From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Classics: Quiz

Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to recover his equilibrium.”  Through his experience, he is “brought face to face with issues of life and death, railing against mortality but coming to understand and accept it.”

Achilles?  Yes, but as M.L. West points out (The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth), also Gilgamesh.  West argues that “the Gilgamesh complex . . . accounts for major elements in the Iliad’s plot, structure, and ethos.”

Did Homer read Gilgamesh?  Did Plato read Moses?

Classics: Odysseus’ wisdom

The idea of Odysseus as a hero of mind or thought has an ancient pedigree.  The Pythagoreans interpreted Odysseus as a thinking man who passed through the underworld on a path of denial of the flesh and escape from the eternal round of reincarnation.

Proclus wrote, “Many are the wanderings and circlings of the soul: one among imaginings, one in opinions and one before these in understanding. But only the life according to nous has stability and this is the mystical harbor of the soul to which, on the one hand, the poem leads Odysseus through the great wandering of his life, and to which we too shall draw ourselves up, if we would reach salvation.” (The harbor of soul is Odysseus’ inland journey after his return to Ithaca.)

That doesn’t get the genius of the Odyssey, the great humanist epic that begins with the word andra and tells the story of the hero’s progress toward humanity in this world.  There is no transfiguration.  His road leads home toward wife, father, family, kingdom, and, ultimately, death.  It is the deepest wisdom, and the broadest humanity possible – in a world without resurrection.

Classics: Why We Needed Nietzsch

Jane Harrison begins her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Mythos Books) with a quotation from Ruskin regarding the “genius of the Greeks”: “there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest.”

Harrison comments sardonically that “the Greek, the favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was exempt from the discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject, never needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.”

Ruskin shows that if there had been no Nietzsche, we’d have to invent him.

Classics: Cult of the Greeks

David Gress’s excellent From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents shows that classics programs, the discipline of classics, great books programs, are founded on a highly questionable “grand narrative” of Western civilization. According to this narrative, Western history is a series of magic moments, beginning with Athens, the “magic moment of magic moments,” and that it is a continuous development from that Athenian beginning.

Gress finds this unconvincing for several reasons:

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Classics: Libido dominandi

David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria, the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something. That which was to be preserved was decus, or ‘face,’ fastigium, dignity, or the maiestas, ‘majesty’ of the empire. Foreign peoples who challenged the gloria or decus of Rome suffered from superbia, or arrogance, which led them to do iniuriae, injuries, to Rome, which needed, above all, to be avenged.”

Classics: Early Archaeology

David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann.  It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems.  There is no reason to doubt that the scepter of Agamemnon that Pausanias reported as being the most revered object at Chaeronea in Boeotia was still there in the time of Philstratus, or that the spear of Achilles had departed from its privileged position at Phaselis in Lycia.  So too we may well suppose that the letter that Sarpedon sent from Troy to Xanthus and Lycia was just as readily available for inspection by famous people as it had been in the first century AD, when Vespasian’s associate, Mucianus, saw it.”

Everything fit perfectly: “The spear that was at Phaselis was of bronze, and so was the sword of Memnon that was in the temple of Asclepius at Nicomedia, proving that Homer was correct to say that the heroes fought with bronze weapons.  The tomb of Ajax in the Troad was huge, as befitted the hero, and the tomb of Agamemnon said to be within the ruined walls of Mycenae was said to be rich in gold.”

Classics: Magnanimity

Aristotle defined magnanimity or “great-mindedness” as a proper estimate of one’s merits: “The Great-minded man is then, as far as greatness is concerned, at the summit, but in respect of propriety he is in the mean, because he estimates himself at his real value (the other characters respectively are in excess and defect). . . . Honour then and dishonour are specially the object-matter of the Great-minded man: and at such as is great, and given by good men, he will be pleased moderately as getting his own, or perhaps somewhat less for no honour can be quite adequate to perfect virtue: but still he will accept this because they have nothing higher to give him. But such as is given by ordinary people and on trifling grounds he will entirely despise, because these do not come up to his deserts: and dishonour likewise, because in his case there cannot be just ground for it.”

For Aristotle, “this virtue of Great-mindedness seems to be a kind of ornament of all the other virtues, in that it makes them better and cannot be without them; and for this reason it is a hard matter to be really and truly Great-minded; for it cannot be without thorough goodness and nobleness of character.”

Christians continued to use the word, but radically redefined it.

