Classical Wisdom for Everyday Use

It is an elegant and most desirable skill in conversation to escape cliche while maintaining simplicity, and conserve the wisdom of the commonplace in a better guise. Among the learned this is easily done with allusions to literature, and is not infelicitous even among the vulgar, so long as they are apt to be impressed. Yet where one's company possesses both the shapely mind of a good education, and an open character that neither marvels nor is haughty, the choicest adornments of an elevated exchange may be found in the words of the ancient writers. Every sentiment is weightier in Latin, nothing glimmers like a touch of Greek. One should therefore always have some phrases ready; I give you some examples.

Cliche: "Don't judge a book by its cover."
Classical Solution: "Nimium ne crede colori" (Vergil, Eclogues II.17; "trust not too much to color.")
Implications to bear in mind among the exceeding learned: The first half of the line is "O formose puer" ("O pretty boy!"); one may therefore deploy the line admonishingly with a subtle grin in the right company.

Common Phrase: "Child Prodigy"
Classical Solution: "Non sine dis animosus infans" (Horace, Odes III.4.20; "An inspired infant, and not without the patronage of heaven.")
Secondary Use: Horace is describing himself as a child, and one could therefore use the line ironically of the self-impressed, although this may lose some sting if the subject, like Horace, is at all worthy of the line.

Political Opinion: "We ought not to appease, Munich, Chamberlain, etc."
Classical Solution: "...χειροτονήσετε ὦ ἄνδρες ᾿Αθηναῖοι ἴνα μὴ μόνον ἐν τοῖς ψηφίσμασι καὶ ταῖς ἐπιστολαῖς πολεμῆτε Φιλίππῳ ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις." (Demosthenes, 1st Philippic, section 30; "Now vote, O men of Athens, so you may be at war with Philip not only in letters and resolutions, but in your actions as well.")
Problems of Employment: The sentence is elegant if not pithy, and long enough that quotation in the original is rarely to be advised. A more general allusion is preferable: "As Demosthenes said, you must fight tyrants with deeds as well as resolutions."

Poetry and Elitism

Dana Gioia, the current president of the National Endowment for the Arts, is probably the most visible representative of a movement in English poetry of the last few decades dubbed Formalism or New Formalism. The main unifying motive of this rather vague grouping of contemporary poets is the revival of meter and rhyme in serious poetry, certainly a valuable endeavor after all the damage that has been done since Walter the White Man took an ax to the English Muse. In Gioia's eyes, however, one of the main culprits in this has been the inability of contemporary poetry to be popular enough (a rather general expression of this thesis can be found in his 2007 Stanford commencement address). Although Gioia lays some blame on the failure of American education to establish cultured readership, his usual object of declamation is academic elitism.

Now, it may be that I would agree with Mr. Gioia if we broke things down, but it seems to me most unfortunate to associate a current disaster for good literature (the taste of the modern academy) with a necessary precondition of it (elitism). In fact, although serious poets are still a sort of elite within society itself, the problem with their verse is a democratization of aesthetic, whose causes must be found farther back than even the last century. By democratization of aesthetic I mean, essentially an aesthetic that falls easily in line with the dominant ideologies of bourgeois democracy and modern capitalism: self-expression and empowerment (as well as the consequent rejection of tradition and authority), a lack of artifice, and the exaltation of the mundane. Democratization of aesthetic, when taken to extremes, as it has been for about the last century by various avante-garde movements, cannot produce acceptable art; to me, this is a self-evident fact. It should not surprise us then that for a long time artists have had to redefine the critical vocabulary to make their innovations "good," even to the point of institutionalizing redefinition itself as a virtue.

The most interesting consequence of this democratization, however, is that the people (the demo- of democracy) didn't react very well to its first manifestations, and have responded to its establishment with the disinterest Mr. Gioia so often laments. It is this strange twist which has led to the intellectual elite (a social element that will probably always exist) supporting a popular aesthetic, although disliked by the people, solely because the value of that aesthetic are more in line with the generally dominant ideology, itself popular, vulgar, and, to bring in the Greek analogue of those terms, democratic. It can only be with democracy as the ruling ideology that the poets are noble while the poems are base.

Mr. Gioia is fighting an uphill battle in the poetic world, and he seems to have used his time at the NEA well, especially in being vociferous about humanizing public schools which often nowadays lack any real instruction in music or the arts. I admire his efforts, although I think they will eventually change little: the contemporary arts can be revived only by the most minimal compromises with the aesthetics of democracy, and, for all their good intentions, New Formalists like Mr. Gioia aren't really radicals in any direction.

