So Gore Vidal ends his historical novel, Julian, which tells the story of the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate (459). At the Catholic college where I teach, when we hear about the light and man’s love for it, we may assume that the author is referring to God and love of God. “A new sun and another day” might suggest the coming of the Savior, or Christian salvation. “Time’s mystery”? Probably God become flesh. And the “darkness,” one would guess, must refer to sin. But our assumptions would be an ironic inversion of the author’s and the speaker’s intent. In Vidal’s novel, Christianity and its triumph represent the “darkness.” In Julian, the light that morose, smothering, hypocritical, irrational Christianity has obscured is Greco-Roman paganism. In Vidal’s and Julian’s view, and in the view of many pagan citizens of the Roman Empire, Christianity and classical culture are enemies — a multitude of gods reflecting the complexity of life and nature versus an overweening Divine Bully. Reason versus irrational fanaticism. Sensible acknowledgment and control of the passions versus perverse denial of human nature. Ease and humane tolerance versus hypocritical and repressive severity.

A Christian certainly would not characterize the oppositions in these terms. He or she might restate them as an infinity of ridiculous gods versus the one, true God. Reasoned faith squared off against an insecurity that leads human beings to worship luck itself. Temperance versus slavery to the passions. Obedience to God and good versus license and moral chaos. But the Christian would have to acknowledge the oppositions. The earliest Christians, at any rate, undoubtedly felt themselves to be a radical counter-culture, notwithstanding their attempts, before Christianity took control of the Empire, to assure pagan authorities that they were fine citizens who represented no danger to the state. And few would dispute that, despite survivals and adaptations, and regardless of whether or not Christianity contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire as a political entity, the Christianization of the Roman Empire effectively brought an end to Greco-Roman civilization. And yet many modern Christian educational institutions, such as my own, consider the study of the Classics fundamental to their mission.

In exploring the peculiar but nonetheless intimate relationship between Christian education and the study of pagan, Greco-Roman antiquity, we can have no better guide than John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Given as a series of lectures one hundred fifty years ago, The Idea of a University raises the question of why the study of dead languages and long dead peoples belongs in a Catholic University.² The Idea of a University provides answers, too, although they are not always explicitly stated. The belief that Greco-Roman antiquity and Christianity are irreconcilably at odds was alive in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding attempts to reconcile the two.³ A. C. Swinburne, for example, sought to promote and imitate Greek poetry and drama as a means of liberating humankind from the slavery Christianity had imposed. He makes his view explicit in a letter to William Michael Rossetti: “One of these days I must write a paper on Athens and Jerusalem as the two rival fountains of light and darkness, liberty and servitude, for the human race . . . ” (Lang 56).⁴ As interesting and relevant to us today at any American college, moreover, are Newman’s ideas on why the ancient Greeks and Romans belong in a modern university.

Among the lectures and essays that comprise The Idea of a University is “Christianity and Letters,” in which Newman gives his most explicit justification for the inclusion of classical learning in Catholic education.⁵ Newman sees two preeminent forces at work in human history, one divine and the other human, and both good. The divine force, unsurprisingly, expresses itself in God’s covenant with Abraham and finds its continuation in Christianity. As for the human force, he calls it simply, civilization, with a capital C — the Civilization. He locates the seeds of Civilization in the Mediterranean and identifies Egypt, Syria, Greece, Italy, and North Africa as its starting points. Of these starting points, Greece has pride of place, and Greece’s earliest surviving author, Homer, he dubs “the First Apostle of Civilization.” Newman is talking about, of course, what we today call “Western Civilization,” and, correctly, he considers it to be the invention of the ancient Greeks (167-74).

We might expect Newman to argue that we should study the Classics, particularly Greek literature and culture, to understand better who we are and where we came from. Many classicists today, myself included, when confronted with students interested only in the world around them, argue that this is one of the most compelling reasons to examine civilizations and texts from so long ago. In The Idea of a University, Newman expresses the notion that both western civilization and Christianity share ancient roots: “We know that Christianity is built upon definite ideas, principles, doctrines, and writings, which were given at the time of its first introduction, and have never been superceded, and admit of no addition” (170). He adds that “Civilization too has its common principles, and views, and teaching, and especially its books, which have more or less been given from the earliest times, and are, in fact, in equal esteem and respect, in equal use now, as they were when they were received in the beginning. In a word, the Classics” (170). Yet Newman also goes in a different direction. The key phrase here is, “in equal use now.” The study of the Classics is useful. Not useful as history — though as an historian I at any rate would certainly argue the utility of history — but rather, in Newman’s words, as an “august method of enlarging the mind and cultivating the intellect, and refining the feelings, in which the process of Civilization has ever consisted” (171). The study of the Classics provides “the most robust and invigorating discipline for the unformed mind” (175). Making sense of deep and intricate thinkers expressing themselves in a challenging — and, I would suggest, remarkable — language surely requires intellectual effort, and most students learning Greek would acknowledge that discipline and organization are essential to success. And yet I must confess that the “good exercise for the mind” argument for the Classics, though employed these days and perfectly legitimate, strikes me as far from the most compelling or most profound reason to study them. And I think Newman here is suggesting something more profound, though not explicitly.