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Classics: Holding Hands

Judith Evans Grubbs notes that the Antonine Roman emperors pursued a pro-family agenda, employing pro-family numismatic symbols for that purpose: In addition to the use of the goddess Pudicitia, “also celebrated on Antonine coins is the concordia (sense of harmony, agreement) shared by the emperor and his wife, symbolized by the dextrarum iunctio (joining of hands) of the imperial couple.  Previously employed to represent political agreement between male members of the ruling family, from the second century on the dextrarum iunctio came to symbolize marital concord especially.  Many sarcophagi of the late second and third centuries portray the deceased standing hand in hand with his or her spouse, sometimes in an iconographic context suggesting the marriage ceremony itself.”

Classics: Athens’s success

Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18).  Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.”  

Ober’s volume, the capstone of a trilogy on Athenian democracy, argues otherwise, and asks why made Athens a success.  One question Allen raises is why the American Founders seem to have gotten Athens so badly wrong.  Her answer is that “the entire evidential base for this discussion has changed in the last two hundred years.”  We simply know a lot more about Athens than they did, and that’s because of sustained classical study on a number of fronts:

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Classics: Greek and ANE

Classics: Epicurean indifference revisited

Wes Callihan writes, in response to my brief quotation from Lucretius:

“Possibly, however, Lucretius wouldn’t consider the indifferent watcher from the porch outside Pompeii a true Epicurean. Doesn’t the very next line go on to say something about how the pleasure is *not* in the other person’s suffering but in recognizing your own safety? And that seems to be the context in which we should take his conclusion, that it’s with this kind of pleasure that the philosophical man should look down from his citadel of wisdom on those struggling in ignorance below — not pleasure in their ignorance but in his own rescue from it. And isn’t the entire poem evidence that Lucretius himself is not indifferent, but interested in raising others up to his safe height by teaching them the nature of things?

“Of course, if he’s right about the nature of things, why shouldn’t we be indifferent, and why should try to elevate others to understanding…

“Since Lucretius describes the cosmos as merely the result of unaccountable veerings and bonkings-together of the ever falling atoms, my students like to call it the Great Swerve, and unfortunate occurences are ‘bad swerve’ and good occurences are ‘good swerve.’  ‘Good swerve on your test tomorrow!’ ‘I’m sorry you stubbed your toe — bad swerve.’”

Classics: Lucretian wisdom

Book 2 of De rerum natura begins with “It is sweet on the great sea to watch from the shore other people drowning.”

The words were found on a wall on a house in Pompeii.  Perhaps someone sweetly watched from a perch opposite Vesuvius as the lava flow swallowed up the town, and that house.  Such are the ironies of Epicurean indifference.

Classics: Roman Death

Andrew Feldherr writes in the TLS that Romans were known by the way they died, as well as how they killed.  Not only individual Romans either: “The Romans as a people ‘decline and fall’; and their collective role as the West’s memento mori continues in the stream of recent books that imply the collapse of American society merely by comparing it to Rome.”

Feldherr is reviewing Catherine Edwards’s recent Death in Ancient Rome (Yale), which argues that Romans considered death a contest and a victory rather than a defeat.  As Feldherr says, “The identity of winner and loser that results from claiming death as a contest becomes a perfect figure for the paradox that it takes a Roman to beat a Roman.  And it is in this context that suicide, the most immediately active form of death, becomes a particularly Roman art, epitomizing, but also displacing, the events of the battlefield.”

Edwards sees continuity between the Roman way of death and Christian martyrdom, which she argues owes much to “the Roman calculus of death as victory.”  Feldherr disagrees, saying that Christian teaching changed everything by preaching “a creed that denies the reality of death itself.”  Well, no.  It’s a creed that preaches the grim reality of death but also the victory of resurrection.

Classics: Gratitude in ancient thought

Griffin begins her essay: “The exchange of beneficia – gifts and services – was an important feature of Greek and Roman society at all periods. Its prominence was reflected in the number of philosophical works that analyzed the phenomenon. From the fourth century B.C. onwards, euergesia and charis became subjects of moral discourse. Xenophon, particularly in his Socratic works and the Cyropaideia, and Aristotle, in his rhetorical and ethical writings, already anticipate much of what the Hellenistic schools were to elaborate. One of Aristotle’s followers gave the first clear formulation we have of the idea that ‘the giving and interchange of favours holds together the lives of men.’ Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus wrote the first treatise we know of to deal wholly and specifically with the subject of charis. His On Gratitude . . . had a long line of successors, including Epicurus’s On Gifts and Gratitude . . . and Chrysippus’ Stoic treatments of the subject, both as part of a general work On Duties . . . and in a separate work On Favours.”

