“A History of the Island” by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa C. Hayden)

This is an odd novel-length parable, told as a centuries-long history about a fairytale island, often enmeshed in political strife, strange rivalries, occasional conspiracies, on-and-off-again civil wars, and, occasionally, threatened by its mainland enemies, such as France. The royal couple, Prince Parfeny and Princess Ksenia, whose commentary is interspersed within this history of the island, are three hundred and fifty years-old and have lived through every change in the island’s history, political and otherwise. Princess Ksenia remembered, “Agafon the Forward-Looking spoke reluctantly to the princes about the impending pestilence and he said nothing about their deaths. He did not like looking ahead. Strictly speaking, the very nickname “Forward-Looking” was not given to him entirely fairly. Agafon looked in all directions simultaneously…. He saw coming events with the same clarity as he saw events that had already arrived. Possibly even more clearly because the imperfections of the human memory had not distorted them. History, Agafon taught, tells much more about the present than the past.” The court historian relates, “In our land, nothing worthy of notice happened during all those years. Is that not a sign of the authorities’ wisdom? Happy are the times that do not enter the annals. Blessed is he whose rule is unmarked by historical events, for nearly all of them are born of blood and suffering.” Prince Parfeny concludes, “Our discovery seemed so beautiful to us that we had no doubt of its truthfulness since beauty and truth accompany one another.”

“The Custom of the Country” by Edith Wharton

This is Wharton’s masterful portrayal of the social-climbing gold-digger par-excellence, Undine Spragg. The aristocratic New York world of old money that she is, at first, so eager to enter is best described through the eyes of her first husband, Ralph Marvell. “Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries…. Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies…. Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live “like a gentleman”—that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting.”

Throughout Wharton’s novel, it seemed that being entranced by Undine’s charms was many a man’s undoing, including her own husband, Ralph Marvell’s. “It was a point of honour with him not to seem to disdain any of Undine’s amusements…. He told himself that there is always a Narcissus-element in youth, and that what Undine really enjoyed was the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration. With her quick perceptions and adaptabilities she would soon learn to care more about the quality of the reflecting surface…. She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted. She wanted to enjoy herself, and her conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity—the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security…. And with the sense of inevitableness there came a sudden wave of pity. Poor Undine! She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure…. That the reckoning between himself and Undine should be settled in dollars and cents seemed the last bitterest satire on his dreams: he felt himself miserably diminished by the smallness of what had filled his world.”

For all intents and purposes, Undine lived on a different plane than those with whom she inhabited her life. Her conceptions of reality simply did not always conform to theirs and life was often just a contest of wills. “It was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice…. She could never be with people who had all the things she envied without being hypnotized into the belief that she had only to put her hand out to obtain them, and all the unassuaged rancours and hungers of her early days in West End Avenue came back with increased acuity. She knew her wants so much better now, and was so much more worthy of the things she wanted!”

“Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy” by Leo Strauss

This is a short collection of essays that Strauss had been compiling when he passed away. Although published posthumously, most of these pieces had been previously published in other venues and Strauss had already selected the order for their presentation in this collection. As usual, these essays mostly deal with a deep reading of the pre-modern philosophers, often with an esoteric interpretation. Strauss begins by stating that “political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always. [It] presents the relatively most perfect solution of the riddles of life and the world.”

Looking at Plato’s “Apology of Socrates,” Strauss begins by discussing philosophy beyond politics and on how a man must live virtuously, in general. He makes the assertion that Socrates insisted that “one must not when suffering injustice do injustice in turn…. Inflicting evil on human beings, even if one has suffered evil from them, is unjust, for inflicting evil on human beings differs in nothing from acting unjustly…. The cleavage among men is no longer that between knowers and ignoramuses, or between the philosophers and the non-philosophers, i.e., between the few who hold and the many who do not hold that the unexamined life is not worth living, but that between those who hold that one may not requite evil with evil and those who hold that one may, or even ought to, do it.”

In Strauss’ essay “On the Euthydemus” he discusses Socrates’ views on wisdom. When talking to his friend and patron Kleinias, Strauss interprets Socrates as claiming, “in all cases wisdom makes human beings fortunate…. Wisdom is, humanly speaking, omnipotent…. The mere use of good things will not suffice for making a man happy; the use must be right use; while wrong use is bad, non-use is neither good nor bad; right use is brought about by knowledge…. No possession whatever is of any benefit if its use is not guided by prudence, wisdom, intelligence; a man possessing little but using it intelligently is more benefited than a man possessing much but using it without intelligence…. Wisdom—and of course not honor or glory—is not only the greatest good; it is the sole good; only through the presence of wisdom and the guidance by it are the other goods good…. Since our happiness depends altogether on our wisdom and if virtue can be acquired by learning, learning, striving for wisdom, philosophizing is the one thing needful.”