When Newman talks about Civilization with a capital C, Western Civilization, he is talking about “an association, not political, but mental, based on the same intellectual ideas, and advancing by common intellectual methods” (168). That is, in Newman’s view, Civilization is, at its core, intellectual, not material. It is based upon ideas, not institutions and customs, and its progress is determined and identified by shared intellectual processes, not by actions. Newman seems to be suggesting that engagement with the classical texts that form the foundation of our civilization is more than good exercise, expanding the brain muscle: it is participation in, virtually inculturation in, Civilization itself. And so he talks about enlargement of the mind, cultivation of the intellect, and refinement of the feelings. It is not so much that we become smarter as we study the Classics, though we do. It is rather that we become wiser, broader, more perceptive — in a word, civilized.

But is this “civilizing” really indoctrination? Is this sharing the “same ideas” and “common intellectual methods, ” as Newman puts it, a way of suppressing opposition to the values and practices of conservative elites? In short, is education in Greek and Latin a strategy to preserve the status quo — in Newman’s time and in our own? Newman certainly thought that liberal education — and for his time that meant an education emphasizing the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans — was essential to the training of gentlemen. But by “gentleman” Newman did not mean the member of a particular economic class, and if we look at the virtues Newman attributes to the gentleman, I would suggest that we could do much worse than to impart them to contemporary students. In another discourse included in The Idea of a University Newman ascribes to the liberally educated gentleman “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life” (89). But did these fine sounding virtues really mask an education in conformity? By “a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life” did Newman really mean “not rocking the boat”?⁶

This is a difficult question to answer, and part of the reason is that the ideas, literature, accomplishments, and institutions of the ancient Greeks were so varied, so suggestive, so complex, so provocative, so reassuring, so unsettling, so comprehensive, that they have at times in the history of Western Civilization stood for the “Establishment,” as they seem to do in the eyes of many today, and at other times they have been engines of revolution. At still other times revolutionaries and conservatives have simultaneously employed classical learning and examples as weapons in ideological, political, and cultural wars.

It is easy to assume that in the Victorian Era the Greek and Roman classics were the exclusive property of the conservative Establishment. But that is simply not true. The nineteenth century — like the fifth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece — was one of the great transitional epochs in the history of the West, particularly in Great Britain. Democracy, rationalism, and science were challenging the old political, intellectual, and religious order. Industrialization, a growing middle class, expanding urban slums, and the displacement of millions were upsetting the old economic and social structures. It would be remarkable indeed if the ancient Greeks, the ur-democrats and ur-rationalists of western history, were not of particular interest to advocates of change. And, of course, they were.

For example, among the parliamentary Radicals and philosophical protégés of Jeremy Bentham was George Grote. The son of a banker — like Newman — Grote served in parliament from 1832 to 1841, but disillusioned with the failures of the democratizing reform movement (it was not until after Grote’s death, for example, that one of his pet projects, the secret ballot, was passed), he retired from public life to complete the monumental history of ancient Greece that he had undertaken before responding to the siren song of politics. To say he retired from politics, though, is misleading, for he intended his history of Greece to be an intellectual and pedagogical weapon for democrats and rationalists to employ in the transformation of British politics and society.

Grote’s history championed radical Athenian democracy and dismissed the then-prevalent notion of Athenian democracy as chaotic, even anarchic.⁷ The founding fathers of the United States, for example, much preferred the Roman model to the Greek — it is no accident that we have a Senate like the Romans, not an Assembly like the Athenians. John Adams expressed his revulsion at the notion of adopting the Athenian model: “In the name of human and divine benevolence, is such a system as this to be recommended to Americans, in this age of the world?” (81) Alexander Hamilton was able to restrain himself, at least a bit: “No friend to order or to rational liberty, can read without pain and disgust the history of the commonwealths of Greece” (651).⁸

Grote, apparently, was able to handle the pain and disgust quite easily, since he argued that through the participation of the lower orders, tolerance, and untrammeled free speech — what the Greeks called isagoria and prized so tenaciously — Cleisthenes and other democratizers had inculcated in the Athenians “a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts” (154). Those democratic habits brought about something wonderful:

Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt

that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness

with the vote of the majority, and became familiarized with the notion of a sovereign authority

which he neither could or ought to resist. (139)

That is, Grote says democracy in ancient Athens produced order, good government, and good citizens. The things that undermined Athenian democracy were not inherent in its very nature, as critics maintained, but the corruption and resistance of reactionary aristocrats like Alcibiades — Grote intends us to think here of Britain’s reactionary aristocrats — and the survival of her superstitious and corrupt religion — Grote intends us to think here of the Anglican Church. Under the influence of James Mill, Grote had abandoned the Christianity of his parents, and though he was reluctant to attack religion overtly, his letters and a pseudonymous Benthamite essay make his anti-religious views perfectly clear.

