From G.P. Goold, “Richard Bentley: A Tercentenary Commemoration” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 [1963]: 285-302), via Laudator Temporis Acti:
The greatest book written in Greek is the New Testament, though a Chinese who studied Greek in the classics departments of Occidental universities might well become an old man without ever discovering the fact.
I’m tempted, in the heat of the moment, to say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a scholar commit to print, though of course that can’t be right. Mind you, Goold was a perfectly respectable classicist; Paul Lewis’s NY Times obit (Jan. 24, 2002) says:
George P. Goold, a Yale classics professor who rejuvenated and debowdlerized the Loeb Classical Library, a collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts published with English translations, died on Dec. 5 in Holyoke, Mass. He was 79. […]
In 1973, just as he was moving from Harvard to University College, London, Professor Goold was appointed general editor of the venerable Loeb Library, which belongs to Harvard and was founded in 1910 to make classical literature accessible to English-speaking readers.
At the time the library was widely felt to be in need of improvement. Many of the English translations were antiquated and inaccurate, while fear of prosecution for obscenity had forced the editors to disguise the bawdier passages by translating risky Greek writings into Latin while those in Latin were left in the original or put into Italian.
Under Professor Goold’s direction, new and more up-to-date translations were commissioned and texts were added to the series. By himself he produced Loeb editions of the Roman poets Propertius and Manilius and the Greek novelist Chariton. […]
A formidable Latinist, George Patrick Goold was born in London in 1922. He spent World War II in London breaking enemy codes and then attended University College, London, where he received a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate.
His teaching career took him first to University College, Hull, and then to the University of Cape Town and to the Universities of Manitoba and Toronto in Canada before he moved to Harvard in 1965. He headed the classics department there in 1971 and 1972 before returning to London to assume the chair of Latin once occupied by A. E. Housman. He held that until 1978, when he went to Yale as William Lampson professor in Latin classics.
And yet he could call the New Testament, apparently with a straight face, “the greatest book written in Greek.” If you feel that way, why not go into religious studies rather than wasting your time with classics? (Even leaving aside the religious element, to call the New Testament a book in the “greatest book” sense makes as much sense as calling the Loeb Library a book.)
A somewhat longer excerpt:
I don’t think it can reasonably be described as stupid, though certainly it is contentious.
If you take “greatest” to mean “most influential” (which would not be any sort of stretch) it’s really a pretty anodyne observation, whether you regard said influence as benign or pernicious.
It’s a valid point, too, that the classical Greek canon that our hypothetical Chinese scholar was assigned to in the Classics department has its own ideological underpinning, representing works thought to represent a particular (and somewhat reductive) notion of “classical culture.” No such antithesis between Before and After Alexander really bears much scrutiny, for all that I can recall Kenneth Dover weeping on reading the treaty by which the Athenians submitted to Philip after Chaeronea.
[The error of supposing that the the early Christians represented a radical discontinuity with the “classical” past is one typically committed by the inhabitants of religious studies departments; it arises from a combination of special pleading and ahistorical retconning with the benefit of hindsight. In reality, they were (inevitably) people of their time and culture, and shared a whole lot of unexamined preconceptions with their “pagan” contemporaries: something that should be the more evident to us, as we often don’t share those preconceptions.]
I don’t think it can reasonably be described as stupid, though certainly it is contentious.
Fair cop, gov; I plead the heat of the moment.
Unfortunately most of the late Prof. Goold’s colleagues in the Yale classics department back in the day likewise viewed Christianity as a “radical discontinuity” but a regrettable one. Accordingly when I wanted to learn NT Greek after three semesters of the pagan variety, I could not do so under their aegis but was required to trek over to Rel Stud (whose building was actually closer to where I lived at the time, to be fair …). I am pleased that by contrast the second-year ancient Greek prose course my firstborn took this just-concluded semester in college mixed together excerpts from simpler Platonic dialogues and suchlike pagan stuff with NT and patristic texts.
Reading the NT in Greek was for me personally a more transformative experience (even mediated through all sorts of ridiculous Teutonic scholarly apparatus and dubious theorizing) than reading Euripides or Homer in Greek. YMMV.
Reading almost anything can be a transformative experience; if that’s our measuring stick for greatness, I guess I’ll join the postmodernists and say it’s all relative.
