By Joshua Hren
"Ulysses Returns Chryseis to her Father" by Claude Lorrain In his Metamporphoses of the City (Fall 2013), Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent, whose The Tragedy of the Republic is forthcoming through Wiseblood Books, posits Homer as the “father of the Greek city” in a careful and ingenious reading of the Iliad (that first poem of the Western world) and he speaks of the poetic birth of the city.
But, we rightly ask, how could Homer grant us access into the birth of the Greek city? After all, when he gathered oral traditions around the year 725 B.C., he gave voice to a state of Greek life that is definitively different from and prior to Greek civic life. How then could he be considered the educator of Greece, “not in a general and so to speak decorous sense, but in the precise and rigorous sense of a master to whose teaching one should conform all the actions of one’s life” (30)? Manent suggests that we can answer this question by turning to Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates and his companions examine the question of the education of the just and beautiful city’s guardians. They first critique the “old” method, calling into question “the stories that mothers and nurses tell children and that, ‘are, as a whole, false.’” (31). These nurses tales are not individualized in each family, but are common across the Grecian households. Such stories are faulty first and foremost in that they said unacceptable things about the gods. (We might find it hard to believe that Homer and Hesiod, the poets whom Socrates and company name, are the actual authors of Greek religion, because this seems to those of us steeped in modern sociological prejudices to be quite beyond their power, certainly beyond the power of poetry.)
In the human order of the Iliad, the gods play a major role. They are the “guarantors” and “authors” of the human world. Zeus, the “father of all things,” holds an irresistible power. And yet, Manent notes, “the human world penetrates the divine world, human passions stir the goddesses and gods, which prompts the Socratic demand to correct the ‘models of theology’ and incites us to regard the divine world rather as an extension, an amplification . . . of the human world . . . there is in the Homeric text much material to justify a ‘religious’ reading as well as a ‘humanist’ reading” (32).
As is true in a certain sense of our own time, in the Greek world humans and gods (our gods being the pantheon forces associated with science, technology, entertainment, etc.), often resembled one another to the point of being indistinguishable. The clear difference between the two is drawn along the lines of mortality. “Homer did not discover that humans are mortal, but the Iliad is throughout, so to speak, a confrontation with mortality as there was never before and will hardly be after. The proof is that as ‘heroic’ and ‘aristocratic’ as the world of the Iliad is, death or the threat of death, equalizes all mortals, including the greatest of all, the son of an immortal, Achilles, who confronted the alternative of a long happy life without glory or an early, but glorious death” (34). The Trojan War that drives the epic narrative is “the condition and the consequence of the self-discovery of ‘mortals.’ That is why,” writes Manent, “while it speaks of nothing but war, nonetheless [it] says everything about human life, or at least considers it in its entirety.” (43).
The gathering of Achaeans around the outskirts of Ilion does not constitute a city per se, but “one can recognize in it a heroic or aristocratic republic, this republic of quarrelsome persuasion that is the invention of Greece and whose virtues democracy will spread and develop. In short, the camp of the Achaeans, the city ‘in speech’ whose founder is Homer, was the common mother of the real Greek cities” (42). What are some of these virtues? We cannot possibly render them justice here, and so I will point to just a few.
First, in case it has been some time since you’ve read or heard read the Iliad, I’ll read a bit and then summarize the opening conflict.
Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, has offended the priest of Apollo by refusing to surrender the priest’s daughter, Chryseis, even as she had come part and parcel with an immense ransom. In reply, the god Apollo sends a plague on the Achaean camp. The epidemic eats away at them for nine days. On the tenth day Achilles rallies the men and summons the greatest prophet-diviner, Calchas, who explains to the Achaeans that the cause of the conflict is King Agamemnon—his unruly, possessive action. In essence, then, the conflict bears on “the share that belongs to each man, to which each man has a right” (56). Agamemnon agrees to surrender Chryseis, but only because he has decided to take Achilles’ captive Briseis as his own. Filled with rage, Achilles declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon. Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream urging him to attack Ilium. Before he heeds the dream, Agamemnon summons the Achaean armies, and, to test them, tells them (by inviting them to flee) to avoid fighting “his war.” He expects the men to push back against his seemingly cowardly insistence. “Thus, by advocating black, he will make them crave white. [Although Agamemnon is “king,] this is not our idea of an absolute ruler. The Achaeans need to be persuaded” (59). Unfortunately, “his typical trick has failed lamentably. He is at the end of his power. The only recourse resides in the prudence, or wisdom, of Odysseus. Only Odysseus is capable of confronting the exceptional situation, or the state of emergency [in which Agamemnon’s supposed sovereignty fails to win men over]. In this sense Odysseus, and not Agamemnon, is the true sovereign” (60). Speaking in turn to the few (the nobles) and the many (the general crowd of soldiers), Odysseus uses various means of persuasion to win the men back into battle, and he succeeds.
