Untitled): ‘‘Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau! / Mock On, Mock On; Tis All in Vain

Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe also by jeffrey hart Political Writers of Eighteenth-Century England Burke’s Speech on Conciliation Viscount Bolingbroke: Tory Humanist The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism When the Going Was Good! American Life in the Fifties From This Moment On: America in 1940 Acts of Recovery: Essays on Culture and Politics Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe Toward the Revival of Higher Education JEFFREY HART Yale University Press New Haven and London Copyright ∫ 2001 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Monotype Baskerville and Bulmer types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hart, Je√rey Peter, 1930– Smiling through the cultural catastrophe : toward the revival of higher education / Je√rey Hart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-08704-7 (alk. paper) 1. Education, Humanistic. 2. Civilization—Study and teaching. I. Title. lc1011 .h365 2001 370.11%2—dc21 2001022241 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 Dedicated to Baker-Berry Library and its sta√, the library being the most important building on any campus A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. —aleksandr solzhenitsyn The temples of the gods are the most enduring works of man. —christopher dawson To lose what is not a waste land is the very condition of being in a waste land. —lyndall gordon (on T. S. Eliot) Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii PART ONE: THE GREAT NARRATIVE chapter one Athens and Jerusalem 3 chapter two Athens: The Heroic Phase 14 chapter three Moses as Epic Hero 35 chapter four Socrates and Jesus: Internalizing the Heroic 73 chapter five Paul: Universal Synthesis 105 PART TWO: EXPLORATIONS chapter six Augustine Chooses Jerusalem 127 chapter seven Dante, Rome (Athens), Jerusalem, and Amor 138 chapter eight Hamlet’s Great Song 169 chapter nine The Indispensable Enlightenment: Molière and Voltaire 187 viii Contents chapter ten Hamlet in St. Petersburg, Faust in Great Neck: Dostoyevsky and Scott Fitzgerald 207 afterword Today and Tomorrow241 Notes 251 Index 263 Preface In 1947 and 1948, when an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I studied with a professor of philosophy named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a refugee from the Nazis. During World War I, as a soldier in the German army, he had fought at Verdun. On one occasion, during a lull in the bombard- ment, he wandered out into the pitted and scarred no-man’s-land. Sud- denly the artillery on both sides began firing again and he took refuge in a crater. He experienced extreme disconnectedness and negation. ‘‘I was a naked worm,’’ he told the students in his classroom. In 1933, he experienced another extreme negation in the form of the Nazi revolution. Like Edmund Burke at the time of the French Revolution, he had been star- tled into reflection by these traumatic negations. He had felt thrust out- side history, a ‘‘naked worm,’’ as he put it, meaningless, wandering on the moon. In consequence, he had thought long and deeply about education, his masters becoming Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, both of whom he saw as attempting to bring meaning out of despair. He had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind. He would say, ‘‘History must be told.’’ He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning. He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth- century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization. x Preface Goethe is often said to have been the last man to have known his civilization in its totality, that after Goethe things became too complex for anyone to achieve such grasp. Rosenstock-Huessy had a di√erent sort of knowledge and mastery in mind. He meant that the citizen, the product of a genuine liberal arts education, should understand his civilization in the large, its shape and texture, its narrative and its major themes, its important areas of thought, its philosophical and religious controversies, its scientific development, its major works of the imagina- tion. The citizen in this sense need not know quantum mechanics, neu- tron theory, non-Euclidean geometry, or the details of the twelve-tone scale, but he should know that they are there and what they mean. That kind of knowledge is the goal of liberal education, the knowledge of the great narrative and other possible narratives, and the ability to locate new things in relation to the overall design, and the ability to locate other civilizations and other cultures in relation to it. In a democracy such as ours the goal must be to have as many people as possible grasp their civilization this way, because they participate in the governing function either directly or indirectly and because they help to create the moral and cultural tone of the social environment we all share. During the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold, reflecting upon these matters in his essay ‘‘Numbers; or, The Majority and the Rem- nant,’’ hoped for a ‘‘saving remnant,’’ those who would be the educated bearers of the central ideas of their civilization. Some thoughtful educa- tors today have felt obliged to settle for a minimum goal of that sort because of the pervasive and deadening power of mass culture. Nev- ertheless, it would be wise not to underestimate the general human intelligence but rather try to extend genuine education as widely as possible. If history must be told, various narratives about Western civilization can attempt to ‘‘cover the facts.’’ The most central, the one that goes furthest, I think, in covering the facts, has been called ‘‘Athens and Jerusalem.’’ As used in this way those two nouns refer simultaneously to Preface xi two cities and to two goals of the human mind. Athens and Jerusalem are at once actual and symbolic. In their symbolic meaning, ‘‘Athens’’ represents a philosophic-scientific approach to actuality, with the goal being cognition, while ‘‘Jerusalem’’ represents a scriptural tradition of disciplined insight and the aspiration to holiness. Together they propose the question: Is all of actuality more like a mathematical equation or is it more like a complicated and surprising poem, reflecting, as Robert Penn Warren once put it, the world’s tangled and hieroglyphic beauty. Over many centuries Western civilization has answered this question not either-or but both-and, both Athens and Jerusalem. The interaction between Athens and Jerusalem has been a dynamic one, characterized by tension, attempted synthesis, and outright conflict. It has been this dynamic relation that is distinctive in Western civilization, and has cre- ated its restlessness as well as energized its greatest achievements, both material and spiritual, both Athens and Jerusalem. In such things as the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the hydrogen fusion reaction and the microchip, the cognitive science of Athens predomi- nates, but spiritual aspiration is also present. In Chartres Cathedral, the music of Bach, Stanford White’s triple porch of St. Bartholemew’s Church, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot, the spirituality of Jerusalem is a potent force but the mind of Athens remains a presence, too. As the achievements just mentioned indicate, the great narrative could be told in terms of art and architecture, and certainly music, perhaps even science and mathematics. But here it will be told in terms of literature, which does not need to be translated from nonverbal to verbal expression. The most important books and other works of high intellect represent a continuing revelation of Western thought and feeling. Such revelation is endless, almost by definition. Attention to it is the work of a lifetime. For the practical purposes of college education, a good introduction can consist of a single one-year course, that is, one course among many at the freshman or sophomore level. One model for such a course is the freshman Humanities I–II course at Columbia College, the seminar ancestor xii Preface of which was introduced in 1919 by John Erskine, a professor of English. It begins in the fall with Homer and ends in the spring with a great novel chosen from many possibilities. The title of this book speaks of a ‘‘cultural catastrophe,’’ and, more cheerfully, of ‘‘smiling through it.’’ The catastrophe is evident to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, but as regards higher education, one aspect of the catastrophe is the fact that of the books discussed in the pages that follow, all of them bearers of essential civilizational knowledge, few are part of the intellectual equipment even of professors in the liberal arts today, much less their students. This occlusion has been accompanied by, indeed is part of, an epistemological egalitarianism that assumes one opinion is as good as another, one book or pro√ered work of ‘‘art’’ as good as another, one idea as good as another, one ‘‘lifestyle’’ as good as another.

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