I personally have grown to dislike all and every kind of imposed competitiveness in the arts, as if works or artists could be assigned an objective index of greatness or whatever, and then ranked according to it. It’s not pleasing and it doesn’t make the world a better place.
It may not make sense to argue over whether Tolstoy or Dostoevsky was “greater,” but if you can’t say either of them are greater than Dan Brown, there’s no such thing as art. I don’t think recognizing that fact makes the world a worse place.
@Y:
Yes, the “contentious” part is not so much the “New Testament” as the “greatest” (especially if you’re going to drop the word in unannounced as if it was quite innocuous.) “Greatest” by what measure? in whose opinion? Greatest for what?
I think “great” is perfectly defensible as a useful term of literary criticism, but only if you do a bit of laying the groundwork first (incidentally, a thing that proponents of pre-Macedonian Greek literature seem have felt to be entirely superfluous until recently; a pity, as explaining why you use the term, instead of merely asserting it, is hardly going to undermine your point – when you’ve got one, as they certainly have.)
A few scattered points:
1. Goold’s point as presented by LTA is a perhaps more contentious extension of the criticism implicit in the other quotation from another source, observing (presumably disapprovingly) that “It is possible to receive a Ph.D. in Classics today without ever having read the New Testament in Greek.” (Of course, in an earlier era it could perhaps have been assumed that possession of a B.A. itself strongly implied you’d read the NT in Greek, so you wouldn’t necessarily have to come back to it in grad school.)
2. In the fuller Goold quote found by mollymooly, I am genuinely unsure whether Goold’s reference to German as “the great universal language of learning” is intended sarcastically/ironically or not. (Certainly as a Bletchley Park alum he would have been keenly aware of some of the non-scholarly uses of German, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t being serious.)
3. While of course possessing competence in both languages, Goold was by scholarly emphasis more a Latinist than a Hellenist, which I guess could be advanced as a reason to discount his opinions on what Greek text was the greatest?
4. I had clean forgotten that, even though the absolute number of classics professors in New Haven back circa the 1980’s was not that large, it was necessary in those days to avoid muddling up the Latinist Prof. Goold with the Hellenist Prof. Gould (Thomas F., 1927-1994), with whom I studied Homer.
Hat: Sure. I am not calling for imposed total agnosticism of quality. It’s the cult of precise ranking, the implied necessity of competition everywhere, which bother me. Personally, once I got out of the habit of declaring (even to myself) my “favorite city”, “best impressionist painter”, “best novel by X”, etc., I felt much freer intellectually, at ease with acknowledging ambiguous qualities and changing tastes.
Gotcha, and that makes sense.
I think that in a context of literary discussion assigning “greatest” or just “great” to a text (or collection of texts) on the basis of its influence is misguided. It might happen that the most influential text ever written in German is The Communist Manifesto (I honestly hope that it really is Grimm’s tales, but there are more sinister candidates…). Should we seriously consider its literary quality as a text written in the great universal language of learning?
That said, I don’t deny that NT or some portions of it are fine specimens of Greek literature (I have no way to judge), nor that it’s influence on the later writings (both Greek and not Greek) is so pervasive that NT should be studied as a literary source irrespective of its formal qualities. And if Dan Brown’s novels became a basis of one of the most widespread religions in the world, we might consider assigning them status of “great” for some definition of great, but that would require a lot of qualifications.
I think that in a context of literary discussion assigning “greatest” or just “great” to a text (or collection of texts) on the basis of its influence is misguided.
I agree. (See: Chernyshevsky et al.)
I don’t particularly want to get involved in the NT debate, but I have to go on record here to say that G. P. Goold was much more than just “a perfectly respectable classicist.” He was a man of prodigious learning and an absolutely brilliant textual critic, in the great tradition of English textual critics like Bentley and Housman. He too had the ability to open an ancient text and (as Housman, quoting Matthew Arnold, once of said of Bentley) to “strike his finger on the place and say thou ailest here, and here.” His book-length article in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology on the text of Ovid’s amatory poems, which I first encountered as an undergraduate, is a master class in textual criticism; the illustrious E. J. Kenney, who edited the Oxford Classical Text of these works, does not come off well in the comparison (although Goold is consistently courteous and respectful in disagreement). And for many years his edition of Propertius, despite the fact that it appeared in the Loeb series, where it tended to be overlooked, was the best existing edition of that notoriously difficult poet.