Finally, Strauss moves his discussion to political philosophy, specifically. He states that Socrates felt that “justice seems to be the only good, the only virtue that is beneficent (on the whole) even if not guided by intelligence, perhaps because the laws which the just man obeys supply the lack of intelligence in the man himself…. Justice in contradistinction to courage and moderation cannot be misused.” However, Strauss ends his essay “On the Euthydemus” by stating that Socrates might have been a better cheerleader than teacher. “Socrates’ effort to determine the science which makes human beings happy has ended in complete failure. He has confirmed by deed the view of some of his critics that he was most excellent in exhorting men to virtue but not able to guide men to it.” Strauss finishes with a tantalizing thought about majorities and the politics of democracy. He states, “According to Socrates, the greatest enemy of philosophy, the greatest sophist, is the political multitude, i.e. the enactor of the Athenian laws.” Given Socrates’ end, this seems apt, even if in tension with his previous thoughts on just laws.

Strauss’ essay, “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” deals further with the practicalities of politics. Strauss contends that Xenophon often puts words in different speakers mouths for effect and that the “character” of “Themoistogenes of Syracuse is a pseudonym for Xenophon of Athens”, himself. Strauss states that Xenophon reports the Athenian Theopompos as saying, “the only good things which they have are arms and virtue, but their virtue would not be of any avail without the arms.” The speaker, “Theopompos,” is making the point echoed by Aristotle, “virtue, and especially moral virtue, is in need of external equipment.” Especially in politics, it does not do to have the moral high ground if you cannot execute your virtue.

Elsewhere in "Xenophon’s Anabasis,” Strauss discusses the role and comportment proper to a gentleman, by way of Proxenos. He states that Proxnos “believed to acquire through his actions with Cyrus [the Persian usurper] a great name and great power and much money; but he was obviously concerned with acquiring those things only in just and noble ways. He was indeed able to rule gentlemen but he was unable to inspire the soldiers with awe and fear of himself…. Proxenos seems to be more attracted to the noble acquisition of fame, great power and great wealth anywhere on earth to than to his fatherland,” Greece, whom he betrays. Two points of interest here are that Proxenos, the gentleman, is far from patriotic to his country of birth, but views his allegiance to whatever cause would advance him, with honor. Secondly, Proxenos might have been a great leader of gentlemen, but not of a mob of soldiers. In politics, one must tailor one’s words and actions to the situation. There are no absolutes.

Later in this essay, Strauss describes the scene after Xenophon has taken effective control of the entire mercenary Greek army on Asia Minor. Strauss speaks of interactions between “barbarous men whom [the Greek soldiers] had met on their march, the most remote from the Greek laws, for they did in public what others would do only when they are alone.” There was the idea of the Laws as being above private virtue and discretion for the Greeks but not for barbarians.

Strauss spent much of his career teasing out the implications of natural law. In his essay, “On Natural Law,” he states “by natural law is meant a law which determines what is right and wrong and which has power or is valid by nature, inherently, hence everywhere and always.” However, he then continues, “the primary question concerns less natural law than natural right, i.e. what is by nature right or just: is all right conventional (of human origin) or is there some right which is natural (physei dikaion)?” Did rights and law come to man when he created a society by covenant or were there laws and rights even within a state of nature? Strauss begins with Plato. “While Plato cannot be said to have set forth a teaching of natural law, there can be no doubt that he opposed conventionalism; he asserts that there is a natural right, i.e. something which is by nature just. The naturally just or right is the “idea” of justice…. A man (or rather his soul) or a city is just if each of its parts does its work well…. Only the wise man or the philosopher can by truly just…. Natural right in Plato’s sense is in the first place the natural order of the virtues as the natural perfections of the human soul…. Such assigning requires that the men who know what is by nature good for each and all, the philosophers, be the absolute rulers and that absolute communism (communism regarding property, women and children) be established among those citizens who give the commonwealth its character…. This order is the political order according to nature, as distinguished from and opposed to the conventional order.”

