Literature is, for many people, the instrument of madness, and for all it is an instrument of arrogance unless (a thing exceptionally rare) it happens to fall upon a good and well educated mind. This last mentioned author has written much about beasts and birds and fish. How many hairs a lion’s mane has, how many feathers are in the hawk’s tail, how many spirals the octopus wraps the shipwreck in; how the elephants have sex from behind and how they remain pregnant for two years, and how they are a teachable and vivacious animal approaching human intelligence and living almost two or even three centuries; how the phoenix is consumed in aromatic fire and is reborn after being burned; how the sea urchin reins in a prow driven by any force but can do nothing when taken out of the waves; how the hunter deceives the tiger with a mirror, how the Arimaspean spears a griffin, how whales deceive the sailor with their tails; how ugly is the child of a bear, how rare the child of a mule, and how the viper gives birth but once and unluckily at that; how moles are blind, how bees are deaf, and finally how the crocodile alone of all animals moves only its upper mandible.
Most of these things are false, which was clear enough when similar kinds of animals were brought to our part of the world. Or, if they were not false, at least unknown to the authors themselves, and either believed more readily or more readily invented on account of their author’s absence. Yet, for all of this, even if they were true, they have nothing to do with living a good life. For, I ask, what good will it do to know the natures of beasts, birds, fish, and serpents when we are either ignorant or contemptuous of human nature – for what purpose we are born, from where we come and where we are headed?
Sunt enim litere multis instrumenta dementie, cuntis fere superbie, nisi, quod rarum, in aliquam bonam et bene institutam animam inciderint. Multa ille igitur de beluis deque avibus ac piscibus: quot leo pilos in vertice, quot plumas accipiter in cauda, quot polipus spiris naufragum liget, ut aversi cocunt elephantes biennioque uterum tument, ut docile vivaxque animal et humano proximum ingenio et ad secundi tertiique finem seculi vivendo perveniens; ut phenix aromatico igne consumitur ustusque renascitur; ut echinus quovis actam impetu proram frenat, cum fluctibus erutus nil possit; ut venator speculo tigrem ludit, Arimaspus griphen ferro impetit, cete tergo nautam fallunt; ut informis urse partus, mule rarus, vipere unicus isque infelix, ut ceci talpe, surde apes, ut postremo superiorem mandibulam omnium solus animantium cocodrillus movet. Que quidem vel magna ex parte falsa sunt — quod in multis horum similibus, ubi in nostrum orbem delata sunt, patuit — vel certe ipsis auctoribus incomperta, sed propter absentiam vel credita promptius vel ficta licentius; que denique, quamvis vera essent, nichil penitus ad beatam vitam. Nam quid, oro, naturas beluarum et volucrum et piscium et serpentum nosse profuerit, et naturam hominum, ad quod nati sumus, unde et quo pergimus, vel nescire vel spernere?
“Charles Walker fiddled for a moment with the sheaf of papers on the desk before him and allowed the remoteness to creep back into his face. He tapped the forefinger of his right hand on his manuscript and looked toward the corner of the room away from where Stoner and Katherine Driscoll sat, as if he were waiting for something. Then, glancing every now and then at the sheaf of papers on the desk, he began.
‘Confronted as we are by the mystery of literature, and by its inenarrable power, we are behooved to discover the source of the power and mystery. And yet, finally, what can avail? The work of literature throws before us a profound veil which we cannot plumb. And we are but votaries before it, helpless in its sway. Who would have the temerity to lift that veil aside, to discover the undiscoverable, to reach the unreachable? The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery.’
His voice rose and fell, his right hand went out with its fingers curled supplicatingly upward, and his body swayed to the rhythm of his words; his eyes rolled slightly upward, as if he were making an invocation. There was something grotesquely familiar in what he said and did. And suddenly Stoner knew what it was. This was Hollis Lomax—or, rather, a broad caricature of him, which came unsuspected from the caricaturer, a gesture not of contempt or dislike, but of respect and love.
Walker’s voice dropped to a conversational level, and he addressed the back wall of the room in a tone that was calm and equable with reason. ‘Recently we have heard a paper that, to the mind of academe, must be accounted most excellent. These remarks that follow are remarks that are not personal. I wish to exemplify a point. We have heard, in this paper, an account that purports to be an explanation of the mystery and soaring lyricism of Shakespeare’s art. Well, I say to you’—and he thrust a forefinger at his audience as if he would impale them— ‘I say to you, it is not true.’ He leaned back in his chair and consulted the papers on the desk. ‘We are asked to believe that one Donatus—an obscure Roman grammarian of the fourth century A.D.— we are asked to believe that such a man, a pedant, had sufficient power to determine the work of one of the greatest geniuses in all of the history of art. May we not suspect, on the face of it, such a theory? Must we not suspect it?’
