Sports and the Poet

From my tutor: not to become a Green or a Blue at the races, or to side with the Light-armored or Heavy-armored in the amphitheatre.

-Marcus Aurelius, Mediations I.5

Marcus Aurelius might not have approved of rooting for sports teams, and in a man who could see the wars by which he preserved Rome as so many vanities it is perhaps not unsurprising to find so dismissive a view of athletic fanhood. Certainly anyone who has seen me or any other deeply invested fan rooting for their team knows that it has the tendency to upset the equanimity of one's mind. Yet not all the ancients were Stoics like the somber Antonine, and many of them, especially the Greeks, found something very meaningful in athletic competition. In part this was because all the major Greek games were both international competitions, in that there were athletes from different city states competing against each other, and domestic competitions, in that only Greeks took part in major festivals like the Olympic, Nemean, or Pythian games, and so became an important unifying element in the culture of Greekness (Hellenism/Hellenicity). The games were also important religious festivals. Poets like Pindar and Bacchylides, the most distinguished writers of their day, were commissioned to celebrate the victors of these games in complex odes.

It would seem absurd today to establish so firm a link between athletics and the arts; since athletics is, at its essence, an exercise of the body, a society as insistently dualistic as our own has troubling admitting it to the life of the mind. After all, although Spike Lee might be seen at Knicks games, the enthusiasm of any artist or intellectual for sports is commonly portrayed more as a quirk of character or a humanizing element than as a genuine interest. Perhaps it is a residual puritanism to regard such affairs as petty amusements, perhaps it is the manufactured nature of sports in a capitalist-consumerist society. Yet the Greek Olympics were every bit as much an expression of their ruling class and ideology as our own Super Bowls and World Cups; one might hazard that their artists and intellectuals did not feel the same mad compulsion to rebel that ours do. In any case, it seems unfortunate that in a society where the importance of sports is as central as in any since the Greeks both the language and the poetic class lack the capability to produce that special delight, the Epinician (Victory) Ode. And yet...

Sketch for the first stanza of a Epinician Ode on the Jayhawks' Victory in the NCAA Tournament:

Like rain is Time to soak the firmness out
From godly grandeur, but the memory
Lives like slow fire in the mind of age,
Sprung from a hazy instant--near to me
The Muses wait with tinder, and more sage
Than all the rest, Apollo, crowned
With laurel; laurel too
Embrows you, Jayhawks, and it summons you
Above the humor of applauding sound,
--If Helicon permit me--and the shout
Gone up for adoration, out of time
Upon the current of my lofty rhyme.


Epinician Odes normally follow their introductory sentiments with a description of the victor, proceed to recount some myth, which more often than not is germane somehow to the victor or his city or family, and close with sentiments similar in bearing to those that opened the poem (here's a link to a serviceable translation of Pindar's most famous Olympian Ode) . Many English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Abraham Cowley most notably, wrote Odes in the style of Pindar, but none of them (so far as I know) wrote for actual athletic victors; I honestly don't even know what sort of organized athletic contest there was in England in that period. In any case, if English poetry is to be saved from the dungheap it seems content at present to reside in, why not start from a central feature of modern society which can cleanly and satisfyingly be patched onto an ancient and unquestionably classical tradition? I think I just might.

Beowulf for Everyday Use

It is not the sole nature of memorable and famous lines to compress profundity or give space to the sublime, although it is as equally no vicissitude of taste alone which is the foundation of fame. Yet there do remain many lines whose reputations have been raised beyond their due by the excellence of their authors, and which have been granted currency among the well-read on this account. All cultures have their classics, which the learned plunder with care for those unassuming phrases whose sentiment, though neither weighty nor lofty, may yet be made the gilt of conversation.

It may well be the misfortune of Beowulf never to have attained such a status, for it is a poem whose style lends greatly to quotation. The treasury of classical and Shakespearean letters from which we draw is certainly neither poor nor wanting, but it is an amusing exercise to wonder which phrases from the nameless Bard might stand beside arcades ambo, carpe diem and their brethren. I present a few offerings, and some advice for usage:

"Þæt wæs god cyning!" (line 11; "That was a good king!"). Rather straightforward and hardly to be limited to politics.

