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Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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Text
Volume V
Spring 2019
2017 Alumni Association
Award-Winning Essay
Joseph M. Keegin
Conversation with Paul Ludwig
Zachary N. Greene
The Joy of Recognition
Moral Intuition in War and Peace
In Defense of the Literature Segment
Emily Langston
Joseph Hiles
Patrick Burley
Louis Petrich
Five Poems
Three Essays on Euclid
Master’s Essay Précis
Conversation with Jim Phillips
A Journal of the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College
�COLLOQUY
St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland
Volume V: Spring 2019
Editorial Board
Jordan Poyner, Editor-in-Chief
Andrew Dorchester
Zachary N. Greene
Jaime Marquez
Colloquy is a biannual publication of the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College
in Annapolis, Maryland. Subscriptions are free. To subscribe or update your
subscription, please send an e-mail to colloquy@sjc.edu with the subject line
“Subscription.” Address correspondence to: Colloquy, The Graduate Institute at
St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland 21401.
Students, tutors, and alumni of St. John’s College and the Graduate Institute are
encouraged to submit manuscripts in PDF or Word format by email to
colloquy@sjc.edu. Writers are encouraged to discuss proposals with an editor
prior to submitting their work. The journal also accepts submissions of poetry,
artwork, and photography. Please include your name, contact information, and
the title of your work with your submission.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in essays or interviews do not
necessarily reflect those of St. John’s College or Colloquy.
©2019 Colloquy, St. John’s College. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
�TABLE OF CONTENTS
Letter from the Editors .................................................................................... 3
MATHEMATICS
The Joy of Recognition
Emily Langston, Tutor ............................................................................... 5
A Student’s Apology: Confronting Myself in the Study of Geometry
Jaime Marquez ............................................................................................. 10
The Architecture of Reductio ad Absurdum
Alejandro Ehrenberg .................................................................................. 17
Does Euclid Start with Axioms?
Derek Foret .................................................................................................. 22
LITERATURE
2017 Alumni Association Award-Winning Essay: “Home”
Joseph M. Keegin ........................................................................................ 45
In Defense of the Literature Segment
Patrick Burley.............................................................................................. 71
Moral Intuitions in Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Joseph Hiles ................................................................................................. 101
MASTER’S ESSAY PRÉCIS
On Education: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Sean Foley..................................................................................................... 75
Hope in Paradise Lost
Samuel Peregrin ........................................................................................... 79
The Flaying of Marsyas
Maxwell Anthony ........................................................................................ 81
�CONVERSATIONS
Paul Ludwig, Tutor .............................................................................................. 30
Jim Phillips ........................................................................................................... 84
POETRY
Louis Petrich, Tutor .............................................................................................. 59
Maxwell Anthony ................................................................................................. 83
Patricia Harden .................................................................................................... 112
Artwork by Andrew Dorchester, Patricia Harden,
Adam Hurwitz, Jaime Marquez, and Brandon Wasicsko
Jaime Marquez
�Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers,
We are thrilled to present the fifth issue of Colloquy. In this issue we have
attempted to represent a portion of the serious thinking and questioning
that goes on in the Graduate Institute. As has been demonstrated in
previous issues, there are many ways to make that attempt. It seems worth
noting that while essays predominate in this issue, this may not follow in
the long term. Colloquy is so new a publication as to admit of trial and
experiment.
The goal—ambiguous though it may be—is to continue the conversation.
In that spirit, much of the writing in this issue relates to the conversation
which is held every fall at the Graduate Institute in Annapolis. Our essays
address the subjects of the courses offered for the fall semester: literature
and mathematics. Our hope is that this issue might serve as a companion
to conversations past and a catalyst for conversation in the future.
For our next issue we are soliciting writing from students, tutors, and
alumni that make use of the Great Books to investigate questions of
political, philosophical, and theological import. Conversations change of
course—yet the form of education one participates in at St. John’s suggests
that the greatest conversations are peculiarly perennial.
–The Colloquy Editorial Board
3
�Jaime Marquez
4
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
The Joy of Recognition
Emily Langston
Emily Langston is Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland. The following is excerpted from her welcoming speech to the new
class of Graduate Institute students starting in spring of 2019.
It’s been my practice to write these addresses based upon something that
I’ve read with Graduate Institute students over the past semester. And so,
this afternoon, I find myself giving a convocation address based on what
we read together in the tutorial of the Mathematics & Natural Science
segment of the Graduate Institute program. I’m happy to have a reason,
even if self-imposed, to address this topic. First of all, this tutorial is one I
love to lead, and it raises questions that I enjoy thinking about. Secondly
and perhaps surprisingly, it often ends up being one of the favorite tutorials
even of students who initially approached it with some trepidation. It’s this
second point that is the starting point for my reflections today.
I’ll start my investigation with the name, specifically with the word
“mathematics.” Our English word “mathematics” comes from the Greek
noun, ta mathemata, which in turn is related to the verb manthano, meaning
“I learn, I perceive, I understand, I know.” Ta mathemata, then—or in
English, “mathematics”—are the most characteristically knowable things. But,
as I have already suggested, this is certainly not everyone’s experience of
math. I often have conversations with students who tell me that they are
“not math people,” that they “just don’t get math.” They are frustrated
because they have encountered this subject that still today is seen as a
model of the knowable, as unknowable and even alien. Still—thanks to the
intellectual curiosity without which you wouldn’t be here—most of those
who are initially hesitant give it a try. And, as we begin working our way
through Book I of Euclid’s Elements, students almost invariably begin to
5
�Emily Langston / The Joy of Recognition
find that somehow these things are “knowable” after all. As I suggested,
seeing the joyful response of students to this realization is one of the
reasons I love leading this tutorial. So can we say more about how this great
thing comes to pass?
The fact that mathematics claims to be about the “knowable,” and the fact
that we (and I do mean all of us!) can experience it as knowable, begs one
of the most profound questions that we confront in every segment of the
Graduate Institute curriculum. What is it to know? What do we mean when
we say something is “knowable?” The question is placed squarely in front
of us by Plato’s dialogue Meno, the one text I know we all have in common;
at the very heart of this dialogue we find a mathematical example
functioning as a case study in what it is to learn and to know. The specific
demonstration is hard to follow without my drawing lines in the sand for
us to examine, though I assure you it repays every bit of attention you can
give to it. In the absence of any sand, I will lay these details aside and move
to what I take to be one of the important lessons Socrates would have us
glean from the example; the myth he recounts claims—and the
demonstration involving the slave boy is meant to illustrate—that learning
is really recollection of something that was already within us. We see it in the
dialogue as, at various points, Socrates asks the boy questions about the
diagram he is drawing. And the boy, though he has never been taught
geometry, is somehow able to look at the diagram Socrates sketches and
then turn to something within himself to make a judgment about what has
been proposed. The example makes the case that learning involves
something like recollection and recognition.
Let’s take this suggestion back to the material of the Mathematics tutorial,
to our reading of Euclid’s Elements. Perhaps the place where Euclid most
explicitly demands that we check something within ourselves and give our
assent is in the postulates. The very word “postulate”—which comes from
the Latin postulare, meaning to ask or pray—makes the case clear. The
claims made in the postulates are not proven to us; we are simply asked to
6
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
accept them. Like the slave boy, who consults something within himself
when questioned about various candidates for the side of the double
square, we consult something within ourselves when confronted with
Euclid’s fifth postulate. The postulate tells us that two straight lines angled
so that they are sloping toward one another will eventually meet. Now it’s
hard to say exactly what within ourselves we consult when we are asked to
assent to the truth of this statement, or where it comes from. Whether it is
there due to some previous experience or there inherently I will not here
speculate. But surely it is not something that Euclid taught us; it was there
already. I will venture a bit further and claim that it seems to be something
in the structure of our visual imaginations; and that the act we perform
when we ask ourselves whether this postulate is true is more an act of
visualization than of reasoning. If I sweep my inner eye far enough along
these straight lines that are angled toward one another, I seem to “see” that
they must meet. Our recognition of the congruence between what Euclid
proposes and what we see with the inner eye is very satisfying and feels like
a type of knowledge.
“But wait!”—those of you who have taken the tutorial may object. This
emphasis on recollection and recognition may work well enough with the
postulates, which are a special case. But what about the material with which
we actually begin the Mathematics tutorial—not Euclid’s postulates, but his
definitions. To take the first definition, it doesn’t seem true to say that we
“already know” a point is that which has no part. Going on to definition two,
I certainly can’t visualize a line that is “breadthless length.” Does it make
sense to say that in seeking to understand these we refer to our spatial
imaginations? Based on my own experience, and on conversations with
students over many years, I’ll try to describe part of what happens in the
encounter with Euclid in the math tutorial: somehow—as we examine the
possibilities determined for us by the definitions, common notions, and
postulates, and move proposition by proposition through book one of the
Elements—a spatial world is described which seems to coincide with our
7
�Emily Langston / The Joy of Recognition
own lived and intuited experience of space. By this I mean that the clumsy
attempts at straight lines we draw on the chalkboard, and the only
somewhat more precise ones that mark the edge of the board, behave
(always within the limits of their gross imperfections) like Euclidean
“breadthless lengths” would behave. The love affair that almost every
student has with Euclid springs partly from the fact that Euclid takes our
own sense of interior and exterior space and re-presents it to us for our
delighted recognition.
I’m making everything overly simple, of course. There are elements to
understanding a Euclidean proposition that even analogously are not
“seeing.” And even in Book I, Euclid presents me with truths that are
confounding to my visual imagination; for example, in Proposition 36, we
learn that the two longer sides of a parallelogram can approach each other
indefinitely, yet never meet, as the shape is stretched between two parallels.
In the end however, contemplating such unexpected truths does not violate
our sense of space; rather, it adds an additional element of satisfaction to
our reading of Euclid, as we realize that we can learn more about the
structure of space than we would ever have seen ourselves by moving step
by step through the propositions. Our intuitions about space, and our
reason, can inform each other.
I hope you all now have at least an inkling of what I’ve been trying to
describe; these moments of recognition and increased understanding—
when we “see” what Euclid means and agree that space we know really is
like that—are moments of exhilaration. These things were in us all along,
even in confirmed non-math people! It’s hard to know why we never
realized this before. Perhaps it’s simply that no one asked us the right
questions. But one of the defining characteristics of Great Books, in the
Mathematics & Natural Science segment and in every part of the program,
is that they do ask the right questions, and by doing so engage us on many
levels.
8
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
As I draw this talk to a close, I’ll note that the coherence we sense between
the space Euclid describes and the space we perceive within us, and within
which we perceive, is not simply a source of joy—it is a source of wonder,
wonder that this should be so. Many students confront this wonder most
directly when, somewhat more than halfway through the tutorial, we leave
behind the world of Euclid and enter the world of the Russian geometer
Nicolai Lobachevski. In ways I won’t attempt to describe, he disrupts
entirely the easy alliance I’ve sketched between our study of geometry and
our intuitions about space. And yet, this doesn’t keep us from moving
forward with Lobachevski, reasoning carefully from one step to another in
a sort of space which feels like it is quite definitely not my own.
The fact that we can do this opens the door to a host of new questions:
about space; about the relationship between knowing and seeing; and about
the nature of knowledge itself. I won’t begin to explore these questions
here, but I look forward to exploring them throughout the program with
many of you. Welcome to the conversation; Welcome to the Graduate
Institute!
Jaime Marquez
9
�A Student’s Apology:
Confronting Myself in the Study of Geometry
Jaime Marquez1
Listening to Ms. Langston’s convocation for the Spring 2019 term,2 I felt
an unsettling nostalgia about my introduction to Euclid’s geometry. Ms.
Langston noted that students “are frustrated because they have
encountered a subject that, though still today is seen as a model of the
knowable, seems unknowable and even alien.” She also notes that “one of
the defining characteristics of Great Books, in the Mathematics and
Natural Science segment and in every part of the program, is that
they do ask the right questions, and by doing so engage us on many levels.”
Furthermore, she asks “What is it to know? What do we mean when we say
something is ‘knowable’?”3 Hearing that I realized that to ask what are the right
questions is precisely the right question I need to ask: what have I learned
from studying geometry at St. John’s? And what does Ms. Langston mean
when she says that the Great Books engage us “on many levels”?
I would have been more successful dealing with aliens than dealing with
my insecurities. Indeed, prior to taking the Math & Natural Science
Tutorial, I saw myself as having a solid training in mathematics (calculus,
real analysis, statistics, matrix algebra). So I figured that a bunch of triangles
would not pose a challenge to me. But in my initial dealings with Book I of
Euclid’s Elements, I failed miserably to understand the life of Euclid’s
propositions: if we’re just dealing in lines without equations, why is it so
hard to get the point? To be sure, the steps, when considered individually,
1
This material is based on an essay that I prepared for Ms. Leah Lasell’s Math & Natural
Science Tutorial, Summer 2018.
2
Ed. note: the relevant portion of Ms. Langston’s address precedes this essay.
3
Italics are my own.
10
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
are not difficult to understand or memorize. To me, the problem was that
the proofs lacked a mathematical flow: why is the first step in the proof
this one and not that one? I saw alternative first steps and I could not
discern why they were deemed irrelevant. It felt as though Euclid had tried
several starting points, found one that worked, and discarded the others
without giving a sense of why. So my initial perception of the propositions
in Book I was akin to opening a cookbook with recipes for increasingly
elaborate dishes. Proving that I could “cook” such dishes involved
memorizing the steps and the sequence. But asking why do I mix this ingredient
with that one in this order seemed beside the point: follow this recipe and you
will get the dish.
All of this changed with Proposition 37 [Fig. 1]
Proposition 37: Let ABC and DBC be triangles on the same base BC and in the same
parallels AD and BC. I say that the triangle ABC equals the triangle DBC.
That these two triangles are
equal to each other is not
obvious. I could visualize
moving points A and D along
line EF and not being sure
about
whether
the
proposition was correct.
Furthermore, the proposition
Fig. 1
rests on the assumption that
the line EF is parallel to the line BC. So? Did we not prove that already in
Propositions 27 and 29? I asked myself. But I chalked my confusion up to the
lack of equations or something similar. As we continued proving the rest
of the propositions, the fragility of the proof for the parallel postulate
became part of our daily conversation: did Euclid actually prove this
postulate? I would be lying if I were to say that Postulate 5 was suspect the
first time I read it. To me, the postulate said that water is wet.
11
�Jaime Marquez / A Student’s Apology
We were not the first to be exposed to this fragility. The Greek philosopher
Proclus, who lived in the fifth century CE, noted that Euclid’s fifth
postulate was “plausible but not necessary.”4 Indeed, Proclus’s second
guessing of Postulate 5 was based on his being aware of the “relation of
the hyperbole to its asymptote.”5 Furthermore, as Florence Lewis indicates,
there are drafts of the Elements in which Postulate 5 appears as a
proposition immediately before Proposition 29 and it is possible that
Euclid decided to state it as Postulate 5 because “he could neither prove it
nor proceed without it.”6 This observation is not about nitpicking or
semantics: if Postulate 5 is incorrect, then much of the subsequent
architecture of Book I becomes plausible but not necessary. One may ask:
so what if this proposition is just plausible but not necessary? For a
mathematician, that is the difference between being alive or not. Indeed,
Lewis notes that:
In the course of centuries the minds of those interested became clear on one
point: they did not wish merely to know whether it was possible to substitute
some other assumption for Euclid's, though this question has its interest;
they wished to know primarily whether exactly his form of the postulate
was logically deducible from his other postulates and established theorems.
To change the postulate was merely to re-state the problem.7
Having read these views, I began to wonder why Euclid was included in
the program: it must be a mistake. So with my arrogance in full swing, I
began crafting mental emails to someone in charge with suggestions about
changing the curriculum. And to bolster my case, I went through the
Greenfield Library’s archives to check the arguments that were used in the
design of the curriculum. And I found a transcript of the discussion at the
4
Florence Lewis, “History of the Parallel Postulate,” The American Mathematical Monthly
27, no. 1 (1920): 16-23.
5
Ibid., 16.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 18.