I met him just once, in the last year of his life. He was living in western Massachusetts with his wife, who until her retirement had taught in the Classics Dept at Mount Holyoke, where I was teaching at the time. He was already unwell, and we only had an opportunity to exchange a few words, but it remains a great source of satisfaction to me that I was able to tell him in person how much I admired his work. I fear I gushed like a fan boy; he was, I think, a bit surprised, but very gracious.
cf. also the perennial ranking, in the U.S., of “greatest presidents”. Some are inarguably influential but by no means good (Reagan), some have greatness thrust upon them (Lincoln), etc.
The Goold quote that rubbed hat the wrong way is perhaps particularly amusing given Goold’s role overseeing the Loeb Classical Library, which conspicuously lacks a facing-page translation of the New Testament among its offerings. Although it has plenty of other Christian texts in Greek, starting with the Apostolic Fathers and continuing through Eusebius and St. Basil the Great and so on, so perhaps they merely thought that the market for English versions of the NT was already more than adequately served?
MEL: Thanks for that personal reminiscence! I certainly didn’t mean to cast shade on Goold, and I am happy to believe he was as impressive as you say.
Probably not, given what the quote means:
“Niemand kann lebhafter als der Rezensent w[ü]nschen, dass Altphilologen — wie einst Bentley, Yalckenaer, Lachmann, Blass, Corssen — sich an der Neutestamenttextkritik beteiligen m[ö]chten.”
“Nobody can wish more fervently than the writer of this review [1sg] that Classicists – as once did Bentley [etc.] – might participate in New Testament criticism.”
Of course if one has, like me, a rather negative view of Neutestamenttextkritik (buncha arrogant anti-Semite Herr Doktor Professors thinking they were smarter than the Fathers of the Church but simply “proving” their own unexamined minor premises), it would be ungallant to fault Classicists for declining to participate in the enterprise, even if their motives for non-participation may not always have been the best.
Minor Premise is a 2020 American science-fiction thriller film directed by Eric Schultz, who co-wrote the script alongside Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey. The film stars Sathya Sridharan, Paton Ashbrook, and Dana Ashbrook.
Attempting to surpass his father’s legacy, a reclusive neuroscientist becomes entangled in his own experiment, pitting ten fragments of his consciousness against each other.
Herr Doktor Professoren must be shaking in their Boots.
Slightly more seriously, arrogant […] HDPen have one advantage over Church Fathers. If they are wrong either in their major or their minor premises or in anything at all, the later HDPen or anyone else for that matter can correct them without much Kopfschmerz.
A big problem with Goold’s statement is that the New Testament is not a book, but a collection of 27 different writings by various authors. That aside…
Since the answer isn’t the obviously correct Homer, I would assume that “greatest” is being intentionally provocative with an air of plausible deniability as there is a strong case it is the most influential. It is certainly the most copied Greek text and the problems its transmission generates for textual criticism are almost sui generis and not really solvable until modern phylogenetic software.
I certainly wish more classically trained scholars would pay attention to the NT, but they don’t and the barriers between classics and NT are real and, I’m afraid, arising more out of prejudice than competence.
In terms of literary quality, yes, there’s not much in that department that the NT offers. Maybe Hebrews is the most elegant. Most are pretty basic and made ideal first-year Greek material.
In terms of literary quality, yes, there’s not much in that department that the NT offers.
One of the striking things about reading the Bible in the original languages* is the contrast between the (frequently) extremely high style of the Old Testament/Tanakh and the workaday pedestrian prose (almost entirely) of the New.
But then, the difference is iconic (in the linguistic sense):
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0182.xml
* Or in a competent modern translation (i.e. not the AV/KJV, which applies a layer of uniform stateliness to everything.)
These days I spend some time going through portions of the New Yale Book of Quotations (2021 revised edition, Fred Shapiro ed.). It is excellent (most libraries would surely want it, I suppose), but quite a workout if read while having in mind what counts as great.
I wonder how high the style of, say, Joshua, was to the readers of its time.
Certainly the Tanach is not all high style by any means; though I think the apparently simple style of the narrative parts of Joshua or Samuel (say) is no more unsophisticated in reality than the also apparently-simple style of Njal’s Saga.
I think there also has been a tendency, at least among Christian scholars in the past, to seriously underestimate the syntactic complexity of Biblical Hebrew (because it is expressed very differently from that of Latin or Greek), contributing to an illusion of stylistic simplicity.