Strauss next contrasts a few other philosophers’ views of natural law. In Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” he defines ““the law according to nature” as the unchangeable law common to all men.” In “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle writes “natural right is that right which has everywhere the same power and does not owe its validity to human enactment.” As far as politics, Aristotle believed, “natural right is that right which must be recognized by any political society if it is to last and which for this reason is everywhere in force. Natural right thus understood delineates the minimum conditions of political life…. Natural right in this sense is indifferent to the difference of regimes whereas positive right is relative to the regime.”

The Stoics were the first Greek philosophers to make natural law an explicit theme of their works. For them, “the natural or divine or eternal law is identified with God or the highest god (fire, aether, or air) or his reason…. The virtuous life as choiceworthy for its own sake comes to be understood as compliance with natural law.” For the Stoics, all study of philosophy was a study in moral virtue. Positive laws that contradict the natural laws were invalid and must not be obeyed.

Finally, Strauss compares the ancient Greek conception with the Christian teachings of Thomas Aquinas. “In the Christian version, Stoic corporealism (“materialism”) is abandoned…. [However,] natural law retains its status as rational…. Natural law is clearly distinguished from the eternal law—God Himself or the principle of His governance of all creatures—on the one hand, and the divine law, i.e. the positive law contained in the Bible, on the other. The eternal law is the ground of the natural law…. As a rational being man is by nature inclined toward acting according to reason; acting according to reason is acting virtuously; natural law prescribes therefore the acts of virtue.” Just like for the Stoics, Aquinas, in the “Summa Theologica,” states that “a human law which disagrees with natural law does not have the force of law.”

Another one of Strauss’ recurring themes in his writings was the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. In this collection’s essay, “Jerusalem and Athens,” he comes about the conflict from a slightly different angle than his previous works. “According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder.” Strauss also contrasts the two viewpoints according to Nietzsche. “The peculiarity of the Greeks is the full dedication of the individual to the contest of excellence, distinction, supremacy. The peculiarity of the Hebrews is the utmost honoring of father and mother.” Strauss takes a close look at Genesis. He concludes, “man was not denied knowledge; without knowledge he could not have known the tree of knowledge nor the woman nor the brutes; nor could he have understood the prohibition. Man was denied knowledge of good and evil, i.e., the knowledge sufficient for guiding himself, his life. While not being a child he was to live in child-like simplicity and obedience to God.” Strauss contrasts Socrates with the Prophets. “The perfectly just man, the man who is as just as is humanly possible, is according to Socrates the philosopher and according to the prophets the faithful servant of the Lord. The philosopher is the man who dedicates his life to the quest for knowledge of the good, of the idea of the good; what we would call moral virtue is only the condition or by-product of that quest. According to the prophets, however, there is no need for the quest for knowledge of the good: God “hath shewed thee, o man, what is good.”” Finally, there is the question of their audience. “The prophets as a rule address the people and sometimes even all the peoples, whereas Socrates as a rule addresses one man.”

Strauss also included his essay, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” in this collection. “For Nietzsche, as distinguished from the classics, politics belongs from the outset to a lower place than either philosophy or religion.” It is not a subset of philosophy, but below it. “Whereas according to Plato the pure mind grasps the truth, according to Nietzsche the impure mind, or a certain kind of impure mind, is the sole source of truth.” There is no natural law. “The world in itself, the “thing-in-itself,” “nature” is wholly chaotic and meaningless. Hence all meaning, all order originates in man, in man’s creative acts, in his will to power.” The world does not exist objectively, but must be interpreted. “The world of any concern to us is necessarily a fiction, for it is necessarily anthropocentric; man is necessarily in a manner the measure of all things.” Nietzsche contradicts Socrates about the nature, purpose, and goodness of knowledge. For Nietzsche, “knowledge cannot be, or cannot be good, for its own sake; it is justifiable only as self-knowledge: being oneself means being honest with oneself, going the way to one’s own ideal.” Nietzsche believed in different morals for different human beings. He despised “the morality stemming from timidity; that morality is the morality of the human herd, i.e. of the large majority of men.” He spoke of the “herd-instinct of obedience which is now almost universally innate and transmitted by inheritance.” Nietzsche denied that there is one true nature to man. “All values are human creations.” Passivity and amelioration will make man weak. “Suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness…. Hitherto suffering and inequality have been taken for granted, as “given,” as imposed on man. Henceforth, they must be willed.”