Homosexuality

I have not yet touched the Third Rail of Mainline Protestantism on this blog, nor do I intend to give it any sort of full treatment here; it is a subject I have given much thought to, not least because the many rifts it has caused in the Church are I think symptomatic of the more fundamental differences between the Christian and Modern worldviews. I would like just to post a few observations from a rather typical blog exchange I ran into today.

1. Some of the arguments of the blog entry linked to above rely on a proposition something like this: "Certain aspects of Jesus' teaching are historically bounded, and therefore can be discarded." This is an incredibly dangerous proposition because it hides behind it the great Platonic error, that the true person is bodiless, immaterial, and outside of history. To this the Christian replies that the truest existence, indeed the Existence by which all things exist, became flesh and walked about on the earth. It is perhaps the most important thing theologically to come to terms with the fact of the Incarnation. A human being like us all, Jesus existed in his historical context, spoke the language(s) he spoke, knew the terms he knew, and yet we Christians confess that he, body, historicity and all, was the Word/Reason/Discourse (all meanings of the Greek 'logos') of God, and that it was not through him but in him that God acted. To begin to explain away teachings of Jesus by appealing to the 'true' message buried beneath all the inconvenient materiality is a very tricky, if not altogether pointless, enterprise.

2. Beneath the blogger's 'love ethic' lies another troubling assumption, which he shares with many, if not most, namely, that sin exists only as a series of discrete moments where we made the wrong choice. Even before we would get into the matter of 'something is wrong only if it hurts someone' (or, as I call it, dripping with scorn, Enlightenment Bourgeois Individualism 101), this assertion is problematic. Under this framework, the Christian needs only to make the right decisions to avoid all sin. Put another way, the human being is sovereign over vice and virtue, even if he is rather silly and often makes the wrong choice; the human being, qua human being, is sinless, and spotted only by his mistakes. Yet such a view hardly accounts for the failure and mediocrity that comprises most of human life, or the immediate dissipation that follows hastily upon the glory of the rest. This fundamental inability to the do the right thing, this unreality and impotence of the human condition is the state of being (in Paul's words) 'under sin:' it is the ever present and essential way in which we as human beings fail to be the image of God we were created to be. It is an existence and not a choice.

This opposition is important because I have found one of the central lines against the sinfulness of homosexuality is that being homosexual is an essential part of a person's individuality, that to deny the expression of that essential character would be to deny the full and total existence of that person. But Christianity does not hold that, like a seed, human beings hold all the potential for their right existence within themselves, and require only the proper circumstances to grow, or that a person's innate characteristics are necessarily good. On the contrary, there is poison from the very birth, which is why Jesus taught that we must be born again (John 3:3) and must lose our lives to save them (Matthew 26:24-26; Mark 8:34-37; Luke 9:23-25). The certainty of death, the wages of sin, is not to be underestimated: here is a thing which human being will do, bar none; it is as essential as the breath and the heartbeat. Yet even death, the cap and captain of all the sin that is in us, will be overcome in the end if Christ is with us, and lie discarded like all the other essential parts of our current existence which do not conform to the image of God.

Unsex Me Here!

On the internet are many ways to waste an hour or two, some of them quite innocent, such as The Gender Genie, which purports to divine the sex of an author from their text.

Milton's scores (1667 words from Book 1 of Paradise Lost):
Female Score: 2646
Male Score: 1707

Apparently 'with' is preponderantly both female and Miltonic.

Lady Shakespeare (1806 words from scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream):
Female Score: 2875
Male Score: 1875

Again, lots of points from 'with.'

If we consult a history (1171 words from Henry V.3.1-2) Bill's a man again, if barely:
Female Score: 1579
Male Score: 1620

Tragedy (1016 words from the last scene of Othello):
Female Score: 1448
Male Score: 1316

A woman here (and 'not' overtakes 'with' as the chief point-getter for femininity).

Francis Bacon is safely a man with the 571 words of his essay On Death...
Female Score: 504
Male Score: 1029

...As is Jane Austen, judging from the first 782 words of Pride and Prejudice:
Female Score: 900
Male Score: 1031

Mary Wollestonecraft, too, must have duped us all, if we consult the first 2712 words of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:
Female Score: 2790
Male Score: 3940

Judging from these results alone, I rather think this site is better for telling what is prose and what is poetry, an hypothesis which I find much more compelling when we consider that...

