The Mighty River of Classics:
in Modern Education
CAMILLE PAGLIA
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem
“Kubla
Khan,”
one of the classic texts of English Romanticism, a
“sacred
river” runs for miles, “meandering with a mazy motion”
through
a paradise realm and then falls down through
caverns
to “a sunless sea.” The river continues underground,
then
reappears as a “mighty fountain,” a geyser forced up
with
such power that boulders are tossed in the air like “chaffy
grain.”
The river now runs overland, only to fall again beneath
the
earth and disappear.
Though
his setting is imperial China, Coleridge calls his
river
the “Alph,” probably after the Alpheus, a river in the
Greek
Peloponnesus that flows past the sacred precinct of
Olympia
and was thought to pass in a single pure stream
through
the Mediterranean Sea until it reappeared as the
fountain
of Arethusa on an island in the harbor of Syracuse
in
Sicily. According to legend, the river god Alpheus had
fallen
in love with the nymph Arethusa, and when he pursued
her,
the virgin goddess Artemis protected her by changing
her
into a fountain.
By
shortening “Alpheus” to “Alph,” Coleridge also evokes
the
Christian use of the first and last letters of the alphabet
as a
symbol for God, who is the “Alpha and Omega,” the
first
and the last, a paradox often illustrated in the wall decorations
or
mosaics of churches. Coleridge’s alternately
“mazy”
and “mighty” Alpheus seems to me an excellent
metaphor
for the classical tradition in Western culture,
which
flows down like a river from antiquity and sometimes
seems
to disappear underground. But despite constant prophecies
of
its extinction, it always reappears, forced up again
with
renewed power.
We
are in yet another period when the validity of the classics
as
the foundation of Western learning and education is
being
questioned and when there are many signs of erosion
—as
in the reduction or outright elimination of Latin
language
courses in public high schools and classics departments
in
American universities and when the amount of
classroom
time devoted to the classics in freshman survey
and
composition courses has in many institutions drastically
diminished.
There are several reasons for this. The demand
after
the 1960s cultural revolution for contemporary
“relevance”
in
the curriculum produced a relaxing of academic
methods
and demands and a proliferation of courses oriented
toward
the present. Popular culture has entered the
classroom
as teaching tool as well as subject—a phenomenon
toward
which there are quite different views. I myself,
as a
product of the 1960s, feel that popular culture has massively
shaped
American society over the past 150 years and
that
students, who have been immersed for their lifetimes in
pop,
need a map to it—to understand its evolution, technology,
modus
operandi, and persistent themes. On the other
hand,
an education that has tipped toward popular culture
at
the expense of the past threatens to become frivolous, faddish,
and
merely reactive. There is a way to teach or discuss
popular
culture, I would argue, that can be integrated with
and
can reinforce the classics, since so much of Hollywood’s
use
of sex and violence—from molten sex goddesses to
larger-than-life
action-adventure heroes—can be seen as an
analogy
to and even as a direct survival of classical mythology.
A
second reason for the turn from classics in the past
quarter
century is the new interest in multiculturalism,
which
also originates in the 1960s. Veterans of World War ii
had
come home with direct experience of Europe, the Pacific
islands,
the Philippines, and Japan, but in the domestic preoccupations
of
the postwar period and in the exacerbation
of
political tensions in the Cold War stalemate with the Soviet
Union,
with nuclear warfare hanging in the balance, a
certain
xenophobia took over, so that the rest of the world
was
sometimes regarded as picturesque to visit but always
improvable
if it would only Americanize. In the 1950s
and
1960s,
the civil rights movement and labor activism for migrant
workers
put the theme of racial and class justice front
and
center. When the controversy over the Vietnamese war
split
the generations, the patriotism of protestors was often
questioned,
partly because leftism from the mid-nineteenth
century
on has indeed been programmatically internationalist.
Proletarian
solidarity was premised by Marxism to cut
across
national boundaries, even though the working class
from
common observation has always been fervently patriotic.
