Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
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Book Length: 544 pages
Given the foundational role of Classical Greece in forming Western Civilization, a proper understanding of its thought, culture, and history is paramount to understanding the true destiny of the West. Special emphasis ought to be placed on the word “proper”, as is fitting to their nature, the destroyers of the West have sought to poison the well of Hellenic wisdom wherever they could not entirely eradicate it. They claim—contrary to the witness of history—that the Greeks were “race-blind” and “accepted same-sex marriage”. In doing so, the Marxist-Liberals recognize that if they cannot entirely purge the greatness of Greece from the earth, they must refashion her ancient glory into something as ugly as themselves. Thus in studying Ancient Greece, one ought to consult texts free from the narrowness of postmodern lies, texts which delve into the transcendental richness of that civilization. Jaeger did not only receive his education well before the fools caught academia, but also had the privilege of writing and publishing his research in a period mostly devoid of the prejudices which haunt us today. His work therefore comes down to us as a refreshing and deeply insightful guide.
The author does not ignore the uniqueness of the Greek people and their culture in his analysis. In fact, he states these truths in such an apparent light that they would come as a shock to the so-called “educated” classes of our time, who commit to an egalitarianism so erroneous that they seriously believe that even Amazonian tribesmen could have matched the achievements of the Greeks if these two groups had simply switched places on the world map. Jaeger sanely articulates what has become—in the terms of postmodernist Newspeak—“hateful” and “racist” to recognize:
Without Greek cultural ideals, Greco-Roman civilization would not have been a historical unity, and the culture of the western world would never have existed.
(xvii)
Furthermore, on the subject of culture itself he writes this very illuminating passage:
We are accustomed to use the word culture, not to describe the ideal which only the Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense, to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive. We use it for the entire complex of all the ways and expressions of life which characterize any one nation. Thus the word has sunk to a simple anthropological concept, not a concept of value, a consciously pursued ideal. In this vague analogous sense it is permissible to talk of Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Jewish or Egyptian culture, although none of these nations has a word or an ideal that corresponds to real culture. Of course every highly organized nation has an educational system; but the law and the prophets of the Israelites, the Confucian system of the Chinese, the Dharma of the Indians are in their whole intellectual structure fundamentally and essentially different from the Greek ideal of culture. And ultimately the habit of speaking of a number of pre-Hellenic ‘cultures’ was created by the positivist passion for reducing everything to the same terms: an outlook which applies hereditary European descriptions even to non-European things, and neglects the fact that historical method is falsified by any attempt to apply our conceptions to a world foreign to them. The circular reasoning to which almost all historical thought is liable begins with that basic error. It is impossible to do away with entirely, because we can never escape from our own inborn ways of thinking. But we can at least solve the fundamental problems of history, and one of them is to realize the cardinal distinction between the pre-Hellenic world and the world that begins with the Greeks—the world in which a cultural ideal was first established as a formative principle.
(xvii-xviii)
Thus, the modern conception of an equality between cultures stems not from Christian thought, but actually from Positivism, which was an early nineteenth century school of atheism founded by the apostate Auguste Comte. 1That such an error would arise from atheistic philosophy is quite natural, for in its disdain for the divine brotherhood of the universal Church it inevitably seeks a universalism of its own. Whether this effect is achieved through sentimentalism or through some form of cold reductionism, it matters little in the end; by seeking to omit the truth about the organic growth of peoples and the natural differences between them, they destroy the uniqueness of the races in their revolt against reality. To regard the Aztec nation, with all its satanic bloodletting, as an equal “civilization” to the Spanish nation that vanquished their empire is to do no justice to the Aztecs, nor does it avenge the so-called crime of “colonialism” committed by the Spaniards. It is instead an act of dangerous appeasement, wherein barbarism is placed on the same level as true civilization. In the name of humanism, the egalitarians therefore abolish mankind.