"Wæs þu, Hroðgar, hal!" (line 407; "Good health to you, Hrothgar!") Beowulf's greeting to Hrothgar and an all-purpose word of greeting in learned and friendly company. Combine with "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," to casually insinuate the peculiarity with which Denmark has fired the English genius.

"Đa wæs swigra secg sunu Ecglafes" (line 980; "Then was the son of Ecglaf a more silent man.") So the poet describes Unferth, who had questioned and mocked Beowulf's capabilities, after the defeat of Grendel; useful after anyone has been shown up, but especially to be applied to the more vain and pompous among us.

Some Wit of Dr. Johnson's

As I am busy with finals, I can only provide you, dear reader, with the fruit of another man's mind.

Samuel Johnson on Rousseau (from Boswell's Life):

Boswell: My dear sir, you don't call Rousseau bad company. Do you really think him a bad man?
Johnson: Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have expelled him; and it is a shame that he is protected in this country.
Boswell: I don't deny, sir, but that his novel may, perhaps, do harm; but I cannot think his intention was bad.
Johnson: Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.
Boswell: Sir, do you think him as bad a man as Voltaire?
Johnson: Why, sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.

On Swift

Swift having been mentioned, Johnson, as usual, treated him with little respect as an author. Some of us endeavored to support the Dean of St. Patrick's, by various arguments. One in particular praised his "Conduct of the Allies." Johnson: "Sir, his 'Conduct of the Allies' is a performance of very little ability." "Surely, sir (said Dr. Douglas), you must allow it has strong facts." Johnson: "Why, yes, sir; but what is that to the merit of the composition? In the Sessions-paper of the Old Bailey there are strong facts. Housebreaking is a strong fact; robbery is a strong fact; and murder is a mighty strong fact; but is great praise due to the historian to those strong facts? No, sir; Swift has told what he had to tell, distinctly enough, but that is all. He had to count ten, and he has counted it right." Then, recollecting that Mr. Davies, by acting as an informer, had been the occasion of his talking somewhat too harshly to his friend Dr. Percy [the sting of Johnson's wit, given an opening by a comment of Mr. Davies, had compelled Dr. Percy to leave the dinner], for which, probably, when the first ebullition was over, he felt some compunction, he took an opportunity to give him a hit: so added, with a preparatory laugh, "Why, sir, Tom Davies might have written 'The Conduct of the Allies.'" Poor Tom being thus suddenly dragged into ludicrous notice in presence of the Scottish Doctors, to whom he was ambitious of appearing to advantage, was grievously mortified. Nor did his punishment rest here; for upon subsequent occasions, whenever he, "statesman all over," assumed a strutting importance, I used to hail him "the Author of the Conduct of the Allies."

When I called upon Dr. Johnson the next morning, I found him highly satisfied with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. "Well (said he), we had good talk. Boswell: "Yes, sir; you tossed and gored several persons."

Billy Graham

Courtesy of Kevin Davis over at After Existentialism, Light, here's a good piece from Time magazine a few months ago about Billy Graham. The article is mainly a response to some rather ugly comments by Christopher Hitchens but nonetheless does a good job of showing how Billy Graham cannot at all be likened to Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen, or similar antichrists, an unfortunate mistake made by so many of the religiously illiterate.

To My Querimonious Peers

The hours, you say, that sound the course of night
Yield up their rest in rend'ring products right;
Those too that stretch the sun across the day
Exhaust themselves in studying, you say.
But say, my friend, when time's so wisely spent,
How can the spender be so ignorant?

Locus Classicus?

This is called Classicism. It is the enemy, we're trying to annihilate it.
-James Redfield, Professor of Classics, University of Chicago, on the idea that learning Greek through Homer ill prepares the student to read "real Greek"

It was the opinion of Ben Jonson that Spenser, in his liberal employments of archaism and coinage, far from enriching their native English, "wrote no language at all." Samuel Johnson similarly chided Milton in his Life, and pointed out quite accurately that the same Latinism which so often elevates the noblest sentiments of Paradise Lost renders the great poet's prose almost unreadable. On the other hand, Addison, speaking also of Milton, felt that high style was unachievable without the intervention of a foreign tongue, citing the Latin poets' borrowings from Greek, and the many different dialects that enriched the voice of Homer. Perhaps the most famous treatment of the issue is that of Horace:

Si forte necesse est
Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita reurm,
Fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cethegis
Continget, dabiturque licentia sumpta pudenter.
Et nova fictaque nuper habebunt verba fidem, si
Graeco fonte cadent parce detorta. Quid autem
Caecilio Plautoque dabit Romanus, ademptum
Virgilio Varioque? Ego cur, acquirere pauca
Si possum, invideor, cum lingua Catonis et Enni
Sermonem patrium ditaverit et nova rerum
Nomina protulerit. Licuit semperque licebit
Signatum praesente nota producere nomen. (Ars Poetica, 48-59)

Jonson translated these lines thus:
Yet if by chance, in uttering things abstruse,
Thou need new terms, thou may'st without excuse,
Feign words, unheard of to the well-trussed race
Of the Cethegi; and all men will grace,
And give, being taken modestly, this leave,
And those thy new, and late-coined words receive,
So they fall gently from the Grecian spring
And come not too much wrested. What's the thing
A Roman to Caecilius will allow,
Or Plautus, and in Vergil disavow,
Or Varius? Why am I now envied so,
If I can give some small increase? when, lo,
Cato's and Ennius' tongues have lent much worth
And wealth unto our language, and brought forth
New names of things. It hath been ever free,
And ever will, to utter terms that be
Stamped to the time.

The idea of a fixed language, dropped perfectly from the lips of Gabriel, is not without a long heritage, nor a certain seduction. I myself am hardly unaffected by its charms, and although the arguments on either side have their compelling points, and I have already found a professor of mine against it, I must admit my own adherence to a sort of Classicism of language. Many have heard my opinions on the subject, and know that I hold our modern brand of English in very low esteem, especially for its use of foreign words. On that particular I am soundly convinced and eager to win converts, but my purpose here is rather to lay out what can be meant by the very idea of judging periods of language against one another, which the kind allowances of modern canonicity cannot fathom, though the common experience of taste assures us it is there.

I should first point out, perhaps, that I am speaking of something a little different than the learned litany above: their concern, as I have quoted them, is the proper use of foreign words and syntax in formal poetry. This is a more specific concern within the broader question of good poetic diction, which is itself within the scope of my present concern. Although his concept is closer, Professor Redfield is also speaking of something a little different, namely, an Ideal Greek Language, from which all others, in true Platonic fashion, would be but emanations or derivations. All language is of course bound to history and emerges from it, and the boundaries of what is English and what is Greek are fixed only with the usage of the time. What we speak now would not be English to Aelfric or Bede, and the boundaries of style are no different than the boundaries of the language itself, as the very idea of archaism demonstrates.

If language then, which is the shape and means of expression, takes different shapes at different times, it seems natural to assume that the language of some periods will be able to express things that the language of another time could not. Concrete examples prove the soundness of this intuition on a basic level: when Shakespeare writes "thy most worst" (Winter's Tale III.ii.177), he says something that a modern English speaker, in a very real sense, cannot say, or at least cannot say without explicit appropriation of the Elizabethan idiom. As with simple gestures so with great ones: it is no coincidence that languages of literary merit can point to periods crowded with excellent writers. Such coteries are often labeled the product of political circumstances, but the usual broadness of a period of literary greatness in a language defies such logic. English poetry, for example, comprehended a broad spectrum of political states from Spenser to Pope, and yet who could deny that for the space of nearly two centuries there was consistenly good poetry in the English language? Similarly, Latin speakers experienced a Republic, its violent collapse, the establishment of monarchy, and its institutionalization all between Lucretius and Juvenal and yet found great writers consistently springing up while the language retained its vigor.

I accept that I have done very little in so short a space to prove any grand claims, and perhaps only muddled the forthright clarity of my opening statements. It is a subject worth far more attention than can grace a blog. I shall close by asking only whether anyone in good conscience can hold today's Atlantic Monthly in one hand and an issue of the Spectator in the other and affirm that our modern speech carries the day.

Hauerwas' Marital Misconceptions

It may appear as somewhat of a presumption to announce a guest posting for a blog so little traveled as this one. Yet I do not think I would be right in withholding the perceptive opinions, upon a subject so recently treated on this site, of none other than my dear and only mother, Cynthia Rivera, enthusiast and sometime scholar of medieval Iceland. Without further ado, then, I present a recent exchange of e-mails between us concerning some statements of Stanley Hauerwas' which I quoted in an earlier post.