The conservative and Anglican establishment fought back, but not by dismissing the applicability of the Athenian model or by deriding the credibility of employing Greek examples. Greek ideas and Greek models mattered, and everyone felt they could find justification for their views in the ambiguity and complexity of the Greek experience. What better way to study real democracy than by looking at the first democracy, especially since some of history’s finest minds and pens — eyewitnesses to Athens’ successes and failures — provide insightful analysis of the theory and reality of Athens’ democracy? Grote wanted radical change, and he saw in the ancient Athenians both evidence and argument for reform. His opponents wanted to preserve the status quo, and they saw in the ancient Athenians evidence and argument against reform.⁹

Grote was only one of many Victorian radicals who turned to the Greeks for insight. Karl Marx did so as well. His doctoral dissertation was a comparison of the philosophies of two ancient Greeks, Democritus and Epicurus, and Marx continued to read the Classics in the original Greek and Latin throughout his life. In May of 1861, for example, he wrote in a letter to his disciple Ferdinand Lassalle that he was reading Thucydides to cheer himself up, observing, “These ancients, at least, remain ever new.”¹⁰ And as G. E. M. de Ste. Croix has pointed out, much of Marx’s view of class struggle not coincidentally closely parallels Aristotle’s (69-80), the ancient philosopher whom Marx in Das Kapital characterizes as a Denkriese, “an intellectual giant” (109) whose “genius shines” (375). It is noteworthy that Aristotle was both Marx’s and Newman’s favorite ancient philosopher.¹¹

Newman was certainly aware that radicals and revolutionaries could employ the Classics quite effectively. In The Idea of a University he suggested that in France the Classics had “subserved the spread of revolutionary and deistical doctrines” and was not pleased (77). Newman makes clear that the context in which we are educated in the Classics makes all the difference. In other words, without proper guidance, the study of the Classics can be a dangerous thing.

Newman’s distress at the radicals’ employment of the Classics and his plea for proper guidance in classical education should not, however, lead us to pigeon-hole Newman as viewing the Classics — and the other liberal arts, for that matter — as instruments for turning young people into tools of the ruling class and its doctrines and privileges. Newman was dangerous in his own right, and his career, especially the early years, clearly indicates that his own deep classical learning had not conditioned him to go along and get along. Frank Turner suggests similarities in Newman’s and Charles Darwin’s apostasies from the prevailing values of England’s educating and ruling classes (Contesting 38-72). Even before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman’s reinterpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England created havoc among Anglicans. Elsewhere, Turner observes of Newman’s early years:

For more than fifteen years he had been the chief disruptive academic personality in Oxford.

In point of fact, John Henry Newman had been the kind of faculty member whom every university

administrator dreads, trustees deplore and fail to understand, and more staid alumni find embarrassing,

but whom students and the young among the faculty and alumni cheer toward further extravagances.

(“Newman’s” 285)

 

In short, he was a troublemaker who had dedicated much of his life to challenging authority.¹² One is reminded of the characterization of the Athenians Thucydides put in the mouth of one their critics: “It’s their very nature neither to be at peace, nor to allow other men to enjoy it!” (1.70.9). Newman does not suggest, however, that educators employ the Classics to create gadflies, and it is pretty clear that, like most gadflies, he preferred buzzing in other people’s ears to having them buzz in his own. So what did he regard as the use of classical learning? A brief digression on contemporary higher education may provide an approach to answering this question.

Scholars who teach undergraduates cannot avoid the disheartening realization that many students these days go to college principally in order to make more money. A freshman advisee of mine, for example, decided not to sign up for a major in Management after all because after September 11, 2001, with the economy slumping somewhat, he felt that the major no longer guaranteed wealth. The student’s response to the changed situation was to try to find a major that would be, in his words, “even easier.”

I have nothing against making money, and I am heartened when able, engaged, ethical students want to make their professional lives in the world of business. The noteworthy thing about my advisee, though — something that should be as troubling to my colleagues in Management as to me — is that he had no genuine interest whatsoever in studying Management, or anything else, apparently. Study was simply a means to a financial end. Had he expressed love for the study and field of Management and sorrow at being compelled to desert the beloved discipline because it no longer guarantees prosperity, I would have shared that sorrow and perhaps urged him to stick with Management anyway. As it was, I confess I had no idea what to say to this student, or what to say to any student for whom a college education is exclusively utilitarian and who is not the least bit embarrassed by the fact.

What would Newman say to students who attend college exclusively for economic advancement? The tension between the education of the student for life and education of the student for a career was very much alive in Newman’s time as well. The world was changing radically, commerce was conquering all before it, and there was a growing sense that education, like everything else in life, should have a “use,” and one that can and should be identified and justified. And so, people of Newman’s era were questioning the practicality of studying Classics and the other liberal arts as well. In 1859 Herbert Spencer, for example, classified,

  . . . in order of their importance, the leading kinds of activity which constitute human life. They may be naturally

arranged into: 1. those activities which directly minister to self-preservation; 2. those activities which, by securing

the necessaries of life, indirectly minister to self-preservation; 3. those activities which have for their end the rearing

and discipline of offspring; 4. those activities which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political

relations; 5. those miscellaneous activities which fill up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes

and feelings. (7)

Classical literature, alas, falls into the fifth category of useless leisure activities and even, Spencer suggests later in the essay, lacks “substance” (31). Even more pointedly, Bentham suggested that “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin¹³ is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either” (253).¹⁴