Anger, simple and dull, rose within Stoner, overwhelming the complexity of feeling he had had at the beginning of the paper. His immediate impulse was to rise, to cut short the farce that was developing; he knew that if he did not stop Walker at once he would have to let him go on for as long as he wanted to talk. His head turned slightly so that he could see Katherine Driscoll’s face; it was serene and without any expression, save one of polite and detached interest; the dark eyes regarded Walker with an unconcern that was like boredom. Covertly, Stoner looked at her for several moments; he found himself wondering what she was feeling and what she wished him to do. When he finally shifted his gaze away from her he had to realize that his decision was made. He had waited too long to interrupt, and Walker was rushing impetuously through what he had to say.
‘ … the monumental edifice that is Renaissance literature, that edifice which is the cornerstone of the great poetry of the nineteenth century. The question of proof, endemic to the dull course of scholarship as distinguished from criticism, is also sadly at lack. What proof is offered that Shakespeare even read this obscure Roman grammarian? We must remember it was Ben Jonson’—he hesitated for a brief moment—’it was Ben Jonson himself, Shakespeare’s friend and contemporary, who said he had little Latin and less Greek. And certainly Jonson, who idolized Shakespeare this side of idolatry, did not impute to his great friend any lack. On the contrary, he wished to suggest, as do I, that the soaring lyricism of Shakespeare was not attributable to the burning of the midnight oil, but to a genius natural and supreme to rule and mundane law. Unlike lesser poets, Shakespeare was not born to blush unseen and waste his sweetness on the desert air; partaking of that mysterious source to whence all poets go for their sustenance, what need had the immortal bard of such stultifying rules as are to be found in a mere grammar? What would Donatus be to him, even if he had read him? Genius, unique and a law unto itself, needs not the support of such a ‘tradition’ as has been described to us, whether it be generically Latin or Donatan or whatever. Genius, soaring and free, must …’
After he became used to his anger Stoner found a reluctant and perverse admiration stealing over him. However florid and imprecise, the man’s powers of rhetoric and invention were dismayingly impressive; and however grotesque, his presence was real. There was something cold and calculating and watchful in his eyes, something needlessly reckless and yet desperately cautious. Stoner became aware that he was in the presence of a bluff so colossal and bold that he had no ready means of dealing with it.”
WITH A THICK MINERVA. WITH A FAT MINERVA. WITH A THICKER MUSE.
Minerva, according to the stories of poets, presides over arts and minds. From this came the phrase: Minerva unwilling. Beyond that, there was also the phrase with a fat or with a thick Minerva, which is indeed sometimes granted the solemn honor of being treated as a proverb. Columella, in the first chapter of his twelfth book of On Rural Matters, writes,
In this study of the country, however, scrupulosity of that sort is not examined, but as it is said, as long as he has a fat Minerva, a useful presage of a future storm will fall to the overseer.
Similarly, in the preface of the first book:
For agricultural matters can be administered neither by the subtlest nor on the other hand, as they say, by a fat Minerva.
And again, he also writes in the tenth book:
Nor is the subtlety of Hipparchus necessary to what they call the more fertile letters of rustic people.
That is said to occur with a fatter Minerva which occurs with less order, and with more simplicity, as if with less learning, and not with refined or exceptionally exacting care. Thus, when that Priapus, asks with naked words, though he could have sought it more urbanely through verbal convolutions, he says, ‘My Minerva is thick.’ And Horace, describing a philosopher instructed not in those precise reasonings and subtleties of the Stoics, but as if, without any art, expressing his philosophy according to his custom, and not so much learned as simple and sincere, says,
A rustic, irregularly wise and with a thick Minerva.
Aulus Gellius, in Attic Nights 14.1, writes,
Nevertheless, it was his opinion that in no way could that be comprehended and understood by however brilliant a human mind in such a brief and exiguous space of life, but that some few things were subject to mere conjecture and, if I may use his phrase, with a παχύτερον,
Manuth, Volker. “Minerva in Her Study” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed.
1.37
CRASSA MINERVA. PINGVI MINERVA. CRASSIORE MVSA
Minerua iuxta poetarum fabulas artibus atque ingeniis praesidet. Vnde et illud fluxit: Inuita Minerua. Praeterea illud Pingui seu crassa Minerua, quod quidem iam olim prouerbii vice celebratur. Columella libro De re
rustica duodecimo, capite primo.
In hac autem, inquit, ruris disciplina non consideratur eiusmodi scrupulositas, sed quod dicitur, pingui Minerua, quantumuis vtile continget villico tempestatis futurae praesagium.
