Untitled Document

Raymond Cormier

Longwood University

Farmville, VA 23901

Time for a New Humanism in Virginia

Raymond J. Cormier

and Alan Ford Farrell

In the aftermath of September 11th , 2001, Americans might well listen to one very charismatic Athenian general. The famed funeral oration by Pericles, given in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, 431/430 B.C., was a strong appeal to the pride and patriotism of loyal Greek citizens. They lived in an incredibly rich era of exceptional genius and brilliance: in philosophy, Athens produced Socrates and Plato, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Then there are the arts, medicine, mathematics, and so on.

Pericles proclaimed: "Our natural bravery springs from our way of life, not from the compulsion of laws....We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the arts without loss of manliness."

Speaking over citizens fallen in the name of the great city, he 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.”

Citizens like that, though, upon whose “native spirit” we can count, require grounding, from the example of the most thoughtful among us but also from those who have walked this earth before.

What Pericles and other classical authors pass on to us has never been a secret. The sad currency of 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 teach us. The untimely yet timeless wisdom of Antiquity arms us 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 humane, or 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.”

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The young ask us perennially the hard questions: Doesn’t global terrorism nullify the need for the humanities? What do the Greeks know of our leaders and citizens? Or of the buzz of educational and political reform? Why Roman Virgil? Why Greek Homer? What are they to America in 2004?

For us, the answers lie in the classics, a plea echoed in several recent books.* Life on this planet has not changed since Homer: personal and public matters hold fast, as do friendship, community, empathy, self-sacrifice, duty, and authority. Mortality, too. And, sad to say, war! Longtime students of Antiquity, we find that the classics--the standard works of Greek and Roman civilization--teach self-awareness and, as its heroes illustrate, an innate human nobility of soul. They offer the consolation of service and stewardship, and most of all, a persistent sense of purpose, and courage, which the Stoic philosophers defined as “that virtue which champions the cause of right” (Cicero, “On Civic Duty”). Cicero also demanded “...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.” Two ancient high-minded heroes, Odysseus and Aeneas, exemplify such virtues, as well as integrity, piety, and loyalty, not to mention eager fortitude and boundless energy.

Odysseus, certainly the “high-souled” but too-human hero, seven years on the island of the powerful goddess Calypso as an unwilling hostage in her cave, is offered in exchange for his freedom an endless and carefree immortality. Tactfully, he refuses, pleading that, though his spouse is “‘only human…still, I want to go back. / My heart aches for the day I return to my home.’” (5. 218-220) Human ties are all the more precious “because they cannot last,” notes Mary Lefkowitz in discussing this scene. For Odysseus, existence as a human being holds out excitement. In spite of his pain and sorrow, past or future, Odysseus steps out from the dark cave of monotony to embrace life in the bright sunshine of adventure.

Dark clouds and squalls, raging and brawling winds, howling storms. A hurricane smashes the earth. The seas whip up huge rolling waves as black night broods over the sky, broken only by heaven’s thundering flashes of lightning. Thus with a “perfect storm” does Virgil open his great Latin epic. His hero, Aeneas, sailing from Troy to seek a new home in Italy, could have let himself fall from his ship’s prow, into the briny deep, could have given up and jumped into the mountain of water to surrender his agony--but also his divine destiny. So no, he swallows his fear and presses on. This story stirs us today: a “behavioral model” of courage, a career spent in the cause of right. These heroes inure themselves to discomfort and sacrifice. They make a habit of persistence and recovery, savoring that union of souls tried in adversity’s crucible and flaunting the strength that comes from mutual resistance.

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By the election of rigor and challenge over ease or accessibility in school, young people can still gain a classical education, the Greek and the Latin, whose ideals inspire wit, passion, and eloquence, the devices of authentic humanism. The humanities--those studies that make us human--emerged in the early fifteenth century, to resist the dreary impersonality of late scholastic rote. God’s moral purpose should guide education, the humanists urged, to prepare youth for civic leadership. Renaissance humanists promoted the standard works of antiquity to educate the elite--male and female--for lives of duty. It was clear that humane education, the “canon” of classical texts, civilized men and women, liberating them--hence “liberal” arts--while cultivating virtues like prudence, eloquence, and generosity. Rather than elaborate social structures, these reformers sought to simplify society’s values. We can trace such principles from their source to the authors of our republican vision--Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt--America’s role as the union of citizens rather than a mere collective of minorities. And today we face the same problems and challenges as our forebears. But the values and discipline they evolved have gone missing, although, once again, we sense that the principles surely survive in some quarters.

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Education, at liberal arts schools like Longwood University or the Virginia Military Institute, remains paradoxical: at the former, we “prepare citizen leaders for the common good,” an endeavor fraught with academic complexity and practical challenges; at the latter, it’s “citizen-soldiers,” after the model of Washington’s hero, the Roman general Cincinnatus, who dutifully took the field in time of war and as dutifully returned home to his plow afterward. Longwood aims to produce socially-responsible lifelong learners, “catalysts for change”--citizens who embrace equality, civility, tolerance, honesty and duty. Longwood students, with their gains in self-understanding, acknowledge significantly more satisfaction with their college experience than their peers elsewhere. Longwood’s citizen leaders, whose core value is social responsibility and volunteerism, serve, vote, and build in our communities, understand the viewpoint of others, speak the truth, as they honor traditional values.

VMI, heir to Sparta’s rigor if not her institutions, denies the attributes of individuality to affirm the individual in the face of that “real world.” That is a place where any force or agency that makes one do what one does not wish is called “Prussian”; where passion in pursuit of discipline or an ideal is considered “militant”; and where words like “soldierly” and “obedient” are charged with mistrust or disdain. The double mission of preparing graduates for military service but also for the duties--and opportunities--of commerce, the professions, the arts and sciences, life among our people requires, it seems, a very unmilitary delicacy, a sophisticated exercise demanded, ironically, of young people before they gain experience in the “real world.”

The human needs of America, and Virginia, and the human agony of struggle in this new century will require much more than lip-service to the humanizing and the humane, those “liberating” arts…, and their roots.

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

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

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

Craig Kallendorf. ed., trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Harvard, 2002.

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

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

Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner. Modern Library/Viking Reprint, 1954.

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Dr. Raymond Cormier has served, since 1996, as Visiting Professor of French in the English and Modern Languages 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 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.