Summer School at the SLC

Yes, I'm going to Summer School! I'm attending, with three other GKC group friends and several other friends and acquaintances, the eight week Christendom Academy book discussion course at the Spiritual Life Center. We meet from 9 a.m. to Noon with lunch following. Mass is offered at 8:15 a.m., so yesterday I was able to complete my interview on the Son Rise Morning Show, leave home by 7:30 and arrive at the Center a little before 8:00 to prepare for celebrating the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist!

We discussed Sophocles's Antigone today; last week, The Epic of Gilgamesh; next week, the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. One of the themes we discussed today was the Greek idea of the polis, referencing H.D.F. Kitto's classic, The Greeks!

The rest of the readings:

Ecclesiastes
The Epistle of St. James
Life of St. Anthony (St. Athanasius)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Hamlet

The purpose of the Christendom Academy:

What has the cultural heritage of Christendom taught us about what it means to be a human person? What does it means to be happy? What is the meaning of suffering? What are our duties and responsibilities, and why do we have them? What does this all have to do with God, sin and judgment, and the afterlife?

Drawing upon pre-Christian tradition (what Joseph Pieper and others have referred to as ‘original revelation’), the Catholic Church has continued throughout its history to provide answers to these questions, and provided the framework for man to understand himself and the world around him. This program will highlight the unique contributions Western Civilization has made to our understanding of philosophy, theology, spirituality, morality, and citizenship. Students will be invited to learn new ways to answer perennial questions like who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What contribution am I called to make for my own salvation, for the good of my family, and the good of the world?

Course content will be drawn from a handful of writings whose contents are essential to the development of Christian culture, as we delve deeply into the wellsprings of the Catholic tradition that has shaped the history of the world, and provided the lens through which every contemporary man examines himself.

More about the program, including biographies of the three tutors, here.

Silencing Ovid

Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal, has some questions and comments for students who are upset by certain aspects of the Western literary canon (Ovid's Metamorphoses in this case) and want works like the Metamorphoses silenced:

Well, here are some questions and a few thoughts for all those who have been declaring at all the universities, and on social media, that their feelings have been hurt in the world and that the world had just better straighten up.

Why are you so fixated on the idea of personal safety, by which you apparently mean not having uncomfortable or unhappy thoughts and feelings? Is there any chance this preoccupation is unworthy of you? Please say yes.

There is no such thing as safety. That is asking too much of life. You can’t expect those around you to constantly accommodate your need for safety. That is asking too much of people.

Life gives you potentials for freedom, creativity, achievement, love, all sorts of beautiful things, but none of us are “safe.” And you are especially not safe in an atmosphere of true freedom. People will say and do things that are wrong, stupid, unkind, meant to injure. They’ll bring up subjects you find upsetting. It’s uncomfortable. But isn’t that the price we pay for freedom of speech?

You can ask for courtesy, sensitivity and dignity. You can show others those things, too, as a way of encouraging them. But if you constantly feel anxious and frightened by what you encounter in life, are we sure that means the world must reorder itself? Might it mean you need a lot of therapy?

Masterpieces, by their nature, pierce. They jar and unsettle. If something in a literary masterpiece upsets you, should the masterpiece really be banished? What will you be left with when all of them are gone?

What in your upbringing told you that safety is the highest of values? What told you it is a realistic expectation? Who taught you that you are entitled to it every day? Was your life full of . . . unchecked privilege? Discuss.

Do you think Shakespeare, Frieda Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes and Steve Jobs woke up every morning thinking, “My focus today is on looking for slights and telling people they’re scaring me”? Or were their energies and commitments perhaps focused on other areas?

Read the rest of her column there. If those students offended by Ovid travel to Rome, they had better avoid the Borghese Palace and Bernini's great sculptures of "The Rape of Persephone" and "Apollo and Daphne", both depicting episodes from the Metamorphoses and the latter featured on the cover of the Penguin edition of Ovid's masterpiece. This wikipedia article demonstrates how influential Ovid has been in Western art and literature--removing him from the canon would leave a huge gap in our knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.