Strauss dives back into political philosophy proper with his essay, “Niccolo Machiavelli.” Strauss makes the case that Machiavelli’s ethics are a return to the ancients, to a pagan ethics. “That rediscovery which leads up to the demands that the virtue of the ancients be imitated by present-day men, runs counter to the present-day religion [Christianity]…. the virtues of the pagans are only resplendent vices.” For Machiavelli, Livy’s histories are his Bible. “Our religion has placed the highest good in humility, abjectness, and the disparagement of the human things, whereas the ancient religion has placed the highest good in greatness of mind, strength of body, and in all other things apt to make men most strong.” The Christian virtues might be fine for the individual, but not for politics and not for the ruler of men. “If one wishes that a sect or a republic live long, one must bring it back frequently to its beginning.” For Machiavelli, that beginning was ancient Rome. “Men were good at the beginning not because of innocence but because they were gripped by terror and fear.”

The final essay in this collection is Strauss’ introduction to a new edition of Hermann Cohen’s book, “Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.” This neatly essay brings together Strauss’ passions for religion, reason, esoteric writing, deep reading, and the Jewish traditions. In Cohen’s discussion on the fellowship of man, Strauss brings out the point that “for the prophets and the psalms it is poverty and not death and pain that constitutes the great suffering of man or the true enigma of human life…. Poverty becomes the prime object of compassion.” On prayer, Strauss states, “the soul and inwardness of the Law is prayer. Prayer gives life to all actions prescribed by the Law…. Prayer is the language of the correlation of man with God. As such it must be a dialogue while being a monologue…. If all other purposes of prayer could be questioned, its necessity for veracity, for purity of the soul cannot.” Finally, Strauss ends, “truthfulness requires knowledge, and our knowledge is imperfect. Therefore truthfulness must be accompanied by modesty, which is the virtue of skepticism…. He who is humble before God is modest toward men.”

“Stoner” by John Williams

This is a tragic novel that details the course of a man’s life. William Stoner grew up on a small farm, was the first in his family to attend college, and became a Professor of Literature at the University of Missouri. However, there is extreme melancholy that seems to follow Stoner as he progresses through each stage of his life. First, he comes to the realization that he wants to study literature and not agriculture at university, therefore, never returning to help his parents on the family farm. “He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love…. But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.” The plot weaves its way through life on the university campus during both World Wars, as well as the Great Depression. “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back.” Personally, Stoner is trapped in a strangely loveless marriage. “Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.” Stoner makes only two friends during the course of his life: fellow graduate students, one who dies at the front during the First World War, and another, who, surviving, returns to the same university to become an assistant dean. “While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.” The novel is a grand meditation on the nature of man and what makes life worthwhile. For Stoner, the world is literature and knowledge. “Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.” For him, life was also a war and one that he was gradually but perceptibly losing. He had a wife who did not love him, a daughter who grew more distant by the day, a best friend who died in his prime, a department chair who dumped upon him the worst classes every semester, and, most troubling of all, an internal emptiness that he could not escape. His old literature mentor had told Stoner, when he was deciding whether to enlist or stay on campus as a doctoral candidate, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history.”

“Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences” by Alex Mesoudi

Darwin posited that three factors were needed for successful biological evolution: variation, competition, and inheritance. Mesoudi makes the case that these same factors are necessary to effectively transmit traits culturally. However, “two societies living in the same environment can have entirely different behavioral practices,” especially the more limited their amount of inter-group contact. Cultural adaptation is favored over innate change in environments that are rapidly transforming because genes cannot adapt as quickly in the span of one biological generation. Cultural learning is also favored over individual learning because one does not need to bear all the costs of trial and error and one can benefit from piggybacking on new inventions and techniques not developed by oneself. Evolution, biological and cultural, however, is not a predetermined path that is ever progressing. “Humans are not at the top of the evolutionary ladder, because there is no ladder of which to be at the top. There is only local adaptation to local environments, which does not necessarily translate into global increases in fitness, and does not result in inevitable and entirely predictable evolutionary change along a prespecified course.”

Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to refer to a discreet unit of cultural inheritance or a cultural replicator, akin to a gene in biological evolution. “In culture, on the other hand, one can learn beliefs, ideas, skills, and so forth, not just from one’s biological parents (termed “vertical cultural transmission”) but also from other members of the parental generation (“oblique cultural transmission”) and from members of one’s own generation (“horizontal cultural transmission”)…. People might preferentially copy very prestigious models who have high social status or excel in a particular skill (prestige bias). Alternatively, they might preferentially copy models who are similar to them in dress, dialect, or appearance (similarity bias) or preferentially copy older models (age bias).”

