Finding Arcadia

Paul Krause Krause, Paul

Description

The classics used to be the seminal texts of Western civilization and education. From Homer down through the Greek poets and philosophers, including the Roman poets and early Christian writers, the classics were indispensable in shaping the hearts, minds, and souls of Westerners toward the Good, True, and Beautiful. Today, however, the classics are under attack as nothing but a relic of racism, misogyny, and sexism that have no place in the modern world. Far from irrelevant, the classics are deeply pertinent to the struggles of modern society and the human soul. In this collection of essays, Paul Krause offers a guided tour through the classics and highlights the wisdom, truth, and beauty that these great works embody. Recovering the hermeneutic of love, rather than promoting the politicization of literature, is needed in restoring the great works of Western literature to their important place in Western culture. From Homer and Aeschylus to Herodotus and Plato, from Virgil and Catullus to Ovid and Saint Augustine, Finding Arcadia reveals the wisdom that our ancestors gained from the books rightfully called the classics.

Sujets

• Comparative Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Social Science
• PHILOSOPHY
• Literature
• General officer
• Social sciences
• Education
• General
• Classics

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680537154
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics
Paul Krause
Academica Press
Washington∼London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krause, Paul (author)
Title: Finding arcadia : wisdom, truth, and love in the classics | Krause, Paul
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2023. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023931828 | ISBN 9781680537147 (hardcover) | 9781680537161 (paperback) | 9781680537154 (e-book)
Copyright 2023 Paul Krause
Dedication
To the Fortune Family and Donald Wilson for the kindness they showed me when studying in London.
Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Don’t Cancel the Classics Chapter 1 On Homer Chapter 2 Why The Oresteia Still Matters Chapter 3 Antigone Agonistes Chapter 4 Euripides: Oracle of Modernity Chapter 5 Euripides: Prophet of Pity Chapter 6 Aristophanes: The First Poet Critic Chapter 7 Herodotus and the Quest for Justice Chapter 8 The Moral Philosophy of Plutarch Chapter 9 Plato’s Symposium: The Drama and Trial of Love Chapter 10 Virgil’s War and Peace Chapter 11 Finding Arcadia: The Garden in the Cosmos in Latin Literature Chapter 12 Fallen From Eden: Reading the Poetry of Catullus Chapter 13 Is Ovid Still Worth Reading? Chapter 14 The Odyssey of Saint Augustine Chapter 15 Augustine’s City of God: The First Culture War Afterword Bibliography Index
Acknowledgements
I first want to acknowledge Paul du Quenoy and the editors at Academica Press for helping to bring this work to fruition. I am also indebted to several editors for the years of writing for them and the freedom to reprint my essays in this volume, they include: Stephen Klugewicz, Jeff Bilbro, Lee Trepanier, and Erich Prince. Lastly, I want to acknowledge the gentle reader who has endeavored to pilgrimage through the classics with me. The reader is the most important reason why any writer writes.
Introduction
Don’t Cancel the Classics
Do the ancient Greeks have anything left to tell us? Anyone who deals extensively in the humanities, and especially the classics, inevitably must ask themselves this question. Apart from being eclectic or a renaissance individual, if the Greeks have nothing important to teach us, why bother wrestling with them at all? That seems to be the new prevailing spirit, notwithstanding the iconoclastic attitudes to ban, or “exclude,” anything from that critically endangered species classicist Bernard Knox called Dead White European males.
Greek literature is one of the triumphs of Western civilization—not merely because it is the seed of our literary garden but because it captures the tensions of the human struggle to find meaning in the cosmos and our place therein. Greek literature is the battlefield of our restless hearts seeking comfort and serenity in an often cold, dark, and pitiless world. Indeed, the entire dialectical movement of Greek literature is a working out of the moral cosmos and its relationship to the polis —or our civil and political life.
The Hesiodic Cosmos
The Greek cosmos is not, initially, moral. It is, however, filled with pathos. It matters not whether Hesiod composed his poem before or after Homer. Giambattista Vico, in my mind, conclusively shows that poetic metaphysics begins with the violence of the sublime. Hesiod’s Theogony is the quintessential sublimely violent poem and, therefore, draws on a tradition much older than Homer. The work, as we know, is an account of the birth of the gods.
There are two lines of gods in the Greek cosmos. The first refers to the pre-existing gods of the pre-existent world, the primordial gods, who are not the product of sex. The second line of gods, the Titans and the Olympians, are the offspring of sex—and very violent sex. The Hesiodic cosmos is governed by lust, sex, and war—or perhaps, more simply, strife in all matters of life. Indeed, the first act of logos, speech, in Theogony is due to hatred and to further the cosmic reality of strife that the poem is saturated in. Gaia speaks to her children after forging a sickle to castrate their hateful and lustful father.