CIVILISATION Remade: "Challenging questions about contemporary pieties"

Earlier this month, I posted about the Kenneth Clark exhibition at Tate Britain, and about the BBC's plans to "remake" the series. I noted the problems some people have with Clark's appearance and manner and said:

What Stourton describes as distractions now I find essential to the series. It was "A Personal View" so the person, Sir Kenneth Clark had to be himself--he did not have to look like a television personality; he had to have ideas and views to present. I like the static camera and the slow pans from Clark to the background and the great close ups of the artwork, so steady and patient--the camera is giving me a chance to see what Clark sees, to learn how to look at the art, see the beauty, and appreciate the civilization that created it.

The BBC is going to "remake" the series with another art critic who will have his or her own "Personal View"--I doubt the critic would dare have such a "conservative" view of civilization or even to concentrate on western civilization. It will have to be multi-cultural and the pace will have to be fast, with quick cuts and angles. The presenter will have to be photogenic with perfect teeth (Sir Kenneth's are horrible, one can tell). I can't imagine a remake of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: A Personal View that could replace it in my library of books, DVDs, or memories. As Clark says at the end of the series, I may be hopeful about the new version, but not joyous.

Now, History Today comments on the BBC's plans and brings up the same issues:

How often has Lord Hall paused to regret announcing that the BBC intends to remake Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation? The notion becomes more fraught with difficulty at every turn. Set aside the question as to whether a modern Civilisation is a good idea and still Hall’s problems, or rather those of his commissioning editors, multiply.

First shown in 1969 in 12 episodes, Civilisation focused exclusively on western Europe. It is inconceivable that today’s BBC could make a series that excluded the cultures of the Far East, India, Africa and Central and South America. So is one that paid little attention to women. Or indeed one that started, as Clark’s did, with the disarming statement: ‘What is civilisation? I don’t know … but I think I can recognise it when I see it.’

Early attacks on Clark were instigated by his ideological opposite John Berger and they hit home. The way that Clark has been wilfully misinterpreted is, however, also a measure of changed times and contemporary pieties. His omission of other cultures was not because he thought them inferior but because, as he admitted, he didn’t know much about them. He did not ‘suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the east’, but people did. It is worth noting that he hardly mentioned Spain – Velázquez, Goya et al – in the series because he thought the country’s contribution to culture too slight: ‘One asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill.’ It is also forgotten that the series had the all-important subtitle; ‘A personal view by Kenneth Clark’.

And then there's the issue of who will host the show:

Hall’s greatest problem though is who should play the Clark role. Immediately after the BBC announcement, the retiring novelist Kathy Lette unhelpfully whipped up a petition signed by the likes of Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier and Sandi Toksvig instructing Hall not to plump for a man. Mary Beard is their poster girl, though what attributes she would bring to a discussion of 19th-century Paris or pre-Columbian Peru was not made clear. Among other widely tipped names Neil MacGregor and Simon Schama stand out. Pick a woman and Hall will be accused of pandering to feminists, pick MacGregor and he will be demonstrating patrician tendencies; pick Schama and it will show a lack of imagination. And why no black or Indian presenter?

Could the presenter at least wear tweed in a few of the episodes?

The Kenneth Clark Exhibit @ Tate Britain

From Brian Cole in The Wall Street Journal:

London

How daring! Tate Britain has devoted a large exhibition to someone who was not an artist—the first time it's done so. Equally surprising, the subject is a figure now mainly known for a television show.

The director and curators of the Tate Britain are to be congratulated for working to restore the importance of Kenneth Clark through an excellent exhibition and catalog, both titled "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation." Beautifully installed in six rooms with more than 200 objects from Old Master to modern, most drawn from Clark's own collection, the exhibition traces Clark's life and chronicles his important role in British culture as patron, collector, art historian and broadcaster.

The show carefully and judiciously reminds us who he was, why he was so important to 20th-century England, and why he deserves to be remembered. They are brave to do so because to many of their peers in the museum and academic worlds, there can hardly be anyone more out of fashion. . . .

Why would Kenneth Clark be out of fashion? Cole explains:

Among the postmodern culturati, Clark has been ridiculed as an upper-class snob (although his entire career proves just the opposite) and mocked for espousing highly unfashionable ideas about truth, artistic genius, greatness—above all, for the peculiar idea that beauty is an important attribute of art. And in an era of multiculturalism his concept of Western Europe as a great civilization has been belittled.

More about the Tate Britain exhibit here. 