In
cultural terms, the 1960s were also permeated by
Asian
influences, coming from Zen Buddhism, an interest of
the
West Coast branch of the fifties Beat movement, and
then
Hinduism as well.
Multiculturalism
is in theory a noble cause that aims to
broaden
perspective in the us, which because of its
physical
position
between two oceans can tend toward the smugly
isolationist.
It is no coincidence that much of the primary
impetus
toward multiculturalism began in California, because
of
its Hispanic heritage and its pattern of immigration
from
Mexico, Latin America, and the Pacific rim. What poisoned
the
debate over educational reform, however, was that
so
many of the proposals for multicultural change were explicitly
political,
using a leftist frame of reference that polarized
the
campuses. Shortcuts were resorted to to get quick
results
in democratizing the curriculum: the number of texts
by
dead white European males was reduced to make room
for
those by women or people of color, sometimes without
due
regard for whether the substitute texts, which were often
contemporary,
had the same cultural weight or substance
as
what they replaced.
Indeed,
for some in this movement, questions of quality
were
fundamentally elitist, having been created, it was alleged,
by a
cabal of imperialist white males to perpetuate
their
own power. The actual mechanics of canon-formation
over
time were either unknown or ignored: in point of fact,
major
writers and artists have rarely possessed or were significant
beneficiaries
of power in the political sense; in most
cases
(as in that of the embittered Dante) they were eccentrics
or
social failures. Second, only sporadically, as in Victorian
England,
can it be shown that major art was primarily a political
vehicle—and
even then, it had little effect on the curriculum,
which
was still based on the classics. When scrutinized
over
a time-span of thousands of years, canon-formation, a
process
always fluid and open to dispute, is more intimately
linked
to artistic impact than to political ideology. We declare
something
is important and assign it to the curriculum when
we
find evidence of its influence on other artists.
In other
words,
the canon is really about artistic or intellectual fertility;
it’s
the dynasty of works that have generated other
works.
To return to my river metaphor, art is a cascade down
the
centuries, like the cataracts that mark the changes of level
of
the descending Nile.
The
laudable mission of multiculturalism also unfortunately
got
entangled with academic careerism. Job creation,
recruitment,
and promotion became attached to multiculturalism.
Some
established academics were so resistant to
change
that as universities sought diversity in the student
body
and curriculum, an add-on strategy was hastily adopted.
New
programs and departments multiplied so that diversity
was
achieved not by genuinely revising the curriculum but by
turning
the campus into a crazy quilt of competitive fiefdoms.
Furthermore,
the nascent multicultural programs were
more
allied with campus administrators than with the older
professors
with their classical erudition. A host of assistant
deanships
were created nationwide whose positions and
budgets
were wed to particular campus constituencies and
which
therefore fostered divisiveness rather than reconciliation.
Over
the past thirty years, American education at both
the
primary and secondary levels has been deformed by a
steady
expansion of bureaucracy that not only drains resources
and
usurps prerogatives that belong to the faculty
but
that sometimes encourages administrators to be more
committed
to external public relations than to internal academic
quality.
In
this first decade of the new millennium, I remain to be
persuaded
that college students are graduating even from the
elite
schools with deeper or broader knowledge. They are
certainly
well tutored in sentiment—that is, in how to project
approved
attitudes of liberal tolerance, though how well
these
will survive the test of adult life remains to be seen.
Too
much academic writing in multiculturalism, whether
about
the Americas or the Indian subcontinent or the modern
Mideast,
has been filtered through poststructuralism—
which
is ironically just about as Eurocentric and elitist a
technique
as can be imagined. Furthermore, too many proponents
of
multiculturalism have adopted the social realist
or
Stalinist view of art as an instrument of indoctrination,
deploying
positive social messages as a prelude to political
action.
However, on the other extreme, those most intellectually
prepared
to give multiculturalism a scholarly system—
the
professors of ancient history and classics—frequently did
not
respond to the demand for change except as a challenge
to
their survival. They set no counterproposal before the nation
and
lost the opportunity to take control of the momentum
of
reform.
