Conservative Student News

photo credit ldab.arts.kuleuven

“So…what’s the point of reading that stuff?”

It was the dreaded question. Without doubt, “stuff” referred to the oddities I had just been describing—Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, and Sophocles’ tragedies. A small group of my friends and I were reading through the ancient Greek playwrights with moderate enjoyment, but it was not always easy to explain to others why we had chosen this activity to occupy our leisure hours.

The difficulty was not without justification. Ancient Greek poets like Aeschylus and Sophocles were—well, ancient Greeks. The youngest author we had yet read was over 2400 years old, and his plays had originated on a sliver of earth half-way across the world in Athens.

In the face of the sheer foreignness of the Greek world, one is tempted to ask what Athens has to do with St. Paul. Practically speaking, what lessons can a busy (post)modern college student in North America possibly learn from a dead Greek poet society?

The answer, of course, is that one learns no lessons at all, and that if one is looking for lessons, one is barking up the wrong bookshelf. “Lessons,” in the sense of handy ten-second practical morals that fairly leap from the text into one’s pocket, are hardly the Greek specialty. One could find them, of course, on the desk of the venerable Aesop; but he preferred to write in fable and not drama. Another good place to look for moral lessons might be the medieval morality plays or the works of the Puritans, but they of course were not Greek.

The Greek playwrights offer no “lessons” in the sense of clear-cut allegories, fables, or inspirational chicken soup for the psyche. Instead they offer us a world. Indeed, it is our world, although we see it through a glass darkly. Behind the outlandish appearance and unpronounceable names of a Clytemnestra or a Philoctetes lurk representations of hatred, bitterness, and love that are strangely recognizable as our own.

The Greek dramatic world, however, is our world with a twist. By virtue of the fact that it is Greek, and again by virtue of the fact that it is art, it has brought certain sights and sounds into focus for us with especial sharpness. We are made to notice what we did not notice before. Most unmistakably, we begin to discern the shadows cast over this world by the dark wings of Fate. The Greek world is governed by destiny, and the resulting conflicts with an assertive humanity lend their own flavor to questions about free will and divine justice—questions that we have not ceased to ask in our own way.

Who can forget the image of Clytemnestra standing over her murdered husband, the gory knife still in her blood-splattered hands, crying out to the chorus and audience, “Is it not a masterpiece of Justice?” Who can forget the freshly-blinded King Oedipus, unwitting accomplice to his own ruin, as he is led off-stage to the advice of Creon: “There is a measure in all things…Command no more. Obey.” What is the measure in all things? Is obedience the only way to face the onslaught of tragedy? What is justice? These are the questions that the Greek poets ask of the world.

In raising such questions, the Greeks are the first in the West to bequeath to unborn generations an extensive literature of wrestling with perennial human problems. Their pathetically magnanimous attempts to reconcile fate, divine will, justice, and human limitation have been remembered long after their Weltanschauung perished from among living human cultures. (Weltanschauung is a rich German term, which is the equivalent to our contemporary cliché, “world view.”)

And now perhaps it is apparent why one cannot go to the Greeks for quick and easy “lessons.” One does not extract morals and maxims from a Weltanschauung. One gets inside of it and looks out at the world.

To step for a moment outside one’s own Weltanschauung—to look through the eyes of another and discover what reality is to him—is an act that simultaneously requires and develops breadth of mind. It is a willing experience of diversity, undergone because the viewer realizes that his own perspective is claustrophobically limited, and that perhaps through the eyes of another he will see an aspect of reality that he otherwise misses.

Ironically, as the viewer gazes on the world through the eyes of the new Weltanschauung, his gaze comes inevitably to rest back on himself. He then sees himself as others would see him, and he places himself in context within a broader vision of reality. The irony lies in the fact that he knows himself best by knowing another. Diversity heightens awareness of what is one’s own.

This act of diversity proceeding from and returning to the individual makes him “liberal” in the best sense of the word, for it makes him free. It frees him from the narrowness of mind that inevitably attends a finite individual in finite circumstances, and it frees him to recognize the peculiarity of his own assumptions and Weltanschauung in relation to those of others.

It goes nearly without saying that this experience of liberality is at the heart of the educational paradigm called the “liberal arts.” Within this paradigm the truly liberal man is the truly conservative man, for intellectual freedom and diversity are precisely what the conservative preeminently seeks to conserve. The liberal arts are the foundation of Western intellectual life. It should therefore come as no surprise that, until very recent times, a thorough knowledge of the Greeks was at the heart of Western education in both its liberal and conservative senses.

Should the contemporary college student in the West busy himself with reading the dead Greek poets? The poets answer that question for themselves. Experience their Weltanschauung. Know thyself. Be free.