Initial Objections to Hauerwas (mother):

I'm sure people have lots of different answers to the question "what
drives you crazy about the way people discuss religion and
homosexuality?" Mine is: will people please read up on the history of
Christian marriage before they start talking about it ?!?! I have heard
more mistakes than I can count--and they come from both sides :(

I'd like to know when and where Dr. Hauerwas thinks "For centuries,
Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage
ceremony." Not any time or place I know of. Certainly not in Western
Europe in ancient or medieval times, or at least not often. I'm not even
sure how that would work when most people married within the same small
geographic area--and by the middle ages were required to announce their
betrothal in public well in advance of the wedding.

I'm sure he knows theology, but I wonder how much he really knows about
the history of marriage (a subject about which lots of people assume
they know more than they do). I'm no expert either, but I can say that
within the past three or four years I have read (all or the first half)
of every significant book-length study of the history of Christian
marriage (in English and skimmed some in French and German) and lots of
articles as well. And I never saw anything like this. In fact, one of
the recurring battlegrounds between the church and older legal/kinship
systems was the church's insistence that a true marriage required free
and informed consent--something not absolutely incompatible with
marrying a stranger but certainly a problematic requirement under those
circs.

I wonder if he's just extrapolating from having read accounts of royal
marriages. It's a fairly common fallacy of people reading about a time
or place with which they are unfamiliar to focus on the top of society.
See, for example, the absolutely unshakable belief lots of people have
that in medieval and renaissance Europe people married very young. This
was true only of the very highest levels of the aristocracy and even
there such marriages often remained unconsummated for years afterwards
(medieval people weren't stupid--they knew just as well as we do that 14
years old girls seldom produce robust babies, which is sort of the point
of marriage among the landed ;)

Another theory, based on your comment, is that he picked it up from
Lewis who was a literature not history person and has been known to
overgeneralize about sexual matters in the middle ages.

Anyway, that's my rant. Put it down as the sort of ranting people often
send to blogs :)

Response (son)

Hauerwas does fire in all directions.  I was already a little
suspicious of the reality of his comment about people
returning from war being barred from communion (I think I
mentioned this in the post), as opposed to it being something
theologians said should happen.

If I remember the C.S. Lewis passage correctly, his emphasis
was on the fact that modern conceptions of marriage put almost
exclusive weight on the romantic love of the two parties, and
therefore lead to lots of divorces when that element
disappears and there is no sense of obligation/vow to fall
back on.  I believe (though my memory is less certain here)
that he also said something to the effect of "people didn't
fall in love and then get married, but rather got married and
then fell in love."  Now that you point it out, Hauerwas'
"they didn't know each other" does seem rather absurd.  But,
and you obviously would know better than I, to what degree
would lower class marriages be arranged as opposed to for love
(as if that's an either/or, right;)?

Come to think of it, Tyndale talks about this at the beginning
of the Obedience, and this may be better clue to why people
like C.S. Lewis and Stanley Hauerwas might disagree with
medieval Icelandic churchmen on this, since Tyndale is
criticizing the Roman church on its marriage practices when he
writes, in the context of the obedience of children to
parents, "See we not daily three or four calling one woman
before the commissary or official, of which not one hath the
consent of her father or mother?  Yet he that hath most money,
hath best right and shall have her in the despite of all her
friends and in defiance of God's ordinances."  Obviously this
is complicated by the implied bribery and/or prostitution
(well, the prostitution is not implied, since he says, in the
sentence previous, "the weddings of our virgins (shame it is
to speak it) are more like unto the saute of a bitch than the
marriage of a reasonable creature."["saute" must mean
something like sale or auction, although my edition's note
says it means "leap," which not only makes no sense, but
cannot be, as the OED first instance of that word, which is
from the French, is 1948, while a word spelled the same but
differently derived is current with Tyndale meaning "ransom
for manslaughter;" that's just poor scholarship on David
Daniell's part]). In any case, the idea of marriage,
presumably for love, sanctioned by the church but disapproved
of by the parents is there in the background in the early
sixteenth century, even if Tyndale attacks the more obviously
deplorable practice.

This definitely is a subject where people like to make stuff
up under the guise of historicism.  I've heard the claim often
trotted out (although as often denied by those well read
enough to have encountered such obscure texts as Plato's
Symposium) that devoted, lifelong romantic love is a medieval
development that didn't really exist in the ancient world.
Certainly overly zealous embrace of historical peculiarity is
just as bad as ignorant acceptance of modern views as universal.