This exhibit has certainly brought Sir Kenneth Clark much media attention, as reviews and profiles were published when it opened in May. Of course, he has never really gone away, because of the popularity of that Civilisation series, as this profile from The Guardian attests:

Even now, says James Stourton [Clark's authorized biographer], thousands of DVDs of the series are still sold every year: "It has never died. It's like being on a magic carpet. It's an amazing grand tour. Today, the presentation gets in the way a bit. He's wearing funny clothes, and has a funny voice. You have to get beyond the Burberry coats and the manner and listen to the words." Clark was by now beginning to fall out of sympathy with the art world; painting, he thought, had not been in such a bad state since the death of Giotto. But, no matter. Amazingly, it was for these films that he would be remembered, his passion for art and all its possibilities somehow having transmitted itself to a rapt nation. The clipped vowels and the awkward body language didn't bother the public (even in 1969 he would have sounded stiff, for this, after all, was the year Monty Python made their TV debut) because, as Stourton puts it, "he owned his material". At the Tate show, visitors will be able to see this ownership for themselves thanks to several carefully positioned screens – and some will doubtless ponder if any presenter now, relying as he or she inevitably will on a team of researchers, will ever be able to match its undoubted authority.

What Stourton describes as distractions now I find essential to the series. It was "A Personal View" so the person, Sir Kenneth Clark had to be himself--he did not have to look like a television personality; he had to have ideas and views to present. I like the static camera and the slow pans from Clark to the background and the great close ups of the artwork, so steady and patient--the camera is giving me a chance to see what Clark sees, to learn how to look at the art, see the beauty, and appreciate the civilization that created it.

The BBC is going to "remake" the series with another art critic who will have his or her own "Personal View"--I doubt the critic would dare have such a "conservative" view of civilization or even to concentrate on western civilization. It will have to be multi-cultural and the pace will have to be fast, with quick cuts and angles. The presenter will have to be photogenic with perfect teeth (Sir Kenneth's are horrible, one can tell). I can't imagine a remake of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: A Personal View that could replace it in my library of books, DVDs, or memories. As Clark says at the end of the series, I may be hopeful about the new version, but not joyous.

Van Cliburn and Memory

Van Cliburn is dead. He won the great International Tchaikovsky Competition the year I was born, and I do remember that my parents had a copy of his RCA Victor album playing Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1--"Living Stereo" on their cabinet record player. This album was mixed in with soundtracks--Ben Hur, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Camelot, etc.; jazz--Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck; various pop instrumentalists and bands--Percy Faith, Mantovani, Herb Albert, Ferrante and Teicher, and others. There were some other classicial albums, like collections of Strauss waltzes, and lots of Christmas albums with big classical orchestras and conductors, Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein.

That our household had a copy of this Van Cliburn album is not surprising. This was the first classical album to go platinum. Cliburn was one of the first American classical artists to have a real popular following. His obits commonly cite Time magazine’s 1958 cover story, which 'quoted a friend as saying Cliburn could become “the first man in history to be a Horowitz, Liberace and Presley all rolled into one.”' A ticker-tape parade for a pianist!

As the AP obit begins:

FORT WORTH, Texas — For a time in Cold War America, Van Cliburn had all the trappings of a rock star: sold-out concerts, adoring, out-of-control fans and a name recognized worldwide. He even got a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

And he did it all with only a piano and some Tchaikovsky concertos.

The celebrated pianist played for every American president since Harry Truman, plus royalty and heads of state around the world. But he is best remembered for winning a 1958 piano competition in Moscow that helped thaw the icy rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Cliburn, who died Wednesday at 78 after fighting bone cancer, was “a great humanitarian and a brilliant musician whose light will continue to shine through his extraordinary legacy,” said his publicist and longtime friend Mary Lou Falcone. “He will be missed by all who knew and admired him, and by countless people he never met.”

The young man from the small east Texas town of Kilgore was a baby-faced 23-year-old when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow just six months after the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik embarrassed the U.S. and inaugurated the space race.

The interesting thing about his career is that, although he went from triumph to triumph for a time, he also took time away from touring to take care of his mother. The world of classical music and performance has always fascinated me, as it combines showmanship and tremendous knowledge. Anyone who dedicates his life to studying the great repertoire of Western classical music, understanding the people and the culture that created it -- that's a special person. May he rest in peace.

Book Review: History In His Hands

Subtitle: A Christian Narrative of the West

By Brennan Pursell, author of The Spanish Match, Benedict of Bavaria, and The Winter King.