Finally, when looking at a particular set of cultures “within-group diversity and between-group diversity should be inversely correlated.” One specific area where Mesoudi stresses cultural evolution is language. In fact, Darwin stated, “a struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand.” There is also an interplay back and forth between biological and cultural adaptation and evolution. “The social brain hypothesis holds that the large brains of primates, including and especially humans, evolved to deal not primarily with ecological problems such as finding food or using tools, but rather to solve social problems…. Social interactions give rise to a range of particularly challenging problems, such as coordinating actions with others, successfully communicating intentions, forming coalitions and alliances, deception, trying not to be deceived by others, and so on, which demand quite sophisticated cognitive abilities.” The more social interactions and bigger the social group of a particular species of primate the bigger the brain, with humans having the biggest brains of all. We are the paramount social animal and we have achieved our primacy through a cultural inheritance that was the work of human cooperation without any explicit human design.

“Symposium” by Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff)

This semi-drunken dinner party is perhaps Plato’s most famous dialogue. All the guests speak on the theme of love and Socrates gets the last word, at least before a fall-down drunk Alcibiades stumbles into the party. Socrates begins by relating the words of a woman, Diotima, who has taught him the true meaning of love. He relates that she said, “Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes [of being wise and ignorant]. And Love is one of them, because he is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is extremely beautiful. It follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such, is in between being wise and ignorant.” She continues speaking to Socrates, “I conclude that you thought Love was being loved, rather than being a lover. I think that’s why Love struck you as beautiful in every way: because it is what is really beautiful and graceful that deserves to be loved, and this is perfect and highly blessed; but being a lover takes a different form.” Love has two parts- the object being loved and the lover. One has attained its perfection and one is still striving.

Diotima also speaks of life having a continuity without necessarily a connectedness in a similar vein to Derrick Parfit. She states, “Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul, too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same.” We might seem to be the same person, but we are continually changing, while maintaining some continuity with our previous selves.

When Alcibiades makes his speech he talks about the man he wishes he was. He says, “All that matters is just what I most neglect…. The moment I leave [Socrates’] side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd…. I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should.” As Agnes Callard has stated, Alcibiades aspires to be a different man. His moral compass is in the process of changing. He is fighting to become a better man, but he cannot let go of his lust for fame and public glory.

Finally, Alcibiades praises the unique wisdom of Socrates. He states, “If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they’d strike you as totally ridiculous; they’re clothed in words as course as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He’s always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners; he’s always making the same tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you’d find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues [of Silenus], if you go behind their surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make any sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great—no, of the greatest—importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man.” True praise for the esoteric philosophy of Socrates.

“Waiting for God” by Simone Weil (translated by Emma Craufurd)

This book contains some of Weil’s thoughts on the nature of God, on the established Church, and on the City of God versus the City of Man. Often, she writes about the proper synthesis and separation between the material and spiritual realms. The book is organized as a collection of letters, followed by a few of her essays, which, in total, detail her conceptualization of the idea of God and how she relates her earthly being to this transcendent spirit. Her writing is deeply moving, personal, and profound.

The first part of this book is a collection of letters that Weil wrote to a Catholic priest and friend, Father Perrin, as she prepared to flee Nazi-occupied France. In them, she explains her conception of her love of God, as well as explaining the reasons she decided not to get baptized into the Church. She writes, “The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul.” You can feel her sense of struggle, but also her certainty. Furthermore, her relationship with Christianity is certainly not orthodox. “If it cannot be given me to deserve one day to share the Cross of Christ, at least may I share that of the good thief. Of all beings other than Christ of whom the Gospel tells us, the good thief is by far the one I most envy. To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far enviable privilege than to be at the right hand of glory.”

Weil also explains her conception of truth to her friend, Father Perrin. “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” Weil describes her struggle with the established Church, because of her love and commitments to the variety of earthly things. “Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves…. Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be. But it is not merely legitimate. So long as God does not give me the certainty that he is ordering me to do anything else, I think it is my duty.”

Weil also feels the presence of God here on earth. For her, there is no reason to hope for an afterlife. “Even if there were nothing more for us than life on earth, even if the instant of death were to bring us nothing new, the infinite super-abundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety.” She compares the love of Christianity with that of Stoicism. “At any rate if I really have the right to be called a Christian, I know from experience that the virtue of the Stoics and that of the Christians are one and the same virtue. I mean true Stoical virtue of course, which is before anything else love…. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within but from without.” In one of her essays she continues, “Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the world, for the country of here below which is the universe…. The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the universe. Nothing less than the universe is beautiful…. The universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of the wisdom of the Stoics. We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”

In another essay, Weil describes her idea of worldly justice. There is love contained in just punishment, as there can be justice in forgiveness. Both have their proper place and utility. “Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being and not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in him the faculty of free consent.” Sometimes we need punishment and sometimes we need mercy. She continues, “Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may sink as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away.”