Be that as it may, the overall stylistic contrast between the Biblical Hebrew bits and the Biblical Greek bits is surely very striking. (The Biblical Aramaic bits are something else again …)
If we’re fixing my OCR errors, “Yalckenaer” is [Lodewijk Caspar] Valckenaer
I am puzzled by the contention that the NT is not a “book” because it is an anthology of texts by various different writers (perhaps under common inspiration of a supernatural variety), that just happen to relate to similar subject matter and just happen to have been bound together as a unified set as a single codex (or part of an even larger codex) for about as long as codices as objects have been a thing. The notion that a “book” must be a single cohesive work (meeting certain length criteria) by a single author is not only narrower in scope that usual dictionary definitions, it seems to me to come from some sort of fuzzy overheated 19th-century Romantic notions of authors as Magical Promethean Heroes who create High Art ex nihilo.
Oh, come on. Yes, that’s a valid theoretical point (and excessively popular in these postmodern times), but when people talk about a “great book” they mean a single cohesive work whether you like it or not. As I said above, it’s like calling the Loeb Library a book.
Much of the whole “Great Books” discourse of the 19th-through-mid-20th-centuries was IMHO flawed from the beginning, part and parcel of an attempt to found a new ersatz religion based on Hochkultur as the Western intelligentsia secularized. I believed in that sort of cultish mythology myself when I were a lad, of course. We were just taking in another thread about the Confucian classic often known in English as The Book of Documents, whose millennia-old cultural authority is not degraded by it being an anthology. I suppose as with the Bible the selection and arrangement and ordering of the items in the anthology itself reflects some sort of quasi-authorial act of great numinosity and authority.
One popular attempt a century ago to provide a comprehensive canon for the new ersatz Great-Books cult was that of Dr. Eliot of Harvard. You can review his selections here, and perhaps observe that some of them seem bookier than others for a sufficiently restrictive sense of “book.” https://thinkingwest.com/the-harvard-classics/
A surprising list!
A clear majority (counting #129 as one item, anyhow) of the ones I’ve actually read are Latin or Greek (or Hebrew), which may reflect how difficult it is to predict how much (near) contemporary stuff will actually stand the test of time.
The Hippocratic Oath is greatly overrated (I think largely by people who’ve never actually read it, but who like the idea of it.)
but/and: call me a postmodernist*, but isn’t the whole “great books” idea basically a move to place other works on the same level as the One True Book, which axiomatically has One True Author? with the Illiad & Odyssey being the perfect exemplars precisely because the blatant fiction of “homer” stands in the same relation to the text attributed to him as the divine & infallible Writer of the christian bible (including its versions of the hebrew & aramaic canon). there’s a certain circularity to the whole idea of “single cohesive work” (so of course my urge is to historicize).
.
* of the voloshinov school, if you must.
I don’t believe in the One True Book (or the One True Anything, come to that), but I do believe in authors, and I dislike attempts to downgrade them to mere scribes of the zeitgeist or whatever it is postmodernists believe in. We no longer live in the age of “Homer” and the Biblical authors, and I’m not so concerned about how they get treated.
@rozele:
On the other hand, JWB’s arrogant anti-Semite Herr Doktor Professors were also keen on dismembering Homer qua “one true author.” I’m not sure which came first, historically, though it all seems to reflect the same Weltanschauung.
I don’t think the Great Books cult is an effort to put a new Canon on a level with the Bible; it’s an effort to displace it. To some extent, the effects are still with us, in the notion that Great Art is the key to (or at least, has some privileged role in determining) ethics. (Thank you, G E Moore.)
@jwb
The objective of the Harvard Classics Canon would not seem to be “Great Books” or even “great books” but “books deemed appropriate for an elite liberal education”. These people would be expected to express themselves clearly, confidently and forcefully when occupying executive or advisory positions in companies, Civil Service / Government or as professionals, and to be acquainted with precepts from history and ancient or modern thought. They would also be expected to immediately recognise, be recognised by, and interact successfully with other “old boys”. I think they would not conceptualise this as a religion, unless you regard “noblesse oblige” as some kind of Golden rule or ersatz commandment.
My parents were involved in two Great Books programs, one descended from Mortimer Adler and one (The Heritage Club) a product of one of the Macy’s. These programs introduced me directly and indirectly to Montaigne, Rabelais, and Cervantes and did a lot to put me on the path I’ve taken.
