Rémi Brague (Paris I / Munich)
When ancient, classical languages are at stake, I am not perfectly competent an authority to be allowed to speak on their behalf. To be sure, I was as fortunate as to be taught, like Shakespeare, “few Latin and fewer Greek” as a youngster. I owe the good counsels of a teacher to have taken up Greek at high school instead of a second living language and I feel immensely grateful towards him. Yet, I never could claim any real expertise on the philological study of ancient tongues.
I had to take advantage of this scanty knowledge of ancient languages when I wrote my doctoral thesis or theses, in the plural, since French academics had to write two theses in those times, very much in the same way as the German Dissertation followed by the Habilitationsschrift. Both had Greek topics: the first and shorter one dealt with Plato, the second, bulkier one with Aristotle.
Nevertheless, I am no longer occupied in Greek things. As a consequence, I can hardly keep abreast of recent developments in classical scholarship. This involves that my competence as an advocate of classical studies is scarce.
On the other hand, this is compensated by an advantage. I can hardly be accused of speaking on my own behalf, pro domo—you can observe that having a smattering of Latin can help anyhow! To put it more bluntly, I am not defending my daily bread. I very well could have kept turning an honest penny by teaching Greek philosophy. Now, I am at present teaching something rather different, i.e. Arabic philosophy. My own career was a winding one. As a historian of philosophy, I shifted from the study of the Greeks to the study of medieval thinkers, for the most part Jews and Moslems.
I thereby followed a track that reproduces at a much smaller scale the very way of European cultural history.
My task is here to plead in favour of the study of classical languages. Many people tried trying to do that and put forward various arguments. I will muster them briefly and sift
First of all, let me point out that a defence of classical studies did not become useful before a relatively late date in the history of European culture. Till the 19th century, it was taken for granted that Latin and Greek were the necessary outfit of any educated person. Even mathematics were taught in Euclides’ text-book. Later on, classical studies had to be defended when a new form of education came to the fore, i.e. the so-called “modern” education that strongly emphasizes natural sciences and living languages. The usefulness of classical studies was called into doubt.
The attempt at a renewal of ancient studies is linked with the name of Werner Jaeger (1888–1961). He was a top-notch German philologist of the venerable tradition. He left Germany in 1936 and spent the remnant part of his career at Harvard University. His main achievement was a fresh start in the study of Aristotle’s intellectual development. In the late twenties and thirties, he launched the idea of what he called a “third humanism”. It was expected to further the heritage of classical Antiquity, by repeating the two former humanisms, i. e. the Italian Renaissance and German classicism.
The main argument is aesthetic in nature. The Greeks and Romans produced masterpieces of world literature. Their worth is everlasting. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, playwrights like Sophocles, historians like Thucydides wrote works of breathtaking beauty and depth. This is all very true. But why should we deem them more interesting than their modern counterparts? Why shouldn’t we lavish the same praise on Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Pushkin, etc. Why should we compel our young people to study their works instead of masterpieces of their own national literature, written in their own language? A similar question was asked already some three centuries ago, first in my native France. I am alluding to the so-called “Querelle des anciens et des modernes”, the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In the eighties of the 17th century, a fight was fought among learned people as to whether modern writers, painters, philosophers, etc. were a match to their forerunners in the classical world. Now, the moderns won out, mainly because of the unchallenged superiority of modern natural science over the ancient world-view. Copernicus, Galilei, Harvey, Descartes, Newton, etc. unmistakably furnished a better account of the phenomena than Hippocrates, Aristotle, Ptolemy, etc.
There is an easier way for us to plead in favour of the classical heritage and of the study of classical languages that allow one to access it directly and authentically. It consists in saying that the people who spoke them were our ancestors. Their culture, ancient culture, is in the last resort our own culture. For instance, French people and whoever has a romance language as his or her mother tongue will say: knowing Latin is the best way for us better to understand our own language, hence to speak and write it with more proficiency. European people at large will say: knowing Greek is the key to understanding the vocabulary of European sciences. A physicist must know what “atom” means; a literary scholar must know what “diegesis” and “mimesis” mean.
There is a large part of truth in this, but it is not always easy to ascertain exactly where this core of truth lies. This is what I will endeavour to point out. To some extent, I will only take some distance from this idea. But at the end of the day, I will bring us back to it. I will do that at another, deeper level, however.
Let me first qualify the argument, to be precise, let us see how easily it can be countered.
Everything hinges upon what exactly is meant whenever we say “we” in sentences like: “we should study Greek, for we are the heirs of the ancient Greeks”.
