the Sake of Art," and there we find the connection back to Chesterton.  Art need not have a function.  It can, but this is not necessary for its value.  It is valuable simply because it is what human beings do.  We create.  We explore.  We imagine.  In fact, it is our imagination that makes the hypothetical and the conditional possible.  Perhaps electricity can be used to light a home, we say, and from our imagination come the lights we depend on to turn our nights into days.  "If I were in Rome," says a friend, "I would visit the Colosseum," and it is the imagination that makes this conditional sentence possible.  Yet whether or not anyone ever got around to creating a lightbulb or our friend ever managed a trip to Italy is irrelevant.  What matters is our capacity to imagine what is not real.  What matters is our capacity for art, and it is in this that Chesterton is correct.  It is the signature of the human race.

The Insincerity of AI

 

Be warned.  This is an anti-AI blogpost.  If you think AI is the greatest invention since sliced bread, this is not for you.  You should probably just ask ChatGPT to write you an intriguing article about sliced bread and enjoy your day.  If you continue reading, you do so having been warned.

Genuine Pottery

Greek Black-Figure Pottery, Art Institute of Chicago (photograph mine)

Although most etymologists today say otherwise, it has for centuries been suggested that the English word "sincere" is derived from the Latin phrase sine cera, meaning "without wax."  To what this phrase referred has been a matter of as much debate, with one theory being that unscrupulous potters would fill cracks in their wares with wax, prompting better artisans to advertise their works as being made sine cera.  Regardless of the actual etymology, there is, of course, the desire on the part of artists and craftsmen to promote their efforts as genuine, and there is just as much desire on the part of patrons and customers to enjoy authentic works of art.  When we refer to a cheap knockoff, we do not use the adjective "cheap" so much to make a distinction with an expensive knockoff, but rather to denigrate the item as much as possible.  "Cheap" in this sense is an intensifier expressing our disgust with an inferior product.

It is in this sense, then, that AI is not sincere.  It is a cheap knockoff.  Now that it exists, we can put it to some beneficial uses, but at best these are mean and mundane.  When it comes to what truly matters, as in art so in all other things, we will always prefer what is real.

A Tale of Two Paintings

Many years ago, my wife and I led a group of high school students on a tour of Italy.  While in Rome, I snapped a picture of the rostra, the speaker's platform from which great orators like Cicero once delivered their speeches.  The mother of one of my students was an artist and used my photograph as the basis for a beautiful painting that she gave me.  It graces my classroom to this day.

Now, let's take a look at what AI can do.  I typed the following prompt into ChatGPT, "Create a watercolor painting of the rostra in the Roman forum viewed at ground level from the perspective of a person looking slightly to the left."  This is what it gave me.

It is not bad, of course, and had I played around with the prompt, I could probably have coaxed it into producing something like the painting my student's mother created, but no matter what, it would be, at best, a cheap knockoff.  It would be insincere.  My student's mother had used the photo from her son's teacher on their trip to Italy as the basis for her own conception of the scene, a conception she brought into reality from her desire to give a gift.  Her painting was a human endeavor from start to finish, and not only does the fact of the humanity make all the difference in the world, but that humanity is reflected in the final product.

That's Not What I Asked

Not long ago I was doing a bit of research on the Latin words indignata, vita, and Aeneid in JSTOR, the online repository of academic journals.  I was not aware that a new AI button had been installed, much less that it could be switched off, so I was surprised when an AI summary popped up to the right of the page.

Now, here is my beef.  First, it took my three-word search and turned it into a question that I did not ask. 

You: How is "(((indignata) and (vita)) AND (Aeneid)) AND disc:(classicalstudies-discipline)" related to this text?

Second, I had not been aware of this feature or the fact that its default setting was to be turned on, thus my feeling of intrusion into my research.  Finally, the serendipitous nature of research is that one can be scanning an article for one thing and discover something else useful.  An AI summary robs me of that.  Of course, I will turn off this feature, but given that it is the default, this troubles me for our students.

What Is It Good For?

In his famous 1970 protest song "War," Edwin Starr asked, "War, what is it good for?"  I would not go quite so far regarding AI as to give his answer of "absolutely nothing," but mine would be close.

AI can crunch data.  It can discover patterns.  It can create things that serve certain basic functions.  But when we want that which expresses truth, goodness, and beauty, the best expressions come from those uniquely created to understand, appreciate, and share them...you and me.

I Know Nothing

 

Susannah York as Margaret More in A Man For All Seasons

In the 1966 film version of Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons, King Henry VIII pays a visit to the home of his Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More.  When the More family comes out to great his highness, there is an amusing exchange in which More's daughter Margaret upstages the king with fluent Latin, but it is their opening exchange that speaks to me most.

King Henry:  Why Margaret; they told me you were a scholar.

Margaret:  Among women I pass for one, your grace.

Margaret More sells herself quite short here, for she was one of the most learned people of her day, composing works in Latin and translating both from Latin to English and from Greek to Latin.  I think often of her humble response to the king, for it is easy for my high school students to think that I know a lot of things.  Then again, they are in their teens and I most certainly am not, and so to those who think I am a scholar, I would borrow More's words and reply that among teenaged students I pass for one.  In fact, it would be closer to the truth if I were to quote another legendary film character and admit, "I know nothing."