And yes, they’re all elite white males (though Cervantes was barely elite), but Laozi was at least important as any of these and probably more so, though he came later, and he’s not white though he is a Great Books type of guy.
The Great Books help you steer away from presentism, where you end up comparing some ancient leader to Hitler, Stalin, or Churchill (or nowadays, Putin, Trump, or maybe MLK).
Two different recent pieces on “Great Books” type conceptions of education:
This one (by a writer I was not previously familiar with, which I endorse as interesting w/o endorsing every jot and tittle of the claims) focuses on the notion that actual elites tend to be pretty lightly and unrigorously educated in most historical circumstances, so the “great books” canon (picked by some Harvard dude but available for mail-order purchase by anyone) was taken most seriously by striver/social-climber outsiders, with the actual elite reshuffling the deck and changing the rules if the outsider fantasy of taking seriously what the insiders had merely paid lip service to posed too great a risk to the status quo: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-myth-of-the-classically-educated-elite/
This one (by a name author who is kind of meandering all over the place in this article …) does have the useful and I think accurate point that certain sorts of “let’s read some Great Books” classes in 20th century (and 21st century) universities were a rear-guard action trying to ameliorate some of the negative side effects of the specialization and professionalization inherent in the modern Teutonic-model research university: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-myth-of-the-classically-educated-elite/
The Great Books help you steer away from presentism, where you end up comparing some ancient leader to Hitler, Stalin, or Churchill (or nowadays, Putin, Trump, or maybe MLK).
Exactly, and the current fashion for discarding everything from the past, starting with dead white males but really everything that wasn’t fully enlightened by today’s standards, annoys me greatly (I would say “fills me with despair” if I were the despairing type). Why are people so determined to lurch from one extreme (Only the Great Books matter!) to the other (Great Books suck!!)?
This one (by a name author who is kind of meandering all over the place in this article …)
What’s a “name author” — an author who has a name? I, at any rate, have never heard of Naomi Kanakia, and I’m not impressed by the article: “If there can be any defense made of literature, it’s that the ruling class usually doesn’t find it particularly useful, other than as an example of how to write good prose.” Really? That’s the only possible defense of literature?
Oops. I incompetently posted the same link twice. The second (and by contrast “name author”) link was supposed to be this one: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates
Naomi Kanakia was apparently formerly known as (and published books as) Rahul Kanakia, but that likewise wasn’t a “name” that had penetrated to me although I do not follow the relevant niches of the literary industry.
Ah, thanks. Yes, Menand is definitely a Name, though his sell-by date may be fast approaching.
I still have trouble keeping Louis Menand and Pierre Menard straight.
I am puzzled by the contention that the NT is not a “book” because it is an anthology of texts by various different writers (perhaps under common inspiration of a supernatural variety), that just happen to relate to similar subject matter and just happen to have been bound together as a unified set as a single codex (or part of an even larger codex) for about as long as codices as objects have been a thing.
On the codex point, codices go back to the first century (Juvenal mentions them) but the New Testament as a collection didn’t get set in the form we have until late in the fourth century. Indeed, the sheer size of the NT required advances in codex technology, namely the multi-quire codex, that didn’t arrive until much after its constituent parts were written. Prior to that, codices were limited to some specific sub-collections of the NT, such as the Fourfold Gospel or the Corpus Paulinum. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, pandects remained rare due to their expense and access to the NT was limited to various volumes that were not usually bound together. Indeed the history of the textual transmission differs between the sub-collections, corroborating the artifactual independence of its parts. The Bible as a “book” is one of the first concepts that Intro to Bible classes problematize.
Excellent problematization!
TL/DR as I understand it: in modern terms, the NT is essentially a short story collection, of the “multiple authors on the same general subject” variety. Whether that qualifies as coherent enough to be considered a “book” is an interesting and nontrivial question.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage. Judge Eglinton summed up.
– The truth is midway, he affirmed. Is the New Testament a book? No, if only production in the smithy of a sole author’s inwit will stamp an in-got as a book. Yes, if hard-won unifying selection and recension, followed by reverent reception over fifteen centuries, will do to hallow it as one.
– A great musical authority (though it skills not to ask which) was asked: “Maestro, you did not mention Mozart among your influences. How can that be?” “Hwæt?” came the indignant reply. “Does one mention the air one breathes?”