But, we rightly ask, how could Homer grant us access into the birth of the Greek city? After all, when he gathered oral traditions around the year 725 B.C., he gave voice to a state of Greek life that is definitively different from and prior to Greek civic life. How then could he be considered the educator of Greece, “not in a general and so to speak decorous sense, but in the precise and rigorous sense of a master to whose teaching one should conform all the actions of one’s life” (30)? Manent suggests that we can answer this question by turning to Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates and his companions examine the question of the education of the just and beautiful city’s guardians. They first critique the “old” method, calling into question “the stories that mothers and nurses tell children and that, ‘are, as a whole, false.’” (31). These nurses tales are not individualized in each family, but are common across the Grecian households. Such stories are faulty first and foremost in that they said unacceptable things about the gods. (We might find it hard to believe that Homer and Hesiod, the poets whom Socrates and company name, are the actual authors of Greek religion, because this seems to those of us steeped in modern sociological prejudices to be quite beyond their power, certainly beyond the power of poetry.)
In the human order of the Iliad, the gods play a major role. They are the “guarantors” and “authors” of the human world. Zeus, the “father of all things,” holds an irresistible power. And yet, Manent notes, “the human world penetrates the divine world, human passions stir the goddesses and gods, which prompts the Socratic demand to correct the ‘models of theology’ and incites us to regard the divine world rather as an extension, an amplification . . . of the human world . . . there is in the Homeric text much material to justify a ‘religious’ reading as well as a ‘humanist’ reading” (32).
As is true in a certain sense of our own time, in the Greek world humans and gods (our gods being the pantheon forces associated with science, technology, entertainment, etc.), often resembled one another to the point of being indistinguishable. The clear difference between the two is drawn along the lines of mortality. “Homer did not discover that humans are mortal, but the Iliad is throughout, so to speak, a confrontation with mortality as there was never before and will hardly be after. The proof is that as ‘heroic’ and ‘aristocratic’ as the world of the Iliad is, death or the threat of death, equalizes all mortals, including the greatest of all, the son of an immortal, Achilles, who confronted the alternative of a long happy life without glory or an early, but glorious death” (34). The Trojan War that drives the epic narrative is “the condition and the consequence of the self-discovery of ‘mortals.’ That is why,” writes Manent, “while it speaks of nothing but war, nonetheless [it] says everything about human life, or at least considers it in its entirety.” (43).
The gathering of Achaeans around the outskirts of Ilion does not constitute a city per se, but “one can recognize in it a heroic or aristocratic republic, this republic of quarrelsome persuasion that is the invention of Greece and whose virtues democracy will spread and develop. In short, the camp of the Achaeans, the city ‘in speech’ whose founder is Homer, was the common mother of the real Greek cities” (42). What are some of these virtues? We cannot possibly render them justice here, and so I will point to just a few.
First, in case it has been some time since you’ve read or heard read the Iliad, I’ll read a bit and then summarize the opening conflict.
Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, has offended the priest of Apollo by refusing to surrender the priest’s daughter, Chryseis, even as she had come part and parcel with an immense ransom. In reply, the god Apollo sends a plague on the Achaean camp. The epidemic eats away at them for nine days. On the tenth day Achilles rallies the men and summons the greatest prophet-diviner, Calchas, who explains to the Achaeans that the cause of the conflict is King Agamemnon—his unruly, possessive action. In essence, then, the conflict bears on “the share that belongs to each man, to which each man has a right” (56). Agamemnon agrees to surrender Chryseis, but only because he has decided to take Achilles’ captive Briseis as his own. Filled with rage, Achilles declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon. Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream urging him to attack Ilium. Before he heeds the dream, Agamemnon summons the Achaean armies, and, to test them, tells them (by inviting them to flee) to avoid fighting “his war.” He expects the men to push back against his seemingly cowardly insistence. “Thus, by advocating black, he will make them crave white. [Although Agamemnon is “king,] this is not our idea of an absolute ruler. The Achaeans need to be persuaded” (59). Unfortunately, “his typical trick has failed lamentably. He is at the end of his power. The only recourse resides in the prudence, or wisdom, of Odysseus. Only Odysseus is capable of confronting the exceptional situation, or the state of emergency [in which Agamemnon’s supposed sovereignty fails to win men over]. In this sense Odysseus, and not Agamemnon, is the true sovereign” (60). Speaking in turn to the few (the nobles) and the many (the general crowd of soldiers), Odysseus uses various means of persuasion to win the men back into battle, and he succeeds.
The amphitheatre in Ephesus The Iliad, then, though it describes a world before the city, before democracy and the virtues that drive it, manifests in Odysseus one of the greatest democratic virtues: persuasion, which is given at random, is not relegated to a particular class or institutional authority, and thus “ . . . it is no coincidence that Odysseus’ other name is Nobody” (61). Yet, even as Odysseus succeeds in persuading nearly everyone, Thersites continues to mock and spew his spleen at Agamemnon. Odysseus rebukes him harshly and cruelly strikes him with his scepter. In Pierre Manent’s reading, Thersites stands as incarnation of the disrespectful person who criticizes power, who speaks truths better left unspoken. “He thus has some important things in common with Odysseus, first of all a freedom of outlook that stems from independence of mind with respect to social ties . . . One could say that Thersites is the spirit of comedy . . . Thus, as we see the Iliad, that with Achilles and Agamemnon contains the source and model of all later tragedy, and with Odysseus the prototype of the wise man and we might say the first version of Socrates, with Thersites also contains the living seeds of comedy. Homer was indeed in every sense the educator of Greece.”
We need to—more than anywhere else—expand our conception of beauty beyond the mere aesthetic. As Manent writes in “The Original Experience of the City,” “Whereas the Greeks situated beauty in things themselves, we situate it in the eye of the beholder, or of the artist, and thus beauty for us is divorced from any explicit idea of greatness: since beauty is in our eyes, the smallest things—for example, three plums in a fruit bowl—can be the most beautiful. But if we detach ourselves even a little from the complacency or laziness of the spectator, from the desire that everything be smaller than our view, we will find meaning in the series of notions that are joined in Aristotle’s definition [of beauty]: self-sufficiency, perfection, happiness, and beauty . . . what is more noble, or beautiful, than the city” (98)?
What we need, then, according to the third fundamental approach to a Catholic cultural renaissance, is a new Iliad, a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty” (98).
We will call beautiful that which comprises within itself “what the many do together” and self-sufficiency, potentiality and perfection, suffering and happiness—all of which are in a certain sense beautiful in and of themselves, but in another sense prepare the natural order for the supernatural. At first glance such a proposal may seem excessively ambitious or even quixotic. And yet, after giving the matter careful thought for many years, and with the small but significant apocalypse that will mark the ending whimper of the (post) modern world years hence (ten years or three hundred I don’t know)—I do not see how we can regard the composition of such an epic, a poem, a story, anything other than necessary.
What will be the new city’s virtues, it’s predominant attributes and characteristics? How do we create a city in speech that is both Catholic and catholic, that educates to the same degree that it remains faithful to the dictates of art, that embodies virtues without falling into the unbelievable landfill of pious trash? Will the poem foster a common world with the citizenship Aristotle set forth in The Politics, in which characters have no political rights but rather political duties? What will these duties, these values, be? Truth? Irony? Justice? Self-interest? Humility? Shrewdness? Courage? A persuasive tongue? Will the new poem, as the Iliad, have a backdrop of war, thereby bringing mortality to the fore and dramatizing virtues (and failures to embody virtues) at their most heroic?