Idem in primi libri praefatione:
Potest enim nec subtilissima nec rursum, quod aiunt, pingui Minerua res agrestis administrari.
Idem libro decimo:
Nec tamen Hipparci subtilitas pinguioribus, vt aiunt, rusticorum literis necessaria est.
Dicitur pinguiore Minerua fieri, quod inconditius simpliciusque quasique indoctius fit, non autem exquisita arte nec exactissima cura. Vnde et Priapus ille, cum rem obscoenam, quam poterat vrbanius per inuolucra verborum petere, nudis verbis rogat, Crassa, inquit, Minerua mea est. Et Horatius philosophum describens non exactis illis Stoicorum rationibus atque argutiis instructum, sed veluti citra artem philosophiam moribus exprimentem neque tam disertum quam simplicem ac syncerum,
Nequaquam tamen id censebat in tam breui exiguoque vitae spatio, quantouis hominis ingenio comprehendi posse et percipi, sed coniectari pauca quaedam et, vt verbo ipsius vtar, παχύτερον, id est crassius et pingui Minerua.
[1] Erasmus is stretching the application of this excerpt.
As we recently related, this phrase seems to pertain equally to the reciprocation of both duty and of injury, but it should refer even more to the recompense for some favor, because Hesiod says:
Αὐτῷ τῷ μέτρῳ, καὶ λώϊον, αἴ κε δύνηαι,
that is, Either in the same proportion, or even better, if it is possible. With this phrase, he teaches that some duty is to be repaid either in the same measure or in an even greater degree, if the opportunity allows, and that in this respect especially we should imitate the fertile fields, which customarily return the seed deposited in them with much interest.
A passage from Lucian’s Imagines is cited in turn:
Αὐτῷ μέτρῳ φασὶ <ἢ> και λώϊον,
that is, In the same proportion, as they say, or better. Cicero, in his thirteenth book of Letters to Atticus, writes:
‘I was preparing myself for that which he had send me so that αὐτῷ τῷ μέτρω καὶ λώϊον [in the same proportion or better], if only I could. For Hesiod even adds this phrase, αἴ κε δύνηαι [if only you are able].
He was not weighed down by this adage, just like our instructor Christ in the Gospel, when he says that some day, with whatever proportion we have measured out to others, it will be with that same proportion that others measure out to us. He speaks thus in Matthew:
that is, In whatever judgment you judge, in that you will be judged, and in whatever proportion you measure out to others, in that proportion they will measure out to you.
I 36 EADEM MENSVRA
Quod modo retulimus, videtur pariter et ad officii et ad iniuriae retaliationem pertinere, verum ad beneficii pensationem magis referendum, quod ait Hesiodus:
Αὐτῷ τῷ μέτρῳ, καὶ λώϊον, αἴ κε δύνηαι,
id est
Aut mensura eadem, aut melius quoque, si qua facultas.
Quo docet officium remetiendum esse eadem mensura aut etiam copiosiore, si suppetat facultas, prorsumque hac parte imitandos esse foecundos agros, qui sementem depositam multo cum foenore reddere consueuerunt.
Citatur a Luciano prouerbii vice in Imaginibus:
Αὐτῷ μέτρῳ φασὶ <ἢ> και λώϊον,
id est Eadem mensura, quod aiunt, aut melius. M. Tullius Epistolarum ad Atticum libro decimotertio:
Ego autem me parabam ad id, quod ille mihi misisset, vt αὐτῷ τῷ μέτρω καὶ λώϊον, si modo potuissem. Nam hoc etiam Hesiodus asscribit, αἴ κε δύνηαι.
Hoc adagio non grauatus est vti praeceptor noster Christus in Euangelio, cum ait futurum, vt qua mensura fuerimus aliis emensi, eadem nobis alii remetiantur. Sic enim loquitur apud Matthaeum:
“Tyndarus, one of the captives in the play of that name by Plautus, was caught red-handed in the middle of his scheming. Having no device by which he could escape, he said
Now I am utterly destroyed. Now I stand between the altar and the knife, and I don’t know what to do.
Apuleius, in the eleventh book of his Golden Ass, writes:
At a time when the hardness of poverty was interfering with my life, I was – as the ancient proverb has it – being put to torture between the altar and the knife .
Apuleius, however, explains the saying allegorically as referring to the priesthood to which he was about to be initiated, and the poverty which was harder than a rock, on account which no resources were at hand. It is clear that this has been taken from the earliest ceremonies of striking up a treaty, in which the Fetial would strike a pig while pronouncing these words: ‘whoever breaks this treaty first, let Jupiter smite him just as I smite this pig with this rock.’ But though the proverb has flowed this way and that, it is clear enough that it was usually applied to those who, in their perplexity, are driven to the most extreme danger.”