12
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
curriculum meetings in 1965, a discussion that is fresh, enlightening, and
humbling. Yes, there are arguments against the inclusion of Euclid but the
counterarguments from Ms. Brann and Mr. Klein are compelling:
Ms. Brann: Most of our students have some sort of vague notion of, to use a
technical term, an "axiomatic system," when they come to us. When we
begin to study Euclid, one of the interesting topics to discuss is whether this
is what they had heard rumors of in high school, whether Euclid's "system"
is intended to be an arbitrary axiomatic system in the sense they imagined.
Well, three years intervene, and we finally come to the senior year when we
begin to study modern axiomatics, and it turns out that in fact there exists
a world of difference between an Euclidean axiom and an axiom of
Hilbert. And though it is in fact the case that we don't do justice to the
ramifications of modern axiomatics, I think that we do do justice to the
difference between the approaches. And this does make many students feel
that they want to go on with the modern side.8
Mr. Klein: I would like only to interject one thing. Euclid is not only a great
mathematician. He is also a compiler. There are certain things in Euclid
which are incredibly valuable for the student. For example, the simple thing
that he hits upon at the very beginning: the fifth postulate. Why is it a
postulate. Why is it not a definition? This is of incredible value. To make
a student understand that this is not a definition, that on this is based nonEuclidean geometry, the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry, is a great
thing.9
Notwithstanding these observations, I kept reading Lewis, who notes that:
Gauss's meditations were leading him through tedious and painstaking
labors to the conclusion that Euclid's fifth postulate was not deducible from
8
“Seminar Discussion on the Place and Extent of the Teaching of Mathematics in the
Liberal Arts Curriculum,” Saint Mary’s College, March 25th–March 27th, 1965 (REF LD
4821.S277), 34-35.
9
Ibid., 41.
13
�Jaime Marquez / A Student’s Apology
his other postulates. The minds of those not conversant with the intricacies
of the problem might easily rush to the conclusion that Euclid's geometry
was therefore untrue, and feel the whole structure of human learning
crashing about their ears.10
I wanted to know more about this crashing. So I took Proposition 47 to be
the Queen of Book I and worked my way backwards, identifying the chain
of propositions that supported it and are connected to Postulate 5 [Fig. 2]
My rendering of that chain is as follows (where P stands for postulate and
I stands for Proposition):11
Whether Proposition 47 is merely plausible matters
not just to mathematicians, but also to anyone who
makes a living out of measuring distances on flat
surfaces. Indeed, Proposition 47 is one of the most
elegant proofs of Pythagoras’s theorem. So if
Postulate 5 is unnecessary, then Euclid’s claim to
relevance would vanish. This exercise allowed me
to visualize a potential mathematical crash and gave
me comfort: if it is tough for Gauss, then it is tough
for everyone, especially me.
Relief came finally when we moved on to
Lobachevski’s work. I liked this portion of the
curriculum the most because the proofs of his
theorems rely on logic with a compelling and selfsustaining flow, instead of the memory that Euclid’s
proofs require. Furthermore, Lobachevski’s work
relies on conventional mathematics: operators
10
Fig. 2
Lewis 19.
To be sure, Proposition 29 influences propositions not shown here and, as a result, they
too become plausible instead of necessary; I ignored these other propositions to focus on
Proposition 47.
11
14
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
(+ and =), negative numbers, and notation for angles—my kind of thing.
But how does Lobachevski’s work relate to the life of Postulate 5? By
allowing it to be “uncertain.” Specifically, his Theorem 16 shows that, in
his new geometry, the definition of parallel lines does not demand the angle
conditions of Proposition 29: lines that are “pinched” need not cut.12 And
as Lewis indicates:
The question, Is Euclid's fifth postulate logically deducible from
his other postulates? is answered by showing that the denial of this
postulate while all the others are retained leads to a geometry as consistent
as Euclid's own. […]Thus was Euclid "vindicated" in an unexpected
manner. Knowingly or not, the wise Greek had stated the case correctly,
and only his followers had been at fault in their efforts for improvement.13
Not content with what Lewis says, I consulted Hardy. This is what he has
to say about Greek mathematics:
The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can
understand: as Littlewood said to me once, they are not clever schoolboys or
‘scholarship candidates’, but ‘Fellows of another college’. So Greek
mathematics is ‘permanent’, more permanent even than Greek literature.
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because
languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly
word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may
mean.14
Alright, I accepted that I had to suspend whatever arrogant image I had of
myself and read Euclid’s propositions as though I was in front of him—all
else absent.
12
Lobachevski, N., 1891, The Theory of Parallels, Proposition 16.
Lewis, 19.
14
G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 81.
13
15
�Jaime Marquez / A Student’s Apology
I try to apply this lesson to all the other courses I take at St. John’s, but,
needless to say, I always fail. There are moments, however, in which the
very act of trying brings unexpected moments of intense joy that are too
brief. In a study group on the economist John Maynard Keynes, I came
across the following observation from Keynes:
The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean
world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel
often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight—as the only remedy
for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no
remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a nonEuclidean geometry. Something similar is required to-day in economics.15
Keynes is as central to economics as Euclid is to geometry. And being the
Keynesian that I am, my study of geometry at St. John’s gave me an
appreciation for the depth of Keynes’ view that I never had and, via a
curriculum discussion about the parallel postulate held more than fifty
years ago, I joined a conversation that has lasted more than two thousand
years. In the process, I was also given an inkling as to what Ms. Langston
meant about by being engaged on many levels (I hope).
Jaime Marquez is a Senior Lecturer at the John Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies and a student in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland (AGI’19). He was a Senior Economist on the Federal Reserve
Board from 1983 to 2013.
15
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935),
Book I, Chapter 2, Section IV.
16
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
The Architecture of Reductio ad Absurdum
Alejandro Ehrenberg
If we were to imagine Euclid’s mathematical system as a medieval
cathedral, reductio ad absurdum proofs would primarily play the role of flying
buttresses. They provide vital support to the whole edifice, and do so from
the exterior, where the absurd gargoyles and chimeras live. Why does
Euclid use this kind of reasoning instead of restricting himself to direct
argumentation? What do reductio proofs contribute to the system developed
in Book 1 of the Elements?
In order to explore these questions it is pertinent to begin by observing
how a specific reductio proof works. Proposition 6 is the first one to be
demonstrated in this manner. It is the converse of the immediately
preceding proposition.
Proposition 5: In isosceles triangles the angles at the base equal one another, and,
if the equal straight lines are produced further, then the angles under the base equal
one another.
Proposition 6: If in a triangle two angles equal one another, then the sides opposite
the equal angles also equal one another.
These can be expressed more schematically thus:
Proposition 5: If a, then b.
Proposition 6: If b, then a.
It is tempting to assume that, once Euclid has demonstrated the truth of
Proposition 5, Proposition 6 only exists for the sake of a complete
exposition, but is really redundant. However, after some thought, we can
17
�Alejandro Ehrenberg / The Architecture of Reductio ad Absurdum
see that the fact that a entails b does not automatically mean that b entails
a.
But it is important that it does entail it. Euclid is building an edifice where
each level rests upon the previous one: if any given part is weak, the whole
is liable to collapse. As an illustration of this, consider the following
definition: a square is a four-sided equilateral figure. That this statement is
true does not imply that its converse is also true. A definition like this
would not do for Euclid’s system of truth, which cannot be built on
definitions that read one way are true but read the other are false.
Reversibility must be explicitly established. Thus, by way of reductio,
Proposition 6 proves that if in a triangle two angles equal one another, then the
sides opposite the equal angles also equal one another. The foundation is now firm;
the mason can build on.
The following question arises: could Euclid have achieved this end through
direct argumentation? Put differently, must the reversibility of a
proposition be proven by reductio? In this regard, looking at Book 1 as a
whole is helpful. A pattern is discernible: almost all converse propositions
are demonstrated by reductio. Nevertheless, there are notable exceptions—
for some converses, like Proposition 48, are proven directly. If the pattern
suggests the existence of some kind of necessity between converses and
reductio, the exceptions point to the possibility that argumentation by reductio
is, rather, a deliberate choice by Euclid.
But surely there is another way to explore the question at hand. By turning
our attention once again to Propositions 5 and 6, we will find support for
the view that the use of reductio is in fact a carefully considered choice.
Proposition 5: If a, then b.
Proposition 5 Absurd: If not a, then b.
Proposition 6: If b, then a.
18
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Proposition 5 Absurd can only exist when its converse is proven by reductio;
direct argumentation is incapable of bringing it out. By means of this
intermediate step, Euclid shows that the negation of a does not entail b.
This reaffirmation of Proposition 5 is important. If b were the consequence
of a and also of not a, then the system as a whole would lose consistency
and become weak. Therefore, proving converses through reductio achieves,
economically, a double end: to establish reversibility and to ensure
consistency. Euclid goes outside the structure he is building, into the region
of absurdity, and creates a flying buttress—Proposition 5 Absurd—with
which he reinforces the cathedral.
Having examined how a particular reductio proof works and perceived the
double-end it serves, we are now able to explore more generally the use of
reductio throughout Book 1. But first, a word on the book’s structure is in
order. There seem to be two parts to it. The first deals mostly with lines,
angles, and the relations between them; the universe where this first half
takes place is triangular. Then, quite suddenly, at Proposition 29, a change
occurs. From here on, Euclid’s focus is directed at parallels and,
specifically, parallelogrammic areas. It is worth noting that Proposition 29
is where Postulate 5 is first employed. This proposition is the peak of the
first part of Book 1; the second peak, the whole book’s climax, is
Proposition 47.
Taking this separation into account, we can see that most reductio proofs in
Book 1 appear before Proposition 29, which is itself a reductio. Out of a
total of 11 such proofs, 9 belong to the book’s first half. Now, if it is true
that the purpose of the first half is to be able to enunciate Proposition 29,
and that Postulate 5 is required for this purpose, then the following
speculation becomes plausible. Euclid knows that Postulate 5 is especially
hard to accept: we have no way of knowing, for sure, that the two straight
lines in question, when produced indefinitely, will really meet. It is a shaky
supposition. He therefore invests a considerable amount of his energies
19
�Alejandro Ehrenberg / The Architecture of Reductio ad Absurdum
reaffirming Postulate 5 before actually using it in Proposition 29, which in
turn is used copiously in the second part of Book 1.
It is worth remembering what Postulate 5 begs the reader to accept: That,
if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side
less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that
side on which are the angles less than the two right angles. In the first half of Book
1, there are 4 propositions that refer directly to Postulate 5: 17, 27, 28, and
29. With the help of Proposition 13 and Definition 23, we can reformulate
and reduce them as follows:
17. If two straight lines cut by a third straight line meet, then the interior angles on
the side on which the lines meet are less than two right angles.
27. If a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles equal to
two right angles, then the lines will not meet when produced indefinitely.
28. If a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles equal to
two right angles, then the lines will not meet when produced indefinitely.
29. If two straight lines cut by a third straight line do not meet, then the interior
angles on the side on which the lines meet are equal to two right angles.
The table below presents them in a schematized fashion; it also notes each
proposition’s relation to Postulate 5, and whether it is a reductio proof:
Postulate 5
Proposition 17
Proposition 27
(reductio) and
Proposition 28
Proposition 29
(reductio)
If a, then b
If b, then a
If not a, then not b
If not b, then not a
Converse
Negation of the premise
and conclusion that
compose Post. 5
Negation of the premise
and conclusion that
compose the converse
Proposition 27 in the process of being proven by reductio reads thus: if b,
then not a, which is demonstrated as being absurd. This flying buttress
20
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
reaffirms Proposition 17: b entails a; b does not also entail not a. Not as clear
is the statement conjured up by the reductio in Proposition 29: if a, then b,
which, in effect, is Postulate 5. In the context of the demonstration, it is
absurd because it contradicts the given. Why Proposition 29 goes back to
Postulate 5 and not to a previous proposition is a question to be explored
in a subsequent essay. For our present purposes it suffices to observe how
Euclid has thoroughly reinforced Postulate 5. It has been firmly laid, and
supported by a flying buttress.
Hereupon the book’s mood changes markedly. Before Proposition 29,
Euclid proceeds cautiously, laboriously, even tediously. Now the author
seems much more at ease. In the second half of Book 1, Euclid is
concerned with the upper part
of the cathedral: he is dealing
with stained glass and
clerestories
and
spires.
Sometimes it seems he is
almost doing magic. He cuts
up parallelograms into smaller
figures and shifts them around
to prove things amazing and
counterintuitive.
In
Proposition 47, the two upper
squares simply pour into the
hypotenuse square; it can only
happen thanks to line AL,
parallel to BD or CE. And it
Fig. 1. Illustration of the proof for
can only be described as
Proposition 47.
beautiful.
A native of Mexico City, Mr. Ehrenberg (AGI’19) will offer an oral defense of his
Master’s Essay on Don Quijote in spring of 2019.
21
�Does Euclid Start with Axioms?
An Attempt to Not Confuse Circles for Lines
Derek Foret
I can still vividly recall my favorite picture book as a child. It was a story of
a little girl, Lily, who said one thing, and one thing only: why? To the
frustration of her father, she never felt satisfied with any answer given,
forcing him to always resort to saying some variation of “it just is.” One
day, while they are at the park, a UFO lands, and aliens announce that their
leader wants them to destroy the planet. Lily, of course, asks why.
Eventually, the aliens can only say, “he just does.” They realize this is not
a satisfactory answer and go back home to think things over. Lily saves the
day. However, it is unclear if she even understood that she did. First of all,
her dad has to put his hand over her mouth once the aliens announce they
are letting the humans live. And at the end of the book, her dad tells her
that he was proud of her at the park today. She says what she always says,
and he replies, “I just was, Lily. I just was…”1
Euclid brings out the inner Lily in all of us. He compels us to ask why
whenever he makes a claim, and we expect an answer from him based not
on faith but on what has already been proven. By referring to previous
statements, logical inquiry both assumes and guides us towards some sort
of beginning. However, herein lies an inherent problem, as a beginning, by
definition, has nothing previous to it. According to our modern conception
of mathematics—by which I not only mean the technical conceptions of
modern mathematicians, but also our popular conception of mathematics
1
22
Lindsay Camp, Why?, illustrated by Tony Ross (Anderson Press, 1998).
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
today—we generally think of this beginning as the axioms given. We see
these axioms as similar to the definitions, postulates, and common
notations that we find at the beginning of Euclid’s Elements2 (what this essay
will refer to as the “prelude” for shorthand). We do not want to “have to
trust [Euclid’s] word” (10/25/18)3 that any of his steps are justifiable. But
simply writing down the prelude does not justify the parts of the prelude,
at least not in the same way as Euclid’s propositions are justified through
proof.
Some great mathematicians have attempted to address this issue. Famed
logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell perceived it when he first
encountered Euclid. He described encountering the Elements as “one of the
great events of my life, as dazzling as first love,” yet, further clarifying,
called that love “not unalloyed. I had been told that Euclid proved things,
and was much disappointed that he started with axioms. At first I refused
to accept them unless my brother could offer me some reason for doing
so, but he said: ‘If you don’t accept them we cannot go on.’”4 This bothered
Russell so much that it “determined the course of [his] subsequent
[mathematical] work.”5 This work culminated in the Principia Mathematica,
an attempt to at least reduce mathematics to assumptions made by logic
itself (if not to de-axiomatize the field completely). Due to Kurt Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems, published a quarter century after the Principia,
the mathematical community today now considers Russell’s desire to be
2
All references to Euclid are from the following edition: Euclid, Elements, ed. Dana
Densmore & trans. Thomas L. Heath (Green Lion Press with Sheridan Books, 2017).
3
These dated references refer to my personal class notes: Math & Natural Science Tutorial,
Fall 2018, Emily Langston, tutor.
4
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. I (George Allen & Unwin,
1967), 67.
5
Christopher C. Leary & Lars Kristiansen, A Friendly Introduction to Mathematical Logic,
2nd ed. (Milne Library, 2015), 44.