We need to—more than anywhere else—expand our conception of beauty beyond the mere aesthetic. As Manent writes in “The Original Experience of the City,” “Whereas the Greeks situated beauty in things themselves, we situate it in the eye of the beholder, or of the artist, and thus beauty for us is divorced from any explicit idea of greatness: since beauty is in our eyes, the smallest things—for example, three plums in a fruit bowl—can be the most beautiful. But if we detach ourselves even a little from the complacency or laziness of the spectator, from the desire that everything be smaller than our view, we will find meaning in the series of notions that are joined in Aristotle’s definition [of beauty]: self-sufficiency, perfection, happiness, and beauty . . . what is more noble, or beautiful, than the city” (98)?
What we need, then, according to the third fundamental approach to a Catholic cultural renaissance, is a new Iliad, a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty” (98).
We will call beautiful that which comprises within itself “what the many do together” and self-sufficiency, potentiality and perfection, suffering and happiness—all of which are in a certain sense beautiful in and of themselves, but in another sense prepare the natural order for the supernatural. At first glance such a proposal may seem excessively ambitious or even quixotic. And yet, after giving the matter careful thought for many years, and with the small but significant apocalypse that will mark the ending whimper of the (post) modern world years hence (ten years or three hundred I don’t know)—I do not see how we can regard the composition of such an epic, a poem, a story, anything other than necessary.
What will be the new city’s virtues, it’s predominant attributes and characteristics? How do we create a city in speech that is both Catholic and catholic, that educates to the same degree that it remains faithful to the dictates of art, that embodies virtues without falling into the unbelievable landfill of pious trash? Will the poem foster a common world with the citizenship Aristotle set forth in The Politics, in which characters have no political rights but rather political duties? What will these duties, these values, be? Truth? Irony? Justice? Self-interest? Humility? Shrewdness? Courage? A persuasive tongue? Will the new poem, as the Iliad, have a backdrop of war, thereby bringing mortality to the fore and dramatizing virtues (and failures to embody virtues) at their most heroic?
While we await the one or the ones who will compose the epic story, I want to point to one living author who is at the very least theoretically capable of composing such a poem. His name is Jeremiah Webster. I do not say that he can compose this poem on command, or that his mind and style are fully matured to the point that he could write the enduring epic that will last however many years or centuries as is necessary for the new city to emerge. I do, however, know that he has looked into the past long enough and in a prophetic sense looked into the future long enough to be able to write it. For now, I give you part of his poem “Ilium,” excerpted from his recently published debut poetry collection, After So Many Fires. It is a sort of prelude to the new Iliad, written from amidst one of the many fragmented forms of contemporary human life, a form so fragmented we can hardly call it a city:
Ilium
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”
thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
—Nietzsche
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”
thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
—Nietzsche
Far enough back
all was born of fire.
See how ordinary
the Pangaea becomes
when home is used
to describe it?
We begin with the silent
prayer
of stromatolites
as coastlines
shimmer
like strings.
I have no words to sink
below a sea with no fire,
but perhaps you can begin
naming these familiar hills.
* * * *
all was born of fire.
See how ordinary
the Pangaea becomes
when home is used
to describe it?
We begin with the silent
prayer
of stromatolites
as coastlines
shimmer
like strings.
I have no words to sink
below a sea with no fire,
but perhaps you can begin
naming these familiar hills.
* * * *
Mortar was left to dry on the trowel
the day we threw down shovel, pick,
left wheelbarrows to bake in the mud,
saw the moon in broad daylight
appear from behind the mountain
before being flung to the sea.
As boys throw stones from a sling,
so the moon flew from its circuit to boil
in the space of the sea.
Why downcast my soul?
Why marvel at the hour of Earth's unraveling?
Even the experts forecasted as much: the terminal
path of empyrean forms.
God is the first
mover, the second
to return, and the third
authority among Moderns.
There is only fear
when the earth gives
way and the mountains fall
on our freeways and interstates.
He begged for the rough rind
before juice could dry
from her mouth and chin.
She asked for a cherry pit
to suck on and survey the landscape.
The shore gave
way under waves
as a split sun
lit plankton and spare parts
from deserted ships.