Inter sacrum et saxum.xv
Tyndarus apud Plautum, alter e captivis, cum jam proditis dolis esset deprehensus nec haberet, quanam arte possit elabi,
Nunc ego, inquit, omnino occidi.
Nunc ego inter saxum sacrumque sto, nec quid faciam scio.
Apuleius Asini sui libro undecimo:
Plurimum ergo duritia paupertatis intercedente, quod ait vetus proverbium, inter sacrum et saxum positus cruciabar.
Explicat autem Apuleius allegoriam adagii videlicet alludens ad sacerdotium, cui erat initiandus, et paupertatem saxo duriorem, per quo non suppetebant sumptus. Sumptum apparet ex priscis foederis feriendi ceremoniis, in quibus fecialis porcum saxo feriebat haec interim pronuntians : Qui prior populus foedus rumpet, Jupiter eum feriat, quemadmodum ego porcum hoc lapide ferio. Sed undecumque fluxit adagium, satis liquet dici solitum in eos, qui perplexi ad extremum periculum rediguntur.
Over the past few years we have seen a return in public discourse to a question of “the canon”. To be honest, calling this a return is a bit dishonest because the issue has been central to discussions about public and university education, the rise and fall of the humanities, and the problematic (re)-construction of “western civilization” since the culture wars of the 1980s. Each iteration is a reactive reassertion in response to justified pressure to question the canon, to open it up, to break it down, and to make space for the majority of people some canons exclude.
One of the most frustrating things about this conversation is that reactions to disassembling or even questioning the canon are basically recycled spasms with different words. Today we hear panic about “cancel culture” and attacks on Aristotle or Homer. Such complaints present the canon as part history, part DNA, but almost always something which unites and forms us. Earlier conversations (e.g. the first period of Bloom) at least debated what belonged in this canon; the recent commentariat is mostly just enraged at the hubris of women and BIPOC students and scholars daring to ask serious questions instead of just imitating and emulating white scholars of old.
This post is already another tired rehearsal, but here’s where we can still do some work. Our discussions rarely ever follow some of the basic tenets of this so-called canon and start with definitions. What is a canon? How long have we had the canon.
In ancient Greek a kanôn is an instrument of measurement. It seems to have non-Greek origins.
As fans of Robert Beekes will undoubtedly report, he often says that unclear roots are non-Greek in origin. The Mycenaean reflex demonstrates that the word—and perhaps the concept—was available in Greece long before the Classical period, so there’s an extent to which the ultimate etymological origins really don’t matter.
From the Archaic period on, we find the kanôn as a tool for measuring, a standard for building, and then, following the broader cultural discourse around the cognitive metaphor of crooked and straight, symbolic uses for right/just behavior and other kinds of rectitude. A clear and potentially ‘canonized version of this appears in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a 29-1113b):
“The good person judges everything rightly, both how things seem and are in truth. For in each thing in particular there are noble and pleasing aspects and a good person differs most in being able to observe what is true for each thing, as if they are a kanôn and measure of these things. It seems that most people are deceived by pleasure. For even though it is not good, it seems to be so and they choose what is pleasing as good and they avoid what causes pain as an evil.”
Here a philosophically informed person demonstrates the intelligence and wisdom—what some today might rephrase as taste or good sense—to judge a thing for its worth and to guide their behavior based on this. Of course, one might make the mistake of imagining that different folks might have different takes on what is pleasing and good. Aristotle addresses this elsewhere (On the Soul 411a):
“If the soul must be made out of the elements, it doesn’t need to be from all of them! It is enough for only one pair of opposites to judge itself and its counterpart. Thus we understand the straight and the crooked by the same method: the kanon is the test for them both—but neither the crooked nor the straight provides its own proof. Some might think that the soul is mixed up in everything, which is perhaps why Thales believed that everything was full of gods.”
Here, he uses kanôn as a metaphor. As any amateur carpenter knows, just because something looks straight or level, does not mean that it is. This passage seems to imply that our soul or mind has the ability to judge things outside of it. But Aristotle makes how these kinds of judgments might work more interesting in a different passage (Nicomachean Ethics 1138a26-35):
“This is the nature of equity itself: it is a correction of the law where it is deficient because it is too general. This is the reason that not all things exist according to law: there are some cases in which it is impossible to establish a law so that we need some kind of vote. For the kanôn of the undefined can only be undefined itself. This is how it is with the lead kanôn used by builders in Lesbos. Just as that kanôn does not stay the same but is reshaped to the curve of a stone, so too a vote/ordinance is made to fit the affairs at hand. This makes it clear what equitable is, that it is just, and that it is better than certain kinds of justice.”
