“All improvement in the domain of politics should derive from the refinement of character—but how can character be refined under the influence of a barbaric state order?” – Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Conservatives in education want to eat their cake and have it too: Keep the canon of Great Books full of white men, but not get called racists for doing so. This obviously presents a difficulty.

In their defense, no conservative that I have ever read or spoken to proposes a color line when it comes to Great Books (or to anything else). However, when you don’t propose a color line, but your book lists still have only the most token representation of blacks, Asians, and other POCs, one begins to wonder.

Wondering about this lack of diversity leads quite naturally to accusations of racism, and indeed, the accusations have poured forth, from insiders to the classical education movement and from outsiders alike.

Conservatives who wish to ward off the destroying angel of inclusion when it sweeps before their dwelling paint their door frame in the blood of “excellence,” hoping their institutions will be passed over. “We don’t want your new favorite 19th century African-American essayist on our book list—but not because we’re racist. We’re extremely not racist, actually! We just believe in excellence.”

Excellence or Tradition?

I suspect that the destroying angel of inclusion hovers so ambivalently about the door frames of these educational conservatives because it senses that the red blood of excellence is fake, or at least, thinned with the water and red dye of “precedent” and “tradition.” “Excellent” and “traditional” are not the same. If something new does, in fact, excel the old that came before—a book, a sculpture, an athlete, a startup—then it can and should replace what came before it. Feel free to go back to Windows 98 if you disagree. Give a gold medal to the man who came in second place.

Whatever is excellent stands out because it is higher than anything around it, just as a hill looms above the surrounding plain. In fact, the English words “excellence” and “hill” have grown, over the course of many millennia of linguistic development, from the same old Aryan root *kelH- for rising or being tall.

That some books stand above, or excel, others none would deny. The same, we all know, goes for students. Why then would the same logic not apply to whole peoples? Can we not say that one tribe or nation excels the others?

That excellence implies hierarchy does not cease to be true when we speak of whole nations simply because it offends modern sensibilities. Conservatives in education must acknowledge this. If they do not, if they support the cathedral of their white, male curriculum with the buttresses that this is simply a long-standing tradition—rather than saying it is the best possible thing they could study—then the destroying angel of inclusion will indeed be right. That blood over the lintel is fake. They are conserving something because it is old and conventional, or in other words, a prejudice, rather than because it is greatest.

In the 1950s, the liberal literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, famously, that in America, “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Is this unfair? Conservatives so often turn to “Chesterton’s Fence,” the clever little parable of the progressive reformer and the conservative reformer who encounter a fence across a road. To the progressive, the fence is simply a hindrance, but the conservative stands next to it (if not athwart it) saying “stop!” until, at last, the progressive can give a good account as to why the fence was constructed in the first place.

Conservatives in education seem eternally in the role of the conservative reformer in Chesterton’s parable. Having seen the chaos unleashed by removing the fence, they believe they can rebuild it, and stand guard over it more attentively than their predecessors did. But the “irritable mental gesture” incarnated in eternal fence-guarding overrides any real expression of thought—the true idea of the classics and their supremacy.

Sitting obstinately atop Chesterton’s Fence is a defensive position from which you cannot create anything fundamentally new. Conservatives in education will even say, and I think they actually believe, that they are laboring toward a new renaissance. But if they grasped how profoundly disruptive rebirth actually is then perhaps they would not be so sanguine. There is, after all, quite a lot of sanguis, of blood, involved in birth.

On Rebirth

Greco-Roman antiquity has always been the sperm of new life that fertilizes the womb of a dark age—almost always, as it happens, a Germanic womb—whether it is the Carolingian Renaissance, the Ottonian Renaissance, the high medieval “Renaissance before the Renaissance,” the Italian Renaissance proper, the Northern Renaissance and conjoined Protestant Reformation, the American Founding, Weimar Classicism, or the several failed attempts to revive Western civilization in the wake of the collapse of Christendom.

And though the Romans best the Greeks in the noble austerity of their manner and such things as the efficient administration of empire, the grace of their culture was dependent upon the Greeks. Compare: While Pindar was composing his heavenly odes to great men in Greece, the highest compliment that could be given to a man in rustic Latium was: “He’s a good husbandman and a good farmer.” Even the founding hero of the Roman race, Aeneas, is lifted from Greek literature (albeit, of course, from the other side of the Trojan War).