Hesiod composed his epic in a time of cosmological, that is, poetic metaphysical, transformation. It seems to me that Hesiod’s composing of the Theogony was to challenge the drift of the erotic strife-filled cosmos toward the Homeric cosmos of philia. Consciousness of this older cosmic tradition was threatened, and so Hesiod, as most poets and writers do, recorded for posterity that ancient lore that was being displaced.
Hesiod’s poem gruesomely details the birth of the gods: Titans and Olympians, through the violent sexual predation of Uranus upon Gaia. The union of Uranus and Gaia, as Hesiod recounts it, is a cruel and vicious one. Uranus constantly penetrates Gaia at his will and seals their conceived children deep in her womb, which causes her much pain as they grow and move about.
Gaia, in turn—and out of desire for cunning revenge—constructs a sickle and implores one of her children that whoever wields the weapon and overthrows Uranus will have supreme power in the cosmos. Cronus, not so much out of devotion to his mother but hatred of his father, took up the challenge, “Great Uranus came, bringing the night, and spread out around Gaia, desiring philotês, and was extended. His son reached out from ambush with his left hand, and in his right he held the sickle, long and serrated and the genitals of his father he quickly reaped and threw them behind his back to be carried away. But they did not flee from his hand fruitlessly. As many drops of blood spurted forth, all of them Gaia received.” The blood from Uranus’s castrated phallus fell to the earth giving birth to the furies, monsters, and the other gods, the first being Aphrodite.
Just as the Titans were conceived in violence and ascended through violence, the apple does not fall far from the tree. So, too, the Olympians are conceived in violence and ascend through violence.
Zeus leads the patricidal overthrow of the Titans, just as Cronus had initiated the patricidal usurpation of his father. Hesiod’s muses sing of the Titanomachy this way:
“They moved wretched battle, all of them, females and males, on that day, Tritan gods and those who were born from Cronos and those whom Zeus from Erebos beneath the earth brought into light. These were dreadful and strong, possessing excessive force. A hundred arms shot forth from their shoulders, for all of them alike, and each had fifty heads grown out from their shoulders on sturdy limbs. Then, they settled themselves against the Titans in the dire fray, holding huge rocks in their sturdy hands. From the other side, the Titans strengthened their ranks eagerly, and both sides were revealing the works of forceful hands, and the boundless sea resounded dreadfully, and the earth screamed loudly, and wide Uranus groaned when heaved, and from the foundations lofty Olympus shook beneath the fury of the immortals. The heavy pounding of their feet reached murky Tartaros, as did the shrill screams of the terrible pursuit and powerful missiles. Thus they hurled mournful darts at one another. The sound of both reached starry Uranus as they cried out. They clashed with a great war cry.”
Clash they did, and the Olympians took their place as heads of the cosmos and the pantheon.
Hesiod’s cosmos is a sublimely and spectacularly violent reminder of our primordial sexual and domineering drive. The cosmic reality of the Hesiod’s poem is one of divine rape, licentiousness, and male domination and violence. The female gods all suffer at the hand of the more vindictive and lustful male gods. Lastly, the Hesiodic cosmos is truly governed by the agon, and that is what the muses sing in celebration of—only the gods with strong wills and the desire for violence are worthy to be sung of.
The Homeric Cosmos
The song of Homer is not the masculine war tale that it initially seems to be. In fact, it is male sexual predation that has caused the Trojan War in the first place. Homer sheds light on the old world of Hesiod that is now being sublated by the cosmos of love. Nevertheless, Homer’s cosmos is not an idyllic and fanciful one. It retains all the old seeds of the Hesiodic cosmos but moves beyond it by offering us a path out through the power of love.
The characters that populate Homer’s cosmic drama are individuals in oscillation between the two worlds. At one pole are the characters that exude the Hesiodic characteristics of lust, strife, and obscene desire for war. Diomedes is undeniably the most Hesiodic of the Argives. His lustful embrace of conflict leads him to spearing Ares and slashing Aphrodite; not even the sacred is safe from the pillaging spirit of war. Paris is also a character who exudes the erotic impulses of the Hesiodic cosmos. His abduction and rape of Helen is what sparked the war, and he constantly fails in his duties to father and fatherland whenever he sees Helen. The other great character who begins with the Hesiodic spirit—but will overcome it—is Achilles.
The other pole includes the characters that exhibit the new cosmic spirit of love, philia, and devotedness—or what the Romans would later call pietas, piety. The Trojans tend to be the characters that exercise these virtues like Hector, Aeneas, and Priam. But these virtues are not exclusive to the Trojan heroes. Briseis and Patroclus also serve as calming characters who keep the maelstrom of war from boiling over into complete chaos.
After Agamemnon steals Briseis, causing Achilles to sulk in his tent and refuse to fight, we learn that Briseis was the intended bride to Achilles. Patroclus managed to work out a deal between her and Achilles, which Briseis tearfully reveals when she cries over the body of the dead hero, “But you, Patroclus, you would not let me weep, not when the swift Achilles cut my husband down, not when he plundered the lordly Mynes’ city—not even weep! No, again and again you vowed you’d make me godlike Achilles’ lawful, wedded w