Undoubtedly Newman’s response to twenty-first century utilitarians like my student would be complex. I will try to convey my sense of what it might have been, with apologies to Newman for unavoidable oversimplification. In The Idea of a University, Newman first suggests that liberal learning is not practical at all. It has no use. In fact, the very definition of liberal education is “impractical.” If education is intended to lead to some practical outcome, either social or financial, then it is no longer truly liberal and is, in Newman’s view, not the special mission of a university.¹⁵

Newman is explicit that liberal learning does not make us morally better either. “Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another,” he states (89). This is contrary to what one so often hears on campuses today. Some academics assume that there is more virtue to be found in department meetings than in board meetings, that, thanks to our reading, thinking and insight, professors are, on the whole, more honest and decent than folks in other professions. I have always been more than a bit skeptical of that view myself. Perhaps our vices are less apparent and interesting because spending a lot of time reading books and preparing lectures keeps us away from high-stakes temptation.

So if the Classics and the other Humanities have no practical application and don’t make us morally better, why, for Newman, should they be at the heart of university education, especially of Catholic university education? In a partial response, Newman translates Cicero’s assertion: “This pertains most of all to human nature, for we are all of us drawn to the pursuit of knowledge; in which to excel we consider excellent, whereas to mistake, to err, to be ignorant, to be deceived, is both an evil and a disgrace” (79). Once we have seen to our physical needs, Newman believes, our very natures drive us to learn, and to excel at learning. I fear that many students these days are dedicating considerable energy to proving Newman wrong. Is the desire to know part of modern students’ natures? Is ignorance a source of “disgrace” on college campuses today? And if the answer to either or both of these questions is “No,” is Newman simply wrong about what it means to be a human being? Or have we lost or perverted a part of our nature? And if something has gone wrong, do professors and intellectuals help combat this perversion, fail to address it, or even abet it? In any event, in Newman’s view, when we learn, we are scratching an unavoidable itch, one that is utterly natural and integral to our humanity. But there is more to it than that.

As I noted above, in reality Newman does, of course, consider Classics and liberal education practical or useful, but in a sense different from that most of us today employ when we speak of practicality and utility. In my experience, when students ask about the practicality or utility of something academic, they are generally talking about their careers, their future livelihoods, their job prospects. And when students talk of some aspect of their education making them better lawyers or managers or whatever, “better” usually means more successful in terms of advancing one’s career and making money, not in terms of giving their legal clients the very best service or of doing the best possible for their customers and employees. Newman would never speak this way about what he believes we derive from the Classics and liberal education, but The Idea of a University nonetheless pretty clearly indicates the benefit that we derive, besides scratching the need-to-know itch.

“Students,” I believe Newman would advise,¹⁶ “Pick a career and be properly trained for it, but keep reminding yourselves that you are not at college primarily for training. You are here to learn. And that learning, the knowledge derived from the Classics, from liberal education is, above all, an acquired illumination, a habit, an inward endowment that you will carry everywhere with you like your skin, whether you are at work, or at play, or deciding to get married, or confronting the myriad ethical dilemmas that mark your life, or enduring the innumerable tragedies that inevitably will darken it. That learning will help you grasp what you see; it sees more than the senses convey, and it reasons upon what it sees and while it sees. Dedicate the core of your education to what opens the mind, corrects and refines it, what enables it to know, and to digest, master, rule and use its knowledge. Concentrate on developing intellectual flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, and eloquent expression. Students, these gifts may not make you rich, and they will not save your soul, either, but they will help you become what God in his infinite wisdom created you to be.”

The utility in studying the Classics is, then, according to Newman, “that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world” (125). Newman has a good deal more to say about the utility of the Classics, and he borrows some very fine passages on the topic from his contemporaries, particularly from Edward Copleston. And in The Idea of a University’s seventh Discourse, Newman even suggests that the Classics also better equip us to succeed in our professional lives.

Not everyone is pleased with Newman’s recourse to utility, however. In his study of Newman’s educational philosophy, for example, A. Dwight Culler chastises Newman for not having the courage of his convictions. Culler is impressed with the way Newman initially asserts that true education has no use, but dismayed by his seeming back-sliding when he claims that it is remarkably useful after all. Culler laments:

  Would that he had not gone on, in the seventh discourse, to reinforce a good argument

with a bad by telling us that the knowledge which he had just recommended as “not useful”

was actually, if we considered the matter closely, more useful than “useful knowledge” itself.

What he says is doubtless true, but it is rather like the preacher who tells his congregation to be

virtuous even if it doesn’t pay and then adds that they may be sure it will pay in the long run

anyhow. (219)

 I would not be so severe on Newman. We do not live in the abstract, or in heaven for that matter. We live in a human community and must make our way in the world, as Newman himself acknowledged and emphasized, and I think it perfectly legitimate and not the least disingenuous for him to emphasize that if classical learning and all the liberal arts, as he puts it,

  aim at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national

taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving

enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining

the intercourse of private life (125-26),

that is, if they aim at making the world a better place, they are useful, and that is not cause for shame.