A) For the most part, this means “we Europeans”. Now, the Europeans are not alone on this earth. Non-European peoples are growing in number and in influence. Why should non-European people study those old folks with whom they never had anything in common? Why shouldn’t they study, instead of them, their own tradition, their own ancestors? A concrete example of this predicament is available in the U.S. Everybody knows, or has heard of, the system that prevails in some places of higher education. The program of those institutions consists in a list of works from Western culture that have to be read and commented upon. Many universities have such programs under different names, among which the word of art “core curriculum” deserves pride of place.
Let’s take as an example Saint John’s College, in Annapolis (Maryland). This is an elite college that enjoys a very high kudos. I know some former students of this place, and all are outstanding. It is interesting for our present purpose, among other reasons, because the study of ancient Greek is a compulsory part of the curriculum. Roughly speaking, the freshman year is devoted to the Greeks, the sophomore to Rome and the Middle Ages, the junior one to early modern times, the senior one, which is the last one, to the 19th and 20th century. The list doesn’t consist exclusively of literary or philosophical works. Some masterpieces of music, many path-breaking articles of mathematicians, physicists or chemists are in, too.
This canon, and the very idea of a canon, was attacked from various sides. First, by people who claim to speak in the name of, or at least on behalf of, cultural minorities that are not European in origin. There are many in the U.S.: Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, etc. not to mention the red Indians. They observed that few texts, not to say none at all, come from non-European cultures. They felt under-represented. Feminists observed that few authors were female. Black people lamented the absence of black writers. The polemical catchword that calls the canon “Dead White Males” became widely acclaimed.
As a consequence, the canon was slightly modified and enlarged to include more female, non-white and non-Western authors: women writers like George Eliot and Jane Austen had been there since the beginning; works by Flannery O’Connor were added. In the same way, works by coloured authors, DuBois’ Soul of the Black People, or the novel Invisible Man, by Henry Allison, were added. An ancient Near-Eastern epic, Gilgamesh, or some Chinese wisdom literature was added, too. By and large, things remained in the same state.
And the problem was still: why should we foist upon people who are not necessarily Greek and Latin in origin the study of Antiquity?
B) On the other hand, the Greeks and Romans appeared more and more as strangers. Progress in the study of the Ancient World has shown that those people were in fact very different from us. They are more and more frequently studied with the methodological tools that were first applied to so-called “primitive” people, i.e. ethnology, anthropology, etc. This began in the 19th century with people like Jane Harrison in Britain, Louis Gernet in France. This goes on with people like Jean-Pierre Vernant. The method proved fruitful. Comparisons were drawn between ancient Greece and cultures that grew in Africa, Asia, pre-Colombian America, etc. All this shed some light on Greek cultural phenomena.
Together with this shift in the methods, the idea of a classical education came under fire. This idea presupposed the greater worth of the classics. The historical approach requires that the object to be studied be considered as totally neutral from a moral point of view. Now, recent scholarship tends to expose the alleged superiority of the Greeks. Some sort of inverted Medic Wars take place. Earlier generations used to identify themselves with the Greeks and took side with them against the Persians, in the same way as they were supposed, when they watched a Western movie, to identify with the cow-boys and side with them against the red Indians. Now, we realise that the Greeks were not better than the Persians whom they vanquished or, for that matter, the Indians, the Chinese, etc.
By this token, we have been asking another question, symmetrical to the first one. The first one was: why should we study the ancient Greeks and Romans? The second one was: why should we study the ancient Greek and Romans?
Let us now cast a glance at our own culture. We can call it European or Western. The two phrases boil down to the same meaning. The difference stems from the point of view: the former formula, “European”, stresses the origin of a movement of cultural globalization, whereas the latter, “Western”, stresses the point of arrival.
More often that not, it is defined by two formulas that contain an hyphen. We speak of a “Judeo-Christian”, or of a “Greco-European” culture. The first phrase has become hackneyed, although it is highly problematic, a hornet’s nest of problems. The second one is slightly less trite, but it had the honour of having been used by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in person, in a courageous lecture given at a dark time, 1935, in Vienna, some months before Austria was absorbed by Germany.
Now, those two hyphens may be misleading. They are, to say the least, problematic. We should change them to what musicians call rests. Not because of harmonious relationships between what those signs bring together, but, on the contrary, for us to have some time to reflect on millennia of tension and conflict. This holds especially true in the case of “Judeo-Christian”.