23
�Derek Foret / Does Euclid Start with Axioms?
tenable for smaller systems that make up parts of mathematics6 but not the
whole of it.
However, modern mathematicians appear to be at peace with this fact. My
textbook defends axiomatic mathematics as a way to be “up front about
our need to make assumptions […] [acknowledging] our axiom set in every
deduction that we write.”7 This is a proper, respectable, and true
concession, and it does appear to solve the issue for mathematicians.
However, I do not see how this concession would solve the issue for Lily.
If concessions satisfied her, her dad would not have had to cover her
mouth when the aliens announced they were not going to destroy the
planet. As Lily appears to be the personification of logical inquiry itself,
this points to a fundamental problem: Gödel may have proved that Lily
cannot be fully satisfied, but Gödel does not make Lily go away. Whether
or not we are able to truly satisfy her remains a question. Euclid, for his
part, gives off the impression that he possesses less of a care for rigorous
axiomatization than modern mathematicians. The rest of this essay will
explore the question of whether or not this impression is tied to a method
for satisfying Lily that differs from (and so may satisfy her more fully than)
the modern approach.
The assumption that Euclid starts with axioms includes the assumption
that mathematical logic is linear. By that, I mean that it travels from a
beginning (the axioms) to an end (a final proposition). In this case, the
postulates of Book I become different points on a unidirectional line. We
tend to think of this structure as logical, which obscures the fact that it is
also natural: its linear sequentiality is analogous to how we see the events
of our own lives as a narrative throughout time. This is the assumption my
6
For the sake of intellectual honesty, a version of Euclidean geometry is one of these parts.
For the mathematics, see: Marvin Jay Greenberg, “Old and New Results in the Foundations
of Elementary Plane Euclidean and Non-Geometries,” The American Mathematical Monthly
117, no. 3 (March 2010): 198-219.
7
Leary, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, 44.
24
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
class made when we began our final discussion on Euclid, where we
seemed to agree that “we have gone from a point that has no part [Definition
1]—or at least from describing an equilateral triangle [Proposition 1]—to
the Pythagorean theorem [Proposition 47]” (10/25/18). If a set of axioms
is a foundation of admitted assumptions to which all logical inquiry
eventually leads back, then Proposition 1 is certainly not an axiom, as it is
both proven and seems to rely on prior concepts (specifically Definition
15, Postulate 1, Postulate 3, and Common Notion 1). So our candidates for
what Euclid’s real axioms are lay in what we commonly agree is his
beginning: the parts of the prelude.
The very fact that we were unsure if we started with Definition 1, the
beginning of the prelude, or with Proposition 1 reveals that we were
uncertain if the former is an axiomatic starting point. Part of this
uncertainty stems from Densmore’s editorial preface, which provides a
helpful, although limited, historical argument against treating the prelude
as axiomatic: she casts doubt on the authenticity of the prelude due to
inconsistencies between the early printed editions in both form and
content. However, we do not even need to turn to scholasticism to see that
“Euclid may not have been trying to cover the foundation exhaustively in
these sections.”8 Putting aside the postulates for now, this is clear in various
ways from the content of the definitions and common notions. First, the
definitions do not seem to be intended to be a potential student’s first
encounter with geometrical ideas. While we may be able to agree that we
can understand what it means for a line to be “breadthless length”
(Definition 1), it is nigh impossible to explain that understanding without
referring to concepts we learned before Euclid. Similarly, the common
notions (unlike the postulates) do not read like rules being agreed to but
general knowledge being drawn upon. For example, the notion that a part
cannot be greater than the whole feels stronger than the claim that if the
8
Dana Densmore, editor’s preface to: Euclid, Elements, xvi.
25
�Derek Foret / Does Euclid Start with Axioms?
interior angles on one side of two lines cut by a transversal add up to less
than two right angles, those two lines will meet on that side (Postulate 5).
The fact that we find potential definitions and common notions in the
propositions that are not listed in the prelude (i.e., “parallelogram” in
Proposition 35 or the Common Notion 2 equivalent for greater things in
Proposition 17) only makes this feel more likely.
Most importantly, Euclid never explicitly cites the prelude. While he
certainly refers to the concepts found in it, he never refers to them as if
they had already been agreed upon. He never writes anything along the
lines of “let us draw a circle according to Proposition 2,” or, at the very least,
“let us draw a circle as stated in the postulates.” A modern reader naturally
supplies this kind of thinking: if one does not remember why one is able
to assert something, one can flip back to the relevant earlier proposition or
part of the prelude. There is a difference, however, between modern
readers justifying a logical step to themselves and said logical step being
justifiable as such. Logical justification seems to speak to what Socrates
says in the Meno, that “true opinions […] for so long as they stay put, are a
noble thing and accomplish all [manner of] good things. Yet […] they
aren’t worth much until someone ties them down by means of a calculation
of cause.”9 However, true opinions are not made true because they have
been adequately tied down; we know this because we are able to tie down
false opinions as well.
Euclid makes no indication that he thinks of the definitions and common
notions as rules that we agreed cannot be broken. Perhaps this stems from
a realization that this does not make them Lily-proof: one could easily ask
why they cannot be broken. Euclid appears to take a different approach by
making the question of why self-answering. For example, he implicitly uses
the notion of a circle in Proposition 1 to argue that two radii are equal. If
9
26
Plato, Meno, trans. Robert C. Bartlett, 97e-98a.
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Lily were to ask why this were true, she would either be confused as to why
they are both radii, which a good tutor could clear up, or she would be
asking why are the radii of a circle equal? The question answers itself: because they
are radii of a circle. Asking why again creates an infinite regress, an absurdity.
Euclid explicitly uses another concept of absurdity in his arguments by
reductio ad absurdum (as we refer to them). In Proposition 6, for example, he
gets to a place where he seemingly violates Common Notion 5, as, due to
his assumptions, his logic has lead him to say that a part (the triangle DBC)
is equal to a whole (ACB) [Fig. 1]. He does not explicitly argue something
like ‘this goes against Common Notion 5,
which we agreed to, and so we have a
contradiction’. Instead, he simply says:
“the less [is equal] to the greater: which is
absurd.”10 Now, whether or not
Common Notion 5, as written, could be
violated without absurdity is a question
that would require an exploration of
mathematics that deals with infinity.11
However, if one only looks at the notion
as it is referenced in Proposition 6
specifically, a violation would always be
absurd: “the less” (DBC) cannot be equal
Fig. 1. Triangle BAC from
to “the greater” (ACB) due to the nature
Proposition 6.
of the two triangles.
Turning to what we previously put aside, our final candidates for axioms
are the postulates. While I do not have the space to offer a full analysis of
10
Euclid, Elements, Book I, Proposition 6.
One might be able to argue, for example, that there are “as many” even numbers as there
are counting numbers, as (2, 4, 6…) can be listed next to (1, 2, 3…). So a part of the
counting numbers is equal to its totality. But whether or not infinity can be a whole is
unclear.
11
27
�Derek Foret / Does Euclid Start with Axioms?
them, we can compare them with the definitions and common notions.
Like the definitions and common notions, they are never explicitly
referenced. Unlike them, however, they do not seem Lily-proof in the same
way, as they do read more like rules being agreed to,12 and absurdity cannot
be invoked. Lily could ask why, if the interior angles of two lines cut by a
transversal add up to less than two right angles, those two lines must meet
on the side of those angles—Lobachevski certainly did. Yet the way Euclid
implicitly invokes the postulates may share a similar self-answering
character as seen above. He states logical claims that rely on the first three
postulates in the same way as he states claims that rely on previous QEFs:13
by using the Ancient Greek third person imperative, translated as let x be.14
This is a complicated notion as the third person imperative does not have
a precise equivalent in English.15 Other than Euclid, God uses it in the
Septuagint translation of the Bible (e.g., “let there be light”). The
connection it offers is that “the mere act of speaking suffices to bring about
the truth of what is being said.”16 This points to a notion of selfexplanation: that the why of the action is found in the action itself. If fully
achievable, this would allow Lily to be completely satisfied by virtue of
doing the proposition.
Is there a similar notion underlying the last two postulates: Postulates 4 and
5? Euclid does not use the third person imperative when referring to their
12
Proclus defines a postulate as a “statement [that is] unknown and nevertheless [...] taken
as true without the student’s conceding it.” Robert B. Williamson, translator’s introduction
to Selections from Nikolai Lobachevski’s Theory of Parallels, published by the Graduate
Institute at St. John’s College.
13
Euclid uses two different kinds of proofs: QEFs (i.e., quod erat faciendum) when
something is being constructed and QEDs (i.e., quod erat demonstrandum) when something
is not.
14
For example, Euclid invokes Postulate 2 by saying “let the circle BCD be described” in
Proposition 1 and invokes Proposition 1 by saying “let the equilateral triangle DAB be
constructed” in Proposition 2.
15
Cf. Alfred Mollin & Robert Williamson, An Introduction to Ancient Greek, 3rd ed.
(University Press of America, 1997), 69.
16
Ibid.
28
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
concepts, but perhaps Postulates 4 and 5 somehow relate to the QEDs in
a similar way to how Postulates 1–3 relate to the QEFs. But how do the
QEDs differ from the QEFs? Last semester, it appeared that my class had
our greatest moments of clarity when discussing QEDs. For example, after
we went through Proposition 21, we not only felt like we knew how,
logically, the proposition was true, but also why, in a way, it was true. We
felt like we could see why an
interior angle like BDC would
be greater than an extreme
angle like BAC [Fig. 2] for any
triangle we considered. These
moments are exciting and
pleasurable: they feel similar to
an encounter with something
overwhelmingly beautiful.
Fig. 2. Triangle BAC from
Proposition 21.
Turning back to the Meno,
Socrates labels the process of tying down as “recollection,” which he
previously identified as “searching and learning as a whole.”17 In these
moments, logic seems to shift from a line to the commonly used metaphor
of a circle.18 We remember something that we already knew: our searching,
or asking why, becomes our learning, or our answering of why. It is here,
then, that we can perhaps imagine Lily fully satisfied. It is as if she could
ride a Euclidean carousel round and round again, eventually both asking
and answering in the same place.
Derek Foret (AGI’20) is a student in his second-semester at the Graduate Institute
and a Senior Resident for Student Activities on campus. He is a Kenyon College
alumnus interested in ancient political philosophy and its clash with science and
mathematics. He can be reached at dforet@sjc.edu.
17
18
Plato, Meno, 98a & 81d.
Cf. Aristotle, Physics, Book VIII, Ch. 9–10.
29
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
Zachary N. Greene
Zachary Greene: Where did you go to graduate school? You went to a
couple different places, right?
Paul Ludwig: I graduated from [The University of] Tennessee–
Chattanooga in 1987, and then I went to Oxford, England, studied English
and Italian literature. You could do both in a weird combo. In one way it
was not graduate school, because it was a second bachelor’s, which at the
time was not so unusual. Oxford was considered so much greater, on a
different plane, that a lot of North Americans would go to do a second
B.A. Partly it was a bit of an indulgence too. But it was considered a pretty
good degree. Actually at the time—I’m not sure if they are still doing this,
but their B.A. turned into a master’s if you waited for three to five years,
or something like that. If you went through another ceremony, it
automatically converted as if it were so great to begin with. The education
was better than what I was used to, though some Ivy League students
complained about it. It was a really good overview of English and Italian
Literature.
ZG: Complained in what sense?
PL: Well, they hated the weather and called Britain “Fantasy Island,” a TV
show at the time—Mr. Roarke and Hervé Villechaize. They thought what
they were getting was not as sophisticated as at Harvard, although I think
they got a lot more personal attention because it was pretty much one-onone with your tutor, usually two different tutors once per week each. Other
than that, there wasn’t too much supervision, you just got two stacks of
books and were told to write an essay on each stack, and that’s what you
did each week for two years.
30
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
ZG: Was there less emphasis on dialogue at Oxford comparatively to St.
John’s?
PL: Yes, you didn’t tend to talk to your fellow students except outside of
class. Now, there was good dialogue, but it was a bit more like the Higher
Gossip [documentary film series] that you guys are pursuing now. It was
not quite serious discussion. They used to joke that you shouldn’t talk shop.
The joke was that you didn’t want to show you were making any effort at
Oxford. Very aristocratic in that way, it was a holdover. I’m sure it has
changed, I hope it has changed. The really smart people didn’t have to
study at all, they got a first-class degree without any effort whatsoever. I
suppose there really were some people like that, but most people who did
well had to study fairly hard. My tutor told me this at the time—I don’t
know if I really knew anybody that did this, so perhaps it was a holdover
from a holdover, but what you would do is study late at night when no one
knew. After the partying was done and you had already hit the bars, you
would do your studying and you would do something to your face to look
like you hadn’t been up all night, a hot pack or a cold pack or something
on your head. Then you would surprise everybody at the end because there
was just one exam at the end—no continuous assessment. So when you
scored really high on that, everyone would be like, “Wow, he did no work
at all,” and that would blow people’s mind and it would be the gold
standard.
—
My conversations with tutors were wonderful and conversations with
fellow students were very good. There was a lot of leisure, it was more
leisurely than St. John’s or any American university. Although I didn’t do
the party thing at a state school, despite going to a state school, so perhaps
I wouldn’t know. Most people at Oxford were studying their pleasures, and
pleasing themselves in rather sophisticated ways. I didn’t do everything
everybody did, but there were odd things. The students would want to have
a ball, and they would get money to have a ball, which is a dance as I
31
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
thought of it. But as part of the ball, they would pay for a festival of rides
to come into the quad of the college with roller coasters and such. Drinking
was pretty intense, but they seemed to have been at it longer. At
Tennessee–Chattanooga, people would get utterly smashed. At Oxford
they would drink slowly, and get more and more smashed as the night went
on, but this could go on for quite a while. You could ride these things for
hours, so I don’t think they were doing so badly overall. It wouldn't be the
lifestyle that I would choose for myself in perpetuity, but at the time it was
great.
—
After Oxford, I did Social Thought at Chicago for the Ph.D. In between I
got a master’s because I realized you can’t get a job in social thought. As
my advisor put it, “You didn’t come here because it's the best social
thought department in the U.S., you came here because there are no other
social thought departments in the U.S.” I realized I wasn’t going to get a
social thought job, and decided I would major in classics. I retroactively
applied for a master’s in classics because I had taken a lot of classics classes
with those professors. So I had a B.A., B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and that was
finally it—it was enough.
ZG: What was your focus when you were at the Committee on Social
Thought?
PL: Greek and a little bit of Latin was a focus. I had really gone there
because I was very interested in Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the
American Mind, and I really wanted to study with him. That meant political
philosophy, whatever that is. Not every political science department would
even consider it a thing. I had those two foci, and neither one was a hot
ticket to any professional life post-graduation. I got interviews at both
political science departments and classics departments, so it wasn’t utterly
self-destructive. From the pure learning point of view, both were fantastic.
The classics department was very interesting indeed. Although I didn’t get
32
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
a whole lot out of political science as a department, there were Allan
Bloom, Nathan Tarcov, and Ralph Lerner, who was my initially assigned
advisor. And I never took proper advantage of all he had to offer, which
was just idiocy on my part. There were wonderful visiting people like
Clifford Orwin, who did Thucydides one year, which was the best course
I really ever took. Then Leon Kass was there, and he taught the book of
Genesis and the Nicomachean Ethics. These were two or three quarter-long
courses, kind of line by line, wonderful philosophizing about those things.
You, Mr. Interviewer, happen to be in my Nicomachean Ethics class right
now, and a lot of what you are hearing is partially digested, regurgitated
stuff I got from Leon Kass’s wonderful teaching. I probably can’t even
express it properly, I’m probably feeling it more than you’re hearing it.
ZG: Our Nicomachean Ethics class is probably the best class I’ve taken at St.
John’s College. How in-depth we go into the text and how much we go to
the Greek, which provides such a valuable context. This is actually one of
the questions I wanted to ask you about. Why should a Graduate Institute
student take Ancient Greek? Many of our [students] are out of school now.
What is the point of taking an ancient language? It’s somewhat impractical
to a certain extent.
