The Return of Classics Corner

In the mid-nineties, as I was settling into Seattle and getting Real Change going, I decided to make a point of having a life outside my work. The best idea I could come up with on how to do that was to cultivate an interest in ancient lit, and find a group of folks who shared my obsession. Some people play bridge. Some people golf. I looked for people who wanted to discuss Thucydides. Call me a freak.

One by-product of this fateful decision was my Classics Corner column, which I wrote for Real Change from 1999-2004. This was a literary column of sorts in which I referred to myself in the first person plural and tried to be funny while discussing current affairs and, mostly, ancient Greek literature.

It doesn't sound like it would work, but it did. People started buying the paper for the column, and three years later I still meet people who ask for it back. My twin daughters came along in March of 2003, and within a year it was clear some things had to go. These included practicing the guitar and banjo, teaching myself ancient greek, and writing the damn column.

I put the old columns up on a website, but no one really seemed to care or notice. When the renewal notice came this month, I decided to let it go. But today, as I scraped moss off my roof and meditated on my love of the Northwest, it occurred to me that I could put all those columns on a blog for FREE!

So I did. The Classics Corner blog now lives, and I put a link underneath my profile. Today I put up most of the columns from 2000. It was bittersweet to come across a column where I prognosticate that G.W. Bush could not possibly become President. A few favorites include a column on King Lear, a short history of the town of Sappho on the Olympic Peninsula, and the Socratic proof that Slade Gorton has no soul. As I find time, I'll get all the Classics Corners I ever wrote onto the blog, even the ones that sucked.

It's still hard for me to imagine me taking up this column again, but this, I suppose, moves me a step closer.

Waiting for God

For most of my life, I’ve been a religious agnostic looking to be convinced. My God is Awe. I look up at the sky, and there it is. An ant crawls by and there it is again. And so forth. Love and compassion round out the deal and that’s pretty much it. Everything else is speculation.

While I have a deep appreciation for the religious impulse, I have no use for spiritual certainty. We’ve seen where that goes and it’s almost never good.

I'm far from alone in this. Former nun Karen Armstrong, whose History of God documents the political history of monotheism, describes our current state of Godlessness as “a sorbet.” The last course is over, she says, and the next has yet to arrive, and in the meanwhile we’re all cleansing our palates with a nice lime sherbet.

Armstrong writes about the Axial Age, in which Buddhism, Confucianism, and the various shoots of the Tree of Abraham all came together. There was a time, apparently, when the old religious paradigms broke down in the face of a changing world, and the search for something new took religious thought to a higher level of understanding. A new axial age, says Armstrong, is upon us.

In between trips to Disney World, visits with grandparents, and other vacation-related Florida activities, I’ve been reading Leon Golden’s In Praise of Prometheus, a scholarly attempt at resolving the contradictions in Aeschylean thought that was published in 1962. The phenomenon of fifth century Athens occurs well within the parameters of Armstrong’s Axial Age.

I’m not enough of a classics geek to really know whether Golden succeeds or not, but his parsing out of the divergent notions of Zeus in Aeschylus’ work reminds me a bit of our own situation. The Zeus of Prometheus, he says, is a rigid, harsh, unforgiving god, who reflects some of the brutality and arbitrariness of primitive religion. The Zeus of The Suppliants, on the other hand, is an upholder of morality and justice who intervenes in the world on the behalf of strangers and those who need help. These can be reconciled, he says, by the idea that both can and do exist at once. That, culturally speaking, spiritual progress is tenuous.

Thucydides illustrates the contradiction as well by placing his hair-raising account of the plague that destroyed Athens, and the collapse of civilization that occurred in its wake, right after Pericles’ stirring funeral oration that celebrates the achievements of classical Greece. The paroxysms of violence that accompanied the Reign of the Thirty Tyrants shortly before Socrates was executed might be offered as another example. The veneer of civilization, Aeschylus seems to say, is paper thin, and a return to barbarism is always more near than we’d like to believe.

The God of Aeschylus was big enough to express the contradictions of the age. There was an emergence from the darkness of superstition, but there was also a nod to the fragility of the social contract. We struggle toward rationality and compassion, but our progress is never complete.

We have yet to forge a God whose identity is equal to the demands of our age.

The God of the televangelists and the mega-churches is an excuse for the consumerism backed by militarism that is the background of our lives. This is a God that is allied with a morally bankrupt State. Were we to slide once more into barbarism, this comfortable and cowardly God would be of little help.

Our God should lead us toward community and joy. Ours must be an authentically counter-cultural God that leads us into knowing who we are and what we must become. A God for our times should offer us more than the comforts of conformity and consumerism, and call us toward our highest selves.

Maybe our new God doesn’t look like “God” at all. Perhaps our spiritual needs are better met by a different sort of symbolism altogether.

The last Axial Age stretched on for more than 500 years. I’m not sure we have that kind of time. We need to get a move on.

Premature Anti-Fascist

I love Bernard Knox. And the best part is, he's not dead yet. I thought he was. This would be a reasonable expectation of anyone born in 1914, but apparently, I was wrong. Most recently, he has written the introductions to the Robert Fagles translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and now The Aeneid as well. He is, for me, everything anyone could want in an engaged intellectual.

Tonight I stumbled across this gem, entitled Premature Anti-Fascist, on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. This is a remarkable speech delivered by Knox at New York University in 1998. The term "premature anti-fascist" was code in the US military during the 40s for "communist." US soldiers in WW II who had previous experience fighting fascism were considered politically unreliable and withheld from the front lines. Somehow Knox got through. They probably figured that as a Brit, this sort of lapse was more to be expected. Besides, he was fluent in French, and they needed that.

The essay discusses the state of the world in the 30s and 40s, and reminds us that the western powers were perfectly ready to make their peace with fascism and only recognized this threat to civilization for what it was when it was nearly too late. As he says, it was already too late for many, the Jews and the Poles in particular.

Knox was wounded in Spain fighting with the POUM in 1936, emigrated from England to the US, and joined the OSS, where he was trained and sent to parachute, "in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance." After the war, he attended graduate school at Yale, where he would become a Professor of Classics, specializing in Virgil, Thucydides, and the Greek playwrights.

In the introduction to Essays Ancient & Modern, which covers much of the same biographical ground as his 1998 speech, he writes about finding a copy of Virgil in a ruined house in Italy. The war had yet to end and his unit was engaging the Germans in sporadic combat. He remembers the idea of the Virgilian lottery, in which one would open Virgil anywhere, and where one's finger landed was thought to be predictive. His lands on this passage from the First Georgic:

"Here right and wrong are reversed, so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil. The plow is despised and rejected; the farmers march off, the fields untended. The curving sickles are beaten straight to make swords. On one side, the East moves to war; on the other, Germany. Neighboring cities tear up their treaties and take to arms. The vicious war god rages the world over."