They gathered antiques,
dug beneath the remains
of a once proud no longer nation.
As cutworms, imperceptible
from the air, feed off the underbelly
of a leaf, so this Adam, this Eve, subsisted
on ruins.
Thesis
Behold, the drunk whispers
as he wanders the streets.
City of Dis, I love you.
I live among your citizens
and praise each one as they pass,
faces flush after meals
on the waterfront.
People stare at passing human
traffic mute to themselves and
others. People talk and wonder
why no one listens.
See the world in your halls,
the vast diversity
of loneliness,
the moment on the metro
when all was silent save
for the clanking of metal against warm bodies,
strangers all texting below the radiant light,
passing all stops wordless to slouch (like shepherds)
over the private miracle:
the incarnate screen.
Gaze with me now,
coliseum, pyramid, gaunt cathedral,
climb my stairs beg skyscrapers, the radio towers reaching in desperation.
Nature lies prostrate before your electric defiance.
Construction sites, hoarse workers, steel, wood, brick, bellow the NEW
with brittle voices.
Praise the promise.
Drink to towers.
Receive this wine.
Antithesis
We’ll have plenty to eat,
Mother? the child asks.
With reverence, she rests
a hand on the generator
for when the lights go out.
One pen for the meat birds.
One pen for the cow.
One pen for heirloom seed.
One pen for the sow.
Water is drawn from wells,
purified through activated carbon filters.
Fiber optic lines run for miles,
the monthly funds funneled in
from urban banks.
Out on the hills, toiling
with able hands, a father builds
his monument.
With those he loves indoors,
he works until palms blister.
His assurance: the plateau
of a world defined by
away from,
further out,
better than,
not that.
the day we threw down shovel, pick,
left wheelbarrows to bake in the mud,
saw the moon in broad daylight
appear from behind the mountain
before being flung to the sea.
As boys throw stones from a sling,
so the moon flew from its circuit to boil
in the space of the sea.
Why downcast my soul?
Why marvel at the hour of Earth's unraveling?
Even the experts forecasted as much: the terminal
path of empyrean forms.
God is the first
mover, the second
to return, and the third
authority among Moderns.
There is only fear
when the earth gives
way and the mountains fall
on our freeways and interstates.
He begged for the rough rind
before juice could dry
from her mouth and chin.
She asked for a cherry pit
to suck on and survey the landscape.
The shore gave
way under waves
as a split sun
lit plankton and spare parts
from deserted ships.
They gathered antiques,
dug beneath the remains
of a once proud no longer nation.
As cutworms, imperceptible
from the air, feed off the underbelly
of a leaf, so this Adam, this Eve, subsisted
on ruins.
Thesis
Behold, the drunk whispers
as he wanders the streets.
City of Dis, I love you.
I live among your citizens
and praise each one as they pass,
faces flush after meals
on the waterfront.
People stare at passing human
traffic mute to themselves and
others. People talk and wonder
why no one listens.
See the world in your halls,
the vast diversity
of loneliness,
the moment on the metro
when all was silent save
for the clanking of metal against warm bodies,
strangers all texting below the radiant light,
passing all stops wordless to slouch (like shepherds)
over the private miracle:
the incarnate screen.
Gaze with me now,
coliseum, pyramid, gaunt cathedral,
climb my stairs beg skyscrapers, the radio towers reaching in desperation.
Nature lies prostrate before your electric defiance.
Construction sites, hoarse workers, steel, wood, brick, bellow the NEW
with brittle voices.
Praise the promise.
Drink to towers.
Receive this wine.
Antithesis
We’ll have plenty to eat,
Mother? the child asks.
With reverence, she rests
a hand on the generator
for when the lights go out.
One pen for the meat birds.
One pen for the cow.
One pen for heirloom seed.
One pen for the sow.
Water is drawn from wells,
purified through activated carbon filters.
Fiber optic lines run for miles,
the monthly funds funneled in
from urban banks.
Out on the hills, toiling
with able hands, a father builds
his monument.
With those he loves indoors,
he works until palms blister.
His assurance: the plateau
of a world defined by
away from,
further out,
better than,
not that.