Weil also describes the subjective experience of human reality as self-centered, but imaginary. “We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world…. Such consent is love.” Later, when discussing the Lord’s Prayer, she concludes, “We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal, selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into the petition, become a lever to tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift us right out of the prison of self.”

“If Not Critical” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of ten of Griffiths’ lectures on literature, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Griffiths’ lectures were famous for their erudition and wit. Before a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Cambridge students, most of whom were not even enrolled his class, would flock to his lectures for the pure entertainment of hearing him speak. Griffiths spoke often about the power of analogies and he, himself, used them freely. In one lecture, he spoke of Shakespeare’s penchant for coining new words, dressed in the style of ancient language, “Shakespeare engaged in this fabrication of the antique, this production of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’…. So in A Lover’s Complaint and Troilus and Cressida we find new words produced by affixation, particularly with prefixes such as ‘en-’ or ‘em-’…. These affixes all have in common a strongly latinate, and especially frenchified, timbre, and they produce when they appear en masse an air of faded courtliness, a sense of outdated refinement; they have an ‘indexicality’ rather like that which attaches to certain linguistic usages in old families, or families which like to pretend to antiquity, in the Southern United States.” Griffiths manages to poke fun at the seriousness of Shakespeare and get in a dig in at the pomposity of American southern gentility, all while expounding on Shakespeare’s lexical innovations. In another lecture dealing with the reign of Louis XIV, Griffiths offers the caution, “with analogies as with kings, it is important to know how far it is safe to go.” Perhaps he does not always take his own advice (or rather he considers himself at safe temporal distance), “The king and the official imagery which surrounded him are better understood as the seventeenth-century French equivalent of Eric Cartman’s repeated cry ‘RESPECT MY AUTHORITY’, which is not something that someone who unshakeably has authority needs to cry.”

Another of Griffiths’ lectures dissects Shakespeare’s Hamlet in great detail. Griffiths speaks of the distinction between history and poetry- “the boundary between the realm of history, contingent on facts, and that of poetry, of general rules. History tells us what in fact happened, poetry lays out the pattern according to which we could have seen the event coming…. This distinction between history which ‘merely’ records what happened in all its particularity and poetry, which gives, as it were, a template for how in general things happen, the pattern or rule of events, has counted in various ways for a lot in literary history.” Griffiths takes to task much of the modern literary criticism of Shakespeare. “A principal weakness of much comment on Shakespeare’s plays is that the commentators pay little attention to what a figure in the play is doing by uttering these words at this point; commentators are often preoccupied rather with such things as imagery, or with what they take to be the philosophical suggestiveness of what is said, as if it were a secondary consideration who says what when and where to whom, whereas it is not secondary, not at all, but rather the drama itself. Some commentators are so concerned with putting across how deep the plays are that they have no energy to spare to describe how they are deep, but they are deep because of, through, their surfaces.” For Griffiths, the whole mode of much modern criticism entirely misses the point. And the point is that Shakespeare wrote plays for the stage to be spoken by actors out loud. “It is as if the words had been said by nobody to nobody in an atmosphere which exercises no pressure on what is said, or as if they had been whispered by Shakespeare himself directly into our collective ear…. So many essays about Shakespeare’s plays make him sound as if he had been occupied in writing essays rather than plays. My claim is that Shakespeare’s material as an artist is interaction, interaction of two kinds—between the figures on the stage, and between the figures on stage and the audience. These interactions are what he composes, and to neglect them is to neglect an essential of his art.”

Griffiths often speaks of appreciating the technique involved in writing exquisite literature, while impressing on his audience, in a light tone, what the purpose of literature is actually for. In a lecture on Kafka he says, “Our fictions concern individuals…. Most of our fictions concern spatiotemporally unique beings who have proper names…. [However,] in our fictions, as Proust writes, ‘the individual is bathed in something more general than himself’. That is, our fictional personages, events, objects, are not sheerly irreducible particulars, but intimations of what Marx called species-being, sketches of an as yet unrealized humanity, representatives.” Griffiths makes the case that the study of literature is every bit as much a study of humanity as the social sciences. “Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness…. To observe the connective tissues of realistic story, its ‘he said’s and ‘then’s, ‘at just the moment when’s, is to pay attention to elemental constituents of the fictional worlds and the world outside fiction…. These speech-markers are structural conventions of storytelling, but just because they are conventions it does not follow that they are ‘mere conventions’. On the contrary, again. To the real artist no convention is ‘mere’; convention is rather just where artistry is likely to be most challenged, most at work.”