PL: Right, most aren’t going to grow up to be classicists. Well, a few of
you are, people have been getting interested that way.
ZG: There are some students in our class that are incredible at the
language… and there are others that are not. But we see the value in going
to the original language of a text, and considering it in that form, which
provides something important to the conversation.
PL: It feels strange for me to be an advocate plugging Greek [in the
Graduate Institute] because I spent so many years as a tutor neglecting it.
Not really knowing—well, I guess I knew on some level [that] the Graduate
Institute did something like freshman language. It was odd: it was taught
33
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
by tutors I didn’t know well, who were themselves part-time tutors that did
not always teach in the undergraduate program and were not well known
to their colleagues. There tended to be a little anti-Graduate Institute
prejudice, that somehow it was a lite version of the Program, and we didn't
always put the very best tutors in the Graduate Institute. There might have
been real reasons for that, it started out as a way to offer accreditation to
teachers in the Annapolis area. You guys who are from someplace else who
move in here to do the [graduate program]—I think there were always
some like that, but you guys have become a majority. In a way, you’re the
students I’m most focused on at the moment. I think that prejudice against
those kind of teachers was a little silly, and the classes were always very
mixed.
In Jon Tuck’s Higher Gossip interview, he mentions he got to the Graduate
Institute somehow early in his tenure here, and he was teaching a poem by
Matthew Arnold or some such poet, and one of the students was the
Andrew Dorchester
34
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
leading expert in this poetry who had just wanted to come out of retirement
to do St. John’s. That was pretty early in the history of the Institute, and so
my sort of prejudice was just ridiculous. I hope all that is safely in the past.
I got interested in teaching Greek [in the Graduate Institute] many years
after I taught other [classes there], I had taught several. My best friend at
the college, Mrs. Mera Flaumenhaft, was teaching it quite recently. She told
me, “You've really got to think about this because these students really
want to be there. They come an extra night each week.” Maybe you guys
have put a number on it, can you quantify how much harder it is to do the
Greek preceptorial?
ZG: I started the program in the summer, which was fairly intensive. I did
the Republic with Mr. Pastille, and I had to put in a lot of hard work. The
Republic is not an easy text. Comparative to starting Greek in the fall and
now finishing it in the spring, I’ve had to put in at least twice as much
effort. The second class per week adds quite a bit, especially when you
consider translations, exercises, and trying to do some more on top of that
to try and cement things. How easy is it to cement Ancient Greek in a
semester? Well, it’s not. It’s quite a bit of extra work.
PL: To have students with that kind of dedication, as opposed to the
undergraduates—all freshmen have to take ancient Greek—I’ve had
wonderful undergraduate students of Greek, but to have the dedication of
a small cohort of four or five great graduate students who really want to be
there makes a very different sort of conversation. I think in some ways
tutors don’t realize what’s out there. You guys all come with an
undergraduate degree, and for a lot of you this is a stepping stone to
something else. A blind tutor might think, “Oh they’re just stepping on us
to get to something else.” But come on! That’s the kind of thing we want.
That we are your springboard means there’s something really good here
that you’re not going to get somewhere else. It shows in the quality of
discussions, and the speediness in which you go through Mollin and
Williamson. You do as much or more philosophizing about language as the
35
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
freshmen do, but getting through it in a semester as opposed to a semesterand-a-half or even longer, or not getting through it... I’ve actually finished
all twenty lessons in the two cycles I’ve taught it, which is very unusual.
Even when Mrs. Flaumenhaft taught the Greek preceptorial, she never got
past twelve or fourteen lessons. For us to be able to do twenty, and have
the better part of a semester to just concentrate on one book—at last, we
can actually see it in the original, not every passage, but the important ones.
It makes a big difference.
—
I’m now teaching classics at the graduate level, in a sense, which I wasn't
doing before, which makes me better from a professional point of view. In
addition to just learning a heck of a lot more because you guys have more
experience in the world. Very important in a work like the Ethics: young
people can’t learn it. Aristotle himself would say you’re wasting this on the
freshmen, that's just a necessary glitch of the Program. A difference in the
Graduate Institute is that you study things topic by topic, so you remember
Aristotle while you’re reading Hobbes. As opposed to the chronological
way the undergraduates do it. In a way, they've forgotten more than you’ve
ever known. What would be the right way to put it? There’s a balance there,
both ways have their virtues, but each also has its vice. So for me, it has
been wonderful, I can’t imagine a better way of spending two nights per
week.
ZG: Currently, we are in the second semester and we are reading the
Nicomachean Ethics, as we’ve mentioned. You are currently working on a
piece on civic friendship, which is towards the end of the book. We haven’t
actually gotten there yet. Would you care to tell us about that?
PL: It’s weird I got started on this almost sixteen years ago. I had done my
dissertation, which became a book, on eros and political philosophy, and
whether they had anything to do with one another—I claimed they did. It
seemed like a natural move to go on to another type of love, from eros to
36
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
philia. It also seemed like a quick kind of thing—I know a lot about
emotions already, this could be a quick rip-off. It became much more
involved very quickly. I’ve gone through many phases of feeling I knew
something, then realizing I was ignorant, then scratching my way back to
thinking I knew something, and realizing “wow, talk about ignorance, glad
I didn’t publish that!” Learning remains a dialectical process, even if you’re
doing it by yourself with either dead or distant interlocutors.
—
The whole need in America for civic friendship, the terrible polarization in
a way and really hostility that we are living through now—all that came
later. I joke that if I had been smarter about this and got this out earlier, I
could have prevented all that and we would be fine. So in a way, events
have caught up with the book and made it more relevant than when I first
started. I think political communities are forms of friendship. They don’t
look like it because they pale in comparison to personal friendships, which
have the sheer emotional affect you feel for your close friends. I think we
feel something analogous to that with fellow citizens without realizing it.
In a way it’s comparative or contrastive: think about how you feel about
fellow citizens compared to how you feel about foreigners, even if they are
living in our country. We aren’t quite as worried about what they are like.
Various hatreds have arisen against immigrants, and that's unfortunate. In
that regard, people are currently worried about what they are like. But, in
general, we are much more worried about what our fellow citizens are like,
we want them to be a certain way, we want them to have certain attitudes—
pro-liberty, pro-equality—because these are assumptions of our regime.
We share our regime, a shared cooperative scheme, and if people don't
believe in equality, they don't fit into our regime as well—same if they don't
believe in liberty, and I realize these are in tension in the current liberalconservative divide right now between valuing one more than the other.
But if you don't value both, you make an odd fit in America. To that degree,
37
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
worrying about immigrants who maybe don't share those regime
assumptions is legitimate.
—
Mostly I think we are worried about each other though. We wouldn’t worry
that way if we didn't favor each other. That’s the kind of worry you have
about your brother, he’s not holding up his end. “Dad, he’s not doing his
part! I’m doing the mowing every week!” That's a kind of favoritism—you
aren’t worried about your neighbor, you’re worried about your brother.
From that, I think there is room to build and see each other as sisters and
brothers, which is what Aristotle said too. It’s natural, there’s something
natural here, but there’s also something artificial, especially the modern
state. Within the modern state, there are tons of things that are still natural.
It’s very natural to feel concerned about your fellow citizens, what they
believe, what they ought to believe, how they are faring, who is persecuting
them. A test case of that would be the pathetic story of someone’s job that
has been outsourced, you immediately feel outraged. “You did that to an
American!” I think we all feel that. I think it’s time for theorists, especially,
to admit that, not just to concentrate entirely on self-interest, which is great,
it motivates us, it does a lot of things. I would never think that self-interest
is not a great political motivator. Civic friendship is another, and they are in
some forms of tension. When people pursue their self-interest utterly, to
the detriment of their fellow citizens, a price is to be paid and they lose the
political support of their fellow citizens. I think cosmopolitan elites have
lost a little political support recently, that’s what we call populism. Really a
lot of the passions that I see as being out there, and somewhat misguided
or even debased today, are civic friendship that doesn't know its name. At
an earlier stage, it dared not speak its name.
—
Liberalism wanted to get us away from civic friendship. Classical liberals—
such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson—they lived through an era of
robust civic friendship, both in theory and practice. I think the wars of
38
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
religion had already showed them that it was very dangerous, civic passions
can be fanatical, especially when connected to religion, but in other ways
too. Geography, maybe? We have a little bit of fanaticism about our border
right now, on both sides. Those passions needed to be defused, so liberal
theorists stopped talking about civic friendship for very good reasons, but
we might now be ready for another corrective, moving back in the other
direction slightly.
ZG: Can a city without civic friendship be just?
PL: We seem to be trying that experiment, don't we? “Let’s forget about
civic friendship and just try to focus on justice.” As conceived as equal
freedom, equal opportunity, or equal result, that would be the basis for
justice. But I think the answer is “no.” Maybe it can be just without
recognizing that it’s a civic friendship and without talking about it. I think
liberal societies have always been civic friendships without recognizing it,
without knowing it, and without calling it by its name. I certainly believe
justice has undergone a manifold improvement since the liberal revolution,
since Locke, Montesquieu, and give Hobbes his credit, and especially
Machiavelli. That justly decried name! Without that revolution, the kinds
of justice we enjoy today wouldn't be possible.
—
I think all through that period, civic friendship was always there, but people
just slowly forgot about it as a thing and began to redescribe it as
morality—therefore fitting [it] into justice itself, or even as patriotism. It
just got redescribed. We may have now hit a limit on what we can do with
a civic friendship that no one knows about. It’s just there, in the air, where
people are breathing it without thinking about it. Maybe to move on from
where we are now, we would need a more self-aware civic friendship. It
seems we are pretty unlikely to associate it with religion again. I think
maybe we’ve made that distinction. I hope religion stays private. I’m
religious myself, but my hope is that it will remain a private issue and not
39
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
become a political issue. Civic friendship could be just political, and not
have to have that fatal connection, which is why I think it faded in modern
theory to begin with. But I’m not sure if I’ve given you a strict “yes” or
“no.”
ZG: I think that was rather sufficient. Congratulations on the book, do you
have a release date?
PL: Thank you, about a year from now. Hopefully it’s all blown over by
then, and it will be dated before it comes out. But somehow I doubt it.
ZG: I’d like to ask you a question that we’ve been asking other tutors. What
makes a great book?
PL: Oof!
ZG: I know, that’s a big question.
PL: I think we’re so spoiled here with not having to set curricula the way
all academics in all other departments are constantly battling about what
makes a book worth reading, battling against other competing visions. We
tutors have a lot of agreement because we are quite conservative of the
canon. Though you guys may not realize it, tutors do deliberate endlessly
about the Program. We are worried there might be better stuff out there,
that we aren’t using or reading, or some stuff might have lost its zing or
not be appealing to people. Since we have so much that's great, we want to
make sure the things we are reading makes that connection for students. I
think a great book often has a surface that will grip you. There’s also a
certain authority it carries. For whatever reason, you usually know that
other people think it's a great book, and therefore it has a claim on your
attention. But each tutor definitely thinks he knows some books are great
that other tutors don’t realize are great.
ZG: What would those be for you?
40
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
PL: My favorite books are the comedies of Aristophanes, of which some
are on the Program—The Frogs and The Clouds. People just don't know
about a play like The Acharnians, that even most of my colleagues haven’t
read. Each one of these plays displays something about Athenian
democracy. The Assembly of Women—more people know about it. The
Acharnians are mentioned by Thucydides, they were a faction—pro-war,
and opposed to peace because their land was destroyed first when the
Spartans invaded. The Spartan King Archidamus would destroy some
crops when the Athenians retreated within the walls, but leave others
undestroyed purely to create factions. It’s all there in Thucydides but in a
nutshell, and then you see it played out dramatically in Aristophanes. It’s
just marvelous. All of his plays are like that. The Knights is an oligarchic
revolution, the knights being a higher class than the heavy armed [soldiers]
or rowers. The highest of the three orders. They of course need a
demagogue. It’s very relevant to today’s populism, where elites make
compromises by using the demagogue to get their own way.
—
Leo Strauss has a wonderful lesser-known book—but very long and
involved—of studies called Socrates and Aristophanes. Ostensibly to find out
more about Socrates by reading Aristophanes’ take in The Clouds: partly
fictionalized, but probably some type of trick mirror that's supposed to
exaggerate features that are truly there. In order to understand The Clouds
that well, with his usual thoroughness, Strauss reads every extant play with
his wonderful political eye. Just reading that book in tandem with the plays
is a political education of the highest order that I’ve ever come across. You
can’t really understand what’s in Aristotle if you don't have that kind of
cultural background, that kind of give and take, the street speech that's
present throughout Aristophanes. I think a great book has to speak to us
at our most profound levels. It has to tell us about something we really
want, or [that] we come to learn through the book itself that is something
we were really wanting all this time without realizing it. It has got that odd
41
�A Conversation with Paul Ludwig
surface-to-core dialectic where there’s something superficially attractive
about it beyond any cultural authority that it might have. But as you get
deeper into it, there are these amazing turnarounds that happen. You think
you’re going down a path, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh! That was at the end
of this path, and I feel like I’m back at the beginning.”
ZG: Is there anything you would like to see added or subtracted from the
curriculum?
PL: I obviously think it’s very good. I feel like the Math & Natural Science
segment is the weakest, and I would probably subtract the social science at
the end of it—the Freud and Jung. My own feeling, and I’m not sure I
share this with a lot of tutors, is that psychologists have moved beyond
Freud. There were intentionally fraudulent aspects of his work. He wanted
a moneymaker and he found one. Some of those case studies, though they
have incredible intrinsic interest (he knew how to interest me)—I think
they weren’t well documented. I think he made some stuff up. I don't think
there’s any reason to think that social science is truly related to math and
natural science. If you really want to have a math and natural science
segment, then you have to leave social science out, because to the extent
it’s mathematized, it’s no longer true of politics, and to the extent it’s social,
it can’t be scientific. Nature does play a role in politics—I guess I, more
than others, am saying that when I say civic friendship is natural. There’s a
big difference because you can’t be empirical in the same way about social
matters. It would be nice to have a separate segment, but then it just
becomes our Politics & Society segment. I would add more math and
natural science, and create the space for it by taking out Freud and whatever
else we do at the end.
ZG: Do you think we should introduce more American authors into the
Program? That’s one thing I’ve noticed that's rather lacking. You don't see
many American thinkers in the Program, it’s very German influenced.
42
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
PL: Yeah, I think that's fair. Graduate students—but especially
undergraduates—do go through this very long American saga, which isn’t
quite the right word for it. But to truly call these “great books”—a
collection of Lincoln speeches or the Supreme Court cases—they aren’t
great books. We read them because of who we are. It's a little bit more of
the American identity. It's a concession, I think, to the kinds of things that
departmental academia has made vast concessions to. They’re way beyond
an American identity, they want to read about a smaller identity, conceding
that students should read more black authors because they have been kept
down all these years, or more female authors. So, in a way, the Program
concedes we have an American identity, and today we have to try to interest
more and more people from all of the world in it, since we are getting a
much more international student body than ever. It's a concession and a
tension—you have to think: to what extent are these great books or just
our great books.
—
There have been recent ideas bandied about, like having a whole American
segment of both literature and politics for the Graduate Institute. It would
be like the History segment: an option not everyone took. I might be in
favor of something like that if it stayed optional. Everyone has to take their
own path. Like you and I, who grew up in middle America, an American
path to greatness is a true path to greatness. If I can come through the
Lincoln–Douglas debates to understand something about greatness of
soul, I’ll recognize it better when I come to Aristotle. We can bypass the
Germans entirely. It's a little bit weirder to ask a Korean student to move
through that, or get interested in American Civil War issues. That Korean
student might say, “I’ve never discriminated against anyone on the basis of
race anyway. The Japanese discriminate against me, but I like them,” or
something like that. “Why should I have to go through it? Let me read
Hegel so I can go to the fuller stuff directly.” There is a tension here, I’m
not sure if I have any great answers. I wouldn’t change the Program just to
add a bunch of Americans, by switching out Kant or something.