Counter-Examples Expressly Stated (mother):

Hi--Here's my promised thoughts on the history of marriage stuff. I
think what Lewis says, as paraphrased by you (and that sounds right), is
fairly accurate. It would be even more accurate if it were something
like "people fell in love and then got married less often than today,
and got married and then fell in love more often." That is, he's
describing the majority of people but not by any means everybody.
Interesting that Lewis also tied it to modern divorce, because I was in
a conversation with friends just recently about how we know almost
nobody (hard to be sure :) who married for entirely non-romantic
reasons, but tons of women our age who have stayed married for what
would have been "reasons to get married" in another time: children,
family businesses, the wishes of their parents, religious teachings,
stability of a community, etc.

Sounds like you think Hauerwas may just have been carelessly
exaggerating something he'd read by talking about strangers. Makes
sense. I think three very distinct concepts get thrown together by those
who aren't careful: stranger marriage, arranged marriage, and marriage
for practical reasons. They can overlap and all three can be contrasted
with marriage because of love or attraction. But they are very different
from each other.

Let me give you a couple of made-up examples of arranged or practical
marriages which are the farthest thing possible from stranger marriages.
Say two farmers who live a few miles apart and are old friends decide
their children should marry each other: that's an arranged marriage, but
the couple have known each other all their lives--probably played
together as babies. Or say a young woman who is the only child of a
harness-maker decides to marry her father's most skillful apprentice: a
very practical marriage but the couple have lived under the same roof
and possibly eaten at the same table since childhood. Both are farther
from stranger marriages than a modern couple who marry after knowing
each other socially for a year or two :)

If I had to summarize what society's attitude toward marriage was in
pre-modern, Christian, Western Europe it would be something like this:
marriage is a practical (economic, political, business, whatever)
arrangement between two families (and therefore as a practical matter
the main decision-making power lies with the parents or their
surrogates). However, (A) the church will not bless a marriage not
entered into freely (B) everybody knows that everything will go more
smoothly if the couple get along and (C) things will go even better if
there is affection between the man and woman. (Nobody wants to live next
door to, or be in an extended family with, people who are fighting all
the time; everybody wants lots of children raised in the best possible
environment.)

Don't know much about the war/communion thing although I do know there
were a couple of periods during the medieval era when the institutional
church (leading intellectuals and/or the papacy) was big on legalistic
pacifism. Not sure of the details, but this could relate to that.

The Tyndale quote is intriguing and I'd like to know more about what
he's talking about--I'm not strong on the period when a lot of things
about the medieval church are collapsing and/or getting corrupt, but I'd
bet they included local marriage practices.

Conclusion (son):

I was thinking about the War/Communion thing, and I think I recall
reading somewhere an argument that claimed the Crusades were so
successful because it allowed all the violent and restless Frankish
noblemen to go off to war without suffering religious consequences.  So
Hauerwas may be closer to the truth there.

As for Tyndale, you can read the passage I'm referring to on Google
Books (just search for The Obedience of a Christian Man; it's the first
one that comes up, starting on the bottom of page 32).  It seems fairly
clear what he's saying, although, given the importance money plays in
all of it, we're probably dealing with burgher-level people at least and
not common folk.  He doesn't say much about reasons to marry in this
passage, or in the Obedience at all, but is more strictly concerned with
the marriage receiving the approbation of "father and mother" and "the
consent of all thy friends," as well as being "[an oath] sworn to God
before his holy congregation."  For the attacks he makes at the end of
the section concerning men getting out of marriages by becoming monks
there seems to be a clear scriptural precedent at Matthew 15:1-9, and
I'm surprised he doesn't cite it.

Anyway, I've probably forced Tyndale into this discussion far enough.
Thanks for pointing these things out to me.  I think in zeal for his
basic conclusion, that marriage ought not to be only or even primarily
about romantic love, as well as in scholarly sympathy for the trope of
the past's complete difference from us, I completely missed the fact
that Hauerwas was making a claim that was patently absurd, and not only
to common sense, but, as you pointed out, the conditions most human
society has existed under would be far less amenable to the marriage of
strangers than the jumbled and fluid modern west.