Classical Americana

 

Among the many claims about the field of Classics made in the New York Times' lengthy profile of Princeton Classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta was that “Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries.” As has already been pointed out, it's a claim that only holds up if we allow the phrase 'Classics as we know it today' to do a lot of work. Classics as a modern academic field within a modern, research-intensive university system may well owe its origins to the emergence of the modern research university in 19th-century Germany. But Europeans have been turning back to classical cultures of the Greeks and the Romans pretty much since Rome fell.

So much is clear from more or less every stage of European history, from the Dark Ages, when monks kept the classical literary tradition alive by copying Greek and Latin manuscripts; through the Renaissance, when humanists like Politian translated and emulated classical writings; to the Enlightenment, when, as Rachel Poser, the author of the New York Times piece, puts it, “a sort of mania” for Greece and Rome took hold of the intellectual classes. The idea Europeans simply invented the classical tradition out of whole cloth in the Renaissance is, in other words, contradicted by virtually the entire history of European culture before then.

It might be objected at this point, as a last-gasp effort to save Poser from what seems like a fairly obvious clanger, that her focus was on the United States, not Europe. 'How these two old civilizations became central to American intellectual life,' she writes (with my added emphasis) 'is a story that begins not in antiquity, and not even in the Renaissance, but in the Enlightenment.' So perhaps her hypothesis isn't that a relationship with Greco-Roman culture became central to European culture only in the 18th and 19th centuries (after all, that's plainly wrong); but simply that Greece and Rome only became big in American culture during the Enlightenment. 

Now, that's obviously true, but it's true for what should have been a fairly obvious reason. Greco-Roman culture only becomes baked into American culture and institutions during the Enlightenment because that's when the United States developed into an independent nation. In other words, there was no United States of America before 1789, and there weren't even any permanent Anglo settlements in North America until 1607. Depending on where precisely you place the Enlightenment, that makes it inevitable that the Greek and Roman classics won't have a big presence in American life before then.

But still, wouldn't the kind of engagement with Greek and Roman history that is on show in the Federalist Papers have been impossible without the Enlightenment? When colonial Americans did wrestle with the Greco-Romans, didn't they always do so in an Enlightenment vein? Well, no. According to Eric Adler, Greek and Latin formed a large part of the curricula of the colonial colleges. And they were taught in a way that reflected two traditions, humanism and scholasticism, that stretch back well before the Enlightenment. 

They were, in fact, taught largely in a Christian vein. This brings us to a fact about Western cultural history that's so obvious that we are, it would seem, no longer capable of seeing it. The Europeans that settled North America in the Early Modern period were, almost to a man, Christians; and Christianity is a religion with roots in the ancient Mediterranean world. When the British settled North America, their religious and educational elites brought the study of Greek and Latin with them in large part because many of their holy texts (the Gospels; influential translations like the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate; the works of the Church Fathers) were written in those languages.

We can, as it happens, actually test the thesis that, had Europeans come to the Americas before the Enlightenment, they would have brought an interest in the Greco-Roman classics with them. We can do this because, as you might be aware, Europeans (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) did actually arrive in the Americas well before anyone's starting-point for the Enlightenment. And, sure enough, if we look at Spanish accounts of their encounters with local people, we find references to Greek and Roman historiography. Many of these accounts were, of course, written by priests of the Christian religion, a religion which, it bears repeating, was a central part of the Europeans' cultural inheritance and which has its origins in the Greco-Roman world. 

The real reason that Greece and Rome play such a significant role in the culture of the nascent United States, then, should be fairly obvious. Early Americans (at least the educated ones) talked about Greece and Rome because they came from Europe, and European culture was rooted in the Greco-Roman past. European settlers in the Americas, from Quebec to Buenos Aires, brought European culture with them, and European culture had a significant classical component. The specifically Enlightenment style of classicising engaged in by men like Georgia founder James Oglethorpe, whose utopian schemes were influenced by Plato, was simply the latest wave of classical influence. That it involved engagement with the classics was, in itself, more of a continuation of pre-existing European cultural habits than anything fundamentally novel.

All of this should, to repeat, be fairly obvious to anyone who knows anything about global cultural history. But the power of the ideology that currently has a stranglehold on US colleges is considerable; so considerable, in fact, that it leads college professors to write statements that any layman can see are plainly false. For Rebecca Futo Kennedy, for example, of Denison College, Ohio, modern Americans ‘are no more or no less the heirs of the ancient Greeks than they are the heirs of ancient China.' 

In fact, Americans are clearly more indebted to ancient Greece than they are to ancient China. Their monumental architecture is Hellenizing in style; banks and state capitols look vaguely like the Parthenon, not the Foguang Temple. Modern Americans' political system was created by men who drew on and discussed Polybius and Plutarch, not Confucius and Shang Yang. The higher registers of their main language, English, is full of borrowings from Greek, not Mandarin. And the holiest text of the dominant religion (the New Testament, Christianity) is written in koine Greek, not Old Chinese.  

