Skyline of the Old City and Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Israel.
“In Jerusalem and in Athens, lightning struck. Socrates asked the question: ‘What is the right way for a man to live? … that lightning has remade the world,” says Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn, a professor of politics and history, in his opening remarks to the first lecture, “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Study of History at Hillsdale College” in the school’s free online version of its freshman core course, History 101: Western Heritage — From the Book of Genesis to John Locke.
This is indeed powerful stuff. It presents the kind of questions I have long wanted to take some time to study and ponder in more depth in ancient and medieval history.
While I have a master’s degree in history, my focus was on 20th century American history (which I studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada in the mid-1990s). Queen’s is a fine school and has a wonderful graduate program with some terrific professors. I was blessed to have the privilege to study there.
And historic Kingston, the Limestone City, is a very pleasant place to live, albeit skewed somewhat demographically to being home to scores of those who spend their days in the hallowed halls of either academia or behind the walls of the goodly number of federal penitentiaries that also call Kingston and surrounding area home (a number that has decreased though by two with the closure since my graduate student days of both Kingston Penitentiary and Prison for Women). At its peak, there were 10 federal prisons, ranging from minimum to maximum security, in Kingston and the countryside adjacent to the city. Joyceville, Pittsburgh, Collins Bay, Frontenac, Bath and Millhaven remain very much in operation. On the academic side there is the aforementioned Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College, plus numerous specialized military schools, including the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence, Canadian Forces School of Communications and Electronics, the Peace Support Training Centre, Canadian Forces Military Law Centre and the Canadian Army Command and Staff College at Fort Frontenac. The military educational facilities in Kingston, just by their very names, suggest the sort of specialized education offered by the modern scriptorium. Civilian graduate school is not so very different most places. While there are significant differences between studying for a master’s or doctorate degree in history (the latter requires an original contribution in knowledge to the field and some foreign language proficiency and takes longer), both endeavors are specialized and research focused, although the M.A., which allows for the use of more secondary sources, somewhat less so. My field of 20th century American history is actually not even that broad, truth be told. It narrows down to diplomatic history and foreign relations, more specifically the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989. Nice thesis title though: America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan.
What I yearn for now that I have the luxury of time to do so is to study the canon of Western Civilization in a more core or foundational way. In other words to be terribly politically incorrect, studying dead white men and their Great Books. Fortuitously for me, I discovered Hillsdale College s few months ago.
Founded as Michigan Central College in Spring Arbor, Michigan in 1844, the school moved nine years later to Hillsdale and assumed its current name. As stated in its Articles of Association, the college undertakes its work “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land, and believing that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”
Though established by Freewill Baptists, Hillsdale has been officially non-denominational since its inception. It was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery. It was also the second college in the United States to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women.
Hillsdale sent a larger percentage of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other American college or university except West Point. Of the more than 400 who fought for the Union, four won the Congressional Medal of Honor, three became generals, and many more served as regimental commanders. Two of those Hillsdale veterans helped carry Lincoln’s casket to the slain president’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Sixty gave their lives during the Civic War.
Because of the College’s anti-slavery reputation and its role in founding the new Republican Party among the notable speakers who visited its campus during the Civil War era were Frederick Douglass, the famed African-American social reformer and abolitionist, and Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded president Abraham Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. While Everett gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” which lasted less than two minutes:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
The orator I am studying at the moment predates both Lincoln and Everett — by about 3,000 years, give or take a few centuries. Homer, believed to be the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is the first and greatest of the epic poets, and his writing is central to the Western canon, albeit we’re not quite sure when he lived, or for that matter, if he lived at all. There are some, shall we say, historical ambiguities when it comes to Homer.
Nonetheless this is the beginning. This is where we come. Says Hillsdale College professor of English and dean of faculty Stephen Smith, in introducing the second lecture for Great Books 101: Ancient to Medieval: “The Iliad is a poem of rage: Rage is the first word of the poem, and Achilles’ rage is a major theme of the story. The Iliad is a poem of desire, especially the characters’ desires that make them who they are, but also lead to their destruction.
“The Iliad is a poem of delusion: The characters are constantly blaming the gods for their troubles instead of their own free will or choices. The Iliad is a poem of deception, perhaps most notably in the case of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, who dies in battle because of Achilles’ lie. The Iliad is a poem of disaster and double-dealing, especially the double-dealing of Achilles that leads to the disastrous death of his friend. The Iliad is a poem of death and outrage: Achilles re-enters the battle against Troy after the death of Patroclus and kills numerous Trojans, including Hector, dragging his body around the walls of Troy. This outrage turns Achilles’ glory from a high into a low point.
“The Iliad is a poem of responsibility and evasion: Achilles has been evading his responsibility, but at the same time he is responsible for the death of his friend. The Iliad ends when Zeus says he will bring the fighting to an end and grant Achilles his glory — a glory that Achilles wins not through battle, but by returning Hector’s body to his father. Achilles’ glory is to be free of his rage, which is the beginning of virtue.”
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