The
grand sequence of the classical tradition, which extends
in
various strands through the Middle Ages and Renaissance
to
the scientific Enlightenment and modern era, is
actually
a master paradigm for how to structure an authentically
multicultural
curriculum on a global scale. All students
abroad
as well as in the us need to learn the general
contours
of the world’s major artistic and cultural traditions.
These
long channels of lineage can best be understood as
streams—mighty
rivers that are fed by tributaries and that
are
a confluence of mixed and varied material. The great
rivers
of cultural tradition are nearly always powered by religion,
even
when they slow down and spread out into the
secular
delta of modern life.
Thus
my premise in understanding art and culture is always
continuity.
From Egyptian and Greek sculpture to
Hollywood
movies and rock music, I believe in creative influence
over
time. I categorically reject the view of culture as
disconnected
fragments or as the breakage of meaning—an
insular
fiction fostered by depressive intellectuals who lack
the
long view and whose ability to weigh or negotiate historical
evidence
is questionable. The modernist delusion of
fragmentation
can be traced to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”
published
in 1922 in the aftermath of the disaster of World
War i.
Its use in the chic postmodernism of the closing
decades
of the twentieth century descended from European
writers
and intellectuals in crisis after World War ii.
Lamentably,
this
outdated and provincial point of view has been
given
canonical status by those who evidently cannot see the
patterns
in culture and who have imposed their own limitations
on
hapless students.
Even
in manifest destruction, I see construction or the possibility
of
cultural recovery and transformation. A superb
example
is a church in Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a
medieval
church with a Renaissance facade. Built in the thirteenth
century
in the Gothic style—the only one of its kind
in
Rome—it sits on the foundations of an ancient Roman
temple
to the virgin goddess Minerva. That in turn was built
over
a sanctuary to the mother goddess Isis, whose cult had
spread
from Egypt to Greece by the fourth century bc and
from
there throughout the Hellenized Mediterranean. Isis
worship
was very popular with the masses in ancient Rome,
though
it was intermittently opposed by religious conservatives.
Everywhere
in the rites of Isis the sacred waters of the
Nile
were used; a cistern to store them has been excavated at
the
remains of the Isis shrine in the buried city of Pompeii.
The
passage in just this one building of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva
from Isis to Minerva to Mary, who is both virgin
and
mother, encapsulates the entire cultural history of the
West.
Such examples of cultural overlaying can and should
be
found for every major tradition in the world. In this age
of
mass media, when students are swamped by the present,
it
is a teacher’s obligation not to tear down or deconstruct
our
artistic and intellectual heritage but to reveal the invisible
foundations
or hidden roots of the present.
In 1665
an Egyptian obelisk, clearly belonging to the original
sanctuary
of Isis, was dug up in the garden of the Dominican
monastery
at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Pope
Alexander
vii asked Gianlorenzo Bernini, the genius of the
Italian
Baroque, to design a pedestal for it so that the obelisk
could
be displayed in the street in front of the church. Possibly
after
consulting with the renowned Jesuit scholar,
Athanasius
Kircher, who would publish a treatise on the hieroglyphics
of
this obelisk in 1666, Bernini produced one of
his
most charming works. Today the obelisk, carried on the
back
of a muscular elephant beckoning toward passersby
with
its trunk, remains one of the most beloved works of
public
art in Rome.
When
they were unearthed during the rebuilding and expansion
of
the city of Rome during the Renaissance and afterward,
obelisks,
four-sided pillars capped by a pyramid,
were
interpreted as symbols of divine illumination. Like the
tendrilous
Gothic spires of Northern European cathedrals
whose
stone seems to dissolve in midair, obelisks carried the
eye
and mind skyward, toward a realm of greater permanence.