Why Stars Fall and Birds Do Not

Varinia (Jean Simmons) and Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) in Spartacus

In the classic 1960 film Spartacus, the former slave gladiator, played by Kirk Douglas, has a quiet moment with his wife, played by Jean Simmons.

Varinia:  What are you thinking about?

Spartacus:  I'm free. And what do I know? I don't even know how to read.

Varinia:  You know things that can't be taught.

Spartacus:  I know nothing.  Nothing!  And I want to know.  I want to-I want to know.

Varinia:  Know what?

Spartacus:  Everything. Why a star falls and a bird doesn't.  Where the sun goes at night.  Why the moon changes shape.  I want to know where the wind comes from.

There are, of course, things about which I am conversant at the drop of a hat.  We all have those areas about which we can speak readily and intelligently.  For me those tend to fall along the lines of the Latin language, Roman history, certain authors, and particular strands of philosophy and theology.  I can also entertain friends with quick knowledge of film lines and song lyrics, in both cases mostly from the 1960s through the early 1990s.  And although my knowledge in those areas can be at times rather broad and deep, a brief consideration will reveal just how circumscribed my expertise really is.  I would be embarrassed to admit what I know about cars, plumbing, electricity, chemistry, physics, astronomy, botany, biology, economics, marketing, computer science, art, opera, musical instruments, musical composition, cooking, sewing, meteorology, psychology, medicine, blacksmithing, the stock market, and farming.  And, when you get right down to it, even in my chosen field of Classics and preferred areas of knowledge, there are now and certainly were in ages past many who knew more.  I am no Theodor Mommsen, of whom Mark Twain once remarked upon observing him at a celebratory function, "Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, and the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations."

Theodor Mommsen, 1817-1903

Tantalizing Ignorance

Ignorance can be daunting or it can be tantalizing, and for those who enjoy learning, it is the latter.  As Kirk Douglas's Spartacus said, I want to know, and this is why I love to read in subjects outside my expertise and enjoy talking with people who can help me learn.  It is thrilling to ask questions of friends at lunch or over coffee or at dinner and to follow the delightfully labyrinthine path of discovery.  There is a time in our life, to be sure, when we care more about appearing foolish and do not want anyone to realize what we do not know, and this leads us not only to avoid asking questions but even to put on airs and pretend to knowledge we do not possess.  Hopefully most of us move beyond that stage as we mature and come to see that it is more important, in the words of Cicero and Sallust, esse quam videri, to be rather than to seem.

It is complimentary when students think their teachers know something, and the kind comments I have received from students mean the world to me.  Yet one day they will find that there was much more their Latin teacher did not know than that he did, and hopefully their own ignorance about the world will be more tantalizing than daunting, drawing them on along the never ending journey of learning.

A Papal Pedagogy

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), portrait by Michael Dahl c. 1727

Despite my regular use in the classroom of a smart board, the Internet, and other technological inventions of the modern age, mine is a pedagogy steeped in history and, as recent reading and reflection have shown, are papal, although not in the sense you may be thinking.  Be warned, however, for what follows may take you into waters far from the current educational current.

A Papal Perspective

The adjective "papal" derives from the Latin word for "pope," which is papa, but my use of it here refers not to the Bishop of Rome but rather to the poet Alexander Pope, whose work I first used to open a speech nearly forty years ago and who has remained my favorite English poet all my life.  In the definitive, indeed magisterial, biography of Pope, Maynard Mack explores in one section the Essay on Criticism, which was published in 1711.  If you will, please indulge an extended excerpt from pages 170-174.

[T]he steady expansion of forms of individualism...[fractured] traditional consensuses, leaving most lines of authority apart from personal self-assertion tentative and insecure.  Partly, at least, in response to all this, the Essay shows a pervasive concern for corporateness:  for the responsibility of the individual member, whether a person, idea, work of art, or critical term to some sort of community or whole.  [The Essay on Criticism acknowledged] that the idiosyncrasies of individual intelligence must be tried, and normalized, against the collective principles of the community of educated men.

For since the ancients participate with the modern in this universal and permanent Reason and have left behind them works whose permanent and universal character many centuries have proved, ancient literature must likewise be considered one of Nature's manifestations:  "Nature and Homer were, he found the same" (line 135).  This in turn meant that the Rules -- the principles of effective writing that a long line of critics had derived from Homer and other poets -- were by no means impositions of a dead hand upon the present....

Pope does not intend by this a theory of servile imitation.  He means rather that every new generation must strive to assimilate the art of those whose success in rendering our common humanity...time has demonstrated; the individual talent must steep itself in the tradition; and in Pope's day, when the only internationally accepted literature was that of Greece and Rome..., Homer and Vergil naturally comprised the heart of this tradition.  Pope knows, of course, that criticism cannot afford to let a live tradition degenerate into formulae, dictating "dull Receits how Poems may be made" (line 115); or lose the contemporary élan...that alone enables it to discern and applaud the "Beauties...no Precepts can declare" (line 141).  But he knows with equal firmness that the individual writer's imagination must be guided by his judgment, reflecting the collective experience hived up in the principles of good writing....