Once again, virtually everyone who hasn't spent too much time around a modern American Humanities department knows this, and knows why this is the case. Americans are more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China because the United States was created largely by Europeans; and European culture, for stunningly obvious reasons, has always been more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China. 

But this simple fact destroys one of the central contentions of the extreme 'social justice' approach to Classics profiled in Poser's New York Times piece. This contention, as Poser describes it, is that ideas about the classical tradition 'cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions.' 'Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below,' she goes on. And she quotes Harvard professor Paul Kosmin: 'That exclusion,' he tells her 'was at the heart of Classics as a project.'

This is wrong-headed in any number of ways. For a start, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has had to remind historians, the idea that exclusion, inter-group violence, and slavery was a product of the Enlightenment gets things exactly the wrong way round. One of the things that most clearly distinguishes Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment cultures is precisely their relative inclusivity and pacifism, not to mention their distaste for slavery, an eccentricity that in itself sets them apart from virtually all previous civilisations. 

But the simplest way we can see that the radical revisionist view is wrong is by going back to the obvious facts about Western cultural history that I've referred to in this post. The new would-be orthodoxy is that the classical tradition 'cannot be separated' from ideas that took shape in the modern colonial period. In fact it can, as a simple glance at the classical tradition before the modern colonial period makes clear. 

The Rediscovery of Johnny Baloney

Another thing it turns out I'm ignorant about (although I might have suspected it) is the short-lived but spectacular flowering of cast-bronze sculpture in southern Germany around 1600. This took place mainly in Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach princes, and Augsburg, home of the HNW Fuggers - no coincidence, since casting large-scale sculptures is bronze is enormously expensive. The 'Neptune ...taming a sea-horse...which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' that the speaker of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' draws his guest's attention towards is supposed to speak loudly about his spending-power. It's also a quiet reminder of a river of artistic influence on which bronze deities of all sorts flowed between northern Italians states and southern German ones as the 16th century drew to a close. 

At the head of this river was a Dutchman, usually known by the less than compellingly Dutch name Giambologna (French Jean de Boulogne). A portrait of him by Hendrick Goltzius (more convincing Dutch name) is above, partly so that he'll stand at the head of a river of images in this post. And partly as a thanks for leading, directly or indirectly, to the flood of monumental bronzes that visitors to Munich can now wade into. 

There's at least one weighty tome on this topic by others who know vastly more about it than I do. So instead of trying to write anything much about it, here's a quick intro in images.

Let's start with two works by Giambologna himself, both on classical themes: the Rape of the Sabines (1574-82) and Hercules and Nessus (1599), both now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

Literal tonnes of smaller bronze versions of these are around (including in a room in the Bayerisches Staatsmuseum  in which my personal rediscovery of Johnny Baloney was made). Some are better than others; here are two chosen at random:

One bronze in Munich that is by Giambologna himself is the towering crucifix in Michaelskirche, a gift to the Wittelsbachs by their fellow jet-setters the Medici. There was a connection there, with Albrecht V of Bavaria's sister-in-law marrying Francesco de Medici in 1565. And, of course, their wedding forged a link in the bronze-casting chain, with Hubert Gerhard, a student of Giambologna,  going on to work for both the Fuggers in Augsburg and the Wittelsbachs in Munich. Here are two examples of his efforts, the archangel Michael defeating Lucifer on the facade of the Michaelskirche, and Perseus holding up the head of Medusa (this one in the Wittelsbachs' Residenz palace in Munich):

Soon the Wittelsbachs decided to breed their own sculptors by sending talented sons of Bayern to Florence. Two of the most successful of the new crop were Hanses Reichle and Krumper. Here's another Michael by the one Hans, above the entrance to the Zeughaus in Augsburg; and the tomb monument of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV (a Wittelsbach) by the other Hans, in the Munich Frauenkirche:

I've saved probably the most recognizable of Giambologna's works for last, the Flying Mercury from around 1580. This one has been extensively copied and played off, and has turned up all over Europe - including, of course, in the Wittlesbach's home in Munich. What better image of the swiftness and borderlessness of artistic influence could there be?

Meditations on the rosary

Recently I started praying the rosary. That may not sound unusual, but it was something of a surprise to me, since I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian (except in an attenuated, cultural sense), nor even a theist (that is, I don't believe in a personal God distinct from the world yet active in it). So why am I doing it?

The proximate cause was the power of context. Specifically, I was lucky enough to have time in the first couple months of this year to wander around some of the dozens of beautiful Gothic and baroque churches that are dotted around Munich and its environs. Poking my nose into the Theatinerkirche one day, I heard a prayer being recited over the loudspeaker, and I decided to sit for a while to figure out what it was.

