Including Trace Lee Simmons’s book Climbing Parnassus on this blogsite is a bit of a stretch, since it’s really not about Christianity or the Bible. It’s a book I saw written up recently as we near the 25th anniversary of its first printing, and its point is to explain how invaluable it is to learn Greek and Latin — meaning not just that reading classics is invaluable, but that the process of learning these languages [the mountain being climbed in the title was home to the Greek muses] is. So, since I have undertaken to learn how to read Greek late in life — mainly to be able to read the New Testament in the original koine Greek, but also to read other ancient works — I thought the book would help cheer me on.
It did. Before turning to the text of the book itself, let me note that there is a foreword by William F. Buckley, Jr., and that Richard Brookhiser and Joseph Epstein are each thanked in the acknowledgments. And I’ll note a charmingly self-deprecatory joke (145, last sentence of first full paragraph).
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Let me begin with a selection of key passages from the book that, I think, give a flavor of the book’s theme and style. A critical discussion of why Greek and Latin, and Greek and Roman culture, matter occurs early (60-62), and especially in this paragraph (61):
Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Greeks was their belief in the goodness of what they were and what they had to give to the rest of the world. But it was the Romans, not the Greeks, who ensured the survival of that intellectual heritage underlying liberal learning and classical education. The Romans created much of the intellectual tradition we appeal to today. Rome too had emerged with a massive confidence in the strength and integrity of that tradition inherited from the Greeks — and the Greeks had no doubts about their cultural superiority. They could be skeptics, but they were not tormented by self-doubt; something new had entered the cosmos with them, and they knew it. Later, the Roman world was filled with many clashing nations. The unity the Romans achieved out of that diversity is amazing to ponder. As [H.I.] Marrou has observed, “Unity could come only from sharing a single idea, a common attitude towards the purpose of existence and the various means of attaining it — in short, from a common civilization, or rather, culture.” Fighting armies alone did not create this unity. Unity was also engendered in those far-flung schools.
I love “and they knew it.”
The author is big on Isocrates — e.g. (65), “If we wish to discover the genesis of the West’s civilizing ideal, as well as the origins of classical education, we look more profitably perhaps to Isocrates than to Plato and Aristotle, for it is Isocrates who represents ‘the original fountainhead of the whole great current of humanist scholarship.'” (The author is at pains to make clear, by the way, that the “humanism” and “humanists” about which he writes are not those reviled as “secular humanists.”)
On Greek joining Latin in the curriculum (117): “Once the pains of the grammar book lay behind them, students would customarily begin their reading with the Greek New Testament, followed hard on by Aesop (for moral reinforcement) and Lucian (for light dialogue). Teachers eventually found equivalents to the Romans they had been mastering for years. Demosthenes became the greek Cicero, Homer the Greek Virgil, and Menander the Greek Terence.”
Regarding (143) schoolmaster Thomas Arnold (1795-1842): “Classics would never again enjoy such complete, undiluted confidence. This age was the high waterline for climbing the Parnassian heights of classical precision and eloquence. This was the world of Mr. Chips.”
Finally, there’s this sobering passage (145): “The generation born and educated between 1870 and 1920 — that of Albert Jay Nock, W. Somerset Maugham, R.W. Livingston, Rupert Brooke, Ronald Knox, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden — would be the last group whose early exposure to classical rigors at school allowed them as adults to be literary masters and gourmands.” Ask yourself, gentle reader, how many people you know who have had classical training.
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Having provided a sense of the book’s overarching themes, let me next provide some passages in the book more specifically relevant to the concerns of this blogsite. For example, to the author the word, the books, and the canon are key — but the author is talking about Athens (and Rome), not Jerusalem. The role in the early church of Greek and Latin and the classics is discussed (83-86); among those mentioned here is Tertullian but, interestingly, not his famous quote questioning what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.
On the other hand, there is a lot of C.S. Lewis in this book: He was, after all, an Oxbridge don steeped in the classics and endlessly quotable and insightful. The quotes and insights here are about classical education, not Christianity, but still I think of interest to readers of this blogsite. There are six entries for him in the bibliography, more than any other author. A Lewis reference (147) ends the author’s (very important) Homer paean. The author also notes (153-54): “C.S. Lewis, we recall, said that equality, so valuable as a legal fiction for a just society, still has no place in the life of the mind. Political ideals of equality, Lewis said, may be necessary. But he, like Aristotle before him, drew that valuable distinction between the ‘education which democrats like’ and ‘the education which will preserve democracy.'” (Pascal is cited once (142), but only as someone who was read, along with the classics.)
And theres’ this: America has, of course, deep religious roots, and the book discusses (198-210) how the classics and classical education were entwined in those roots, as well as otherwise being an important part of the Founders’ mindset. Earlier (132) the author noted this parenthetically: “Volumes of Plutarch especially would prove a prophetic gift to the college [i.e., Harvard via the library of founder John Harvard] and to the future of this new country launched under the umbrella of the English crown. ‘It is fair to say, wrote Richard Gummere, ‘that Plutarch was to the rebellion what Cicero was to the Declaration, and Aristotle and Polybius to the Constitution.'”
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As I said at the beginning, including this book on the blogsite here is a stretch. But the takeaways for Christians from this book are important: (1) Western civilization and culture are great; (2) they rest on the accomplishments and, especially, the words of some very smart and wise people; and (3) what happened 2000 or more years ago can still matter, can still have truth, can still teach. For what it’s worth, I don’t know that the author succeeded in persuading me that the rigors of learning Greek and Latin are, apart from the content of the classics, alone enough to justify a classical curriculum beginning early on, but who knows? The title and the paragraph on page 245 prompted me to think also of Camus and the myth of Sisyphus: “But it’s the climbing that counts.”
Here’s a good quote from the book to end on, from T.S. Eliot (220, bracket in original): “I do not wish to be accused of inventing a new heresy to the effect that salvation depends on getting a first in classics. But the culture of Europe [and, by extension, America] cannot preserve its intellectual vigor unless a high standard of Latin and Greek scholarship is maintained amongst its teachers.”
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Also a stretch to include on this blogsite is a book of juvenile fiction that I recently read simply because my grandson read it: Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi. It is the story of an impoverished boy in late medieval England who, because of his mysterious parentage, has to flee his village and hide out in a city; along the way he is befriended by a jovial vagabond/minstrel who is mixed up in some revolutionary intrigue. It’s a good story, winning the Newbery medal, and it plants sympathetic seeds for both Protestantism (see especially 115-16) and for republicanism (or at least against feudalism). (There’s also a verse about Lady Fortune (124, 296) spinning us up and down, reminding me of Boethius.) Readers may want to read the interview with the author at the end of the book first (303-07); note that author’s parents are both Jewish and I do not know his faith.