The final lecture of Griffiths for this collection is on the theme of “Godforsakenness”. He speaks of the Passion of Christ, his last words on the Cross, and of the duality of Christ, as both man and God. Griffiths’ lecture meanders into wondering upon possible ends for this world and on the omnipotence of God. He then ties this all back to the theme of tragedy as a literary form. “In the long run, either God becomes all in all or all becomes nothing, dust and ashes as this earth falls into the sun. Tragedy is quite indifferent to either of these conclusions, not being an art of the ‘long run’ but rather of the ‘from time to time’ realities of human experience and what we believe we can find through or within that experience…. God is essential to tragedy because He is its supreme audience, and it is a fundamental process of tragic art to enable its human audience for a time and from time to time to guess what it might be like to be such a God.”

Griffiths, in speaking of the joys of experiencing literature, supposes, “this is one source of the pleasure we take in works of art, whether comic or tragic: they offer us worlds we cannot change, before which we are without recourse, as we are at times helpless in our own world, but now our incapacities have become a spectacle for us rather than a dilemma or a source of the despair.” Sometimes it is best if we can laugh or cry at our impotence, whether real or imagined.

“The Ambassadors” by Henry James

James’ novel takes place in turn-of-the-century Paris. But the story is just as much about American industry. Strether is tasked with bringing the scion of an American manufacturing fortune, Chad Newsome, back from his extended sojourn in Europe to attend to business back at home. Strether has been led to believe that the completion of this task will result in nuptials between him and the wealthy widow, Chad’s mother. But Chad loves Paris. And has a woman, perhaps, in a complicated situation, perhaps. “‘I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!’ — Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.”

Strether had not sailed across the Atlantic prepared to be converted to the lifestyle of the man he was sent over to escort home. But converted by Paris, as much as Chad, he was. “Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile. ‘He’s not so good as you think!’ They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad was—quite in fact insisted on being—as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn’t but be as good from the moment he wasn’t as bad.”

From the American side of the Atlantic, the Newsome family was certain of a disreputable love interest of some kind or another that was holding Chad in Paris. Strether was to discover, to his initial chagrin, that even more than by Chad, he was being swayed by the personal charms of Madame de Vionnet. “The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of a supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour.”

After thoroughly enjoying his months-long visit of Paris, Strether concludes, “I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth.”

“Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England” by David DeLaura

This is an intellectual and spiritual biography of John Henry Newman, Mathew Arnold, and Walter Pater. Their lives were intertwined by their respective associations with Oxford, both the University and the Movement. While Newman left the Church of England for Rome, Arnold remained nominally Anglican, and Pater moved from years flirting with deism and atheism to the High Church in latter life. Despite these differences, the aesthetic and moral aspects of Christianity played a great role in the lives and works of all three men.

Owen Chadwick reminds us just how Oxford united these disparate individuals, “probably it is this element of feeling, the desire to use poetry as a vehicle of religious language, the sense of awe and mystery in religion, the profundity of reverence, the concern with the conscience not only by way of beauty, but by growth towards holiness, which marks the vague distinction between the old-fashioned high churchmen and the Oxford men.” Their religious differences also did not serve to distance these men from each other, but united them in their struggle for truth, as Newman expressed in one of his sermons, “controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven, Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other; but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.” This was not a battle between Rome and Westminster, or deism, or doubt, or even atheism, but each individual’s struggle with truth, revealed or not. 

Newman, as the elder statesman, spelled out in his Sunday sermons, which Arnold would have heard and Pater would have read at Oxford, his position on the ideal mind, “the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world… [a] habit of mind… of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” This habit of mind is not for the masses, however, but for a select few. Arnold (and Pater after him) shares in this evaluation, “a very few of mankind aspire after a life which is not the life after which the majority aspire, and to help them to which the vast majority seek the aid of religion… the ideal life- the summum bonum for a born thinker, for a philosopher like Parmenides, or Spinoza, or Hegel- is an eternal series of intellectual acts… this life treats all things, religion included, with entire freedom as subject-matter for thought, as elements in a vast movement of speculation. The few who live this life stand apart, and have an existence separate from the mass of mankind;… the region which they inhabit is a laboratory wherein are fashioned the new intellectual ideas which, from time to time, take their place in the world.” This is not your opium for the masses. It is all rather Straussian really: religion as different things for different people, the same canonical texts read individually and uniquely, for a higher purpose. This theme is repeated again and again by Newman, Arnold, and Pater. There is a supreme life for the select few: the remnant.