It helped that it was in German, a language I thought I knew but was trying to get back up to speed with. It also helped (if that's the word), that six of the years since my last stint in Germany were in California, where I got deep into a hippy version of Buddhism.

The California hippy Buddhism I got deep into encouraged us to look at religious activity just as a kind of practice, and an experimental one at that. (Unlike Greco-Roman religion, it's not even 'orthopraxic,' since engaging in certain practices isn't seen as madatory.) 

After I'd recited a few hundred verses of Japanese (a language I really don't know) as a kind of psychological experiment on myself, I started looking at Christian worship with fresh eyes. Why couldn't I just look at Christian practices like the Eucharist as a practice, without getting into the question of whether the claims made about it were true?

Well, one of the reasons is that official Catholic teaching, in particular, requires you to believe certain claims in order to take part. That's an impasse I'll come back to in this post and, no doubt, on this blog. But nobody has questioned me on what's going through my mind as I work through the rosary, at least not so far.

One of them is that I don't believe some of the things I'm saying (like that Mary is the mother of God), though others strike me as possibly true (like that Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns). But that's probably not the most interesting thought I've had praying the rosary (if it turns out it is, the rest of the post will offer you diminishing returns). Nor is the way I feel it's such an unexpected and interesting thing, something I need to explain (surely a product of being Protestant by upbringing, a kind of cultural identity it takes occasions like this for me to even notice, but is apparently there.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me too, in the odd way they seem to when you're engaged in a meditation practice focused on focusing on something else. So here are some rather secular meditations on the rosary, with hopes that Christian readers will forgive me.

One interesting thing about the rosary is how it features a combination of repetition and variation - variations on a theme, as it were. The main bit, the Ave Maria ('Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' etc.), is recited fifty times, but there are also five 'Our fathers' between each set of ten Ave Marias, and there's a distinct lead-in to the whole exercise. And on top of that, after each 'Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' there's a different descriptive phrase about Jesus which varies depending on what set of ten you're on, what day of the week, and can also vary depending on the season (Lent) say, and what specific tradition you're following.

Catholics will no doubt find all this pretty familiar and banal, but it's interesting to me as something you see in so many religious traditions - in fact, this combination of repetition and variation is basically what ritual of any sort boils down to. In the San Francisco Zen Center, I remember a lot of the California Buddhists offering explanations of that sort of thing in terms of mindfulness practice. (Justifications in terms of tradition didn't seem to have as much purchase in the Haight as in some other places I've lived.) Paying attention to bowing correctly was meant to snap you out of your thoughts and bring you back to the present moment.

But I'm also interested in how the variations might add to your attentiveness. It's something scholars used to write about poetry - that the slight variations poets introduced to regular metrical schemes kept the readers' attention. When you have to perform or recite something yourself, it makes you use that bit more cognitive energy. You could mindlessly recite the Ave Maria a hundred times, but whether you could do so while getting the added descriptive phrases about Jesus right is another question.

All this talk of Buddhist meditation has reminded me of another thing that caught my attention - the theory that this Christian form of devotion using a chain of beads might actually have originated in Buddhist practice. (I've also recited 'karmapa chenno' and such things with beads in Buddhist contexts.) I have no idea how respectable this theory is, and I can't find any solid evidence for it. But having recently read Thomas McEvilly's huge book on possible transmissions of philosophical and spiritual ideas from East to West, I do believe I'm credulous. 

The final thought, as often at the end of a meditation session, is a practical one. This time it isn't 'Right, I'm going to send him that email' or anything like that, but a modest proposal to the Catholic Church to transform the way it presents itself. More precisely and generally, I do wonder whether Christianity isn't losing out on a big opportunity.

There's an enormous market of attention for meditation in the West, and (as I exemplify) young people in the West are quite willing to recite things they don't believe, and seem alien to them, if it's presented as a way of calming the mind.

Personally, I believe that's actually the most honest way of presenting practices like the rosary, since I don't personally believe many of the religious claims that often go along with them (as with the rosary). But even if you do believe in those more concrete claims, presenting them as a practice others can share in might be an interesting way of reaching out, and of inviting outsiders into your own contemplative tradition.

Don't get me wrong: some people really believe what they're reciting, and I respect that. What isn't clear to me is what trouble it causes to have others who don't believe them reciting them for their own reasons. In any case, as I say, so far nobody has objected to me praying the rosary with my own funny thoughts in my head.