Walt Whitman (starting from the first 1962 words of 'Starting from Paumanok') is a man!
Female Score: 2394
Male Score: 2767

P.S. To my adoring public I must apologize as much for the cursory matter of this post as the great tardiness with which it has come: being pressed first with finals, then travel, and at last a mild but uncomfortable illness, I am settling only now into what shall, I hope, become a regular summer schedule. I intend no more to try the patience of my esteemed and regular readers, nor leave the visit of an expectant browser unrewarded.

I am thus, as always, your humble servant,
C.A. Rivera, for now, a man
(Words: 325
Female Score: 562
Male Score: 587)

To Ialdabaoth with thee, O National Geographic!

Here's a fascinating article about the Gospel of Judas mess a couple years back (and if you didn't know it was a mess, you really ought to read the article). It's stuff like this that shows the kind of real damage that can come from the pairing of careless scholarship and profit-eyed sponsors, especially when they meet over an area, like the early history of Christianity, where the public is both emotionally interested and severely misinformed.

The hat tip, as they say, goes to Jim West.

Update: You can read a response to this article from National Geographic here. (thanks again to Jim West)

Lord Macaulay and Political Rhetoric

I recently came across this excellent passage, written by Macaulay in 1839 in a review of William Gladstone's book The State in its Relations with the Church, in a collection of his essays. It seems to me a fine characterization of political rhetoric, although the circumstances of politics have changed greatly since Macaulay's day, even if the bare structures of legislature have not. In an era when statesmen speak to broadcast cameras before their colleagues and the debates of any body aim rather to flatter the commonest voter than convince their abler representative, even the showman's eloquence that Macaulay here describes is lost to us. For this reason the faults he cites have been greatly and unfortunately magnified, so that the orators who seemed to wed vacuity to eloquence in his day have found a style as ugly and as stumbling as their arguments in ours. But these are my thoughts; here are Macaulay's:

"There is little danger that people engaged in the conflicts of active life will be too much addicted to general speculation. The opposite vice is that which most easily besets them. The times and tides of business and debate tarry for no man. A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must; and if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully. He finds that there is a great difference between the effect of written words, which are perused and reperused in the stillness of the closet, and the effect of spoken words which, set off by the graces of utterance and gestures vibrate for a single moment on the ear. He finds that he may blunder without much chance of being detected, that he may reason sophistically, and escape unrefuted. He finds that, even on knotty questions of trade and legislation, he can, without reading ten pages, or thinking ten minutes, draw forth loud plaudits, and sit down with the credit of having made an excellent speech.
Lysias, says Plutarch, wrote a defence for a man who was to be tried before one of the Athenian tribunals. Long before the defendant had learned the speech by heart, he became so much dissatisfied with it that he went in great distress to the author. "I was delighted with your speech the first time I read it; but I liked it less the second time, and still less the third time; and now it seems to me to be no defence at all." "My good friend," says Lysias, "you quite forget that the judges are to hear it only once." The case is the same in the English Parliament. It would be as idle in an orator to waste deep meditation and long research on his speeches, as it would be in the manager of a theatre to adorn all the crowd of courtiers and ladies who cross over the stage in a procession with real pearls and diamonds. It is not by accuracy or profundity that men become the masters of great assemblies. And why b e at the charge of providing logic of the best quality, when a very inferior article will be equally acceptable? Why go as deep into a question as Burke, only in order to be, like Burke, coughed down, or left speaking to green benches and red boxes? This has long appeared to us to be the most serious of the evils which are to be set off against the many blessings of popular government.
It is a fine and true saying of Bacon, that reading makes a full man, talking a ready man, and writing an exact man. The tendency of institutions like those of England is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness. The keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language. The habit of discussing questions in this way necessarily reacts on the intellects of our ablest men, particularly of those who are introduced into parliament at a very early age, before their minds have expanded to full maturity. The talent for debate is developed in such men to a degree which, to the multitude, seems as marvellous as the performance of an Italian Improvisatore. But they are fortunate indeed if they retain unimpaired the faculties which are required for close reasoning or for enlarged speculation. Indeed we should sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesmen who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons."

Quotes to be Attributed to Me in My Fame

"It was Jonson's view that Donne's meter merited hanging, and I am generally much in favor of following his advice with modern poets. Unfortunately, the state of affairs is such that we would soon run out of rope in applying that principle today."

"I find it hard to respect a poet who has no command of the classical languages. He had better be Shakespeare or he had better stop trying."

Interlocutor: "But surely you would agree that Poe's jingling is as bad as Whitman's formlessness?"
Rivera: "I certainly would not! Poe's verse is merely bad; Whitman does violence with his poems."