In their poetry, in their drama, in their sculpture, in their architecture, in their philosophy, in their historical investigations of both themselves and their neighbors, in the high theater of their bloody conflicts, in their religious myth, in their forms of political organization, and in the stature of their heroes—in short, in their whole life as a civilization—the ancient Greeks have, like an ancient flood, left a watermark on the high face of a mountain from whose foot all subsequent civilizations have gazed upwards, marveling at the alpine magnitude of the Greek achievement. And most marvelous of all? They did this on their own power, with no direct revelation from the God of Israel.

But you might say, if the Greeks had not given us the assaying touchstone by which to test all future cultural achievement, someone else would have. After all, it didn’t have to be the Greeks. Perhaps so—but that is only a perhaps. To those who accuse me of inhabiting a nostalgic aether of Hellenic romance, I can only answer: It is not I who propose an alternate reality in which the marble gracing the Acropolis is returned uncut to Greek hillsides, or in which the words of Homer are returned unspoken to the abyss whence language comes.

Undying Glory and the Greek Hero

What spiritual genius propelled the Greeks to excel not only their neighbors but also every civilization since which has looked back on them, whether with delight or with disgust? It can only be that spiritual genius still whispering to us even now, her voice audible in the poetry of the Greeks’ universally acknowledged spiritual father, Homer, and echoed again and again by the poets who followed after him.

It is their lust for undying glory, that ancient preoccupation of the Aryans to the pursuit of which the Greeks brought a single-minded ferocity far exceeding that of any other people. A hero, to the Greeks, was a mortal man who tasted death and yet grasped this imperishable fame, and for this reason, it can be said that when, after long searching, you locate the heart of Greek civilization, you find: hero-worship. To the degree a civilization emulates the Greek passion for glory, it ends up resembling the Greeks of old.

Unfailing glory gives Homer’s poems both their energy and shape. What opens the Iliad and drives its plot? The conflict between Agamemnon’s “social superiority” as the preeminent king in the Achaean host, and Achilles’ “martial superiority” as the preeminent warrior in the Achaean host, to use the terminology of Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy.

Who is the best of the Achaeans? In the Iliad, Achilles’ martial excellence is vindicated against Agamemnon, the Lord Marshal who must beg his recusant warrior to return to the fight after having humiliated him by confiscating Briseis, which was an affront to Achilles’ honor, and thus a dark blot on the effulgence of his glory.

It is not, in the end, Agamemnon’s begging that returns Achilles to the fight, but return he eventually does, and achieves what in Iliad Book 9 he had said he would:

I have lost a safe return home, but I will have unfailing glory

The rivalry engendered by this question—who is the best of the Achaeans?—is not merely the theme of the Iliad alone. Nor is it a question limited to the rivalry of Achilles and Agamemnon.

Who is the best of the Achaeans? This question is, in fact, the basis of the Iliad’s and Odyssey’s poetic unity. In Nagy’s book of the same name (The Best of the Achaeans), he considers the tantalizing allusion to strife between Achilles and Odysseus in Demodokos’ song in Book 8 of the Odyssey:

the Muse impelled the singer to sing the glories of men, from a story-thread which had at that time a glory reaching the vast heavens: the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles son of Peleus, how they once fought at a sumptuous feast of the gods

This allusion, Nagy argues, refers to a mostly-lost epic tradition concerning the rivalry between Achilles and Odysseus, a rivalry pitting Achilles’ might against Odysseus’ artifice.

Later in Demodokos’ song, we learn that it was Odysseus’ artifice of the Trojan Horse that finally enabled the Achaeans to conquer holy Troy—not Achilles’ might. The Odyssey is itself a long chronicle of crafty Odysseus’ pursuit of the glory that attends a king’s safe return home, something Achilles traded for glory, and something seemingly granted to Agamemnon, but then perversely ripped away.

Both Achilles and Odysseus are tempted, in different ways, to abandon the pursuit of undying glory, temptations which modern men would, I suspect, find irresistible. If only Achilles would remain home, he could enjoy long and prosperous life; if only Odysseus would remain with Calypso instead of returning home, he could do Achilles one better and become immortal. In both cases, however, they would forfeit the title of hero: One, because if he avoided the war to prolong his life, Achilles’ might would never send Trojans down to Hades and be sung forever, and the other, because the heroic return home, engineered by artifice, is precisely what Odysseus must forego if he accepts Calypso’s offer.