Thus, to ignore the uniqueness of Greek civilization is to ignore the roots of the West; if Westerners ignore these roots en masse, the West itself becomes ignorant of it is and what it ought to be, as it sadly has, though not to the point of extinction. As Jaeger himself states, the Greeks have much to teach us today:
It seems, in fact, that the culture of the present cannot impart any value to the original Greek form of culture, but rather needs illumination and transformation by that ideal, in order to establish its true meaning and direction.
(xviii)
Quite true—though it must be added, without the light of the Faith guiding this rediscovery, such illumination will not be possible, as will be further elaborated in this review.
Key to this work is the author’s examination of the Hellenic concept of areté as it initially appeared and as it organically developed throughout the early history of Classical Greece. This concept is practically impossible to translate outside of the Greek language; but, suffice to reason, it is something more broad than a general sense of virtue or justice. Concerning the concept as it was understood in the Homeric age, he writes:
Areté exists in mortal man. Areté is mortal man. But it survives the mortal, and lives on in his glory, in that very ideal of areté which accompanied and directed him throughout his life. The gods themselves claim their due honour. They jealously avenge any infringement of it, and pride themselves on the praise which their worshippers give to their deeds. Homer’s gods are an immortal aristocracy. And the essence of Greek worship and piety lay in giving honour to the godhead: to be pious is ‘to honour the divinity’. To honour both gods and men for their areté is a primitive instinct.
(9-10)
But where did this concept of immortal heroism emerge? Given a voice through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, areté was originally an ideal which arose from the aristocracy, as Jaeger explains:
It is a fundamental fact in the history of culture that all higher civilization springs from the differentiation of social classes—a differentiation which is created by natural variations in physical and mental and capacity between man and man…The history of Greek culture—that universally important aspect of the Greek national character—actually begins in the aristocratic world of early Greece, with the creation of a definite ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race were constantly trained.
(4)
Fundamental to understanding both the culture of this early Greece and the significance of Homer is that the two epics attributed to him were not merely read and sung for the purpose of entertainment, as it may appear to us today. Rather, they had an intrinsically educational component to them. It was the Homeric concept of training the nobleman in areté by setting before him and his peers “…an eternal ideal, to which they have a duty to conform” that formed the most antique form of education in the Western sense (7). This can be gathered from a careful reading of the Homeric epics themselves, as Jaeger notes:
Homer gives us several pictures of the old bards, out of whose work grew the epic. The bard’s vocation is to keep alive among posterity ‘the deeds of men and gods’. Glory, and its preservation and increase—that is the real purpose of the heroic poems; and heroic poetry is several times described in so many words as ‘the glories of men’.
(40)
The kind of person who subsists in their proverbial ivory tower and scribbles lines of nonsense in a selfish pursuit of “self-expression” would not have been seen as a poet in Classical Greece, though these persons are viewed as such in our society. To the Greeks, the poet was instead a teacher and a recorder of deeds of heroic and historic import. This concept was no flash in the pan—unlike what will inevitably become of the modern so-called poet—as it went on to influence the development of education as well as the arts, surviving beyond the end of Antiquity into our time.
As in the same manner he covers Homer, so does Jaeger evaluate the works of the subsequent great poets of Ancient Greece, by analyzing them in the context of their society and civilization. Furthermore, he illustrates how they in turn influenced Hellenistic culture, a dynamic that becomes even more apparent when he extends his study to the famous playwrights of Athens. With his depth of knowledge and high-minded approach, the author’s interpretations not only deliver, but exceeded my expectations. One of the many fascinating revelations that came to me when reading this book—similar cases will come to you if you so choose to read it—was simply how close some of these illustrious Greeks came to the truth of Divine Revelation. For example, in his analysis of the writings of the agrarian poet Hesiod, the author comments:
The Theogony is filled with the idea of causation; and Hesiod uses that same idea, in the tale of Prometheus in the Works and Days, to solve the practical, moral, and social problem of work. Work and suffering must have come into the world at some time; but they cannot be part of God’s original perfect scheme of things. They were introduced, says Hesiod, speaking as a moralist, by the disastrous action of Prometheus stealing the divine fire. To punish that deed, Zeus created the first woman, the crafty Pandora, mother of all womankind; out of Pandora’s box came the demons of sickness and old age, with ten thousand other evils who now inhabit all the earth and all the sea.