Now, since my topic requires it, I will devote some attention to one of these hyphenated phrases only, the second one, i.e. “Greco-European”.
The French for hyphen is trait d’union, i.e. word for word something like “unifying stroke”. My claim is that this hyphen is not what the French phrase for “hyphen” suggests, but rather the contrary, i.e. the sign that something was torn off. It is like a scar left by a wound. Our culture was not born out of the self-satisfied consciousness of a union, of a peaceful and harmonious continuity with the ancient world. On the contrary, it arose from the painful impression of a break with this world. One can spot a feeling of inferiority and of nostalgy towards the lost paradise of Greece in as Italian Renaissance, still more in classical German literature, but signs of it can be found as early as Charles the Great’s attempt at founding a new Roman Empire in the Western part of Europe.
To be sure, this feeling was grounded on several assumptions that had hardly anything to do with reality. Let me quote two of them.
(1) First, this involved an idealized view of Antiquity. The ancient world was reduced to its highest level, i.e. to its political and cultural heroes and masterpieces, as if each and every person in the ancient world was a scholar and a saint. This distorted view of the ancient world was a direct consequence of the fragmentary way in which its heritage was transmitted to us, what was called the “literary shipwreck” of Antiquity. An amusing example of this stance is to be read in a work by Razi or Rhazes, a physician of 10th Century Persia. In a small treatise on morals, by the title of “Medicine of the mind”, he writes that the Greeks were wholly dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and even that they were not at all interested in sexuality. The Greeks a chaste people! This sounds funny, but this is easily understandable, since Razi could read in Arabic translations works by Galen and Aristotle only. He had not the slightest inkling of Aristophanes, of the Greek love novels, not to mention the obscene graffiti or vase-paintings.
(2) Second, this alleged break never was total. The break with Rome never was, for three reasons: (a) Rome was inside of the European space; (b) some languages of Europe, i.e. the romance languages stem from Vulgar Latin; (c) there remained some scattered shreds of Roman law, of Roman economy and technology.
The break with Greece was neater, however: in the first times of the Empire, the Roman elites were educated in Greek as well as in Latin. But after Boethius (executed in 524), the Western elites forgot Greek, and people who spoke it were in the other half of the Empire, say in Constantinople. After Charles the Great, who founded a Western Empire, native speakers of Greek were even in another Empire. The only exception was Ireland. It had not been invaded and had not to absorb newcomers. In some convents there, Greek kept being taught and learned.
Be that as it may, even if the break is for a large part due to a feeling, nay is a myth, this does not matter very much. Feelings and myths have a power of their own, and they can set people in motion as efficiently and even more efficiently than any cool description of past reality made by non-committed historians. Anyway, this break was felt as a wound, as a trauma that should be healed, as a gap that had to be bridged.
In order to do so, Europe did set to work. It studied ancient languages. Barring some exceptions like Scotus Eriugena in the 9th Century, this began in the 12th century. The wave swelled in Italy, earlier than the fall of Byzantium and the exile of some Greek scholars to Florence, Rome and some other towns in Italy. Today, the guild of the philologists and of the historians of Antiquity is heir to this study. But this did not affect the scholars only. Greek studies took the dimension of a social phenomenon. For centuries, the European elites were educated in German humanistische Gymnasia, in colleges held by the Jesuits or the Oratorians, in the English public schools, in French lycées, etc. There, they were trained to translate Latin and Greek authors, nay to write prose and poetry in those languages. They were selected according to their ability in so doing. This is weird and should be looked at with wonder. Let me show how bizarre this is thanks to a comparison.
In May 68, French students coined a word that was supposed to describe and at the same time to criticize the top university people, full professors surrounded by several assistants, in charge of research centres, etc. They call them “Mandarins”. This playful name has some efficiency as for polemics. Furthermore, the term is not devoid of some relevance as an element of sociological analysis. In France, the same way as in ancient, imperial China, the state elite of higher civil servants was recruited by a system of competitive examinations. In France as in China, the criterion was the ability to explain and comment upon literary texts. In France as in China, the program consisted in a canon of writings that were considered as “classical”. So far, so good.
Yet, if we take a closer look at the content of the canon, the parallel looks desperately lop-sided. It shirks a decisive difference: the Mandarins of the celestial empire studied Chinese classics, i.e. their own classics. European high-school pupils and students read the Greek classics, i.e. the classics of another culture.
This bears witness to what I called elsewhere the “eccentricity” of European culture. European culture has its reference-points outside of itself: strangely, of the two symbolic cities towards which Europe has been looking up for centuries, i.e. “Athens and Jerusalem”, none is located inside of the European space.