The rage of Achilles provoked by Agamemnon’s slight, and the grief of Odysseus provoked by Calypso’s prison, are mirror images of each other. Both are mocked by modern audiences: Achilles for having a temper tantrum, Odysseus for a contrived sadness while bedding an immortal. But the rage, the sadness, these are in fact the understandable responses of men born to be heroes but seemingly denied the fulfillment. Lions in captivity. Without grasping the overwhelming passion for glory that is central to the hero, modern audiences will not understand Homer.

There is much more that can be said, but Nagy is a greater Hellenist than I, and my purpose, after all, is only to show that the proposal to place hero-worship at the center of our understanding of the Greeks, and therefore as the controlling theme of classical education, is not arbitrary.

This Cursed House

What then, for educators in the 21^st century? We are not in the position of Achilles or Odysseus. We are not engaged in a great war or heading home from one. If anything, we find ourselves entangled in tragedy rather than caught up in heroic epic. Tragedy, however, is not without heroes of its own, and Attic tragedy’s greatest poet, Aeschylus, painted in words an image of the hero Orestes, to whom we bear more than passing resemblance, and from whom, perhaps, we might stand to acquire knowledge of a path forward for the classical education movement.

Orestes is the son of Lord Marshal Agamemnon, the cuckolded king slain by his own wife in the bath upon his triumphant return from Troy. Orestes is the heir to a great house, and yet raised apart from it, his distance now doubled, for he is deprived of the throne that belongs to him by an incestuous interloper, Aegisthus, like Hamlet was by Claudius.

We must remember that when Orestes returns to purge his home of regicidal blood, he comes to cleanse the House of Atreus of an older pollution too, the one responsible for his forefathers’ interminable suffering in the first place. While this is simply an assumed background for the Oresteia’s Athenian audience, it presses upon the characters of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy with no less force if we from ignorance are insensitive to it.

The ancient curse had been brought upon them first by Zeus-born Tantalus, who cooked his own son Pelops to feed to the gods, and whose grandson Atreus cooked his own brother Thyestes’ sons and fed them to Thyestes. Aegisthus, who seduces Clytemnestra, helps kill Agamemnon, and usurps the throne, is himself the fruit of Thyestes’ union with his own daughter.

How do we resemble Orestes? Is it overstatement to say that we are the estranged heirs to a modern House of Atreus? What could be our curse, those of us in the West who are trying to restore the glory of our own fathers?

Since the fall of Christendom, the West has steadily become less itself, or if itself, a demonic parody of itself. We sense this, even if we disagree on how to date the fall or whom to blame. A civilizational fall, after all, is a long decline. The French Revolution doubtless presents itself as a singular, irrevocable moment of destruction, and the First World War, the final incineration of the last dilapidated ruins of Christendom. But we must leave such questions of when and whom to the historians of modernity. Whatever the case, the estrangement, the sense of irretrievable loss, the usurpers who defile our heritage to serve their own wicked ends—all of this is apparent in such tedious repetition as is found in the House of Atreus. In such a “barbaric state order,” as Friedrich Schiller called it, can we hope for anything except the ongoing, deepening degradation and humiliation of the West?

It was my intention in previous essays to warn that the classical education movement appears doomed, not to reverse the decay but to succumb to it. Why are woke mediocrities who will put you in the time-out corner for transgressions against inclusivity invited onto boards and conference panels? The leaders of the classical education movement are either too afraid of going to the time-out corner, or else they are themselves too mediocre to know a mediocrity when she delivers a keynote.

This is what I mean by “curse”: Every time we in the West attempt to become ourselves again, we fall immediately into the morass we thought we had escaped.

The “destroying angel of inclusivity” is in fact an insatiable Fury, a bloodthirsty executor of the curse on the heads of the impure. The classical education movement, the stodgy conservatives and the woke activists alike, are calling the Fury down upon themselves and will not be able to ward it off with half-hearted attempts at propitiation. And from the classics they will draw no strength for resistance to the Fury’s onslaught, because when gazing upon the Greeks, they are blind to any image that they might imitate except one of themselves: portly nerds and pant-suited women in self-adorned laurels.