Let me give two, in my view, very practical examples, one for our private lives and one for our public lives. First the private. In Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad, the troubled hero Achilles has slain his adversary Hector, who had earlier killed Achilles’s dearest friend, Patroclus. Achilles knows full well that he is fated to die soon after Hector, although he is a young man and seems to be an invincible warrior. In avenging Patroclus, he has signed his own death warrant. He has been defiling Hector’s body, dragging it around behind his chariot. The gods tell Achilles that he must return Hector’s body to his father Priam so that Hector may receive a decent burial. When Priam goes to Achilles’s tent by the battlefield, Achilles receives him courteously. In his desperation to recover the body, Priam even kisses the hands that have slain his son. Overwhelmed by sadness, both Priam and Achilles weep about the tragedy of two elderly men, Priam and Achilles’s father, losing their sons, Hector and Achilles. Priam is speaking:

“Pity me in my own right,

remember your own father! I deserve more pity . . .

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before —

I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire

to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand

he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory

both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely

for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching

before Achilles’s feet as Achilles wept himself,

now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. (Book. 24.588-99) 

The scene is too long to include in its entirety here, and not even Robert Fagles’s fine translation does justice to Homer’s magnificent and heart-breaking poetry.

But where is the utility? It was a commonplace among the Greeks that one of the most awful catastrophes that can occur is for parents to outlive their children. Homer’s poetry brings this bit of wisdom home more powerfully, I believe, than any thesis or psychological analysis possibly could. The reader — or in Homer’s day, the listener — must pause, confront emotionally and intellectually this crushing inversion of the natural order and contemplate the character of our most important relationships and what we deem important in life. Most parents would acknowledge Homer’s insight, though we perhaps do not often enough consider what it suggests about how we should lead our lives. Having shared in our imaginations Achilles’s and Priam’s experience, we cannot but look differently upon our own parents and children.

Now the public, or civic, example.

In his history of the late fifth-century B.C.E. war between Athens and her allies, on one side, and Sparta and her allies on the other, Thucydides describes the nature and typical course of the many social revolutions that took place in the cities of Greece. The war between Athens and Sparta had a strong ideological component, not unlike the twentieth-century Cold War, and occasioned savage civil wars. Vying for control of their states, aristocrats and democrats would wage brutal campaigns against each other. In describing and analyzing the pattern of this class warfare, Thucydides seems more interested in the violence committed against language than the violence committed against people. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is most interested in how the violence done to language interconnects with the violence done to people. His description is brilliant and troubling, and Thucydides’s Greek is as magnificent and idiosyncratic as Homer’s poetry. Here, nonetheless, is a loose translation of one brief passage:

And they reversed the normal meanings of words in assessing actions. “Irrational audacity”

was considered “loyal courage;” “thinking before acting” became “cowardice,” and people

thought restraint nothing but the coward’s pretext. Those who could take the big picture into

consideration were deemed of little use . . . The man who couldn’t keep his temper was called

trustworthy, while the man who opposed him was viewed with suspicion . . . Those in power did

not give an honest hearing to their opponents, even when they offered wise advice, but rather plotted

to thwart the implementation of their adversaries’ sensible suggestions . . . Most men were happier to be

called clever in their criminality than to be labeled stupid in their decency . . . The cause of this appalling

situation? The lust for power that greed and ambition produce . . . The leaders of the competing factions

exploited noble slogans: “universal equality before the law” versus “the paramount importance of sensible

leadership." But while they carefully spoke of the common good, they were really competing to control

the goods of the public for themselves.  And willing to do absolutely anything to prevail, they committed

appalling atrocities and even more outrageous acts of revenge, while ignoring justice and the interests

of their communities. (3.82.3-8)

Where is the utility here?  At any time, but particularly in times of anxiety and danger, we must be wary of the way we ñ all of us, and not just politicians - exploit, distort, mangle, and murder language in trying to explain and justify activities and attitudes that our most basic principles would label abhorrent.  Thucydides urges us as citizens - I would say that the power of his exposition virtually compels us - to look beyond the rhetoric, to demand that our politicians and we ourselves consider how our words and actions jibe with our claims about our character; to think clearly about language as a powerful and dangerous instrument that affects action and forms our very natures.  Words can kill, and just as terrifying, our own words can kill what is decent in us.

        Passages such as these and their usefulness to our lives, that is, the actual writings of the Greeks and what we can make of them, are the key to understanding why Newman thought Greek literature should be the core of university education and of the life of the mind.  I will try to clarify this assertion presently, but first I need to acknowledge other issues in the Victorian debate concerning the value of classical education that I could have addressed in this essay, space permitting.  Failure to mention these at all would give an oversimplified impression of the breadth and complexity of the debate.