In a passage one could argue is potentially revolutionary, Aristotle notes the slippage between descriptive measures and prescriptive measures and that standards of judgment will need to be changed for different circumstances, especially in search of what is equitable.
During the Roman imperial period, Dio Chrystosom calls law “a straight-edge [kanôn] for affairs, against which we must each align our own manner. Otherwise, we will be crooked and wrong.” (Ἔστι δὲ ὁ νόμος τοῦ βίου μὲν ἡγεμών, τῶν πόλεων δὲ ἐπιστάτης κοινός, τῶν δὲ πραγμάτων κανὼν δίκαιος, πρὸς ὃν ἕκαστον ἀπευθύνειν δεῖ τὸν αὑτοῦ τρόπον· εἰ δὲ μή, σκολιὸς ἔσται καὶ πονηρός, Discourse 75: On Law). Longinus echoes a similar use when he quotes Demosthenes’ On the Crown as complaining that those who betrayed their countries to Philip and then Alexander transgressed “the boundaries and measures [kanones] of all that the Greeks used to hold as good” (, ἃ τοῖς πρότερον Ἕλλησιν ὅροι τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἦσαν καὶ κανόνες, ἀνατετροφότες, Longinus, On the Sublime 1 32, quoting De Corona 96).
The idea of the kanôn as a thing we measure ourselves against overlaps with the philosophical notion of a kanôn as presenting rudimentary basics necessary for a discipline: Epicurus is said to have composed a Kanôn where he “says that our perceptions, preconceptions and feelings provide the criteria for truth. So, Epicureans also make perceptions of imagined ideas function in the same way” (ἐν τοίνυν τῷ Κανόνι λέγων ἐστὶν ὁ Ἐπίκουρος κριτήρια τῆς ἀληθείας εἶναι τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ προλήψεις καὶ τὰ πάθη, οἱ δ᾿ Ἐπικούρειοι καὶ τὰς φανταστικὰς ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας, Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus 30). Such definitions are questioned by Sextus Empiricus as the “Kanon of the verifiable truth” (κανόνος τῆς κατ᾿ ἀλήθειαν τῶν πραγμάτων ὑπάρξεως,) which underlies the positions of Dogmatists and the subtraction of would undermine their belief system (Against the Logicians 1 27).
In philosophy, canonical principles of a discipline can also be extended to principles of canonical behavior, satirized by Lucian (Hermotimus 76):
“If you ever met the kind of Stoic who is at the peak, that kind who neither feels pain nor is attracted by pleasure and never feels anger, but is stronger than envy, looks down on wealth and is completely happy, we need some straight-edge and square for a life of virtue from this sort of person. If this stoic is imperfect in even the smallest way, even though possessing more of everything else, well then they’re not yet happy.”
The applications of canonical standards move easily from description to prescription and are not merely philosophical and ethical, but they also move into the aesthetic. Do just a little searching and you will find reference to thekanôn of Polyclitus, a description about the “proper” proportions of a human body described by Lucian (The Dance, 75)
“I am planning to show the body which is aligned with the kanon of Polycltius. Let it be neither too tall and long now short and dwarfish in shape, but a precisely correct proportion, not being fat, which makes the dance unbelievable, or too thin, which would be skeletal or corpse-like.”
A tool for measuring, metaphorically or literally, can function to describe the qualities of a thing but can also prescribe the boundaries of a thing itself. A measuring tape can be used to find the length of a thing but a measuring rod can also be used to indicate that something fails to adhere to some externally imposed model. In the example of Polyclitus’ kanôn the ‘ideal’ body is used to mark other bodies as deformed. In the Greek tradition of Aristotle we could say that the male body functions as a kanôn against which the female body is judged monstrous or sub-standard. In the same way, an aesthetic and intellectual canon demarcates space around it outside of which other forms, contents, and peoples are found lacking.
An additional problem comes from the dangers of exemplification: learning from representative models must be done with care. If they are haphazardly offered as “great” and admirable, audiences can be led astray. Plutarch notes this in his How to Study Poetry (25e):
“And so, the young should understand when we urge them to read poems not to have such high beliefs about them and their impressive names because they believe that they are wise and just men, the best kinds and models [kanones] of virtue and rightness.”
Oftentimes, the process of canonization tends to level with an upgrade: people who do big things (in fiction or real life) are never simply one thing or another.
