R. Cormier

Raymond Cormier

Longwood University

Farmville, VA 23901

Getting High on the Classics:

Time for a New Humanism in Virginia?

Raymond Cormier

and Alan Ford Farrell

In the aftermath of the September 11th tragedy and in the gyre of continued debates on national security, Americans might do well to listen to the Athenian general Pericles who, speaking over citizens fallen in the name of the great city, could find no higher praise for them than to cite the achievements of the society for which they gave their lives: “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit from our liberality, trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens” (Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner. Modern Library 104). Citizens like that, though, upon whose “native spirit” we can count require some sort of grounding, certainly from the example of the most thoughtful among us, but also from those who have walked this earth before. And that brings up the question of the source of spirit: Where does it come from? The answer, embarrassingly, is that is has always been there and always open to our scrutiny and inspiration if we could only pay attention. What Pericles has to say to us--no less than what many classical authors declare with conciseness and clarity--has never been a secret though certainly enough secreted over the years. The sad currency of every cataclysm, every outrage, every disaster must, of course, torture us… but it need not surprise us. Phrases like real world, this world, new world have the lamentable consequence of persuading us that the old world has nothing to tell us, show us. Should we not arm ourselves with universal and timeless wisdom against anyworld? Faster, more dependable communication does not, sadly, spare us the need to have something to communicate, and we’ll be lucky if what we say over our dead proves as enduring, as profound, as humane, as inspiring 2500 years from now as Pericles’ ringing words: “steadfastness in his country’s battles,” he said, reminding us that those we mourn were like us after all, “should be as a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual” (107).

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Indeed, the hard questions perennially asked by our children and students: Don’t the threats of terrorism nullify the need for humanities’ “high-culture”? What do the Greeks have to do with the active life of leadership and citizenship? How can we attach genuine substance to the current buzz of educational and political reforms? And, too, why Roman Virgil in the 21st century?

For us, the answers lie unambiguously in a return to the classics and to classical studies, as yearned for in several recent books.* The central issues of life and survival on this planet have not changed since Homer: personal and public matters hold fast, as do the nature of friendship, the need for community and creativity, empathy and self-sacrifice, the obligations of duty and authority. Our mortality is a constant, too, like the endless debates over the usefulness or futility of militarism.

As longtime students of antiquity, my colleague and I have found that the classics--the standard works of Greek and Roman poetry--teach, first of all, self-awareness and, as its heroes illustrate, an innate human greatness of soul. They embody as well consoling lessons of service and stewardship, and most of all, a persistent sense of duty and mission. These are deep concepts, more than a mere faddish “construct.” Similarly, the ancient Stoic philosophers defined courage as “that virtue which champions the cause of right” (Cicero, De Officiis [“On Civic Duty”] ¶ 62). Cicero wrote also that “...we demand that men who are courageous and high-souled shall at the same time be good and straightforward, lovers of truth, and foes to deception; for these qualities are the center and soul of justice” (¶ 63). It is clear to us that two ancient high-minded heroes, Odysseus and Aeneas, exemplify such character, as well as integrity, piety, and loyalty, not to mention eager fortitude and boundless energy.

In an unforgettable scene, Odysseus, the wily and multi-talented hero of the Trojan War, lands on Ogygia, the island of the powerful goddess Calypso in Book 5 of The Odyssey. After seven years as an unwilling hostage, taking pleasure in her cave, he is offered a unique gift in exchange for his freedom--an endless and carefree life of immortality. Very tactfully, of course, he takes the risk of refusing, replying that his spouse is “only human” and that Calypso, of course, will remain “eternally young.” “‘Still,’” he pleads, “‘I want to go back. / My heart aches for the day I return to my home.’” (Lombardo trans., 5. 218-220) Intense human ties are all the more precious “because they cannot last” (Lefkowitz 90). Odysseus wisely proves that existence as a human being is an exciting adventure. In spite of all the pains and sorrows he has known or will suffer, past or future, Odysseus exits the cave of sameness and embraces life in the bright sunlight....

Dark clouds and squalls, raging and brawling winds, howling storms. A hurricane smashes the whole earth. The seas whip up huge rolling waves as black night broods over the sky, broken only by heaven’s thundering multiple flashes of lightning. Thus does Virgil describe a “perfect storm,” the opening crisis in his great Latin epic poem, written around 25 B.C. His hero, Aeneas, a foundling in exile, seeking a new Troy in Italy, could have let himself fall from his ship’s prow, into the briny deep, could have just given up, just jumped into the mountain of water and forgotten his destiny, his divine duty and mission. After all, he had once gotten as far as Sicily with his ships and riches. But no, he swallows his fear and presses on, to fulfill his mission in self-renunciation. For us, this is still a stirring story today. And a thrilling metaphor for a “behavioral model” of costly courage, a career spent championing the cause of right, which has become so much part of our American DNA.