I could have analyzed the worth in examining the origins of Western Civilization-- love it or hate it --in ancient Greek philosophy, architecture, politics and political thought, rhetoric, literature, art, drama --and on and on.  Newman certainly recognized these origins and their significance (The Idea 171-77).  Also worth considering is the Victorian belief ñ shared by many today --that the ancients' attention to detail and language, and the very intricate languages themselves, inculcate a way of thinking distinguished by discipline and clarity (Mill: "St. Andrews" 225-33).  I will not discuss here how the ancient world has provided Western Civilization with innumerable images, stories, metaphors, and paradigms that enable us to articulate, communicate, and understand, although, I admit, for most of us, contemporary commercial culture has displaced Greece and Rome.  Still, I am not sure that we are better off for Ronald McDonald having more resonance than Medea, and "Just do it," being more familiar than "Know Thyself."  We will need another essay to discuss the significance of the classical languages and culture for the formation of Christianity.  The New Testament is written in Greek after all, and it is amazing that so many Christians, even fundamentalists, are content to view an interpretation, which is what any translation must be, of God's word rather than learning a bit of Greek in order to read the real thing.  As Mill observes, "Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings and their type of character" ("St. Andrews" 226).  Surely for Christians knowing St. Paul's thoughts, feelings, and character should be worth considerable effort.  And we have to neglect the theme of how the Greeks and Romans are of particular interest and value to us because they were so much like us and yet, at the same time, different and alien.  Newman may be implying this in The Idea,¹⁷ and Mill makes hay with this as well ("St. Andrews" 226-27).¹⁸

Despite the virtues of the arguments for studying Classics just noted, Newman prized ancient literature for something greater and more fundamental.  Newman thought that the ancient Greeks were uniquely wise and thoughtful and that they were able to address the most important issues of the human condition in ways that have not really been equaled.  That is, we should read the Greeks primarily not because of their historical significance, not because their language provides excellent intellectual training, not even to read the New Testament and better understand the context of Jesus' life.  Rather, we should read the Greeks because their writings are still unsurpassed in their ability to help us understand and even live our lives.  This is a bold assessment that even classicists are reluctant make these days, inasmuch as contemporary academics and intellectuals are expected to view all cultures and peoples as equally wise, and we are loathe to ìprivilegeî any one culture over any other.  In the nineteenth century, of course, there was little reluctance to assert the superiority of one culture over another.¹⁹  And yet there is some daring in Newman's assertion for his own period.  Nineteenth-century advocates of "useful" education could legitimately ask what wisdom the ancient Greeks could provide to people trying to navigate the scientific, technological, practical, commercial, modern world.  Newman and his allies seemed to many to be trying to preserve a dated and ineffective education.  Newman thought otherwise.

He argues in The Idea that the special mission of the university is to form "a habit of mind...which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom," (77), to lead students to "perfection of virtue of the intellect" (92), and to train minds to exercise "Thought or Reason...upon Knowledge" (101). Newman argues that the liberal arts are the most effective path to achieving that habit of mind, that perfection of intellectual virtue, that exercise; and when he speaks of the liberal arts, he means principally the predominately Greek and Latin education that he had received and loved at Oxford.²⁰   In support of this ideal he tellingly quotes Copleston's²¹ defense of Oxford's classical education: "that complete and generous education which fits a man 'to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war'" (120).  That is, as Newman quotes Copleston further, education in the Classics prepares each of us not only for our professional lives, but "as a friend, as a companion, as a citizen at large" (121).  To prove this claim, Newman does not provide specific passages from Greek literature, but I hope that the passages from Thucydides and Homer discussed above will serve as compelling examples.  Later writers, Newman makes clear, have not been able to replace the Greek genius, which continues (and will continue to be) the cornerstone of liberal education:

            ...Civilization too has its common principles, and views, and teaching, and especially its books,

            which have more or less been given from the earliest times, and are, in fact, in equal esteem and

            respect, in equal use now, as they were when they were received in the beginning.  In a word, the

            Classics, and the subjects of our present purpose...these august methods of enlarging the mind,

            and cultivating the intellect, and refining the feelings, in which the process of Civilization has

            ever consisted. (The Idea 170-1)

Newman concludes:  "The world was to have certain intellectual teachers, and no others; Homer and Aristotle, with the poets and philosophers who circle round them, were to be the schoolmasters of all generations..." (The Idea 173)²²  Indeed, Newman considers Greek literature "the food of civilization, from the first times of the world down to this day..." (174)

       Newman tells us that the object of the "cultivated intellect," of that "habit of mind" that Greek literature develops, is "Truth." (109).  And so by giving the Classics pride of place in the development of the intellect, Newman indicates the particular strength of Greek writers: they help us arrive at Truth.²³  Later in The Idea, moreover, he asserts that Truth, in turn, "has two attributes - beauty and power" (150). The Classics aid us, then, in the pursuit of Truth through their exceptional, even unparalleled, beauty and power (to take Newman's logic a step further).  Part of the "power," I would suggest, is found in the logic and wisdom of the Greeks' writings, in their application of "Thought or Reason...upon Knowledge." (101)  Like so many other readers, Newman is responding to the timeless clarity, insight, and intelligence of Greek literature.  We should not be surprised that he particularly prized Aristotle, the most analytical of ancient writers.  Another part of the "power," and the lion's share of the "beauty," is found in the literary qualities of ancient writers.  It is not, after all, Homer's logic that persuaded Newman to characterize him as "the First Apostle of Civilization." (The Idea 171)  And so the Greeks train our minds though their sense and wisdom, expressed exquisitely and forcefully.