43
�Adam Hurwitz, Cosmic Petri Dish #1, 2018, Black ink and 24k gold
leaf on heavyweight cotton paper. Color inversion with Adobe
Illustrator.
44
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
The Alumni Association of St. John’s College funds a prize for a distinguished graduate
preceptorial paper to be awarded at spring commencement. A prize committee, composed
of tutors, will consider papers submitted by tutors of preceptorials in the previous spring,
summer, and fall terms for this award. Award-winning essays are kept in the Greenfield
Library. “Home,” by Joseph M. Keegin (AGI’18), is the 2017 award-winning essay.
Home
Joseph M. Keegin
At the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid, we find the surviving remnants of Troy
floating across the Mediterranean in a mere handful of vessels after
suffering defeat at the hands of the allied Achaean army. Waves toss the
Trojan ships like a petulant child having a temper tantrum. The goddess
Juno, angry about a prophecy foretelling the destruction of her beloved city
of Carthage at the hands of the Trojans, petitions Aeolus to loose violent
winds upon the already-tattered fleet. He complies. Violent gusts batter the
Trojan galleys, breaking several against rocks jutting up from the sea floor.
The sea-god Neptune notices what is happening in his domain and rages
at the other gods encroaching upon his sovereignty: he dispatches the
winds back to their mountain home, rebuking Juno and Aeolus for their
impetuousness. The winds calm, the seas still, and the Trojan exiles drift
ashore near Carthage. They sprawl out in exhaustion on the beachhead, run
an inventory of their remaining equipment and rations, and start fires for
their first meal on land since being forced from their home. Aeneas goes
on the hunt, killing seven huge bucks: one for each vessel destroyed in
Aeolus’ storm. The Trojans—“a remnant left by Greeks, harassed by all
45
�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
disasters known on land and sea, in need of everything”—sorrow at their
condition.1
However, there is hope. Aeneas, sensing the dejection gnawing at his men,
makes a rousing speech: “You have neared the rage of Scylla,” he reminds
them, “and her caves’ resounding rocks; and you have known the Cyclops’
crags; call back your courage, send away your grieving fear.”2 Then he
reveals a second prophecy concerning the future of the Trojan people:
“Through many crises and calamities we make for Latium, where fates have
promised a peaceful settlement. It is decreed that there the realm of Troy
will rise again.”3 Though driven from their homeland, the Trojans are fated
for a new home.
A new home is a strange idea. For us modern, twenty-first-century
Americans, “home” is often merely a euphemism for “where you happen
to live”: it is not uncommon to see billboards along highways advertising
“New Luxury Estate Homes,” “1 & 2 Bedroom Apartment Homes,” “New
Homes For Sale.” But for most of human history, home has been
something familiar, old, and beloved—it precedes us, produces us, and
remains a permanent part of the background of our lives even if we leave
it for somewhere new. “You can take a boy out of the country,” they say—
you know the rest of the story. Like Ithaca for Odysseus, home awaits your
return, because one belongs to one’s home as much as one’s home belongs
to oneself. Which is to say, home is as much a place—a fixed, bounded
geographical zone with specific, identifiable qualities and details—as the
stories, feelings, things, and—perhaps most importantly—people
associated with it. Home is the place where you exist as a midpoint between
a succession of generations into the past and a procession of generations
into the future. “There’s no place like home” may be a cliché, but the saying
1
Virgil, Aeneid, Book I, lines 841-843. All citations refer to Allen Mandelbaum’s
translation, published 1961 by Bantam Classics.
2
I.279-282.
3
I.284-286.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
is common for good reason: home is a place and no two places are
identical. No two homes are alike—maybe not even for the people who
share them.
What happens, then, when one’s home disappears? Not mentally, mind
you: not as if the place that was once considered “home” is no longer
thought of in those terms. What happens when home is destroyed? Where
do you go when homecoming is impossible? Unlike many peoples whose
names have been wiped off of the map and out of the register of human
memory for all time, the Trojans are not simply homeless: they have a great
destiny, foretold in prophecy. The destruction of their city provides them
an opportunity. They are bound for a new home—not for an alreadyestablished, foreign city into which they will assimilate, but for a new place
entirely. They will make a new home: Rome, a city fated to blossom into an
empire. Aeneas will “establish a way of life and walls for his own people,”
Jupiter reveals to Venus. And as for the following generations of Romans,
the father of the gods will “give them empire without end.”4
This essay will explore home: what it is, how one comes into being, and
what happens when home and world become identical.
Troy and Beyond
Troy was one of the richest and most beautiful cities in the world. The
beautiful face of Helen was not the only thing that brought the Greeks to
Trojan shores: the possibilities of plunder to be won from Priam’s city and
well-wrought armor to be stripped from the bodies of dead Trojan soldiers
were not overlooked. Even before Helen’s name is mentioned in the Iliad,
Apollo’s priest Chryses relays to Agamemnon and Menelaus that “the gods
grant who have their homes on Olympos / Priam's city to be plundered
and a fair homecoming thereafter”—treasure was always part of the deal.5
4
5
I.369, 390.
Homer, Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore, I.18-19.
47
�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
Aeneas and the Trojans, even, did their best to rescue as much wealth from
their city as they can: after landing in Carthage they draw from this
collection to thank Dido for her hospitality. All the more horrible, then, to
see it burned and pillaged.
But along with some of the city’s riches, the surviving Trojans also escape
with the city’s “household gods.” The night after leading the infamous
wooden horse inside the city walls, Aeneas is approached in a dream by
Hector: the dead warrior reveals the treachery of the Greeks to our sleeping
hero, urging him to wake and flee the flames of his burning home and
entrusting to him Troy’s “holy things and household gods.” “Take them
away as comrades of your fortunes,” he urges, “seek out for them the great
walls that at last, once you have crossed the sea, you will establish.”6 Aeneas
wakes, arms himself for battle, and charges into the streets to make
vengeance. There he meets Panthus, son of Apollo’s priest, desperately
leading his grandson to safety while “in his hand he carries the holy vessels
and defeated gods.”7 But the existence of these peculiar deities is also
mentioned in the first stanza of the poem: once he founds Rome, Aeneas
will have “carried in his gods to Latium.”8 And after landing at Carthage,
as if to clarify just what “carry” means in this context, Aeneas announces
to his disguised mother Venus:
[...] I am pious
Aeneas, and I carry in my ships
my household gods together with me, rescued
from Argive enemies; my fame is known
beyond the sky.9
6
Virgil, Aeneid, II.400-404.
II.437-438.
8
I.10.
9
I.534-537.
7
48
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Unfortunately, the poem does not provide any direct description of what
these “household gods” are. We learn about them only by way of what
happens to them—in their being held, carried, transported across the ocean
in the galleys of ships. We learn that Juno is horrified by their fated arrival
in Italy. While leaving Troy, Aeneas—hands soiled with Grecian blood—
begs his father to carry them. And much later, after landing on Italian
shores, we see Aeneas make a tribute to the household gods of his friend
and ally Evander.
Every home has its gods, it seems: homes are not just where you and your
family live, but also where your gods reside. And unlike the gods of
Olympus, the gods of one’s home are fragile, transportable, and require a
great deal of care. It is unclear what kind of role they play in the lives of
mortals: we do not see any children of household gods, they never take
human form, they do not intervene in human affairs. Rather, they are quiet
elements of city life that seem to grant a sense of the sacred to affairs both
domestic (Panthus and Evander seem to have their own household gods)
and political (Aeneas carries the gods of Troy).
When home is the home of your family and your gods, it could never just
be a house—which is why none of the places the Trojans stop on their way
to Italy could have been their new home. Many of the places are selfevidently unfit for consideration as the location of a new Troy: Thrace is a
poisoned place, the site of an ancient crime; Buthrotum is a sad and hollow
replica of the once-great Troy, now shot through with sorrow and anguish.
Others, however, are less clear. When the Trojans found the city of
Pergamum on the island of Crete, it seems a fitting enough locale for longterm habitation—that is, until a plague befalls the island. Aeneas, sleeping
in bed one evening, has a vision of his household gods standing over him:
they speak to him, reminding him of the promise of Italy, Rome, and the
eventual empire over which his descendants will rule.10 Clearly, the gods
10
This is the only occasion in the Aeneid in which the household gods are personified and
take on an active role.
49
�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
are not happy in Crete. Aeneas orders the ships loaded and the sails raised,
though a small group of Trojans stay behind. By the time they arrive in the
comparatively hospitable Actium, it seems they have internalized the lesson
taught at Crete: the Trojans spend a year there without founding a city,
experience no hardship beyond the coldness of winter, and raise their sails
for Buthrotum.
What ruled out Carthage, however, is initially much more opaque. Though
initially met with resistance and suspicion, the Trojans are welcomed with
open arms by Dido and the Tyrians. Their fame has been preserved in a
series of murals—whether painted or etched is unclear—at a shrine to Juno
in the heart of the city, depicting both the heroic deeds and the suffering
of Trojan warriors in their battle against the Greek invaders. Carthage has
built a monument to Trojan courage. And with the heroes themselves
suddenly landed upon the shores of their domain, the Tyrians are happy to
offer them a home. “[Should] you want to settle in this kingdom on equal
terms with me,” Dido promises them, “then all the city I am building now
is yours. Draw up your ships. I shall allow no difference between the Tyrian and
the Trojan.”11 So why did this offer not last? The simplest answer is that the
gods would not allow it. Indeed, when Hermes approaches Aeneas to
remind him of the prophecy, “he sees Aeneas founding fortresses and
fashioning new houses.”12 Assimilation seems to be underway. It is only
once the god reminds Aeneas of the promise made to his son that the
Trojan leader’s mind changes. To remain in Carthage would mean to rob
Ascanius of the glory for which he is fated. Carthage would provide a happy
home for Aeneas and his people—but it could never allow for the
glorification of Aeneas’ true heir.
11
12
50
I.805-809. Emphasis mine.
IV.347-348.
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
People in a place with their gods and their families: this is the basic recipe
for a home. But if a people cannot simply assimilate with another to have
a home, how do they make a new one?
A New Troy
When Jupiter reveals the fate of Aeneas to his mother Venus, the first item
in his list of events is that he “shall wage tremendous war in Italy and crush
ferocious nations”—only after which he will “establish a way of life and
walls for his own people.”13 Rome will happen, but not without conflict.
Prophecy does not imply simplicity or ease. But what is the function of war
in the founding of a new home? Is it the whim of the gods? Or might
conflict be a necessary part of founding a new home?
The Trojans do not simply invade Italy. When they land at Latium they are
initially extended a warm welcome by King Latinus, who just recently
received a prophecy that his daughter will be married off to foreigners.
“For strangers come as sons-in-law,” the voice of his dead father tells
him—and as if to assuage any doubt about who these strangers might be,
he recites the fate of the Trojans: “their blood will raise our name above
the stars; and their sons’ sons will see all things obedient at their feet,
wherever the circling sun looks on both sides of Ocean.”14 Rome, then, will
begin with a wedding—but the wedding is the first source of conflict.
Princess Lavinia has been all but promised to Turnus, the handsome and
young king of the Rutulians, but Latinus’ prophecy inspires him to break
off the engagement. Juno, furious at the prospect of a Trojan marrying into
the Latin royal family, sics the Fury Allecto on the Latins: Lavinia’s mother
13
I.363-369.
VII.123-127. The ghost of Creüsa, Aeneas’ wife who died at Troy, had told him of this
fate before he and the survivors had escaped the burning city: in Hesperia, “days of gladness
lie in wait for you: a kingdom and a royal bride” (II.1056-1057).
14
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�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
Amata and Turnus are roiled into bloodlust. The Rutulian king begins to
muster an army against the Trojans.
Allecto also helps sow the second seed of conflict, by leading Ascanius’
hunting dogs to the beloved stag of Tyrrhus and Sylvia. Ignorant of the
stag’s privileged place among the Latins, Ascanius sends an arrow into his
gut, killing him. It is a grievous betrayal of custom, but a custom that the
Trojans could never have assumed—and which the Latins, being “a race
of Saturn, needing no laws and no restraint for righteousness,” would never
have told them.15 Sylvia and Tyrrhus rouse the Latin farmers to battle:
wielding whatever sharp implements they can find—“anger makes a
weapon”—they march against the Trojan encampments.16 First blood is
drawn: Almo, son of Tyrrhus, is struck by an arrow from an unknown bow.
Latinus rebukes Turnus and the Latin mobs and refuses to open the city’s
Gates of War—but Juno does it for him, making the war official. War,
however, requires alliances—and while the Trojan encampments are under
siege, Aeneas sails down the Italian coast making pacts with friendly kings.
The most notable of these is Evander, king of the Arcadians, who entrusts
his son Pallas to Aeneas’ tutelage. By the time Aeneas returns to assist the
Trojan ramparts, he has assembled thirty ships with ten generals from
different regions of Italy. It is a motley crew, including gods and mermen,
all willing to put their lives on the line for a Trojan victory.
Marriage, the breaking of custom, and alliances: these are the preconditions
for the Trojan-Latin war. The marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia, if carried
out, would result in the union of two peoples—but beneath the kingship
of one: the Trojans. Aeneas and his people would inherit a city, a place to
live while raising the walls of Rome, and the Latins will become
collaborators in Rome’s greatness. And as Rome is destined to be an
15
16
52
VII.268-269.
VII.670.
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
empire of law—one that is destined to “teach the ways of peace to those
[they] conquer, to spare defeated peoples, [and] tame the proud”—the
flimsy, ambiguous rule of custom must be overcome.17 A civilized people
must be able to articulate the rules, especially to guests—a tradition of
inexpressible cultural habits is no way to teach the ways of peace to others.
Furthermore, the alliances crafted in battle set the terms of who will
possibly be victor and who the conquered: not only do the Trojans win if
Aeneas leads his army to victory, but so too would (for example) the
humble and rustic Arcadians. The winning party will determine the
character of the peace that takes shape afterward. The conquered will be
subject to the laws and customs of the conquerors.
Or so it seems, but the arrangement arrived at by Jupiter and Juno
complicates this outcome. “For the Ausonians [Italians] will keep their
homeland’s words and ways,” Jupiter promises his wife:
‘[...]their name will stay;
the body of the Teucrians will merge
with the Latins, and their name will fall away.
But I will add their rituals and customs
to the Ausonians’, and make them all—
and with one language—Latins. You will see
a race arise from this that, mingled with
the blood of the Ausonians, will be
past men, even past gods, in piety;
no other nation will pay you such honor.’18
Jupiter turns this expectation on its head: the conquerors will take the name
and language of the conquered. In a set of circumstances unique to the
Trojans and Latins—and brought about only through divine authorship—
Trojan and Latin customs will exist peaceably alongside one another.
17
18
VI.1136-1137.
XII.1107-1117.
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�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
Neither will dominate. But again, customs are not laws, and the Latins are
a lawless people: one may assume that the laws established by Aeneas will
be binding for this whole new race. Which is, of course, a curious and new
term. From the union of these two peoples we will get one: no longer
understood as members of family groups (Teucrians descended from
Teucer, Dardaans descended from Dardanus, and so forth), the people will
comprise a unity of plurality—a many that makes one. And this
transformation of peoples into a race is a reflection of another
transformation that Rome will effect: that of home into world.
World
Before meeting with the Latins after landing on the Italian peninsula,
Aeneas visited the Sibyl. A deranged priestess of Apollo, the Sibyl was
granted the ability to presage the future by writing the fates on a collection
of leaves, which are then frequently scattered by the wind. But Aeneas is
not here to hear the future from the Sibyl. Rather, he requires her assistance
in descending to Hades to visit the soul of his dead father, who will tell him
the whole story of Rome. The Sibyl agrees, but Aeneas must first complete
a few tasks: so Aeneas picks the golden bough, performs the required
sacrifice for Persephone, and the two climb into the bowels of hell.
When they reach Anchises in the Fields of Gladness, he is positively
glowing: he stands in the middle of a grassy meadow, telling the story of
his bloodline to the souls of his descendants. Aeneas tries to embrace him,
but his arms pass through his body like a beam of light through a window.