[T]he positives...are humility in the presence of what is greater than ourselves and intelligence to rectify our personal vision by collective wisdom.

The 21st Century Classroom

With this I could not agree more.  As I have written, I share my classroom with a vast number of teachers, most of whom are dead, for Homer and Vergil, Aristotle and Cicero, Aquinas and Montaigne and Pope, all teach with me.  As Mack wrote above, we do not go in for servile imitation.  My students have their own voices and their own ideas and insights to express with them, yet it is my task and calling to help them do so in the best way.  Again, this does not mean following "dull Receits," but it does mean introducing to these young thinkers that how a thing is said can help it be heard with greater or lesser effect.  It means pulling back the heavy curtain of prosaic, mundane communication and revealing the intricate beauties of language that have been developed and perfected throughout the ages by the poets and philosophers, the authors and orators whose works have stood the test of time.  Yet again, Mack rightly points out that Pope's vision is to help us develop humility in the presence of that which is greater than we and the intelligence to rectify our own visions, which is quite literally to make them right and straight, with the collective wisdom drawn from the centuries of the human race.

Where Such Teachers

Alexander Pope, attributed to Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736

Toward the conclusion of this section of his biography, Mack quotes a few lines, with which I will conclude, from Pope's Essay as an ideal, one that applies to teachers as well as to literary critics.  He goes on to observe, "Pope shared with most us a total inability to attain this ideal; yet it is touching to see it so vividly sketched."  Unattainable it may be, but I have known many teachers who have spent their lives reaching for it, and whether or not they grasped it, their students were the better served for their trying.  Then again, as Robert Browning put it, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"  ("Andrea del Sarto, 97-98)

But where's the Man, who Counsel can bestow,

Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know?

Unbiass'd, or by Favour or by Spite;

Not dully prepossesst, nor blindly right;

Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin'd;

A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind.  (lines 631-634, 639-640)

Chain Breakers and Legacy Makers

 

I do not know whether the sound of humans screaming at each other is the same as that of doves crying.  In 1984, the musician known as Prince seemed to think so.  I do know that it does not accomplish much when we blame others for our lot in life and that there are better options.

Stoic Wisdom

Errant...qui aut boni aliquid nobis aut mali iudicant tribuere fortunam:  materiam dat bonorum ac malorum et initia rerum apud nos in malum bonumve exiturarum.  Valentior enim omni fortuna animus est et in utramque partem ipse res suas ducit beataeque ac miserae vitae sibi causa est.

"They make a mistake...who judge that fortune gives something either good or bad to us.  Fortune gives the raw material of good and bad and the beginnings of things that will come out among us either good or bad.  Stronger than all fortune is the mind and it itself leads its own affairs in either direction and is the cause of a happy or wretched life for itself."  Seneca, Epistle XCVIII 

My students and I discuss this passage from one of the letters of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 B.C. -- 65 A.D.) in our third-year Latin class.  It seems an apt reminder in an age in which blame seems the name of the game, although that does not greatly separate our current age from any other, and it came to mind when a middle-aged friend recently emailed me the following.

"My sister used to blame everything wrong with her life on our parents, my father especially.  I explained to her that Mom and Dad weren't perfect parents, and neither were we, and screaming [at him] won't solve anything.  Our parents have left us with problems to deal with, but our parents weren't able to fix those problems, so they're 'our' problems now.  Hopefully we can add a few pieces to the puzzle so our children won't have to deal with the same problems we had to deal with.  Also, never forget that while our parents dealt with those problems, they still loved us enough to raise us to the point where we [were] mature enough to deal with such problems, just as we will do for our children.

"Our parents are human, with all the human frailties and glorious potential of the next person.  We think of them [as] perfect beings when we are children, which is appropriate for a child's development, but, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:11, 'When I became a man, I put away childish things.'  Unless they were simply monsters, our parents did the best they could most of the time, although sometimes not reaching the mark of what they could have achieved in their own lives or ours, but again, no one does."

Chain-Breakers and Legacy-Makers

Turkey Run State Park

When our son was a teen, he and I went away for a few days each fall to Turkey Run State Park in western Indiana.  We hiked the trails and talked of what it meant to become a man and in particular, a man of God.  As I planned something special for the autumn when he turned eighteen, I asked him who were some of the men who meant the most to him, and he quickly named four.  I then invited each of them to join us on one evening of our annual trip to share their own thoughts about manhood with my son.

One of them spoke to him about those who are chain-breakers and those who are legacy-makers.  Rob explained that some people will be the ones to break the chains of abuse or addiction or the many other curses that afflict families and often continue across the generations.  Others, he said, will be the legacy-makers, those who live lives of fullness in Christ and pass on His life and light to their descendants.

It is far easier to blame others for the things that are not working well in our lives.  Some of those people may indeed be the cause of the worst that we experience, and not blaming them in no way exonerates them.  Not blaming them, however, frees people to become the chain-breakers and legacy-makers that help themselves and others live the lives for which we were made and to which we are called.  The choice, of course, is always our own to make.