Of course, Orestes too faced the Furies. Driven by Apollo, he kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, but the Furies chase him across Greece for the crime of matricide. The curse continues, just as for us; every attempt at a fix seems to renew the curse rather than end it. But on the Areopagus in Athens, Orestes finally stands trial, and is vindicated by Athena. Then, Athena not only establishes a new legal regime on the Athenian Areopagus, but converts the avenging Furies into beneficent Eumenides, who will bless marriage, the source of new life, rather than curse men and drink their blood.

This is what anyone who loves the classical heritage of the West awaits. Not mere escape from that nauseating odor of decay which we can smell wafting from the ripe corpse of Christendom, but the breaking of the curse altogether, which, we see, requires a theophany in which something altogether new is born. Who would dare the deed to provoke the divine intervention required? What kind of deed summons a god? Some tool is needed, something immune to the barbarism of our politics and institutions, a tool that while subsisting with the corruption of the social and political order is nevertheless immune to it and is capable of reforming and healing it.

How to Break the Curse

In Letter Nine from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, from which this essay’s epigraph is taken, Schiller gives his answer: “This tool is fine art.”

Fine art? Have not even our philosophers and artists surrendered to the corruption of their age? Yes—but there is something in art that remains untouched. “Truth and beauty,” Schiller writes, “victoriously wrestle themselves upward with indestructible vitality.”

The great divorce between nature and reason which afflicts us, as Schiller had argued in an earlier letter, was found unified among the Greeks, where it reached its apogee, like an arrow shot high into the sky, “at which there could be neither pause nor further upward movement.” Decline must inevitably follow. The further development of reason required a bill of divorce from nature—paradoxically, the development of culture is itself culture’s enemy. And yet in a further paradox, fine art is the path forward, culture to heal culture’s wounding: “It is up to us to restore through higher artifice, the totality in our nature that artifice has destroyed.”

In the cold womb of a dark age, we await the Greeks and their unifying art. If the classical education movement cannot attempt to produce this artist, then it will sit obstinately atop Chesterton’s Fence, like a fat boy insisting that he won’t move out of principle, when in reality he has torn his pants and is too embarrassed to come down. The hoped-for renaissance will slide out stillborn.

But for those who can stomach the blood of new birth, what would such an artist look like? Schiller offers to us none other than Orestes himself:

The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion. May a benevolent divinity tear the infant from his mother’s breast and nourish him with the milk of a better age, and allow him to grow into maturity under a distant Greek sky. When he has become a man, let him return as an alien form to his own century; not to please it by his reappearance, but instead terrifying, like Agamemnon’s son, to cleanse it.

The artist must be an alien, speaking like Orestes a foreign dialect. He must retain a stony indifference. And he must cut off completely the old ties that perpetuate the survival of the curse. For this, Orestes has served as inspiration to more than just Schiller.

Californian Orestes

The great Californian poet, Robinson Jeffers, who was once the most celebrated poet in America, before being banished from critical consideration for attacking American intervention in World War II and deriding FDR, identified Agamemnon’s son as the aesthetic deliverer of civilization too. In his verse-drama “Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Jeffers retells the story of Orestes. His Orestes knows he cannot stay in Mycenae and rule once he cleanses the palace, as his sister Electra wishes. She pleads with her brother:

It is accomplished: my father is avenged: the fates and the body of Electra
Are nothing. But for Agamemnon to rule in Mycenae: that is not nothing. O my brother
You are Agamemnon: rule: take all you will: nothing is denied.

But if he does, he will be merely another Agamemnon—the curse will not be broken. He will enter into that long line of polluted, mingled family blood. And then, as if on cue, the old temptation arises. Electra offers herself to him in real life, as before she had only in dreams. Family blood has been spilled out; let it now be mixed. Electra urges him:

O fire burn me! Enter and lay waste,
Deflower, trample, break down, pillage the little city,
Make what breach you will, with flesh or a spear, give it to the spoiler. See, as I tear the garment.