They share tears. Anchises then takes Aeneas on a tour of the blessed part
of the underworld, the place where great souls live out their afterlives in
joy and gaiety while waiting for the moment of their resurrection—when,
a thousand years after death, they will drink from the river of forgetting
and return to a bodily form on earth. Then he reveals to him the destiny of
Rome: the events that will shape its legacy, the greatness it will win, and the
men who will lead it there. “Rome will make her boundaries as broad as
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
earth itself,” Anchises says, “will make her spirit the equal of Olympus, and
enclose her seven hills within a single wall, rejoicing in her race of men.”19
Rome, it seems, will be founded as a great city by great men—but then will
become something different. Rome will eventually become the whole world.
If what was said earlier about home has any validity—that home is a place—
then this poses a strange problem. Just as home is a place, world is a space.
Rather than being defined by boundaries, specificity, and uniqueness, the
world is that space which transcends all places and inside of which all place
loses its place-ness. A place is defined explicitly in opposition to the world:
in full knowledge of the vastness of everything and the infinite array of
possibilities, I settle myself in a small corner of existence whose contours
become as familiar as the backs of my hands. I always live in a place, though
I may have knowledge of the world: I can study astronomy, oceanography,
and the histories of distant empires without ever leaving my home.
Somehow, however, Rome will collapse these category distinctions: it will
be an empire that spans the whole world, while remaining the home of a
people in the form of a race. How does a transformation of this kind take
place?
It seems to involve two factors: people and history. World-as-home-forrace carries with it a different set of categories than place-as-home-forpeople: as seen before, the category “race” transcends of particular family
groupings to constitute a higher-order unification of people. The Trojans
and Latins will retain their separate customs and rituals, but will become
one inasmuch as they are members of the same race—only this
arrangement of people is capable of inhabiting a world-sized home. No
longer will separate peoples inhabit far-flung cities ruled by hereditary
kings: the boundaries of Rome and those of the world will become
19
VI.1034-1038.
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�Joseph M. Keegin / Home
identical, uniting all people under one banner. The whole world will have
an order, then—and he who rules Rome rules it all.
It is no accident that Anchises’ prophecy takes place over the course of
many generations. The founding of Rome will not be like the creation of
the heavens and earth (or even, perhaps, like the transformation of the
Trojan and Latin peoples into a single race): it will not go from being a city
to encompassing the entire earth in a single instant. Rather, though its
destiny is already written, the transformation must play out in time.
Successive generations will make their contributions to this transformation:
specific human beings—people like Tullus, Numa, Romulus, Mummius,
and Caesar—will be the agents of the change. Fate does not preclude active
human participation in its execution. Gods may author what will happen,
but humans must effect the execution. And inasmuch as human beings are
beings in time, their actions are events in time—and the memory, or story,
of these events constitutes history.
At the end of the Aeneid, however, we do not see the founding of Rome.
The bleeding body of Turnus does not provide us with a vision of Roman
greatness that we expect after reading numerous instances of prophecy: it
is hard to see how the merciless, vengeful slaughter of the Rutulian king is
a beginning-point for the eventual Roman mission of teaching peace to the
conquered, sparing the defeated, and taming the proud. Perhaps the
execution of prophecy often plays out like the opening of the poem, where
a band of confused refugees float around the Mediterranean, unsure of
where they may land. But though we all long for a home, perhaps only a
few are called to inhabit their own—and even fewer to see theirs to
greatness.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Adam Hurwitz, Moon Graph #3: Star Birds, 2018, Black ink and 24k
golf leaf on heavyweight cotton paper.
57
�Adam Hurwitz, Cosmic Petri Dish #3, 2018, Black ink and 24k gold
leaf on heavyweight cotton paper.
Adam Hurwitz’s work combines nature with mathematics using a distinctive
minimalistic and playful technique. “We are all at once large and small, connected
through the depths of our skies and seas, hearts and spirits,” Hurwitz suggests.
Using Micron Pigma black ink, vivid colors, and negative space, his work explores
the miracles of nature, love, and music under the lens of an artist microscope.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Five Poems
Louis Petrich
Waking
I get how Love makes choice,
her friends to mate:
she sees
and hears
and touches them—
directly.
The man on words dependent,
senselessly kept distant,
wiser though than these,
dispenses himself vainly,
present not to please.
Teach him to care—
(his letters archives fill, to glory hers)
and not to care—
to face her sideways,
lean of appetite
and shoreline straddling—
uncommitted.
From sea
come sounds
to measure
his up-heaving.
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
Let’s see . . . he’ll write his Dear infrequently,
applaud more circumspectly, too, hereafter,
to make himself Love’s equal, sporting free,
and take close by her beauties, satisfied.
Yet still he wonders much
the fitting thing to do
with all the waked words fine
that passed so nearly true
between them heretofore,
for light, you know, it bends
through human mediums, too.
Who thinks that —
buy them, someone would—
like new?—
Give everything she treasured once before?
Are women—covetous so—of their dreams,
as twenty-thousand times would men try proof?
If only such another he could meet,
rehearsèd mettle, richly hers, he’d keep.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Love Lesson #5
Unshaped the things your words once licked adorn.
Now what impression must I pray be mine?
Give arrows lips to drink me, salt afloat . . . .
Tap wat’ry cheers, no! Nails and teeth, my shore!
Your thirsty arms in rainbow stretch between
the world I’m in and yours! Untangle shy
spurred feet from stirrups, horse let fly on wet
stones, cobbled vain-discrete for leg-gripped ride!
Not wont were you to be obtuse so. What?
Must, like a leaf-blower, I speak? To pile
for binding pages torn by heart’s fell winds?
Yes,
it pains me witness cast of smiles from mine
on faces tilting rapture, yours to win,
as entered at the wrong cue for my scene,
I ever after play the man upstaged.
Straight
I’d give and hazard all that I do dream
for one good go with you, and summon rage
if going faints, as Shylock fills with hate,
yet greedy less for years than lusty spill.
No,
I must not think you worse than those before,
to slide rings back and forth ‘twixt present mates,
or tricked to swallow, urged by absent core.
Goal—
keep heart-strings taut to penetrate the storm—
writ arrows marry minds, spite bodies torn.
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
Love Lesson # 7
You laugh—
as if it shouldn’t matter,
touching friends like us,
that homeward heart
lets absent body
make defection:
“Odysseus, thigh-scarred,
mends goddess beds—
his love’s not home removed.”
As I flip eggs in bacon grease
(no doubt, for breakfast, bacon’s good),
I think about the fact
you would a vegetarian become,
if bacon were not blameworthy.
So taste of tongue does matter make of life,
and earth disfigures,
even stars,
which though God promised counted could not be,
in time we learned to spy them out,
and later, how to trace the infinite diagonals,
which painters ply as energy
that flows through arms and legs
to guide eyes pleasured home.
So when you smile that others matter not
to bold partakers sharing breast
of deep Athena’s confidence,
yet hear confess of tangent doings
that deserve a place in stories
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
trying matters no and yes.
I’ve fewer owls to feather lettered night.
I drink, still thirsty, morns their skimmed-off milk.
Sun-freckled skin, yours,
I’d have honeyed spread,
unwrinkled shores for golden clime to taste!—
Instead, by hornèd moon,
your hairs uncurl with cries
throat-pulled from deep pale stores of time laid waste.
Your waves, strong manly bent,
head home towards me
on what’s not matter—
ethereal laws,
which go by other names, when convenient,
for none knows really what explains
how pain or pleasure
alters cause
or fate removes.
Dark light misshapes the matter in my brain.
A shot is heard in distant space:
a duel for love is fought.
One man drops down,
his tall proud rival stands his ground,
though she won’t style him now,
and probably would never have,
while the dead one she’d already tak’n,
though without love.
So why’d it matter them, to kill?
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
Whose rift?
What difference does it make
to one who hears
the shot far off,
for he cannot remember
if the woman he adored
once loved him dear—
or to what purpose—
married she was then—
and moreover, she died
before she could
of life make mess—
hers, his, and others, when.
So many reasons things that matter,
like love,
should not—
it’s Chekhov
who’s my master here—
you must recall his Sisters Three,
who would’ve died to get to Moscow,
home,
but making love before the way,
they found—too late—they had to stay.
He’s always letting fire somewhere
a shot,
whose bullet carries passions
deeply fraught
toward breasts that feel the same.
Oh, doctor-taught,
let’s exercise in friendship
all the difference it makes
to keep the sunny side up smart.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
No stabbing turnings, then. No breaking heart.
No yoke of misery to tear apart.
(How gods at us have laughed.)
No . . . oh wait, please, how could I have forgot,
from Chekhov, his negative craft:
if cheer you take
from matters not,
then life, your only,
lacks the means
to make a plot—
much tease,
but no end—
except the stop
of memories.
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
Looking Back
So why’d you drag us, of all places, here?
If Egypt was your hole, why plains gone dry?
You like to sit at gate and catch the cries,
afraid to enter, marking faces dear.
You look for beauty worthy all the rest.
And now you hasten family God knows where,
and all you say is this, “Don’t look back there!”
If you had only stayed for old man’s test,
you might have gotten all the herds and slaves,
and we’d be looking at each other kind.
At least they kept to what they wanted blind.
How wonderful feels fire that bad behaves—
it takes by force the strangers newly lacked—
what guts—to know! For that—one last look back . . .
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
He makes faces she answers
He’s stuffed with faces, works his head
with practiced hands—
some wonder wrought inside
must perplex out
—it’s born!
Cute secrets smile in smooth text voice . . .
Look there:
your said beloved—
‘s come under the man-babe’s morn.
To satisfy the day’s new cravings,
I spy on screens for words
she leaves behind, of plot turns—
fear and sorrow kind—
Now really! Here now!
His-my-love-is-yours!
Present laughter take,
and all else becalm.
She words you—with here’s and now’s—
she words you ply time’s surface balm.
Night-mined words make rough return:
confess me the force
who crushes your heart
that feeds your green eyes
with pulse mine to yearn.
Sharpened steal, your dreams!
Facts, like gun-start, wake!
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
We stand the faceless man,
the nameless occupier
whose deft hands knead
and staff lifts higher
the sky,
that loneliness stead
less inside our friend’s
fair spirited mess.
Yet faces,
friended ours,
who friend to bed,
our thoughts imperil,
eyes intern.
Still, friends in common hold all things.
What?
So mated round, do heads each turn look up?
So gripped between, will hearts not reprehend?
Let’s make compare: in speaking, cooking sup,
at doubles tennis, drinking, watching feats,
the Holy One in worship, fighting free,
these things partake most well in common,
yes!
so why not make love better—
best!—
by three?
Try her, he can—the sweetness of life—
since none can taste her long.
Yet pause:
no wife or children’s voice
to smother in pretended kiss,
there’s stuff to fear, in ear his song.
The students slake him, all agree,
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
and lover does he claim his specialty,
whose course of music much he plays
in order (motion tossed) to find
behind irreverent borders
women
ever to and fro across,
obeying no ruled mind
save dancing hearts
come hither faces,
parts moral, bowing—
of course, in time.
She asks me to reflect
her distant light his way,
belike the moon she reckons by—
another picked god’s creature, spelled:
her altar, phasing bright, inscribes
before the fixèd mark of stars—
amazing me thus far:
to bastardize—as if I could—our sky!
Biology—
this only word she leaves behind,
undeleted mine,
this underlying risk of life,
as brief as red, and masterful—
but listen . . . logic, kindly towing:
Don’t you know, dear friends,
I place you top my list
nearly of missed things?
Oh, do not forget facts!
If she’s the mind to sport for flings,
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�Louis Petrich / Poetry
and wants us kept in view’s collection,
while court she pays to body’s pacts,
remain you may, who feel not racked,
so keep she far away from me—
to make believe
her days and nights
turn like the moon’s
in monthly circuit,
that I may dream
the features of her face—
just like the moon’s—
come round
to shine in pace
earth bound—
one mind, to trace.
In darkness lies far-sided face . . .
Obsessive watching! Tell me why I waste.
The skies bejewel emptiness apropos
the piercing holds her wand’ring eyes patrol.
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
In Defense of the Literature Segment
Patrick Burley
When St. John’s graduate students meet, there is a question that seems to
be commonplace after the initial introductions are made: what segments
are you going to take? St. John’s does, of course, encourage graduate
students to take all five segments—and many students do—however, it is
not uncommon that other students only take four. Although options each
semester are limited, the Literature segment is presented as an option each
fall. During my time in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s, I have heard
mixed reviews regarding the Literature segment. Some students seem eager
to pursue it, while others appear to be completely disconcerted by the
prospect of reading Chaucer, a Shakespeare play, or English romantic
poetry. Many students say that the Literature segment lacks the rigor that
other segments provide and feel as if literature is mere child’s play
compared to an intense text on metaphysics. Other students claim that they
have read many of the materials before and are not sure what else they
could gain from revisiting them, especially if their focus is philosophy or
politics. I focus on the Literature Tutorial, for the Literature Seminar is
looked upon with less aversion as the Greek tragedies and epics are
foundational for any student of the liberal arts.
I recall sitting in my undergraduate dorm room in late spring, determining
if I wanted to begin my St. John’s education with the Literature segment or
the Mathematics and Natural Science segment. I had just finished studying
English literature so, with a strong bias, I chose the former. I had
experienced many of the texts for the Tutorial before, however I had yet
to experience them so intimately with other individuals who possessed
such a passion for education, a dedication to the liberal arts, and a drive for
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�Patrick Burley / In Defense of the Literature Segment
truth. I was eager to take on literature within a St. John’s environment, yet
I was also nervous, as I was so used to reading scholarly articles concerning
literary theories and criticisms that shaped my thoughts more than I wished
to admit. However, I entered McDowell with a fresh mind—a mind ready
to examine the assigned literary texts for what they meant specifically to
me, and not concerned with what they meant to scholars or critics.
We laughed and wondered about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, debated about
King Lear’s passions, and then we moved into lyric poetry. There was one
poem that, I felt, successfully relayed an idea that encapsulated the nature
of studying and experiencing literature. That poem was “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” by John Keats. The poem follows the thoughts of Keats as he
examines an ancient Grecian urn. In the last two lines, Keats writes,
“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.’” These two lines boldly describe the truth that accompanies
witnessing beauty and our innate drive to understand the feelings such
beauty elicits. When we witness beauty, we are engulfed with a surge of
feelings—whether it be passionate love, sublimity, or darkness. These
indescribable passions are, simply, truth. For Keats, truth is what you feel
and, in the Literature segment, there is a litany of beautiful works that
provokes such truth from within ourselves or from the text itself.
When you engage with a piece of literature, whether it be a play, a novel,
or a poem, you are guided through the reality created by the writer and are
called to discern the principles and truth of the characters and,
subsequently, of one’s self. We find truth in what we feel and our
experiences call us to examine why we felt a certain way, or why we now
possess vastly different emotions than the ones we had in the midst of an
experience. This engagement brings one closer to the reality of one’s own
condition and emotions that hold truths, which cannot be described
without the use of a narrative from a novelist or a profound metaphor from
a poet.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
The stories that are read in the Literature segment will arrest you and insist
that you consider your own narrative and story. Doing so will allow you to
examine how your narrative fits in the macrocosm of reality and how it is
to be defined by yourself alone. For example, in reading the Canterbury Tales,
one is called to examine the relationship between the tale and the teller of
the tale. Doing so draws one to contemplate one’s own narrative and
perception of self, and how this perception of self is effectively or
ineffectively portrayed to the external world as we wish it to be. Such an
exercise is integral for understanding how you present yourself to others,
whether that be how you act, speak, or treat others. The urn that Keats is
describing and the variety of characters and their narratives in the Canterbury
Tales reflect this idea and relate to the reader the way art or poetry, which
has been immortalized, can remind us of our own mortality. This creates a
paradoxical dilemma—for art reflects our uniform, perennial passions and
truths, while also reminding us of our finite nature and how we are to use
such truths in an effective fashion.
