The Devil Knows Latin

The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition
© 1999 E. Christian Kopf
327 pages

Earlier in the week I read The Devil Knows Latin, which like Who Killed Homer? contends for the value of a classical education to western civilization.  His argument, appropriately enough, is trinitarian; he argues on behalf of tradition itself, argues for the classics' place as the bedrock of the western tradition, and argues for Latin and Greek's importance in imbibing the west's heritage most fully.  Kopf is a partisan of the west who regards attempts at emphasizing multiculturalism in education as dodgy; not because other cultures don't have value, but because they cannot be appreciated piecemeal.  A cultural tradition is, like a great house or a city, a thing built across the ages by succeeding generations; the work laid down by the dead is used and advanced by the living; each piece connects to the other. One generation of Greeks makes written stories out of another's myths;  Shakespeare takes those stories and makes them the background for his own; even a 'modern'  mind like Freud uses Greek mythic language to communicate his ideas. Attempting to teach culture through random stories from across the world would be tantamount to constructing a house by grabbing diverse elements -- a Japanese roof, Igloo walls, French doors -- and pushing them all together.  It doesn't work, and nor does modern western education work in presenting children with a slate of wholly seperate subjects without connection to one another. Kopf's understanding of education is more integral; for him, subjects should be learned together, like Roman schoolboys learning philosophy or history as they translate or read Latin in their mastery of it.

Regrettably, Kopff doesn't dwell on the Greek worldview the way Hanson does, though a conviction that education is less accumulating facts and more the cultivation of an individual undergrids his perspective.  The book doesn't have the cohesion its author admires; between an essay on the importance of language and several fascinating pieces of movie and literary criticism lays an argument for protective tariffs.. This is really more a collection of articles, linked by highbrow cultural defense.  If The Devil Knows Latin succeeds, it is in its first argument for culture, specifically the fact that culture is not a thing in itself, with its own life, but something which depends on the living to preserve and build upon.  Russell Kirk made an identical argument in America's British Culture, where he sweetened the pot by  contending  that  the classical tradition was one that Americans of all ethnicities and religions could use to bind one another together, instead of falling apart in cultural balkanization. Though I'm an ardent lover of the classical tradition, for me The Devil Knows Latin will be more memorable for the movie reviews.  Hanson's work, which predated this by a year, is much superior.

For the curious:  the title is taken from the story of a bishop who insisted a child be baptized in Latin instead of English, because "the baby doesn't know English and the Devil knows Latin."


Related:
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education, Victor Davis Hanson
The Roots of American Order and America's British Culture, Russell Kirk. Both not only include reviews of the west's classical heritage, but stress the importance of cultural continuity.

Who Killed Homer?

Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson
290 pages

For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men.  Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical  expertise in fields like business, engineering, or nursing, and such a focus is lauded as practical.  A degree in Greek literature would be derided as useless as a degree in art history, the epitome of wasted public finance.  Victor Hanson argues that vocational training is not the point of a university education; an education is not what you know, but how you behave. In Who Killed Homer? he examines the soul-forming virtues of the classical tradition and contemplates their reason for their unnecessary but imminent demise.

Hansen begins by arguing that the greatest virtues of western civilization have their origin, and sustaining permanence, in the Greek tradition.  Drawing from philosophical treatise (to the Greeks, a category broad enough to cover politics, science, and more) in addition to extant literature, Hanson reviews a spectrum of values with origins in Greece.  These range from concepts given overt legal protection (consensual government and the open criticism thereof, armies subordinate to civil power, free enterprise, etc) to ideas understood at a deeper level, and contributing to the others.  These more fundamental appreciations include the belief that every polis' wellbeing depended on the average middling citizen, not the aristocracy or the mob, and that the world was fraught with meaning. Mysterious yet rational, the world was a place imbued with limits -- limits that extended to man. Part of the Greek heritage are more obvious than others; the very shape of US government structures bears witness to their past, and most histories of science will begin with the Greek enterprise. Other appreciations have been forgotten;  like the belief that man was nothing without the polis;  only the power of culture and threat of sanction by others kept the human animal from behaving worse than beasts.  It is in civilization than man finds salvation from his own destruction. This is a hard lesson given an obscene and brutal summation by Hanson: "Man is nothing without the state."  Ultimately, classical education imparted a cohesive view of the world in which science, politics, and philosophy were knit together, a part of the whole.

If these truths are indeed timeless, how have they fallen by the wayside during the 20th century? Hansen lays the blame solely at the feet of the Classicists, who have thrown away the responsibility of their tradition in the pursuit of status and fortune. They ought to know better, and here Hanson's attitude reveals how seriously he takes his belief that education was the moulding of character, not acquisition of knowledge. To Hanson,  those who have committed themselves to knowing the Greek mind, who have studied it in earnest, bear responsibility for practicing it. Just as we expect a minister to conduct himself with greater care than the average parishioner, so to does Hanson expect classicists to be, if not moral champions, at least contenders;  he expects them to live the values of the Greeks, to take their place in the hoplite ranks of the mind and defend what is theirs, to rise to the challenge of revealing the classics' enduring relevance. Instead,  they focus on increasingly more pointless esoterically in pursuit of esteem,  viewing fellow classicists as competition to be beat for choice university positions in which they can focus on their 'research' and leave the actual teaching to grad students, producing not keen minds but papers on mathematical relationships governing the use of similes in The Illiad.  The comprehension of the whole is lost, and insult is added to injury when said scholars apply tortured modern interpretations,laying waste to The Odyssey by accusing it of being the wellspring of western sexism. Instead of defending and advancing the Greek way, classicists have allowed it to become the scapegoat for every moral self-doubt of the west. After outlining his case against his colleagues, Hanson proposes ways to put the focus back on the meaning of the classics,  in part by forcing classicists to teach."Publish or perish" is anathema to this professor who sees his primary vocation as  giving young people a structured education, not advancing his own  prestige. The work ends on a bitter note, however, as he does not expect the modern world's slide into the moral abyss to be arrested. Instead,  we will probably have to wait for civilization to collapse and demand strong men again, men who will rediscover the Greek truths.

That final bitter retort casts a pall over a strongly-argued book already shadowed by contempt for the modern world, especially ideologies like multiculturalism and relativism. The Greeks understood nuance, but in Hanson's view they stood by everlasting truths. Hanson's own stand is strident at times, to the point that he's less a Pericles calling forth citizens to stand with him and more a Leonidas rallying the troops before a final stand. His appraisal of Greek contributions is surpassed by the analysis of why classical studies have faltered, but Who Killed Homer does double duty as a traditionalist critique of modernity and a passionate appraisal of how much value the tradition still holds, even for moderns overawed by their own cleverness. As a classical partisan myself, I found it invigorating, but Hanson's zeal may spook the unconvinced.

Related:

• The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton
• The Way of the Greeks, Edith Hamilton
• Greek Ways, Bruce Thornton
• The Life of Greece, Will Durant