– I see, said the quaker librarian. I see. So also, the druidy Loebdruiden cannot be expected to place the word of the living God in their hommedrome könyvtár.
Dark dome received, reverbed. Revered hometomedrome.
Okay, is the Iliad (reasonably close in length to the NT by word count in English translation) actually a “book” (albeit conventionally subdivided into 24 units also conventionally called “books”) or is it something else? By 11 or 12 centuries ago it was technologically possible to get the whole Iliad into a single codex (e.g. the MS known as Venetus A), but earlier on it had been a multi-scroll affair.
If the NT isn’t the greatest Greek “book,” what is, given that a lot of highly-praised ancient Greek texts don’t really come in “book” format? An individual play by Aeschylus or dialogue by Plato (much less poem by Sappho) isn’t a “book” (if you read them today, as a college student or otherwise, a semi-random number will have been anthologized into a single conveniently sized and priced paperback), and a lot of things that subsequently got treated as booklike millennia later (eg. Plutarch’s Lives) are collections of a bunch of similar-genre-but-individually-composed shorter works. Maybe Thucydides actually wrote a book, in the sense of a single prose narrative of appropriate length with a coherent argument and sort of a beginning, middle, and end, but a lot of the ancient historians work in a chronicler sort of style that just rambles on indefinitely from one thing to the next out to the horizon and beyond. How many of the Greek volumes published in the Loeb C.L. consist solely of the entirety of a single work by a single author? It’s a pretty small percentage, and if you say the Loeb format often requires single “books” to be split into two volumes (because of the facing-page translation and because the individual volumes never get that fat), that doesn’t increase the percentage all that much.
Is what the Loeb calls The Learned Banqueters (8 volumes), a/k/a the Δειπνοσοφισταί, a book? A series of books? In what genre? Is it a “great” book? (I’ve never read it but maybe I will put that on my list of New Year’s Resolutions.)
The whole “Great Books” mindset has, you might say, a certain implicit conception of bookness that does not really match up very well with what authors actually generated and publishers actually published much before the 18th century, when the novel began slouching toward respectability and you could begin to think of other prose works of similar length addressing historical or philosophical or scientific topics together with novels as all instances of the same higher-level (potentially Great) book category and you could then maybe sneak in epic poems (although not shorter poems, whose fate is always to be anthologized) through the side door.
I do take the point that the NT, in particular, has over the centuries been sliced and diced and presented in all sorts of different ways qua physical object. Indeed, when I have had recent occasion to read portions of the NT aloud in public it has not been from a physical volume you would call a “New Testament” or “Bible,” but from what is called among Slavs an Apostol (Апостол), i.e. a codex that contains the various pericopes appointed as epistle* readings in the Byzantine lectionary, organized in the sequence they fall into during the liturgical year.
*Acts can be considered an honorary epistle for this purpose, but not Revelation, since the Holy Fathers apparently thought that reading from it in public during the Liturgy would not have a positive effect on the faithful.
I don’t think the exact definition of what makes a book is a necessary or even a desirable thing. You can call NT a book or even both OT and NT a book (the Good Book no less), it makes no difference unless there is some sort of formal competition, which I find pretty boring, but tastes obviously differ. The important point is how we treat these texts. For example, Herzen, who was an illegitimate child of some landowner, highly educated, etc. etc., and of course, Russian Orthodox from birth, discovered in his twenties or something that the Gospels are full of important moral teachings. For such a person treating NT as a single book that taken together tells something nontrivial and worthy is a good approach. On the other hand, for someone who grew up with NT as the inerrant word of God, it might be useful to look at it as a diverse collection of writings in which the constituent texts are in some tension with each other and show the personal sides of each author.
Frye on comparative greatness vs. positive goodness in literature. I’ve quoted this about five times here on LH, but “truth cannot be too often repeated” (John Joseph Bonforte).
” Putin, Trump, or maybe MLK”
Notice my difficulty in finding a heroic or admirable figure to put alongside Putin and Trump.
The Prussian-/Humboldt-model university assumes that the students already got their liberal-arts education in school-as-opposed-to-university, in a Gymnasium/lycée – they can afford to “learn more and more about less and less till they know everything about nothing” because they won’t know nothing about everything. That’s why transplanting it to the US required a few adaptations.