With a couple of important exceptions (notably in the case of Odysseus), each of these kinetic heroes inure themselves to abnegation, discomfort, and effacement; make a habit of resilience and recovery; they savor, meanwhile, that union of souls tried even in a local crucible and the strength that comes from mutual resistance to adversity.

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In a recent harangue, Tracy Lee Simmons invites curious readers to climb Mount Parnassus, a prominent peak near Delphi, hallowed by the Greeks since ancient times. The Oxford classicist takes the ascent in a metaphorical way, making a vociferous argument in favor of rigor and challenge rather than pablum and false standards in education. The author elucidates the values inherent in a classical education, i.e., the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and these ideals shape his intelligent, passionate, and articulate arguments. He reminds us of the origins of authentic humanism.

In another study, Kallendorf illustrates how, as a field of study, the humanities emerged in the early fifteenth century, as a reaction to the excessively practical and utilitarian pre-professionalism of medieval scholasticism. Moral purpose should guide education, they urged, so to prepare youths for civic leadership. For Renaissance theorists, immersion in the great classics of antiquity would educate the elite classes--both male and female, both socially and politically. They believed that these canonical tools civilized; that such studies, through mind-stretching exertions, freed the individual (“liberal arts”) and cultivated classical virtues like discernment, prudence, eloquence, and historical awareness. Rather than re-engineering the social or political structures, these reforming humanists sought to improve the human quality of life in the community.

The pervasive influence of such principles on prominent writers and statesmen--Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and C.S. Lewis, among many others, can be demonstrated, as Simmons shows. He also leads the reader across the historical trajectory of Greek and Latin education, in a vivid exposition of how classical studies both forged Western notions of order and fashioned America’s own understanding of itself as a splendid union of citizens (rather than a mere collectivity of minorities).

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Education, both at Longwood or at VMI, remains paradoxical: at the former, we “prepare citizen leaders for the common good” (Vision Statement), an endeavor fraught with academic complexity and practical challenges. We aim to produce socially-responsible lifelong learners, “catalysts for change”--citizens who embrace democratic values like equality, civility, tolerance, honesty and duty. Recent research has shown that Longwood students, with their gains in self-understanding, experience significantly more satisfaction with their college experience than their peers elsewhere. Longwood’s citizen leaders, while harnessing social responsibility as a core value, work effectively with others, vote in elections and contribute to the welfare of our community, understand people of other racial or ethnic backgrounds, are honest and truthful, as they develop a personal code of ethics or values. As Ben Franklin advised, they attempt, through the good works of volunteerism, to link private virtue and civic virtue.

On the other hand, at VMI, the community is one that denies the attributes of individuality to affirm the individual! In what is called the “real world,” anything that smacks of doing what one doesn’t want to do is described as “fascist” or “Prussian”; where passion in pursuit of a goal, in defense of an ideal is “militant”; where words like “soldierly” and “obedient” are charged with mistrust or disdain; where “discipline” and “camaraderie” if not laughable become intrusive, cumbersome; where “loyalty” and “self-effacement” get derided as “lockstep” or lacking in imagination.

That leaves this school with a dilemma--the double mission of preparing her graduates for military service as a career or in the event of war but also of preparing them for the duties--and opportunities--of commerce, the professions, the arts and sciences, life among our people. And for that dual purpose, considerable delicacy is in order. Like that program of study for citizen leaders at Longwood, the VMI curriculum that claims to make soldiers of citizens threads a very narrow channel of contradiction. It's a slippery and sophisticated exercise that we demand, ironically, of young people before they gain experience in the “real world” of materialism.

We propose, therefore, to give more than lip-service to the liberal arts. Reconciling opposites in compromise, we approve no special curriculum for the soldier and none for the civilian: only one--action-oriented--for the citizen leader. Utopian? Yes, but that’s how the two of us continue to “get high on the Classics,” for their timely untimeliness.

Thomas Cahill. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. Doubleday/ Random House, 2003.

Andrew Delbanco. Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now. DIANE, 1997.

David Denby. Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Craig Kallendorf. ed., trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.

Mary Lefkowitz. Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Them. Yale, 2003.

Stanley Lombardo, trans. Homer: The Odyssey. Hackett, 2000.

???Albert Jay Nock. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. AMS, 2001.

Tracy Lee Simmons. Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. ISI, 2000.

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Raymond Cormier has served, since 1996, as Visiting Professor of French in the English and Modern Language department and as “First Gent” at Longwood University. Among other projects, he has been studying an Old French adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid since the late 1960s.

Dr. Alan F. Farrell fought in Vietnam with the Fifth Special Forces Group, taught nearly 25 years at Hampden-Sydney College, then served as Dean of Faculty from 1996 until 2000 at Virginia Military Institute, where he is now Professor of French.