In
Baroque Rome they were usually crowned with a
bronze
crucifix, signifying the triumph of Christianity over
pagan
religion. In ancient Egypt too, obelisks, which were
hewn
by virtuoso engineering in the quarry as single, fragile
blocks
of stone, also signified a yearning for ultimate reality
as
they soared toward the divine disc of the sun.
The
obelisk, therefore, in its simple, clean, sharp-edged
geometry,
can be seen to embody a long line or current of
idealism
in the Western tradition that connects pagan with
Christian
thought. It is precisely that idealism that I find
missing
in contemporary higher education, which in its
laudable
movement toward secularism—that is, freedom
from
sectarian coercion or dogma—has ended up with a
chaotic,
diffuse humanities curriculum that is too often simplistic
in
content and spiritually empty, despite its claims to
be
the agent of social good.
Many
members of my 1960s generation followed the High
Romantic
pattern of critiquing politics and rejecting organized
religion—both
of which were viewed as forms of outmoded
masculine
authority. But the sixties counterculture,
like
Romanticism, retained a religious perspective and sense
of
the sacred by honoring nature: hence the poet Percy
Bysshe
Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford University for
writing
a manifesto in defense of atheism, could write an ecstatic
ode
to the highest mountain in Europe, “Mont Blanc,”
with
its awesome spectacle of cold, brute power. American
Romantics
like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman
explored
religious traditions outside the West, specifically
Hinduism,
which was assimilated into 1960s music as well as
the
transcendental meditation movement. But the Romantic
comprehensiveness
of sixties consciousness was almost immediately
lost
by the 1970s, the hedonistic disco era.
Massive
drug-taking in the sixties, notably psychedelics
used
to gain visionary insights, became a substitute for serious
spiritual
inquiry and took a great toll personally and
psychologically
on some who, urged on by new-minted gurus
like
Timothy Leary, chose to become dropouts from the
career
system and public realm and thus were unable to effect
authentic
and enduring change. But I respect those psychedelic
explorers
of inner space who destroyed themselves
in a
genuine quest for truth. On the other hand, I lament the
tragic
waste, for these were the idealists of my generation,
the
ones who should have been the real educational reformers
of
our time.
The
religious impulse and cosmic perspective of the sixties
shifted
not into education but in diminished and sentimentalized
form
into the New Age movement, which has become
a
highly commercialized farrago of self-help therapies,
mystical
lore, and sometimes quite beautiful, atmospheric
trance
music, Asian or Celtic in mood. New Age, another
creation
of the West Coast, is syncretistic in the way it fuses
Asian
and European influences, but as an approach to life, it
is
all-accepting and undemanding, suspending guilt and
judgment.
It offers a psychology without conflict, and a subjective
ethics
without challenge or moral responsibility.
Elements
of New Age sensibility seem to have entered
American
Catholicism, which in the 1950s was already moving
away
from its déclassé ethnic roots and Protestantizing
itself
through a startling drabness of church architecture and
décor.
The folk songs, Protestant hymns, affable sermons,
and
literal hand-holding in today’s suburban Catholic
churches
illustrate mellow New Age principles of inclusion
and
harmony and reinforce the casualness of the vernacular
Mass
and the slackness of unpoetic contemporary translations
of
Scripture. Priests, meanwhile, are now being trained
to
be social workers; theology and learning per se are no
longer
as heavily emphasized. The priest, with his public
performance
of the mysterious Latin Mass, was once an embodiment
of
learning for ordinary people. Latin, which I still
believe
to be the basis of most strong writing in English, was
intrinsic
to a priest’s official identity and gave churchgoers a
moving
sense of historical continuity with classical antiquity,
when
the Christian story began. The priest, in other words,
was
an educator, just as university education began in the
Middle
Ages as training for priests.