Implicit then in the metaphorical use of the canon is the meaning we have in the modern world, but before we get to these meanings, it is worth considering some more recent history. Following the rise of Christianity, canon came to mean that which was authorized as legitimate by the Church (which Biblical books were divinely inspired; and these are some of the first definitions in the OED) and, eventually, laws and judgments issues by Ecclesiastical authorities. Our first use of the term canon to denote a group of authors seems to be by David Ruhnken in 1768 (Historia Critica Oratorum Graecorum see Montanari in Brill’s New Pauly, s.v. Canon and Easterling in the OCD3 and this blogpost).
Ruhnken uses the term to refer to the groups of lyric poets, orators, and tragedians who were handed down from antiquity. His use seems to have been prescriptive: if we follow his career in Sandys or Rudolph Pfeiffer, he seemed to have been dedicated to working with texts that were not in these groups. As Pat Easterling notes, however, the prescriptive meaning was long latent in scholarly circles: Photios uses it to denote the earlier model on which a later author based his work. As an authoritative, evenly divinely inspired model, the use of canon which emerges in the 19th century probably has more to do with Biblical studies than Aristotelian ethics.
How does any of this matter today? If you search google books or other sources there are very few uses of the term Canon to refer to a collection of ‘Western Great Books’ prior to the 1980s. So let’s be clear about what a canon is and what it does in this post-Biblical tradition: it provides a model with the hope of directing behavior, including ethics and aesthetics. This canon works by excluding one thing from another, by de-authorizing some traditions and burying them, and by rendering the selected object as sacred.
This, I suspect, is central to Harold Bloom’s use of the word canon in 1994’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages which functions almost entirely to exclude certain kinds of things from the halls of good taste (most often meaning any works not by European men). Regular mentions of the Western Canon at All prior to the culture wars of the 1980s/90s are further evidence of a very reactionary stance: in 1870, the Western Canon is used to refer to the imposition of the selection of New Testament Books on African Bishops. And it seems that century’s use of the phrase focused on the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church to the exclusion of others. (Although, to be honest, I would really prefer a church historian to confirm some of these assertions.)
If we can, we need to think about the other phrases people seem to use to mean something similar: in the early 20th century there was an effort to great curricula based on Great Books motivated by the overall concern that education had become too specialized and that students were missing out on the broader interdisciplinary tradition of the liberal arts and “western civilization”.
Both this movement and the subsequent culture wars of the humanities in the 1980s are reactions to higher education being opened up to new audiences: the middle classes of growing universities in the west before and after WW2 and the increasingly class, gender, and race diverse classrooms of the 1960s-1980s. Great books, Western Civilization, and The Western Canon are reactive creations, attempts to impose strict measures and rules on a world in flux.
The problem with the prescriptive canon is it obscures, I think, the aesthetic rule, responsibility of judgment, and any acknowledgment that both aesthetics and judgment are subject to experience and context.
The bigger problem is that our public discussions about canons do not acknowledge the religious and authoritative history of the term and that earlier debates about the canon—even the attempt to establish a singular one—are intentional attempts to create an authoritative culture that privileges a 19th century, Eurocentric, white supremacist, colonialist world view
A few weeks ago, I started asking myself how a canon is like a statue. Both are purportedly erected to honor something which has been lost. But both are much more about the present than they are about the past: they are raised to project a certain view of the world. And while some memorials of this kind are certainly aspirational, even these can be constrictive: those who don’t fit into that view are excluded. The implicit and explicit aesthetic and normative rules of a canon of literature of art has the same impact on expression, belief, and belonging.
A canon is unlike a statue because it cannot be brought down easily and parts of it are so thoroughly knit into our culture that it would be impossible. But we can talk about what it is, we can acknowledge the disproportionate impact canons can have, and we can broaden them understanding, following Aristotle, that to achieve equity, sometimes you need to change the measures you use.
“By ‘erudition,’ I do not mean that common, confused sort of learning, which theologians now profess, but a real and liberal understanding, which joins experience in literature with knowledge of the world. This is the sort of learning which we find in Lactantius, Augustine, and Jerome – to be sure, the best theologians, and the men of the highest literary attainment. But now, we should be ashamed at how little the theologians of today know of literature.”
“Angel Appearing to St. Jerome” by Guido Reni
Eruditionem autem intelligo non vulgarem istam et perturbatam, quali utuntur ii qui nunc theologiam profitentur, sed legitimam illam et ingenuam, quae litterarum peritiam cum rerum scientia coniungit; qualis in Lactantio Firmiano, qualis in Aurelio Augustino, qualis in Hieronymo fuit, summis profecto theologis ac perfectis in litteris viris. Nunc vero, qui eam scientiam profitentur, pudendum est quam parum persciant litterarum.