We possess a very telling example of this stance: the first Revolution in European history. I am alluding to the so-called Investiture Quarrel, and with it to the opposition between the Popes and the Emperors that began in the late 11th century, culminated in 1122 with the compromise of Worms and lasted for centuries. Some historians coined the phrase “papal revolution” to describe it. Modern times were a consequence of it. This movement got along with a rediscovery of Roman law that was in fact a creative re-creation of this law. Law students came from the whole European space to study in Bologna. There, they did not study their law, the customs that obtained among the different nations of medieval Europe, but another law. They collected, scrutinized, tried to reduce to a systematic order a great deal of law-books. Now, those compilations contained a law that was not enforced, that had not been enforced for centuries in their countries, to wit, Roman law. Roman law was originally a foreign law. It became European because it was appropriated by European lawyers.
By this token, not only in the field of law, but also in literature, philosophy, art, etc., Europe performed what I could call an inverted adoption. As a rule, parents choose the children they want to adopt. Here, the order was reversed: the latecomers chose their forebears. Europe chose its own ancestors. It sort of adopted the Greeks and the Romans. Such a process, as I already suggested, is not natural. It is even highly artificial. Our relationship to ancient culture is itself a cultural relationship. Thereby, culture is so to speak potentialized.
Why then should we study ancient languages and cultures? We should not study them in order better to realise that those who spoke those languages or created those cultures were like us, nay, in the last resort, were us. On the contrary, we should study them in order to understand a couple of very important things about our own culture: (1) First, to what huge extent the people of classical Antiquity were others. (2) Second, how deeply we succeeded in making of them our ancestors instead of the real ones, whom we ousted out of our memories.
As a consequence, I don’t object to our making a list of what we owe the Ancients. Such a list of our debts will be a pretty long one. It will begin, as far as languages are concerned, with the traces of Latin and Greek in our present-day vocabulary, a fact to which I alluded above. But the important thing is to remember that the bulk of those inherited cultural goods was not passively received, but conquered at the price of great efforts. Ancient culture is not a sap that flows in our veins without our taking notice of it. It is, to stick to the same metaphor, the result of a grafting, of our own grafting on the classical tree.
The Ancients are “others”, too. They are our others, the others that we chose for us. By this token, they enable us to know what an “other” is. For there are other “others” than the Greeks. Studying classical languages should not lead one to a smug self-centeredness. In any case, it never did that.
We have seen that the path of culture leads through the appropriation of what one is not. “Become what you are”, said Pindar, in a famous formula that was taken up by Nietzsche. Let me add a rider: become what you are by becoming what you are not, by becoming what you never were. Once one has learnt this lesson, one can extend this stance, even generalize it, and apply it beyond the boundaries of classical Antiquity.
As I told you at the beginning of this lecture, I shifted from Greek philosophy to Arabic philosophy in the course of my academic career. For a European scholar, this is quite a normal move. Shifting from an “other” to another “other”, from Greek and Hebrew to, say Arabic, Sanskrit or Chinese, was and is a common practice. This is what people who were far more learned than I am kept doing in former times, from the beginning of European cultural history to the present day. Thousands of Europeans set their feet on this track so that they deserved the glorious name of orientalists. As an example, we could take Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian in origin, a student of Islam, perhaps the greatest of all times, who died in 1921. His study of the languages of Islam furthered two competences: on the one hand his training in classical languages in a humanistic Gymnasium; on the other hand the knowledge of Hebrew he had acquired as a practicing Jew who could write for his Bar Mitswa, at the tender age of twelve, a short treatise on liturgical poetry — in the holy tongue, as a matter of course.
As a side-issue, let me point out that some people take “orientalism” as a boo-word. They want to make us believe that “orientalism” was an offspring of European military and commercial expansion overseas, i. e. of colonisation. As if orientalism looked down on colonized peoples and shared the pride of domination. This is not only false; this is the contrary of the truth. The interest for Oriental studies arose several centuries before colonisation, and even before the circumnavigation of Africa, let alone the discovery of the New World. It first found its model in the humble learning of languages that were felt as being the vehicle of a superior wisdom, i.e. classical and biblical languages.
As a conclusion, the Ancients can first enable us to know who we are, i. e. what we became. Furthermore, they can help us better to understand to what extent we too are “others”. The study of classical languages might be the best exercise in reflexive and self-critical thought. As Europe has to face the very question of its identity, classical studies may be an utterly actual pursuit.