Unfortunately, only two of these many treatises survive – Cicero’s de Officiis and Seneca’s de Beneficiis.

Classics: Tears of things

And/Or: Virgil is aware that the furor of civil war can be curbed only by an opposing, and more intense, furor. That, as Milbank says, is the way of paganism – peace established only by superior violence against violence.

But in those tears Virgil expresses the the painful recognition – perhaps just beginning to dawn in the Roman period – of the costs of a peace won through the blood of victims. Those tears express the sense of waste of pre-Christian civilization – the waste of defeated victims every bit as noble and skilled as the victors, the waste of a thousand thousand sacrifices, the untold gallons of blood shed on earth.

Aeneas’s tears are tears of despair, but their despair hopes toward a peace that will pass human understanding. These tears do not take how the world goes for granted, as a simple given. They have been touched by a vision of a world at peace, and long for more. These are the tears of things, the tears of empire and temple, that John tells us will be wiped from every eye.

Classics: Sentimental cruelty

Virgil is not a critic of empire, but he’s not quite an unqualified celebrant either. He knows the costs, and mourns them. But neither he nor his hero wishes the conquests away. Sunt lacrimae rerum, indeed, but neither the tears nor the things are going to cease. This is just the way things are, and the Roman weeps for the victims he crushes under his boots.

Virgil perhaps reflects the Roman penchant for sentimental cruelty, cruel sentimentality, that Shakespeare captures so well in his Roman plays. Perhaps, though, Virgil created it.

Classics: Honor skeptics

In his recent book on the cultural history of honor, James Bowman notes that “both Greeks and Romans had a history of skepticism about honor that ran in parallel with the mainstream culture’s celebration of it. Plato anticipated a particular Christian tradition of other-worldliness by treating honor as a mere illusion, born of a world of illusions against which he counterpoints an ideal reality. That was one reason he banished poets from the ideal republic: because they were conduits of transmission for fame – that is, honor. In Cicero and Seneca there are similar cautions, where a distinction between mere public applause and real virtus is acknowledged. Cicero, indeed, was terms ‘the Pagan Christian’ by Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist with whom he shared a powerful interest in honor, partly on account of this inwardness, which was so uncharacteristic of most honor cultures.”

Classics: Boyish Greeks

Stephen McKnight points out in his recent The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (University of Missouri, 2006) that Bacon dismissed classical Greek thought in favor of a knowledge both more ancient and more recent: “Bacon introduces another memorable image when he likens classical philosophy to an adolescent boy: both are sterile and incapable of producing or generating. This is, of course, an inversion of the Renaissance reverence for the classical age as a period of maturity and excellence, which must be recovered and emulated if humanity is to advance. Bacon, by contrast, portrays the classical period as humanity’s childhood and disparages his contemporaries, who hold such a vaulted opinion of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. According to Bacon, the wisdom ‘which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate.’”

Bacon proposed to move beyond classical thought and into generative maturity by drawing on resources more ancient than Plato and Aristotle.

Classics: Plato’s forms

In his “Hortatory Address,” Justin claims that Plato’s theory of forms came from a misreading of the tabernacle texts of Exodus:

“And Plato, too, when he says that form is the third original principle next to God and matter, has manifestly received this suggestion from no other source than from Moses, having learned, indeed, from the words of Moses the name of form, but not having at the same time been instructed by the initiated, that without mystic insight it is impossible to have any distinct knowledge of the writings of Moses. For Moses wrote that God had spoken to him regarding the tabernacle in the following words: ‘And thou shalt make for me according to all that I show thee in the mount, the pattern of the tabernacle’ . . .

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Classics: Types and Shadows

As Hugo Rahner made clear in his classic study of the patristic uses of Greek myth, the church fathers saw Christ anticipated not only in the OT but in ancient literature and philosophy generally. Some examples:

In Plato’s Republic (2, 361d-e), Glaucon describes the perfectly just man as one who will be “whipped; he’ll be racked; he’ll be bound; he’ll have both his eyes burned out; and at the end, when he ahs undergone every sort of evil, he’ll be crucified and know that one shouldn’t wish to be, but to seem to be, just.” Clement of Alexandria comments in the Stromata that Plato’s thought here is quite close to that of Wisdom 2:12 (”let us remove the righteous man from us, because he is troublesome to us”). And, of course, the account matches the experience of Jesus, the Just.

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