Francesco Petrarch sends greetings to his own Cicero
It was with the utmost avidity that I read through your letters, ‘sought for long and hard’, and found where I had hardly suspected to find them. I heard you saying many things, deploring many things, altering many things, Marcus Cicero, and I who had long ago known what a teacher you had been to others now at last recognized what you were to yourself. In turn, hear this – it’s not advice, but a lament, stemming from sincere affection. Wherever you are, hear what one of your posterity, one who loves your name most dearly, poured forth not without tears.
O, you who were always ill at ease and anxious, or – in your own words – ‘o rash and calamitous old man’, what did you want from so many contests and quarrels which were to do you no good? Where did you leave behind the leisure so suited to your age, your profession, and your fortune? What false splendor of glory wrapped you, an old man, up in the wars of the young and snatched you off, tossed about through all kinds of misfortunes, to a death unbecoming a philosopher?
Alas! So unmindful of your brother’s counsel and your own salutary precepts, bearing a lantern in the shadows like a nighttime wanderer, you showed your persecutors the footpath on which you miserably fell. I omit Dionysius, I omit your brother and grandson, I even omit Dolabella himself if I may, whom you now bear to the sky with your praise and now lacerate with your sudden curses; perhaps even these things were tolerable. I will even skip over Julius Caesar, whose well-known clemency was itself a harbor for your harassers. I even remain silent of Pompey the Great, with whom you seemed to be able to engage in some little bit of familiarity. It must have been your love of the republic, which you used to say had collapsed to its foundations. Because if pure faith, if liberty drew you on, why were you on such chummy terms with Augustus? What will you say to your Brutus? ‘If indeed’, he says, ‘Octavius meets your approval, you will not seem to have fled a master but to have sought a more friendly lord.’ This remained, and this was the last horror, unlucky Cicero, that you would badmouth this man who was so praised, and who, while he may not have done you ill, certainly did not stand in the way of those who did you ill. I mourn your fate, my friend, and I regret and lament your errors, and now with that same Brutus, ‘I attribute nothing to these arts, in which I know that you had been instructed.’ Indeed, what good does it do to teach others, or what good is it to go around talking all the time about virtue in the most ornate speeches, if at that same time you don’t even hear yourself? Ah, how much better it would have been especially for a philosopher to have grown old in a quiet country home, ‘thinking’, as you yourself write in some place, ‘about that eternal life, and not this little one which we have here.’ How much better to have had no fasces, not to have stood open-mouthed at triumphs, not to have had any Catilines to puff your mind up. But all of this is in vain. Farewell forever, my Cicero.
[1] Franciscus Ciceroni suo salutem. Epystolas tuas “diu multumque perquisitas” atque ubi minime rebar inventas, avidissime perlegi. Audivi multa te dicentem, multa deplorantem, multa variantem, Marce Tulli, et qui iampridem qualis preceptor aliis fuisses noveram, nunc tandem quis tu tibi esses agnovi. Unum hoc vicissim a vera caritate profectum non iam consilium sed lamentum audi, ubicunque es, quod unus posterorum, tui nominis amantissimus, non sine lacrimis fundit. [2] O inquiete semper atque anxie, vel ut verba tua recognoscas, “o preceps et calamitose senex”, quid tibi tot contentionibus et prorsum nichil profuturis simultatibus voluisti? Ubi et etati et professioni et fortune tue conveniens otium reliquisti? Quis te falsus glorie splendor senem adolescentium bellis implicuit et per omnes iactatum casus ad indignam philosopho mortem rapuit?
[3] Heu et fraterni consilii immemor et tuorum tot salubrium preceptorum, ceu nocturnus viator lumen in tenebris gestans, ostendisti secuturis callem, in quo ipse satis miserabiliter lapsus es. Omitto Dyonisium, [4] omitto fratrem tuum ac nepotem, omitto, si placet, ipsum etiam Dolabellam, quos nunc laudibus ad celum effers, nunc repentinis malidictis laceras: fuerint hec tolerabilia fortassis. Iulium quoque Cesarem pretervehor, cuius spectata clementia ipsa lacessentibus portus erat; Magnum preterea Pompeium sileo, cum quo iure quodam familiaritatis quidlibet posse videbare. Sed quis te furor in Antonium impegit? [5] Amor credo reipublice, quam funditus iam corruisse fatebaris. Quodsi pura fides, si libertas te trahebat, quid tibi tam familiare cum Augusto? Quid enim Bruto tuo responsurus es? «Siquidem» inquit, «Octavius tibi placet, non dominum fugisse sed amiciorem dominum quesisse videberis». [6] Hoc restabat, infelix, et hoc erat extremum, Cicero, ut huic ipsi tam laudato malidiceres, qui tibi non dicam malifaceret, sed malifacientibus non obstaret. Doleo vicem tuam, amice, et errorum pudet ac miseret, iamque cum eodem Bruto «his artibus nichil tribuo, quibus te instructissimum fuisse scio». Nimirum quid enim iuvat alios docere, quid ornatissimis verbis semper de virtutibus loqui prodest, si te interim ipse non audias? [7] Ah quanto satius fuerat philosopho presertim in tranquillo rure senuisse, de “perpetua illa”, ut ipse quodam scribis loco, “non de hac iam exigua vita cogitantem”, nullos habuisse fasces, nullis triumphis inhiasse, nullos inflasse tibi animum Catilinas. Sed hec quidem frustra. Eternum vale, mi Cicero.