I have ventured to briskly examine Keats’s poem and this major theme
from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in order to express the illuminating doors
literature can open to folks in the program who are considering skipping
the segment—for literature provides just as much perplexity and wisdom
as the other segments. Politics, math, science, and history are all very noble
and essential, but literature provides vehicles for connection to our most
intimate passions and truths. These connections bring us closer to a deeper
understanding of our experience as beings with a faculty for emotion.
Therefore, we should engage with the beauty found in literature, for there
is truth to be sought in the passions that accompany beauty.
Mr. Burley (AGI'20) is a student in his second-semester at the Graduate Institute. He
is a recent graduate of Warren Wilson College with a bachelor's degree in English. He
currently works in the Greenfield Library and serves as Treasurer on the Graduate
Council.
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�Brandon Wasicsko
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Students at the Graduate Institute who elect to write a Master’s Essay undergo an oral
examination upon completion of their essay. Each examination begins with the student
reading a précis of their work. Colloquy asked those students who underwent their
examinations in the spring semester of 2019 to submit a copy of their précis, and received
the following three pieces.
On Education:
A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Sean Foley
As Johnnies, our common experience is enmeshed in an educational
institution. If you are anything like me, most of your life has centered
around institutions that claim membership to that same category, but you
never inquired seriously after what an education is or ought to be. I, for
one, relied on intuitions and normative influences. During my time in the
Graduate Institute, I began to feel uneasy about my lack of reflection,
especially in light of my career as a teacher. Therefore, in my Master’s
Essay, I endeavored to form a clearer and more rigorous conception of
what it was I had devoted my life to, and what it was I did at St. John’s for
four glorious summers. In what follows, I will sketch the arc of my essay,
which is on record in the Greenfield Library.
I begin said essay by delineating two general models of education: the type
offered by a research university, like the one I attended as an
undergraduate, and the type Plato’s Socrates seems to advocate. The
former I call acquisition, the latter calling-into-question. At research
universities, you acquire a body of knowledge. Socrates, on the other hand,
often calls into question what his interlocutor posits as the truth. Upon
examining these two models of education, I identified three ways in which
they are fundamentally opposed: First, acquisition is positive, while callinginto-question is negative; second, acquisition is for the sake of society,
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while calling-into-question is for the sake of the individual; and third, for
acquisition truth is in an alien object, while for calling-into-question truth
belongs to the thinking subject.
I then propose that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can show us how to
reconcile these seemingly opposed models of education. Furthermore, I
propose that this is not a one-way street, and reading the Phenomenology as a
book that is at its deepest level about education can help us understand Hegel’s
project. The Phenomenology presents us with a drama of education; it shows us
what an education looks like. It also presents us with a theory of education;
the theory functions as the organizing principle behind the drama—giving
it a form—but it also comes to the foreground as Hegel explains what we
see in the drama.
Hegel’s theory is that education is neither acquisition nor calling-intoquestion, but formation. This formation happens through our lived
experience, which challenges our conception of the truth and therefore
fundamentally changes our way of knowing the world. When our way of
knowing is proved inadequate, we gain perspective on ourselves through
reflection. Formation therefore entails self-relation, and, specifically, selfalienation—experiencing oneself as an other. Education is complete when
life no longer leads to our self-alienation. This means the telos of education
is to recognize in the world the full expression of our innermost selves.
One side of the problem is to understand what that innermost self is. By
means of the drama and theory of education presented to us in the
Phenomenology, Hegel intends to shed light on this side of the issue: he
intends to lead us to know ourselves as what he calls Spirit. The
Phenomenology is the description of the historical coming-to-be of Spirit, and
is also intended to help effect the full actualization of Spirit by giving the
reader theoretical insight into her own formative experience. The other side
of the educational problem is that the world—which includes other
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selves—must confirm our self-concept. Education therefore is a cultural
activity, the completion of which requires a cultural reorientation.
Standing in the way of this ultimate end of education is what Hegel calls
edification. Edification makes us feel more at home in our current, spiritually
destitute self-conception and spiritually defunct world, but is a mere
palliative to the feeling of alienation that exhorts us to identify with Spirit
and engage in the reorientation of culture. Education, by contrast, is truly
therapeutic, but requires great cognitive labor so that we can hold onto the
lessons of experience. Not only that, but it requires sacrifice. Identifying
oneself as Spirit means that one must, like Christ, knowingly relinquish
one’s current self so as to be reborn. Hegel makes this self-sacrifice more
palatable by showing that one is not obliterated in the process, but purified.
What is true in the lower self-concept is preserved in the higher. Any
educational project that does not demonstrate this preservation will not
prevail against edifiers. This is where history’s first self-conscious and
culture-wide educational project, the Enlightenment, went astray.
The showdown between faith and reason in the Enlightenment occurred
because Enlightenment took umbrage with the mysterious and seemingly
superstitious elements of religion. Enlightenment accounted for Faith in
terms of its own profane paradigm, and in so doing was blind to what was
true in Faith. Enlightenment did not seek to raise up or cultivate its pupils
into maturity, but to destroy their faithfulness as if it were a disease. The
success of Enlightenment’s hostilities leads to the spiritual destitution that
leaves us prone to edifiers. But the legitimate fruit of the Enlightenment’s
myopic and misguided educational project, Hegel tells us, is the Reign of
Terror. Educators in the Enlightenment tradition might think of
themselves as the purveyors of insight into the absolute truth, and set up a
system of education that leads to the acquisition of that insight—which
insight is, that truth is a matter of method rather than content. However,
Enlightenment is really an unbridled calling-into-question that is hostile to
life. It privileges the individual over the social situation in which she finds
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herself, but simultaneously conceives of the individual in such an abstract
way, that those who subscribe to its ideology become hostile to anything
and everything actual and positive. This is why the revolution devoured its
own children.
Hegel’s characterization of Enlightenment advises both urgency and
caution in our quest to reconcile acquisition and calling-into-question. The
apparent reconciliation offered by Enlightenment—that is, calling-intoquestion elevated to the level of knowledge—is both unsatisfying and
dangerous. And yet, this is the very substance of the knowledge tradition
enshrined in departmental disciplines at research universities: the truth of
research is ultimately grounded in its methodology. The heart of Hegelian
education is, by contrast, its therapeutic effect—the subject’s complete
reconciliation to the world. An education that leaves us unsatisfied is hardly
consummate.
I close the essay with reflections on what a non-Hegelian could learn about
education from reading Hegel. In my understanding, this is especially
pertinent because we cannot take part in the cultural project Hegel had in
mind; even if we subscribe to the fundamentals of Hegel’s System, we, as
non-Germans, cannot execute his educational plan. I therefore focus my
energies on discussing the way in which careful and principled study of
Great Books can effect a radical transformation of the reader’s way of
knowing, thereby mirroring a fundamental feature of Hegelian education,
and offering some pedagogical advantages of close reading and attention
to particulars—which distinguishes the type of reading we do at St. John’s
from the type of reading Hegel espouses—given our cultural and
technological situation. I believe this examination helps clarify and justify
a central activity we all take up at the College. Yet, I leave off there, and
another pressing question about St. John’s remains untouched: what is the
role of conversation in our education? I have some thoughts, but I will save
them for a tête-à-tête.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Hope in Paradise Lost
Samuel Peregrin
In choosing my essay topic, I knew I wanted to try a text that I had no
previous experience with and that I wanted something both poetic and of
a certain scale, also I wanted the original to have been written in English.
Suffice to say this led me to Paradise Lost. In my first reading of it, not
knowing what I wanted to explore, I was struck by the comparison made
between Eve and Pandora. And I was particularly taken by a part of the
Pandora story that was left out by Milton, that hope was left stuck inside
her jar of suffering. It is here that I must apologize to the committee for
having thrust upon them the Hesiod reading,1 but it felt dishonest to
exclude the seed of my thoughts. From this point on I began to wonder
what opinion Paradise Lost had concerning the nature of hope.
I never found it to be strictly or explicitly defined in the way other virtues
or passions were, and began to doubt whether or not there was some
concept working behind the many mentions of hope at all, or if it was
nothing other than colloquial and semantic. I began to find that hope was
as much defined by its opposites, auxiliary powers, and perversions as any
of its own attributes, but perhaps this should not have been so surprising.
From here I did find some ways of understanding hope as a virtue. Firstly,
it became obvious that hope was connected to suffering wherever it was
presented. That seems a part of how I would define it now: a comfort felt
presently to alleviate a present pain, found by looking to the future. And
yet, it has its restrictions.
So secondly, it must abide by proper reason lest it fall into vanity. This then
leads to its two big determinants, faith and love. For, in order to be a hope
1
Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 58-128.
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�Three Précis
more than secular, and then purportedly fulfilling to a person, it must seek
confirmation with the will of God. Thirdly then, we become witness to the
negations of hope referenced in the poem; ambition and despair, these
perversions of hope, abound. This then can tell us hope is not impatient,
unbounded attempts to grasp power, nor is it a complete reservation to
fate. Rather it is but a piece, one of passive fortitude, in the harmony of
virtues needed to achieve a life of righteous obedience. But the fact that
hope appears most often in its diminished state makes me wonder whether
there is a great danger hope may yet pose. That when divorced from its
associates, love and faith, it is empty; to keep hope within these boundaries
is no small challenge. So perhaps this is why there is no exposition of hope
for us in the poem, because it is simply too easy to fall into vain
expectations. Although, a life without any reparation to hope would be one
incapable of surmounting the daily sufferings cast about us.
I must thank Mr. Haflidson, my essay would not have come to fruition
without his counsel and encouragement. Also, thank you to the committee
members, and all those in attendance, for your time and interest in this
difficult topic. I do hope we all gain from, or at least enjoy this discussion
as it begins.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
The Flaying of Marsyas
Maxwell Anthony
I would not like to have my précis published. Anyone who wants to know
about my Master’s Essay is welcome to review the copy entrusted to the
Greenfield Library’s care. However, I would like to use this opportunity to
expand on a topic inadequately addressed in my essay—the contest of
Marsyas and Apollo. In the Euthydemus, a passionate young man, Ctesippus,
says that two sophist brothers, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, are
welcome to skin him, so long as they turn his hide into virtue, not a
wineskin like Marsyas’ was made into. Marsyas, a satyr, challenged the god
Apollo to a musical contest. Whoever won could do whatever he liked to
the loser. Marsyas played the aulos and Apollo played the lyre. Stories differ
as to how the contest proceeded and was judged, but the consensus is that
Apollo won and flayed Marsyas.
I have a general suspicion that something is important about the aulos, a
double reed instrument, and the lyre, a harp with two arms united by a
crossbar and chords, in respect of being images of duality. The music of
the aulos differs from the music of the lyre in that the aulos is a wind
instrument, so playing it prevents the player from speaking. Also, it can be
tuned only insofar as it is well made, whereas each chord of the lyre might
be tuned to precision. Playing the aulos leads to a certain wanton
indulgence—the breathing associated with it recalls sexual panting.
Something about the aulos is more passionate and something about the
lyre is more rational. Calling the aulos the most “many stringed”
(πολυχορδότατον) of instruments Socrates and Glaucon refuse it admission
to their city.1
1
Plato, Republic, 3.399d.
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�Three Précis
A general suspicion I have been entertaining is that the aulos connotes the
principle of otherness—the wild indeterminate principle of multiplicity. I
associate this principle with imprecise multiplicity, the sort of slurred and
passionate windy music of the aulos—whereas I tend to associate the lyre
with precision and exact multiplicity—the sort of otherness when one thing
is a clear image of another. Given the constraints of my essay I did not get
to explore this topic but am comfortable voicing my suspicion that Plato
associates the aulos with the principle of otherness and the lyre with being;
one might call the former the indeterminate dyad and the latter the eidetic
two.
The aulos encourages dancing and passionate movements opposed to
speaking; perhaps for this reason the flute players are sent away in the
Symposium. Writing the essay, I was given to the view that such dancing and
immoderation would be alien to the god Apollo. This god, I thought, would
be possessed of such cold bright deliberation that he could flay a hubristic
satyr like Marsyas with clinical charm. This opinion, and over reliance of
well know artistic representations of the episode, tempted me to a static
view of the flaying. Recently it occurred to me that the flaying itself would
be a sort of dance. The point is not simply that Marsyas was punished but
that the bound satyr would writhe and contort as the punishment was
administered. Even the god Apollo would be unable to prevent himself
from participating in this bloody spasm. To perform the punishment
Apollo would have to embrace, if not, let’s say, enwind, Marsyas’ trashing
body. Thinking about this “dance” in relation to the Euthydemus, I realized
that the point of the story is not simply that a hubristic satyr was punished
for challenging a god, but that even a god can be corrupted in the
administration of justice. A shocking but unannounced dramatic detail of
the Euthydemus is that Socrates is able to remember and relate what is said
and happened although the narrated events occurred in an environment of
public ridicule and indignation. Socrates, unlike his interlocutors, has
amazing self-control that permits him to pay extreme attention to slight
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
and seemingly insignificant details and motives of almost all who surround
him, while understanding nuances of argument and formulating prudent
responses. Socrates’ moderation is more than godlike. In respect of the
musical contest the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus pose,
Socrates supplants Apollo.
The following poem and picture are intended to accompany Mr. Anthony’s thoughts above:
The Bloody Aulos
Quiver body bound
taut skin folds;
blood whets blade and bark.
These bright hands
that twist the tuning pegs
pluck jumping flesh.
"Writhe, pant, wail,
Dance, satyr,
As you are flayed!"
Maxwell Anthony, The Bloody Aulos, 2018, digital art.
83
�A Conversation with Jim Phillips
Kelly Custer
Kelly Custer: Probably a question all students in the Graduate Institute
end up being asked at one point or another—as it seems appropriate to say
of the Graduate Institute itself that it is the speakeasy of academia—is: how
did you come to find out about the program? And along with that, what
piqued your interest in it and how did you finally say, "Yes, that's for me?"
Jim Phillips: I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1975 with a Bachelor
of Science in electrical engineering. The books we read at St. John's are the
books they told me I did not need to read to make a living. So, I never read
them. But also, I've been a student of the Bible [for] the past fifty years and
a teacher of it for the last thirty. As a teacher, I've tried to learn from other
teachers and I discovered it seems like the teachers that understand [the
Bible] best were teachers that
had a good grasp of the
classics. So roll the clock
[back] ten years ago. My wife
and I move to Annapolis to
found the C.S. Lewis Institute
and a couple of guys from St.
John's knock on my front
door when they saw the sign
on it that reads “Aslan
House”—Aslan from the
Chronicles of Narnia. And
they said, "Does this have
anything to do with C.S.
Lewis?" And I said, "It does."
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
And they said, "Can we have a study group? We study all these great books
down the street, but we would like to be with other followers of Jesus to
talk about the teachings of the authors of our books in light of the teachings
of Jesus.” I said, "That sounds great." Now I didn't have any knowledge of
the classics, but I did have a lot of knowledge of scripture. So I said, "Okay.
Maybe together we can do this.
—
So for the last ten years I have been hosting young men, and my wife and
another young lady host the women at a different time. We have, on
average, twenty to thirty young people a week participating in those
discussions. And the last ten years I have been surrounded by these young
men with a passion for understanding the classics and understanding the
questions that every author of the classics is trying to address. The
questions like: how did I get here? Why am I here? There seems to be
something broken in the world. There seems to be something broken in
me. I understand Descartes as saying [that] there is an imperfection within
me. Plato says there seems to be an instrument in me that needs to be reset.
They are all wrestling with the same idea. And these young men would
come into my home and read these things to me, and I would point to a
spot in scripture where it says we have a fallen, rebellious nature and there
is this thing within us that causes to do things we don't want to do. So we
would have great discussions, but I longed to know what they knew. I
longed to read what they were reading. For eight years of the last ten, I
hungered to understand these classics, but I was also a full-time employee
working in the IT industry.
—
Two years ago I retired. The minute I retired I said to my wife, "I need to
get a couple of things together that I would like to focus on because I'm
not ready to fully retire.” She said, "Oh I know what it is." I said, "What?"