Spengler had an answer to both on p. 182 of the abridged version:
Spengler quotes always need a lot of context, so I’ve quoted the whole paragraph and will translate it as soon as possible, but not now, because it turns out I just spent half the night looking for it. (The table of contents is… also abridged, it seems.) But here are the first two sentences:
“We have in front of us three forms of nihilism, using the word in the Nietzschean sense. Yesterday’s ideals, the forms of religion, art, state that had grown for centuries, are over and done with, except that even this last act of a culture*, its self-negation, reexpresses the primordial symbol of its entire existence. The Faustian nihilist, Ibsen just like Nietzsche, Marx as well as Wagner, smashes the ideals; the Apollinian one, Epicurus just as Antisthenes and Zeno, lets them fall apart in front of his eyes; the Indian one [Buddha] retreats from them into himself.”
* “culture” as opposed to the “civilization” that inevitably follows it
I am not big on cultural history, but didn’t Bible die out as a standard stock of cultural capital (I mean, something whence people take their ready made life examples, metaphores, and stuff like that) well before the rise of the literary traditions in European languages?
@do
Until quite late (mid 19C?), books were a luxury. In many, at least Protestant, households the only book (apart from schoolbooks, account books and diaries) was the Bible. Again, in Protestant households, there were daily or at least frequent readings from the Bible. So it permeated popular thought. Berthold Brecht said once when asked which book had most influenced him “Sie werden lachen–die Bibel”.
I commented elsewhere on a greatest question, given a recent essay (link not working at the moment)
https://themarginaliareview.com/why-josephus-matters/
Steve Mason makes a very good case that Josephus matters to many people. …. Mason began (first paragraph):
“If we leave biblical and New Testament authors out of the frame, Flavius Josephus (37–100+ CE) was the most consequential ancient writer in the West. This claim is not provable by statistics, but a process of elimination supports it. Plato was big, Aristotle too. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius had their admirers, and every literate Roman knew Cicero and Livy. But Christian Crusaders did not take Plato into battle in the Holy Land. Thucydides was not rewritten in Latin and Hebrew versions, as Josephus was, amplifying his already huge impact. From the first to the twenty-first centuries, Josephus’ work has mattered to more people and more consistently than any other non-biblical text.”
Yet his case that Josephus was, in the west, other than Bible authors, “the most consequential….From the first to the twenty-first century [it is not clear, potentially ambiguous, whether here he still limits to “ancient” ones],” perhaps could be questioned. Granted that Plato was not in every Crusaders’ baggage–nor was Josephus?–but Plato and Aristotle influenced practically all later western philosophers. Including Augustine and Thomas of Aquino. Who is studied more in schools: Josephus or Shakespeare? Many lives have been affected by Freud and Marx….
I am not big on cultural history, but didn’t Bible die out as a standard stock of cultural capital (I mean, something whence people take their ready made life examples, metaphores, and stuff like that) well before the rise of the literary traditions in European languages?
Absolutely not — the Bible is still a standard stock of cultural capital for many, many people. I don’t know where you live, but you are making a mistake common to urban sophisticates whose circle of acquaintances is entirely irreligious.
Talking about the “greatest” and/or most influential/consequential authors who wrote in ancient Greek is, as I suggested above, a bit of a lateral move away from “greatest book.” I still have right here at hand on the shelves near my home computer two rather thick Greek-in-Engish-translation codices I purchased as a college freshman in 1983: The Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961 edition, edited by Hamilton & Cairns) and The Basic Works of Aristotle (1941 edition, edited by McKeon). I don’t think that either of those is a “book” in a sense that the New Testament is not. Indeed if you go back over enough centuries, I would expect that which pieces of the Aristotelian corpus actually got read and/or quoted more than others and which less than others has shifted significantly.
Separately, I fear that today’s young “urban sophisticates” are mostly as ignorant of Joyce and Pound etc. (and maybe even Freud!) as they are of Scripture and the Holy Fathers. The Hochkultur ersatz religion has itself now fallen victim to a second secularization, as has been argued interestingly (don’t necessarily agree with all his details) by Simon During.
Separately, I fear that today’s young “urban sophisticates” are mostly as ignorant of Joyce and Pound etc. (and maybe even Freud!) as they are of Scripture and the Holy Fathers.
Sure. Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. That doesn’t affect my point. The Bible will be with us as an important cultural source long after those Ezras-come-lately are largely forgotten.
“The Hochkultur ersatz religion has itself now fallen victim to a second secularization, as has been argued interestingly (don’t necessarily agree with all his details) by Simon During.”