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, de Liberorum Educatione:
“Boys should also read the historians such as Livy and Sallust, though they may need to be further advanced in order to understand them. Justin and Quintus Curtius and Arrian, whom Petrus Paulus translated are true, and not fantastic stories. They ought to run through the deeds of Alexander. Valerius, the historian and philosopher, is not unworthy to be joined with these. But Suetonius ought not to be entrusted to boys. History may also be received with no small profit from the books of Kings, Maccabees, Judith, Esdra, Esther, the evangelists, and the Acts of the Apostles. ‘For history’, as Cicero says, ‘is a witness to the times, the light of the truth, the instructor of life, the messenger of antiquity.’ It is most useful, therefore, to have read as many histories as possible and to exercise oneself in them, so that you might know from the example of others how to pursue what is useful and avoid what is harmful. I would not, however, have you occupied with excessive labor, but it is enough to have learned the histories related by famous authors.On no account, if it were up to me, would I let the histories of the Bohemians or the Hungarians be given to a boy. For they are written by the uneducated, they contain a number of imbecilities, many lies, no notable thoughts, and no ornamentation. For, as Pliny says, ‘no book is so bad that some good may not be taken from it’, and on that account appears willing to grant anything written a reading over, the thought really ought to apply to those who are already learned, and not to children. For, unless children are steeped from the beginning in the best examples, they will never be able to attain good sense.”
Ennius sat silently meditating on the deck, the constant witness to and companion in Scipio’s affairs. Scipio approached him and began in these pleasant words:
‘Will you never break your silence, o my sweet solace of my many labors? Speak, I beg you. For you can see my heart melting away from many cares. You’re accustomed to ease them with your pleasant speech. Just relax your face, loosen your expression, if highest Apollo gave you the talent which you excel in at your birth, if the crowd of the goddesses washed you as an infant submerged in the Castalian pool on sacred Helicon, led you to the high hills, and have you the pen, the voice, and the mind of a poet.’
Ennius raised his head at these words and spoke thus: ‘O young flower of Italy, certain pledge of divine offspring, why does it please you to be moved by my mouth, or why do you order me thus? Indeed, I was considering in my silent heart that no age will ever bring forth a greater work of outstanding virtue than the one which our happy age sees; no one will ever move anything great under his mind for whom an honest name does not sound among his great hopes, who will not, coming to the point, wish to recall the deeds of Scipio, who would not wish to see your face as a gift. The greater fame of the grave will remain for you after the grave, for Spite plucks away at mortal achievements. But Death consumes Envy and wards it off from the funeral busts. Your glory had already conquered this pest, and now it safely flees the ground, the diseases and malignant habits of people, through the lofty breezes, and bore itself as the equal to the gods.”
Puppe ducis media tacitus meditansque sedebat
Ennius, assiduus rerum testisque comesque;
Scipio quem tandem aggreditur verbisque benignis
Excitat incipiens: “Nunquamne silentia rumpes,
O michi multorum solamen dulce laborum?
Fare, precor; nam perpetuis tabentia curis
Pectora nostra vides. Placido sermone levare
Illa soles; faciesque modo, tantum ora resolve,
Si tibi nascenti, quo polles, summus Apollo
Ingenium celeste dedit, si turba dearum
Castalio infantem demersum gurgite lavit
Ex Elicone sacro, collesque eduxit in altos,
Et calamum et vocem tribuit mentemque poete.”
Ennius auditis caput extulit atque ita fatur:
“O flos Italie, iuvenis, stirpisque deorum
Certa fides, quid nunc nostro placet ore moveri,
Quidve iubes? Equidem tacito modo pectore mecum
Volvebam quod nulla ferent iam secula maius
Eximie virtutis opus, quam nostra quod etas
Leta videt, nullusque unquam sub mente movebit
Grande aliquid, cui non, magnas spes inter, honestum