From the publisher:

Most professional historians write history as though God either does not exist or doesn’t matter. History in His Hands offers a radically different approach. Brennan Pursell, Harvard-trained historian and author of Benedict of Bavaria, shows how God’s directing hand ensures that history—and each person in history—has significance. We can discover the difference that God’s presence makes in several key issues in human history: time, space, war and peace, wealth and poverty, and human love and hatred.

As we discover that all of us share an identity as God’s creation, Dr. Pursell also challenges us to cease thinking in terms of radically distinct historical periods, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, and recognize how all people who have ever lived are part of the same story.

Finally, Dr. Pursell invites us to recognize how, for all the achievements of our own day, we remain as flawed as ever, and in need of recognizing God as the source of our existence and the shaper of our destinies.

I think an informed reader will get the most out of this book--one who already knows the outlines of the history of Western Civilization, even if it is based upon college-level textbooks that may take an anti-religious or a-religious view of history. A well-read and well-informed reader who has studied that history with a Christian worldview will also benefit greatly from reading this book and one who has studied Christopher Dawson will be almost completely satisfied with Pursell's work in this book. It is not a traditional history text--no footnotes, no index, no apparatus like maps and tables, and the table of contents doesn't even include page numbers (!), just an excellent select bibliography and a very clear teaching voice. This is a book to be read aloud. The style is so lucid and the narrative so direct. (Now how many history books do you ever say that of!)

I have a few minor arguments with Professor Pursell's interpretations (for example: the second son theory of the Crusades has been debunked, I thought {see page 125}). His chapter on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon is excellent; he correctly traces the secularization of Western Culture to those historical landmarks. On the other hand, he barely mentions the American Revolution and the founding of the United States--the US just pops up fully formed like a mythical goddess during the section on the "Struggle for Freedom" in Chapter 9. In the last chapter, Pursell takes a prophetic stance, rationally analyzing the post-modern, post-human zeitgeist of the cultural elite.

Overall, Pursell completely debunks the Whig, progressive, "we're so much more advanced now" view of history while also introducing an element of mystery: why do some things happen? what is God's purpose in certain events of history? Since history IS in God's Hands, Pursell opens up this survey of western civ history to meditation and wonder. Highly recommended.

Contents:

Introduction: God Matters (The Secular Narrative+Augustine and the Christian Narrative+Finding Truth in History)

1. God and Man (God, the Alpha, Love, and Reason + Cosmos and Earth + Adam and Eve + Suffering and Death + The Omega + Human "Prehistory" + Paleo- to Neolithic)

2. The Gift of Civilization (Babel + The "First" Civilizations + Mesopotamian Diversity + Unity in the Nile Valley + Around the World + Israel)

3. The Greeks Thought of Everything (In and Out of Ignorance + Archaic and Classical Poleis + The Birth of Western Philosophy + Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle + The Greek Legacy + The Hellenistic World)

4. The Romans Did Everything (Splendor and Squalor + From Republic to Principate + Western Convergence + Jesus of Nazareth + The Resurrection and the Church)

5. The West Diversifies (The Roman Imperial Temptation + the Growth of Christianity + Loving God as One + Rome's Miracle + The Empire Shatters + The Germanic Age in the West, 500-900 + Islam: Another Separation? + The Franks and the Lure of Empire + A New Era Comes)

6. Christendom Consolidates (The Feudal Age + For Better and for Worse: Church, State, and Warfare + The Crux of Centralization + The Papal Monarchy and the Church + A Christian Culture + Feudal Heights + Life Lived in Common + The Burden of Living)

7. A Tear in the Heart (Humanism and the Italian Renaissance + The Old Word and the New + Luther's Reformation + More Protestantisms + The Catholic "Counter-Reformation"? + Wars of Religion?)

8. Christendom Repudicated (New Worlds on Earth and Heaven? + The Scientific Revolution + The Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment -- Writers, Wits, and Renegades + The Coming of the French Revolution + Napoleon, The Revolution in Person)

9. The Perils of Wealth (A Century of Progress? + Still the Christian West + The Struggle for Freedom)

10. Slaughter and Surfeit (A Century of War: World War I and its Offspring + Number Two, and Then Some + Twentieth-Century Surfeit + Twenty-First Century Civilization Barbarism)

11. The Third Millennium A.D. (Post Modernity + The West in the Third Millennium A.D.)

Afterword

Select Bibliography