Where should one start with During?
Here’s one talk by During that’s conveniently available for free online: https://history.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/02/During.The-Second-Secularization-1.pdf. But he’s developed similar ideas different places at different lengths, not that I have kept notes or can give you the bibliography.
Has anyone written an Anti-During yet?
John Crowley, The Solitudes: “… Introduction to World Literature … Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes all fled past in the first semester, well over most of the students’ heads, slow-flapping pterosaurs dimly glimpsed: Pierce supposed that if in later life they met any of these authors, it would be nice to be able to claim they had once before been introduced.”
This is essentially what I did, and in this spirit, for 37 years, with the eventual addition of Laozi, Cao Xueqin, Murasaki, Basho, Valmiki, Ferdowsi, Hafez, etc., and the consequent expansion of the first semester into most of the second.
@J.W.: … Hellenist Prof. Gould (Thomas F., 1927-1994), with whom I studied Homer.
That must be Tom Gould, whom I knew in Austin in the latter half of the 60s, along with other folks in the Classics Dept. of UT. I did actually learn some Greek there, after all.
@Stu: The very same. One internet source says he relocated from Austin to New Haven in 1968. When I had him as a teacher (’86) he had a very old-school tweedy-Ivy sort of vibe but I imagine upon reflection that however un-Texan that vibe seemed to me it was never unrepresented on the UT-Austin faculty and at similar Texan campuses (e.g. I expect that Texas A&M didn’t necessarily have that style of humanities department in the first place but that Southern Methodist did). One offbeat anecdote I recall: one of the other students in my Homer class was the son of the muckraking journalist William Greider (1936-2019), who at that point was publishing his populist assaults on the wicked bankers and their political patrons in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. It transpired that Tom Gould was a big fan of Greider pere’s writing but had zero interest in rock music, and was thus one of very very few people who bought copies of Rolling Stone solely for the political-economy stories.
Today, every Catholic household seems to have a Bible but practically never open it, and there’s no tradition of reading it. A selection of stories from the Bible is nevertheless familiar from whatever religious instruction there is – in many countries it’s a school subject almost like any other.
Berthold is the normal form of his name, but he was a Bertolt. (The only one I’ve ever heard of.) I have no idea how he managed to lose his /h/, which is otherwise neither silent nor unexpected ((-)hold is in everyone’s passive vocabulary, while I can’t think of any *-old or *-olt).
…I suppose it died out as a source for new metaphors and examples sometime in the early 20th century. But the already established metaphors that are based on the Bible are mostly still there. And if they’re used in parliaments, the members using them may actually be more likely than average to be Social Democrats.
In Europe, urban sophisticates are both more likely to be Social Democrats and more likely to know selected Bible stories than the great masses of Christians who go to church only for Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.
Actually, general knowledge of religion may be lowest in France and Russia.
Interesting indeed. (As it happens, that’s the opposite of Spengler’s concept of a second religiosity, not that I ever found that idea terribly convincing.) I’ve downloaded the paper and… hope to read it at some point…
Actually, general knowledge of religion may be lowest in France and Russia.
Religion has never been about general knowledge in Russia; that’s why “Old Believers” are старообрядцы in Russian — people of the old rites. Being Orthodox in Russia has always meant keeping the fasts, crossing yourself at the proper times and places, etc. This has led to a lot of misunderstanding, since Westerners expect religious people to be able to discuss the finer points of Trinitarian doctrine, justification by faith and/or works, etc. (Note that the старообрядцы broke away not over points of doctrine but over how many fingers to use when crossing oneself, how many letters to use in Jesus’ name, and the like.)
Yes, I worded that rather sloppily last night.
There are American KJV-only fundies who insist that the general American spelling Savior is nothing short of Satanic, and therefore actively dangerous well beyond a matter of life and death, because it contains only six letters instead of the seven of Saviour. But I’m sure they also have strong opinions on fine points of Trinitarian doctrine, and they definitely insist on justification by faith alone to the point of defining “good work” as “done by a true believer”.
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
WhenIwereinmylateteens, I was traveling from New York to Cleveland, or perhaps in the opposite direction, when my seat-mate decided to go off on a Kids Today rant. But when he informed me that no one of my generation learned Latin any more, I had just enough presence of mind to come out with the above hexameter and (so my memory would have it) utterly confound and refute him. More likely he just looked me, baffled.