It's an interesting irony of my own spiritual life that I was raised in a tradition (Christianity) that has its own rich mystical history, but when I felt the need for contemplative experiences I headed increasingly Eastward (all the way, in fact, to California). Was that because hippies seemed more hip than Anglicans, and Buddhism more exotic? Yes. But it's also, I think, because Christian churches are, in my experience, oddly embarrassed about the more direct mystical strains that most of them have holed up, like eccentric elderly relatives, in their attics.

Accomplished accomplices

The other day I went on a day-trip to the city of Augsburg, just outside of Munich. It's well worth a visit: for centuries an autonomous city-state within the Holy Roman Empire, it's a very pleasant place to wander around, and has, besides, a number of interesting things to see. There's the cathedral (with an excellent museum attached to it), the Golden Hall (which richly deserves its name) in the Town Hall, and the Fuggerei, one of the world's earliest experiments of social housing, set up by the Fuggers, the Silicon Valley billionaires of their day. (Rent was set at one Rhenish Guilder back in the 16th century, and you can still live there for €0.88 a year - all you have to do is say a few prayers each day for the souls of the Fugger family). 

Just down the river from the Fuggerei, another extraordinary encouragement to prayer was being constructed around the same time. These are the three enormous late Gothic/early Baroque altars set up in the church of local saints Ulrich and Afra. (There are actually two churches - one Protestant and one Catholic - in what used to be an independent monastic complex. The ornate altars I'm talking about are obviously in the Catholic one.) These are the work of the Bavarian master Hans Degler, and you can get a sense of them in the picture above. Only a sense, though - I couldn't really find any photos online that succeeded in reproducing the effect of entering the church with the light falling in late winter, and seeing these enormous, shadowy structures looming at the far end of the nave. 

What's so wondrous about them isn't only their hugeness, but also the proliferation of figures crowded into them and hanging off them, like on an Indian commuter train (or, indeed, a Hindu temple). The southern altar (on the right) shows Christ rising from the dead (apparently with a Swiss flag), with Augustine on one side of him and Ambrosius on the left. The northern altar (on the left) is dedicated to the Holy Spirit possessing the Apostles at Pentecost (fifty days, as the Greek term suggests, after the resurrection). It's also dedicated to St. Afra, and shows her martyrdom, in the presence of Saints Ursula, Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara and Cecilia. 

Finally, there's the high altar, in the middle of the picture above, marked with a cross. (Of course, all of the altars are high, but this one earns its name with five stories, one more than the others have.) At the centre of this one is the familiar scene of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. One story above him, his mother is being crowned, with Peter and Paul the paid bouncers beside her. 

And that's only a pathetically quick description of some of the main figures. I've left out Gregory and Jerome (Fathers of the Church); Saints Rochus and Sebastian; and Mary as Queen of the Martyrs, among many others. And as a matter of fact, it's this super-abundance of focal points that got me thinking on the forty-minute train trip back to Munich. As a good non-theist with an interest (both senses) in meditative techniques, I've been praying the Hail Mary, you see, and one of the things that popped into my mind was the Marian motto 'to Jesus through Mary.' 

Another thing that I was reminded of after staring at those altars was the 'refuge tree' I'd encountered at Diamond Way Buddhist centres. Again the proliferation of figures, deities and semi-deities, Buddhas male and female, young and old, green and blue and white. 

One question that might occur to us when looking at such things is why a monotheistic religion needs them - not to mention a religion which, technically, isn't focused on a divinity at all. If the point is God/Jesus, what's the point of contemplating the saints? And if the point is awakening, or (at a pinch) the Buddha as a guide to awakening, why the profusion of spinning green houris? 

One idea I had is that omething like the following might be going on. As we're always being told (by science as much as religion) the human mind is weak and easily distracted. Because of that, even the simple techniques that have grown up with the idea of calming or strengthening it are quite hard to do - at least, they're hard to do with any degree of success (if by success you mean succeeding on focusing on something without your mind wandering). If you sit someone down in front of a crucifix or a Buddha, chances are their mind will wander to the closest new thing it comes across.

Why not, then, make sure the closest things it comes across guides it back to the meditation object? You could just put up more Jesus or Buddha statues (it's been tried), but the mind would probably just reject all of them in one go. But a saint or a minor Buddha that reminds you of a story involving the Anointed or Enlightened One - that's just the right amount of difference to catch the attention and draw it back. Maybe this is part of how the rosary works - by stringing us along with talk of Mary until we're subtly roped back into God through the changeable tags at the ends of the phrases (which usually tie in Jesus).

I don't know if there's been any scientific work or whether this is how these things really work in the minds of Catholics or Buddhists who dedicate themselves to the these practices. I also don't know of any very explicit passages in the writings of these religions which state that this is what's going on (or should be going on). If you know of any, please let me know in the comments below. If I've lost you at this point but you're still haunted by those altars I was describing before your mind wandered, I'd definitely recommend getting on a train from Munich and being haunted by them again up close.