This unsurpassed excellence of beauty and power in the service of Truth did not seem the least bit dated to Newman.  And he was not alone.  Some Victorian advocates of classical education went beyond asserting that classical education has value even in an age of science and business.  They suggested that the Classics have value especially in an age of science and business.  Mill argued,

Not only do those [Greco-Roman] literatures furnish examples of high finish and perfection

in workmanship, to correct the slovenly habits of modern hasty writing, but they exhibit,

in the military and agricultural commonwealths of antiquity, precisely that order of virtues

in which a commercial society is apt to be deficient; and they altogether show human nature on

a grander scale: with less benevolence but more patriotism, less sentiment but more

self-control; if a lower average of virtue, more striking individual examples of it; fewer

small goodnesses, but more greatness, and appreciation of greatness; more which tends to

exalt the imagination, and inspire high conceptions of the capabilities of human nature.

("De Tocqueville" 195)

One of Newman's admirers, Matthew Arnold, expresses similar misgivings about ìthe present ageî and equal conviction that the study of classical antiquity prepares us to address its and our own flaws:

            ...the present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our

            admiration.  I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce,

            in those who constantly practice it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of

            literary works only, but of men and events in general.  They are like persons who have had a very

            weighty and impressive experience: they are more truly than others under the empire of facts,

            and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live.  They wish

            neither to applaud nor revile their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and

            whether this is what they want.  What they want, they know very well; they want to educe and

            cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves... ("Preface" 212)

And for Newman, too, classical antiquity offered less of an escape from reality than a journey to a truer, more important, reality.  Even bustling people of business confront ethical dilemmas, experience grief, and die. 

Newman, in any event, could not help but respond to the magic of the Greeks.  As a young man in his early thirties, he accepted an invitation to sail to the Mediterranean with Richard Hurrell Froude and the Archdeacon Robert Hurrell Froude.  In many of the letters he wrote back to England, he included verses that reflected his impressions and changing moods.  The glorious Hellenic past of Sicily inspired him to include in a letter to his sister Jemima a sonnet marked by questioning and lament, the first seven lines of which read:

            Why, wedded to the Lord, still yearns my heart

                        Towards these scenes of ancient heathen fame?

                        Yet legend hoar, and voice of bard that came

            Fixing my restless youth with its sweet art

            And shades of power, and those who bore a part

                        In the mad deeds that set the world on flame,

            So fret my memory here-- ah! is it blame?

            (Letters 305-6)

The Classics, these lines suggest, are competing with Christianity for Newmanís heart, and providing pretty stiff competition at that.  This was not an uncommon experience in the nineteenth century.  According to Sir Edward Russell,

            A game was played...at Hawarden at a visitorís suggestion.  Each person had to say what day in

            past or future he would choose to live...Mr. Gladstone said a day in ancient Greece when

            Athens was in its highest glory.  The visitor said he would choose the day of Pentecost.

            On this Mr. Gladstone seemed rather ashamed and withdrew his former choice, and said

            he would select "a day with the Lord." (123-24)

Clearly, Gladstone found it difficult to subordinate Athens to Jerusalem.  Gore Vidal would have urged Gladstone and Newman to fish or cut bait.  "Yield to the siren song of the ancient Greeks and reject Christianity," he might say.  "You know Christian and Greek are at odds, and both your heart and intellect tell you to select Greek.  Don't be cowards; take the leap." 

But Newman could neither reject his faith nor resist the power of the Greeks.  Out of his impassioned engagement with words and ideas sprang his love for the Greek language and for the classical writers who recorded with such eloquence and wisdom the stories and ideas of their revolutionary times.  And so later in the same sonnet he justifies the preoccupation of his Christian mind with a pagan culture:

            Nay, from no fount impure these drops arise;

            'Tis but that sympathy with Adam's race

            Which in each brother's history reads its own.

We may be God's creation, but we live on earth, mortals surrounded by mortals, and we must be, in Newman's words, "fit...for the world" (The Idea 125).  As our bodies require nourishment to survive in this world, our minds need the "food of civilization," Greek letters, to thrive.  And though Greek literature does not lead us to God and salvation, Newman was convinced that the words of the ancient Greeks provide the best guide for us to make our way among our fellow mortals, to understand them and ourselves, and to appreciate and delight in the "sweet arts" we mortals can ply.  And if Newman's devotion to God and Church estranged him from the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, that same devotion called him to sympathize with them in their human striving and to celebrate their lives and the best flowering of their culture as an indispensable expression of God's creative power.

Footnotes

1 An earlier version of this essay was delivered on January 23rd, 2001, in the Newman Scholars Program at Loyola College in Maryland.  I would like to thank Gayla McGlamery, Angela Christman, and the editor of Renascence for their invaluable corrections and suggestions.

2 This paper will focus primarily on the Greeks.

3 One strategy of reconciliation was to see in Greco-Roman culture a precursor of and complement to Christianity (eg. Gladstone 6-9).