In
the wake of the 1960s cultural revolution, organized religion
in
America has clearly tempered its authoritarianism
and
tried to make itself more user-friendly. But in this welcome
process,
which posits the parish as a happy family, what
has
been lost is the sense of theology as intellectual history,
complex
and daunting. Jesuit colleges, following the mandate
of
early Jesuit missionaries to learn native languages and custhe
toms,
tended to be hospitable to the post-sixties movement
for
multiculturalism. But I am not aware of Jesuit voices taking
a
leading role on either side of the public debate over
poststructuralism,
which seeped into American universities in
the 1970s
and early 1980s and has in my view damaged the
humanities
in ways that it will take a half century to repair.
Surely
Jesuit professors, with their scholarly training and tradition
of
disputation, could have been in the vanguard of engaging
poststructuralism
in its own terms as a putative
philosophy
and freeing nascent multiculturalism from its
grip.
Certainly the response to the theory trend by the professoriat
at
secular institutions was too slow and feeble, so by
the
time the general alarm sounded, it was too late.
Nothing
has been more deleterious than the common error
that
poststructuralism is a product of 1960s
leftism and
therefore
an agent of progressive political change. This misconception
was
made possible only because authentic American
radicals
of the sixties rarely if ever entered or completed
graduate
school in the humanities or made their way up the
academic
ladder. Poststructuralism was two generations
older;
it was a product of the school of Saussure, a system of
linguistic
theory predating World War ii and subscribed to
by
French intellectuals who were heavily influenced by the
pessimistic
modernism of Samuel Beckett. The American sixties
believed
in social reform, in individual identity, in emotional
intensity,
and in nature; poststructuralism believes in
none
of these things. It asserts that there are no “facts”; that
language
constructs or mediates all reality, that political
power
is created and sustained through language, and that,
conversely,
an alteration in language will somehow produce
political
change. Poststructuralism is simply a new version of
verbalism—the
excessive preoccupation with words—that
has
repeatedly plagued the history of Western education,
even
in ancient Rome. The sixties cultural revolution, as energized
by
mass media, was grounded in the sensory—and it
should
have produced a massive reform of education in this
era
of cutting-edge science and technology by moving the hu-
manities
curriculum forcibly toward the arts. That leftist politics
can
be synthesized with traditional erudition and passionate
respect
for the arts is proved by Arnold Hauser’s
Marxist
study, The Social History of Art, a
magnificent magnum
opus
in the tradition of German philology.
America
is presently suffering from an effete, cynical
pseudo-intellectuality
in the universities, a manic rotation of
superficial
news cycles in the media, and a generalized hypochondria
in
the professional middle class, as shown by its
preoccupation
with stress-related ailments and disorders,
buffered
by tranquilizers. From a distance, this affluent society,
with
its avalanche of high-tech toys, must look as if it
can
barely survive the anxieties of freedom. In a secular society
where
commerce is king and where the fine arts have
never
been deeply rooted, it is up to professional educators
to
provide the sustaining material of culture. But when they
themselves
cannot agree on what constitutes a basic body of
knowledge
for the young, then education disintegrates and
the
humanities are inevitably marginalized, disdained and ignored
by
average Americans busy with their daily lives.
At
the University of the Arts in 1990, I collaborated with
Lily
Yeh, a professor of painting and art history and a social
activist
born in China, to create an experimental course
called
“East and West,” the notes for which were published
in
my first essay collection in 1992. We sought to identify
the
major themes in Western and Asian tradition that could
provide
the foundation for a curriculum not just for American
but
for global education. I certainly expected to see
more
evidence over the past decade that college teachers understood
the
urgent need to address the general public about
educational
reform. But American humanities departments
have
been amazingly stagnant in this period, demoralized in
some
cases by factionalism or by financial pressure. Few
new
ideas have emerged, and no rising major critics or scholars
are
visible on the horizon. Bread-and-butter issues have
come
to the fore, such as the long overdue recognition by the
profession
of the outrageous exploitation of part-time teachthe
ers
and graduate students.