But Orestes is free, and will remain so, so long as he does not succumb to the family curse and thereby extend it. He replies to Electra:

I have greater kindred than dwell under a roof. Didn’t I say this would be dark to you? I have cut the meshes
And fly like a freed falcon. To-night, lying on the hillside, sick with those visions […]
I entered the life of the brown forest
And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours

Both Jeffers and Aeschylus’s Orestes transcend tragedy itself. Both lift the curse, but in different ways, each appropriate to his time.

For in the Athens of Aeschylus, the state transcended politics – it was the object of religious devotion and in fact the arena for all great deeds of any kind. As the historian Jacob Burckhardt writes:

So the polis, with its vitality much more developed than that of the Phoenician city-republic, was a creation unique in the history of the world. It was the expression of a common will of the most extraordinary vigour and capability; indeed the polis succeeded in rising above mere village life thanks only to its deeds, the power it exercised, its passion.

When all great cultural creation emerges from the public life of the polis, so then Aeschylean Orestes, indirectly through his matricide and subsequent trial, takes on the role of refounder of a city. This is what curse-breaking looks like for a man who can offer himself, as a Greek could, to be an adornment to a proud state who is herself a work of art.

But when men are instead reduced to serving as a gear in what Schiller called “the mechanical state,” or in our age, perhaps we are better called cells in a spreadsheet state, then Orestes must escape and seek immortality outside of the state, according to stone-time, not human-time. Jeffersian Orestes, rather than refounding a city, instead flees to bestial, immortal nature, whatever is unpolluted by sick and dying human culture. He will know and be known by the only things that last.

In both cases, Aeschylus and Jeffers show us, in Orestes, an avatar of the Greek lust for undying glory when it comes into contact with sickness. The hero in a tragic mode. This is the curse-breaker for people weighed down by the accumulated pollution of generations.

Jeffers the poet is himself, I believe, a prototype, a precursor, to the tragic Orestes-artist of blood whom we await. Raised by a Presbyterian scholar-minister and recipient of a truly classical education – unlike the dilettantes trying to redefine classical education at the very moment of its rebirth – Jeffers was able to approach the Greeks as they were and understand them. In turn, the whisper of Lethean voices rejuvenated by eternal Mnemosyne led him to Helicon, where he observed, so it seems – even if only from a distance – the ancient dance atop the Muses’ peak. Jeffers then gave to us, who live as cells in this spreadsheet state, living poetry for our time in our own tongue.

Why listen to the hysterical girls insisting we paint Chesterton’s Fence pink, or the fat little boys sitting self-satisfied on top of the Fence with their pipes and spectacles, thinking they are the reincarnation of Chesterton himself?

The curse laying upon us has eluded breaking, and half-hearted measures, irritable mental gestures, will not be enough to “cut the meshes” so that men in the West can once again “fly like a freed falcon.” The ancient peaks are yet far off.

Greece Lives

In 1922, the year T.S. Eliot broke poetry apart with The Waste Land and refashioned it in his own allusive, abstract image, Jeffers was busily writing “Tamar,” the epic poem which, when published, would give him his first taste of glory. That poem, which headlined the volume in which “Tower Beyond Tragedy” also first appeared, was an alternative route for and revolt against the modernism championed by Eliot. A rugged byway which was open to the caravan of Anglophone poetry for the next 20 years, but which went largely unventured, and has now been effaced from most maps of the territory.

While composing that poetic revolt, Jeffers also scribbled, in an unpublished fragment of prose from 1922, this luminous poetic manifesto:

Homer and the race he sired are alive, because light and darkness, mountains and sea, humanity and its passions, are permanent establishments… Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has; while prose is a cultured interior thing, prose is of the house, where lamplight abolishes even the tides of day and night, and human caprice rules. The brain can make prose; the whole man, brain and nerves, muscles and entrails, organs of sense and of generation, makes poetry and responds to poetry.

Greece lives. The poets are her children. Will they be born to the classical education movement?

The renaissance we are building to, this tower beyond the present tragedy, requires artists and philosophers raised “under a distant Greek sky” whose starry vault catechizes them in the worship of heroes, the only way to once again unite in higher artifice absent nature and estranged reason.

If the classical education movement is to actually give birth, then it must see its responsibility as stealing children away, like Schiller says, so that they can be nourished with the milk of a better age and once grown, return to us alien and terrifying.