(66)
Hesiod, through use of his natural reason, and likely building on the oral tradition of his fellow countrymen, thus articulated something very similar to what us Catholics believe. If the parallels are not immediately obvious, I shall spell them out here. Pandora, the first woman—like Eve, of whom this Greek counterpart seems to be a faint memory—is tempted by curiosity, and it is by her indulgence in something forbidden by a divine power that reduces mankind to a fallen state. Prometheus is akin to Satan, who rebels against a divine plan by “stealing the divine fire”. This is reminiscent of how the Evil One told Eve that by eating the forbidden fruit she would not “die the death”, instead falsely promising to her that she and her husband, “shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The “knowledge” Satan promises Eve is like the knowledge of fire which Prometheus sought to give to mankind. Moreover, the insight that suffering and the toil of physical labor were not a part of “God’s original perfect scheme of things” calls a Christian mind back to the Garden of Eden. There was work to be done there—but it was solely pleasurable, not involving the negative effects now associated with physical labor, for God said to Adam after the Fall that, “with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:19).
These similarities are not mere coincidences, nor are they proof that the Old Testament plagiarized Greek mythology. Rather, they entail that the Greeks, being descendants of Japeth, preserved some remembrance of the primordial revelation even after they, “changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of fourfooted beasts, and of creeping things” (Romans 1:23).
Jaeger’s analysis of the masterful Athenian playwright Aeschylus also unveils an Ancient Greek perspective not too dissimilar from Christian belief, this being reflected through the mode of tragedy:
His whole conception of fate is summed up in the tension between two ideas—his faith in the perfect and uninterrupted justice of God’s government of the world, and his horrific realization of the daemonic cruelty and perfidiousness of até [folly], which leads man to violate the world-order and inevitably to be punished for his violation.
(257-258)
Though Aeschylus did understand the reality of sin as we Catholics understand it, he still grasped it by means of what St. Paul termed, “the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15). Folly leads man to “violate the world-order” and it leads him “inevitably to be punished for his violation”—is this not a realization that pride is the capital sin, and that sin invites chastisement from God? Such a statement is worth all the more considering when weighing the great themes of this playwright, his contemporaries, and his successors in perspective of the author’s observation that “…the writer of tragedies was an important political figure…” (248). This point is only further elaborated on in the later chapters of Jaeger’s study, as he guides the reader from a journey through the cultural and intellectual activity of the Archaic Hellenic world to the realm of Athens in her famous years, wherein the figure of the playwright became more culturally significant than that of the poet. The popularity and endurance of the works of Aeschylus demonstrate that the Athenians were wrestling with these important questions of divine justice and of fate and free will in a manner quite foreign to our post-Christian society rife with indifferentism.
No conclusive book about Ancient Greek history can be written without delving into the philosophical tradition; in this too, Jaeger delivers exceedingly well. So rooted in the cultural and intellectual life of that other world, he is able to even connect Hellenistic culture to Hellenistic philosophy in a manner which evades most other scholars. In the process, he produces thought-provoking observations such as this one:
Actually, it is not easy to say how the Homeric idea that Ocean is the origin of everything differs from the doctrine of Thales that water is the basic principle of the universe.
(151)
Thus, the author is able to support his preceding statement with great effect that “…the history of Greek thought is an organic unity…” (Ibid). But within this unity—as the history which Jaeger gives us of the various Ionian philosophers and their immediate successors informs us—there was often immense disagreement. Paradoxically, the disagreements do not disprove the unity; for all these thinkers were unified in their Hellenic search for the world-order, imitating in their intellectual ventures the fabled quests of Odysseus with which they were intimately familiar. Though their ideas so often conflicted with the myths, they also drew upon the myths in understanding their observations of the world around them. Of these unfortunately lesser-known philosophers, one especially stands out to the Christian mind: Xenophanes. For it was he who grasped through that lesser light of natural reason the truth that, “God is a spirit” (John 4:24), not the work of human hands:
His own conception of God, which he presents with fervent trust in the validity of his new doctrine, is that God is the same as the whole universe…He is all Sight, all Thought, all Hearing. He sways the universe without effort, by pure thought. He does not hurry busily here and there like the gods of epic poetry, but rests unmoved.