Radical
change would be needed for the universities to
shift
to a truly global curriculum. But the Western classical
tradition
would nevertheless retain centrality because of the
sheer
massiveness of its documentation, as well as the unrivalled
interrelationship
of its artistic genres. In my own experience
over
thirty years as a teacher in a wide variety of
schools—including,
when I was a struggling adjunct, adult
night
classes at a helicopter factory in Connecticut—I have
found
that archaeology captures students’ attention. They
are
transfixed by material about the destruction of great civilizations.
Because
they inhabit a superefficient world of
plastics
and stainless steel, where the old and worn simply
disappears,
they find particularly sobering images of the catastrophic
effects
of time. The contemplation of
ruins, in all
their
decay and devastation, was basic to European education
in
the eighteenth century. Engravings of the broken,
half-buried
remnants of the Roman Forum, then an overgrown
pasture
for herds of sheep and goats, provided a
melancholy
object lesson on human vanity and mortality.
Archaeology
is a fusion of the arts and sciences, of theoretical
speculation
and engagement with the stubbornly
concrete
material world. It is in the recovery, identification,
and
conservation of objects from the past that the West has
distinguished
itself. My proposed reform of education
would
put the world’s major religious traditions at the center
of
the curriculum and present them in an Old Historicist,
multi-tiered
way as a combination of ritual, text,
artifact,
and architecture. Through archaeology conjoined
with
anthropology—and here I am deeply influenced by the
early
twentieth-century Cambridge school of classical anthropology
—religion
can be taught in a non-doctrinaire
way
that expands and develops the student’s mind and
opens
up the distant past without smothering it with contemporary
assumptions
and political projects.
Occupying
the center of Rome’s spacious Piazza Navona,
whose
oval shape follows that of the ancient stadium of the
emperor
Domitian, is another splendid monument by
Bernini,
the Fountain of the Four Rivers, commissioned by
Pope
Innocent x and built between 1648
and 1651. A mammoth
Egyptian
obelisk, ringed at its base with papal insignia,
rests
on the grotto of a hollow travertine mountain in
front
of the church of Sant’Agnese. At the foot of the mountain
sit,
gushing spouts of water, colossal sculptures of the
four
great rivers of the world: the Danube, representing Europe;
the
Ganges, representing Asia; Argentina’s Rio de la
Plata,
representing the Americas; and the Nile, representing
Africa.
Carved around the fountain are allegorical inscriptions
by
that omnipresent Jesuit scholar, Athanasius Kircher,
whose
treatise on this recently unearthed obelisk was published
in
the Holy Year 1650.
Bernini’s
stunning design for the Nile sculpture seems to
me a
great metaphor for culture in general and particularly
for
European culture, which descends from the warring
tribes
and empires of the ancient Near East. The Nile is depicted
as a
burly, nude, adult man wrapping a shroud
around
his head—signifying that the source of the Nile in
central
Africa was still unknown. These pagan river gods
ringing
a North African obelisk before a Catholic church
represent
the mighty force of tradition feeding and irrigating
the
present. But the Nile god’s masking shroud suggests that
all
earthly knowledge is partial and contingent. This is no
discovery
by modern theorists but a basic perception of most
major
philosophers since Heracleitus, the pre-Socratic who
said
you cannot step into the same river twice.
The
Baroque era, in which St. Ignatius’ Society of Jesus
flourished,
produced a public art that teaches without condescension,
that
translates big ideas into passionate, theatrical,
accessible
form. Counter-Reformation Baroque, in which religion
was
turned into grand opera, has more in common with
Hollywood
than with the wizened creeds of our current campuses.
Bernini’s
Fountain of the Four Rivers, fusing pagan
and
Christian and incorporating the entire known world, is
multiculturalism
at its best. It presents culture as massive and
monumental
yet at the same time in perpetual flux. It is a
perfect
symbol for enlightened education, whose energies
must
be constantly renewed by the interplay and confluence
of
tradition and innovation.
A lecture delivered on 5
May 2001 at a conference, “Jesuit Humanism:
Faith, Justice, and
Empiricism in the Liberal Arts,” at
Santa
Clara University, Santa Clara, California.