Pater, always ambivalent about doctrine, highlights the soundness of a religious character, “longing, a chastened temper, spiritual joy… have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import… [They have value] not because they are part of man’s duty or because God has commanded them, still less because they are a means of obtaining reward, but because like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a few over a dead world routine in which there is no lifting of the soul at all.” And it is this higher standing in the world which is of most import. That is why Arnold placed culture even above religion. Culture “is a moral orientation, involving will, imagination, faith… Culture may best be described as religion with the critical intellect super-added.” Religion was the means, but culture was the end. “All forms of religion are but approximations of the truth.” And as Newman writes in an epistle to Arnold, “it is that sympathy you have for what you do not believe, which so affects me about your future.”

But in this effort these men were also against reason as being the final arbiter. For them reason alone was not enough. Newman preached what was lacking, “reason does not, like faith, attend to what is at once so great and so simple. The difficulty about faith is, to attend to what is very simple and very important, but liable to be pushed by more showy or tempting matters out of sight. The marvel of faith is, that what is so simple should be so all-sufficing, so necessary, and so often neglected… [Knowledge] never healed a wounded heart, nor changed a sinful one.” Arnold, quoting Benjamin Jowett, is kinder to reason and knowledge, “the moral and intellectual are always dividing, yet they must be reunited, and in the highest conception of them are inseparable.”

The other great unifying aspect of the three men’s lives was the preeminence that they held for all things beautiful and sublime. It was a particularly Oxford aesthetic, what Arnold referred to as “the sweetness and light.” This came across in their love of poetry, as practitioner and as critic. Arnold described how poetry could rise above even religion, “but for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” But for him poetry was something not only sublime, but conservative and anti-materialistic. It was against the currents of the age, “poetry has been cultivated and cherished in our later times by the Cavaliers and Tories in a peculiar way, and looked coldly on by Puritans and their modern representatives… Poetry then is our mysticism.” For Arnold, poetry “refreshes, fortifies, elevates, quickens, solaces, relieves, and rejoices; and thus it satisfies man’s deepest needs, both moral and aesthetic, even in the absence of the metaphysical system that once seemed to buttress these emotions.” Pater would agree, even equating the best of scripture with poetic writing, “may not our ‘most cherished sacred writings’ once belief in them has gone, ‘exercise their highest influence as the most delicate amorous poetry in the world?’”

For unsurpassed aesthetic taste there was one place where men of the age looked- and these three were no exception- to Greece. Arnold stated that “the governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.” Newman, in his lecture on the Idea of a University, suggested that the ideal education “is still mainly governed by the ideas of men like Plato” and that all the best of culture was “passed from Greece to Rome to the feudal communities of Europe.” Newman, of course, had a sweet spot for the unifying aspects of Rome, “Jerusalem is the fountainhead of religious knowledge as Athens is of secular… The grace stored in Jerusalem, the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome… Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning.”

Pater would give more credit to the Greek forefathers. “Hellenism is not merely an element in our intellectual life; it is a constant tradition in it… [This] element of permanence, a standard of taste [in European art] is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition… [and] takes its rise in Greece at a definite historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek society.” For Pater, Greek culture in all its forms is the pinnacle to be strived for in modern aesthetics. In Apollo, Pater finds, “the concentration of mortal achievement, an ideal of human development,” while, in Dionysius, he finds, “the power of a massive vitality external to man” and “the promise of the continuity of life in nature.” As expressions of culture, Pater finds perfection in the medium of sculpture that captures “the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit” in its most “pure form.”

This Greek spirit is the essence of what Arnold refers to as “the sweetness and light.” It is a “keen desire for beauty” and “a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are.” Pater echoes Arnold in suggesting that for life itself, and not just in art, “not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end.” And to that end, “the service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as well, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a sharp and eager observation.” Arnold, saw things just a little differently, where “the model is Greek art and poetry”, “in which religion and poetry are one”; the ideal of human life is the aesthetic one of “beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection.”