(170)
Such a doctrine was certainly closer to the truth than the anthropomorphized gods and goddesses of the Hellenic cults. But even in what he vehemently opposed, there was a truth buried within; one day, God would become man.
To the backdrop of the intellectual and cultural developments of the Greek world, the author does not forget to inform the reader a deep-rooted value which permeated the life of the Greeks: the importance of the polis, or city, from which emerged the city-state. Characterizing the relationship between the polis and the citizen, Jaeger writes:
The polis is the sum of all its citizens and of all the aspects of their lives. It gives each citizen much, but it can demand all in return. Relentless and powerful, it imposes its way of life on each individual, and marks him for its own. From it are derived all the norms which govern the lives of its citizens…Law is the objective expression of the state, and now Law has become king, as the Greeks later said—an invisible ruler who does not only prevent the strong from transgressing and bring the wrongdoer to justice, but issues positive commands in all the spheres of life which had once been governed by individual will and preference.
(108-109)
When reading Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, this important fact, so vital to any sound interpretation, is bound to be lost on most modern Western readers; for in the modern West, the polis has been replaced by the ego. For instance, the response of most American so-called “conservatives” to this concept, if it were explained to them, would be some ignorant utterance along the lines of “this sounds like Communism.” Yet, after nearly ten years of the American government imposing a “legalization” of so-called “marriages” between men and men, women and women, most of these same conservatives have caved into this demand. They have accepted the imposition of filth without much protest, yet they would reject the imposition of virtue as tyranny by the same forces of the state. They are justly derided in our day, and would have had their hypocrisy mocked in the comedy plays of Athens, had they lived there and then.
In closing, this work is a masterful study, though not a Catholic one.2 What will be a special delight to those deeply fascinated by the topics of this book are the abundance of footnotes, which given in their entirety in the “Notes” section of this text, take up an order of about eighty pages! This work is therefore recommended to discerning minds, ones capable of persevering through the dense but rewarding academic language of the author that they may learn the truth about the Ancient Greek world.
- For a detailed explanation of Positivism, I suggest consulting the following article on the subject:
“Positivism.” Catholic Encyclopedia.
-
One of Jaeger’s claims I found which a Catholic ought to disagree with, in my view, is his assertion that:
The vast difference between the historical position of mediaeval epic and that of Homer is shown by the fact that he influenced Greek civilization for a full thousand years, while the German and French epics of the middle ages were forgotten soon after the decline of chivalry. In the studious Hellenic age, the Homeric epics still lived on and produced an entire new science: the science of philology, which aimed at discovering the secrets of their origin and the transmission, and drew its life from the unquenchable vigour of the poems themselves. But it was not until modern scholarship had been long at work that the mediaeval epics, Roland, Beowulf and The Nibelungs, were rescued from their dusty oblivion in old manuscripts. The only epic of the middle ages which became part of the life, not only of its own nation, but of all humanity, was Dante’s Divine Comedy—and that for the same reason as the Homeric epics.
(38)The reason for this apparent lack of interest in the medieval epics was not a natural one. Rather, it was the bias of the rationalist scholars of the so-called “Enlightenment” which relegated those excellent works to a fate of “dusty oblivion”, until their re-discovery in the nineteenth century. As another scholar of Greek history wrote:
The enlightened age of rationalism was proud of its ‘reason’, its philosophical outlook and religious scepticism, and it despised the history of the whole medieval period.
(Ostrogorksy, History of the Byzantine State. pgs. 4-5)