4 The Victorians often associated light with the Greeks (Jenkyns 170-73).

5 Newman's The Idea is actually the cobbling together and revision of a series of speeches or essays that can be divided into two groups.  First are the speeches he delivered in Dublin in 1852 to convince his mostly Catholic audience of the desirability of founding a Catholic University in Ireland.  We might be surprised to hear that such an audience would be skeptical about Catholic education, but at the time many, if not most, Irish Catholics with prospects for higher education and advancement in life were more inclined towards what was at that time called "mixed" education, the nonsectarian education of Catholics and Protestants together, or "mixed" with one another.  Ambitious parents feared that an exclusively Catholic education would deny their children the opportunity to make the kind of contacts with Protestants that would be essential to success in a Catholic country dominated by a Protestant elite.  At the same time, Irish nationalists feared that the conservative Pope Pius IX, who was still hostile to Italian independence and unification, might use the university to undermine their fight for independence.  On top of it all, Newman was an Englishman telling the Irish what to do.  The other group of essays that comprise The Idea consists of lectures and essays on higher education that Newman wrote while rector of the new Catholic University.  "Christianity and Letters" is one of these.  These comments on the composition of The Idea are intended to emphasize that it comprised, in origin, practical reflections on university education addressed to practical people of the world, and ideas issuing from the acting head administrator of a university. 

6 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, classical education did, in some circles, come to be little more than a gentlemanís (in the most superficial sense) affectation (Jenkyns 63-5).

7 Before Groteís History, the standard British interpretation of Greek history was Mitford's History of Greece, whose politics Macaulay succinctly and accurately characterized: "Democracy he [Mitford] hates with a perfect hatred!" (Macaulay 131).

8 Thomas Paine was, of course, one of the exceptions among the founding fathers: "What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude." (Rights of Man part 2, chapter 3).

9 Much of my analysis of Grote is based upon Turner (Contesting 322-61).

10 "Um meine grofle Verstimmung ¸ber mein in every respect unsettled situation zu brechen, lese ich Thukydides.  Diese Alten bleiben wenigstens immer neu" (Werke 606).

11 Newman characterizes Aristotle as "the most comprehensive intellect of Antiquity" (Sketches 195), "the great philosopher of antiquity" (The Idea 46), and "a genius so curious, so penetrating, so fertile, so analytical..." (The Idea 47).

12 He did not become passive in later life either; see Walter Jost, "What Newman Knew: A Walk on the Postmodernist Side" Renascence 49 (Summer 1997): 245-46.

13 A simple game in which players push their pins with the object of crossing the pins of their opponents.

14 In attacking the value of poetry, of course, Bentham attacked the classical poets his contemporaries read.  The relegation of Classics to mere leisure even found its way into popular literature.  In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell has Mrs. Thornton say to Mr. Hale, "I have no doubt that classics are very desirable for people who have leisure.  But, I confess, it was against my judgment that my son renewed his study of them.  The time and place in which he lives, seem to me to require all his energy and attention.  Classics may do very well for men who loiter away their lives in the country or in colleges; but Milton men ought to have their thoughts and powers absorbed in the work of today."(132)

15 Newman presents his argument in greatest detail in Discourse 5, "Knowledge Its Own End" (The Idea 76-91).

16 I am in fact adapting some of his own language from Discourse 5, "Knowledge Its Own End" (The Idea 84-5).

17 In the same paragraph in The Idea, Newman asserts both that "there is no enlargement, unless there is a comparison of ideas one with another" and the value of "a connected view of old and new, past and present..." (98); yet Newman seems to emphasize more the lack of difference: "on the whole, all Literatures are one; they are the voices of the natural man." (158)  Newman's claim that "the civilization of modern times remains what it was of old...the lineal descendant, or rather the continuation, mutatis mutandis, of the civilization which began in Palestine and Greece" (169), is more ambiguous.  Newman is far from Millí' explicit and suggestive comments.

18 In "On the Modern Element in Literature," Arnold argued that moderns should study Greco-Roman literature precisely because classical literature is modern, despite its antiquity.

19 The Idea's assertions about Western Civilization provide an excellent example; see, too, Newman's characterization of Chinese civilization as "huge, stationary, unattractive, morose" (168).

20 Newman is, of course, in part responding to a series articles, remarks, and letters published in the Edinburgh Review starting in 1808 (written by, among others, Richard Payne Knight, Sydney Smith, and John Playfair) that ridiculed the Oxonian emphasis on the study of the Classics to the neglect of practical learning.  The Edinburgh Review's assaults and Copleston's rebuttal in his A Reply to the Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review against Oxford (Oxford: J. Cooke and J. Parker, 1810; 2nd ed.) make it clear that the classical languages and literatures were the core issue.  In The Idea, Newman explicitly takes on the Review's writers and their allies (114-26) and even quotes Copleston at length (119-25).  For a discussion, see Culler (220-22).

21 Who, in turn, quotes Milton's "On Education."

22 Further: "The simple question to be considered is, how best to strengthen, refine, and enrich the intellectual powers; the perusal of the poets, historians, and philosophers of Greece and Rome will accomplish this purpose, as long experience has shown..."(175); "...and the studies which seemed to be going out gained their ancient place, and were acknowledged, as before, to be the best instruments of mental cultivation, and the best guarantees for intellectual progress" (174).

23 Newman considers Aristotle, for example, "...the oracle of nature and of truth.  While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind.  He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born.  In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle..." (The Idea 82-3).  These assertions indicate, moreover, that Newman does not think Aristotle's genius irrelevant to the modern world, or even superceded by modern philosophy.

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