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She said, "You need to go to St. John's." And I just lit up. I said, "Yes! For
ten years I have been wanting to do this.” So, I just lit up and began two
years ago. And the other night was so wonderful. I'm with these young men
and one of them says, "Do you think Socrates deserved the persecution in
Athens that he received from the culture, especially the leadership of the
culture at that time?" I was able to engage in this discussion with text. And
we started laughing. [Ten] years I've been with this group, now they come
and go throughout the years, but I still have some young men helping me
today that were in that group six, seven years ago, and we were just laughing
that, finally, I was able to participate. That's what brought me to St. John's.
KC: That's really wonderful and hearing your path to St. John's, and a little
of your background, it often appears that Christianity and, perhaps more
specifically, many strands of American contemporary Christianity appear
to have a great deal of skepticism toward any secular texts, including the
classics. And I find what you just said very interesting because, if I am
hearing what you said correctly, it’s in fact a sense of understanding, an
understanding of the classic works and authors of Western thought that
becomes and perhaps enriches the dialogue around Christianity. And
allows, to an extent, for a common language to be shared where two
people, who might not have read the same texts, can interact with one
another in a very meaningful way.
JP: To your point, there is a passage in scripture that says, "Don't be taken
captive by hollow and deceptive philosophy that depends on the principles
of the world and traditions of men rather than the teachings of Jesus." And
a lot of people read that and throw all philosophy out. It doesn't say throw
all philosophy out. It says examine it to see if it also aligns to the teachings
of Jesus, and there are so many things where we see, beginning with Greek
philosophers, them weighing thoughts that if you look, you will see
thoughts that also Jesus himself taught about. So there's this great synergy
in the thinking. And here's where the learning comes to play. The passage
of scripture doesn't say to throw it out. Rather you examine the thoughts.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
And I've been able to talk to a number of parents whose sons or daughters
were coming to St. John's, and they were concerned that their children were
going to be exposed to all this philosophical thinking [and] that all
philosophy is bad. And it's just the opposite. I would always say: this is a
wonderful place for young people to come and get grounded in the
teachings that have shaped our civilization and culture, and they will
discover that a lot of the things they have said and a lot of the things they
have proposed are very much in line with the things Jesus taught. So, it's a
wonderful place to begin to examine these things.
KC: As I hear you saying this, I am reminded of St. Paul in the first letter
to the Corinthians saying: "If anyone among you thinks to be a wise man
in this age, let him become foolish in order to become wise." I find that so
interesting because most of the things we read at St. John's were very much
considered folly in their own age, condemned as folly, or at least were not
very popular. And certainly challenging of the going wisdom in their own
time, which then really makes me think that St. Paul is not being dismissive
of reason, but challenging [on behalf of] a perennial wisdom. We could
probably agree that many of [the] philosophers we read greatly challenge
the wisdom of the day, but do so, in many cases, by raising the same
questions and posing similar thoughts to previous ages going back to early
Greek philosophers, which in a way, seems to bind much of their thought
to perennial questions that—when neglected—become the folly of an age.
JP: Yes. St. Paul was brilliant and very effective when speaking to the
Greeks. He clearly knew Greek literature and he understood the Greek
pantheon of gods. And he went and he sat with them, he started there, with
their understanding of things, to start with things that had begun in Greece
and show how they compare to the teachings of Jesus. He did amazing
work in Greece.
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�A Conversation with Jim Phillips
KC: I know that you were a graduate of the Naval Academy and of your
work with the C.S. Lewis Institute. Could you speak a little more to your
background professionally?
JP: I was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas. I went to the Naval Academy
right out of high school. I then went into the Marine Corps after graduating
from the Academy and flew AV-8B Harriers. I was one of the first rookies
to fly a Harrier. That means the first people they took directly from flight
school to fly the Harrier. It was a brand-new airplane. It hovers. Instead of
a conventional take-off and landing, it can hover like a helicopter. And the
Marine Corps decided they needed to demonstrate that a rookie could fly
the airplane or they didn't want it. So they took four of us right out of flight
school into that program. It was a very dangerous time and I lost a number
of friends in the four or five years I was flying Harriers, more than ten in
that period of time, and this was peacetime. So, I lost a lot of friends. That
also caused me to really take a look at the questions: who am I? And why
am I here? And am I doing what I was created to do? So it really made me
take a close look at my life.
—
I left the Marine Corps after six years. Went to IBM for twenty years and
a smaller company, which was like IBM, and worked there for almost
twenty years. All in information technology and hiring software engineers
to maintain large computer systems that the likes of AOL or FedEx use.
So that's what I did all that time. But in the middle of all that I was an avid
reader of books that really tried to answer the hard questions in life. Books
that really tried to answer the questions of origin, meaning, morality, and
hope. I call that a worldview. Everybody has a worldview and how you
answer those questions defines it pretty well. I love sitting with people and
exploring their worldview. It's fascinating. So that got me interested in
trying to understand the philosophy that shaped Western Civilization
because that shapes peoples' worldviews.
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�Colloquy / Spring 2019
KC: At what point did you discover C.S. Lewis? Has he always been an
author whose works you engaged with, or is there a particular time or work
that enkindled a passion for all his writings?
JP: Other than Screwtape Letters, which I probably read in high school and
couldn't appreciate at that time, it really wasn't until ten years ago, when I
went to a one-week summer institute at Oxford. It was hosted by an
organization that had a great partnership with the C.S. Lewis Institute, and
it was there that I met the president of the C.S. Lewis Institute and
discovered he lived in Washington D.C. We got to know each other. He
said: let's have lunch when we get back. We did. He said there are a lot of
people in Annapolis that would like to take advantage of some of the
offerings of the Institute, but it's too far to commute to D.C.—would you
start an Institute in Annapolis? And actually, it was one of the first cities
besides D.C. to do this. Today there are about 14 to 15 cities that offer the
C.S. Lewis programs. So over the last ten years I've tried to catch up with
my readings of C.S. Lewis. And I've come to appreciate him greatly.
KC: One of my professors in undergrad was very attached to the C.S. Lewis
Institute and I had the pleasure of taking a course in which we simply read
works by Lewis. It was a great course and I had, and still have, great
admiration for that professor.
JP: I see [that] you're reading The Abolition of Man. [Right] now I am in the
Politics and Society Seminar, and we've spent a great deal of time talking
about Aristotle and his questions and thoughts on ethics. And he talks
about natural law—that there is an eternal law and natural law. Natural
law—it doesn't need to be written down, we just all know these things, it's
the ways in which we interact with things. Well, Lewis called that absolute
morality: that we all have a sense of a right way to behave, we know a right
way to behave, and if you were to look across cultures, all the cultures that
have ever been, you will notice some commonalities like: no one
appreciates a coward, no one thinks it's ever okay to abuse a child. And this
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is one of my favorites: if you look at the different cultures throughout
history, they might disagree as to whether you can have one wife, two
wives, or more, but they all would say you can't have any woman you want.
And what Lewis does: in the back of The Abolition of Man is an appendix
and he lists things that he thinks are examples of absolute morality, and
you could see Aristotle saying that's natural law.
KC: That's really interesting that you've directed us [to] The Abolition of Man,
which has been a very significant book in my life and, throughout the years,
a text I continue to revisit and certainly one of the books I give out the
most as a gift. I brought The Abolition of Man to read a short passage as a
preface to a question I have for you with respect to the program at St.
John's and your familiarity with Lewis. The passage I wanted to direct us
to is very similar in spirit to what you just mentioned, and this is where
Lewis introduces the Tao and the Tao as being—whether we call it natural
law or first principles of morality—what one always appeals to whenever
one makes a challenge or claim about morality. I always find this passage
striking where Lewis writes:
There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value
in the history of the world. What purports to be new systems or (as they
now call them) ‘ideologies,’ all consist of fragments from the Tao itself,
arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to
madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such
validity as they possess.1
That's just one of those passages that purely in style is profoundly and
succinctly beautiful. In thinking about the passage and St. John's, I really
have two questions for you. One, in many ways I do not think the texts we
read purport to be new systems or ideologies in the way Lewis here
describes: do you think they all in some way point to what Lewis has in
mind with the Tao for their appeal? And two, has your experience in the
1
90
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1947), 56.
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
program at all resonated with the texts you've read pointing to something
like the Tao? And to add a little to that, would you say that perhaps the
only way we can truly understand these texts and put them in conversation
with ourselves, and one another, is to presuppose and accept such
objectivity, regardless of our ability to define it or even agree upon its
name?
JP: Yes. Right now in the Politics and Society segment it's been all about
what is the best form of commonwealth beginning with Plato's Republic.
And right now I'm reading Hobbes’ Leviathan where he advocates for a
strong sovereign as the best form of commonwealth, and he talks about
religion and all the various forms there can be and he says something very
similar to what Lewis says in that passage, that when you take away things
you come down to a common set of things or principles that seem to
survive in all the variations. So, religions may have started in the same place
and branched out, and there may be varieties of religion, some less or more
true than others. But at the end of the day, if you bring them down by
reduction to the common roots of each one of them, you find a lot of
similarities. I think that's exactly what Lewis is saying.
KC: I find it so interesting that many of the texts within the St. John's
curriculum presuppose something like the Tao from which to start, which
seems paramount to even have traction in discourse. If you didn't, it would
almost be as Aristotle discusses in Book IV of the Metaphysics, where if you
can't agree at some point and are demanding a demonstration of something
like the Tao, there's just no having a conversation. And I find that to be
such a stark juxtaposition to our contemporary society. Particularly when
you talk about ethics or morality, you tend to hear people wanting to say
something like the truth is subjective, relative, and as long as what you do
doesn't hurt anyone, it's okay. Or some other variation of a golden rule
with the caveat that telling anyone else what they should or shouldn't do is
at odds with the relativism lurking about. But yet, that always ends up in
contradiction, as if there are no grounds for normative ethics, there are no
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grounds to prescribe to anyone why they shouldn't harm other people. In
the same vein, in what I would consider a secular society, there is a kind of
crude scientism lingering with very positivistic tendencies that demands
empirical demonstration of anything before discussing truth—
JP: Just stop right there: demonstrate that last statement empirically.
KC: Exactly.
KC: That's all to say that I think St. John's, as an institution, ends up
presupposing something like the Tao and that's part of the reason that all
these marvelous conversations you are able to have with folks—even if you
radically disagree—can take place.
JP: I'm glad you brought that up because that is one of the most beautiful
things about being at St. John's. We sit every Monday and Thursday
evening together with twelve to fifteen peers. Around that table are
different worldviews, different answers to the questions: how did I get
here? Why am I here? What's wrong with the world? And how do I fix it?
Many different worldviews. The beauty of St. John’s is civil discussion. We
are able, because we are centered and agree to talk within a text, and we
agree to stay within the text, we are able to discuss what the author might
be saying about the questions going on in our minds. And it is lovely.
—
The world, our country, every talk show on TV every night, could learn
from the civil discussion that's being exercised at St. John's College. I wish
somebody could put lights over the campus and say, "Look. You want to
return to civility—you hear that term often in our culture—come sit here
and see how people so different from one another discuss these things."
You just think about it. The next thing you know, after being in classes
with people: you're sitting down having a beer with somebody you would
never have the opportunity otherwise because of the disparity in
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worldviews. And yet here you are sharing something beautiful and in
common and you realize you arrived where you are because you are a
rational creature and you have some rational presuppositions, and so have
I. Though where we arrive may be different, we are rational creatures with
rational presuppositions that are capable of arriving at some rational
conclusions. Now we can have a discussion. Nobody needs to label
anybody with anything derogatory. Let's have a rational discussion, because
I want to understand the presuppositions you have to arrive where you are.
That's where learning occurs.
KC: I couldn't agree more. And it reminds me, as a first-semester student
and having “Notes on Dialogue” freshly on the mind and being struck by
the observations Stringfellow Barr is making: Wow! What would he think
now of our contemporary climate watching the news—or whatever we
might call the unceasing barrage of polarizing media that has become so
increasingly hard to escape—in which people swing at one another in
disagreement only to go back to their respective corners without hearing a
single thing the other has said? It seems that one of the things Barr was
suggesting is that the model of conversation we engage in at St. John's,
while not rendering definitive answers that remove the presence of the
questions we start with, raises a middle ground in conversation that allows
people to understand the people they are conversing with and the texts
upon which the conversation is grounded.
—
One question that I would really like to ask you is: have there been any
texts you've read in the program that you had already read? And, if so, what
was that experience like for you?
JP: I read Augustine before as he is an early father of the Church. But,
Descartes said, there is this imperfection in me. Why would God make me
with this imperfection? He could have made me perfect? Now I go back
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to Augustine—and this actually happened in the same evening during the
Philosophy and Theology segment—an hour later we're reading in
Augustine's Confessions, and Augustine says something like this: without
imperfection in the world we would never know a virtue. What? How do
you become a reformer unless there is something to reform? How can you
be brave unless there is something to stand bravely against? How do you
forgive unless there is something to be forgiven? And all the sudden a
saying that I have heard many times came alive because of the
enlightenment of new reading and that was: we certainly don't live in the
most perfect world, very few people would disagree with that, but we might
live in the most perfect world to prepare us for the most perfect world.
And here I see Augustine and Descartes agreeing, though they are
hundreds of years apart, and wrestling with the same issues and coming up
with similar conclusions.
KC: Yes. As someone currently in the Philosophy and Theology segment,
and having just had the overlap of readings you brought up this past
Thursday, those two readings together are fantastic, because in a very
different way than Augustine, you see Descartes posing the question why
should error be in him at all—and I think that's sometimes overlooked in
the text. It is very important to Descartes’ conclusion. It is very similar to
Augustine claiming he would not know virtue if it weren't for imperfection:
I see Descartes saying he would not know himself, what he truly is without
error.
JP: Love it.
KC: Are there any texts in the program that you had not read, and were
perhaps skeptical or indifferent about, but after encountering the text it
became something that really made an impact on you?
JP: Most theists would have an aversion to reading Darwin and would
discourage others from ever reading him. I read him for the first time at St.
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John’s. I had previously read a lot of quotes by him, but I never read him.
I loved his style. I fell in love with a man who was a great thinker. I fell in
love with a man who really drew conclusions from the presuppositions and
evidence he had in front of him that were rational. Darwin stated that if
there was ever the discovery of an organism [and] you could not explain its
existence by a number of incremental, successive, progressions; he would
need to rethink his whole project. Since he said that we've seen some
discoveries that challenge his conclusions. And I believe if he were still
alive, he would be one of the most vocal advocates for modifying his
conclusions because I found him winsome and intellectually honest. Even
though I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I was in love with the
man for his pursuit of truth. So to answer your question, that's the beauty
of something like St. John's: you can disagree with someone's conclusions,
but you come to discover that they are rational beings and really trying very
hard to get answers to the same questions you have, and are providing you
some insight along the way—whether you end up agreeing with their
conclusions or not.
KC: Is there any work or text that you did not encounter in the program
that you wish you would have?
JP: That's like asking me if I would like a flavor of ice cream I have never
tried, it is hard to desire what you have no familiarity with. All I know is
that three or four months into the program, about where you are now, I
was walking to class and the thought hit me: I am going to graduate in a
year and a half. And my next thought was: darn. And I thought [this is] the
first time I can remember that I was pursuing a goal and not counting the
days until I achieved it, but rather enjoying the days of the journey. It's just
been that kind of experience. So if there are other texts that would have
enriched this, I wouldn't know. I am just so grateful for the ones I have
encountered.
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KC: I think you really hit the nail on the head in that it's such a different
experience. No one I have talked to in the program is looking toward its
end—only lamenting that it should end at all.
—
I wanted to ask you a question given your background and your life. Given
your commitments, I am very interested in your response. I'm currently
reading Nietzsche's later works in preceptorial. We are reading The AntiChrist right now and throughout that work there is an overarching theme
that Nietzsche takes Christianity to be dishonest. It's also very nuanced in
that he seems to have a certain appreciation for Christ, but very much
wants to take away anything miraculous and separate Christ the man from
divinity. And I guess my question is—Nietzsche seems to see the
attractiveness of Christianity to the many as rooted in the fear that this life
is it. And that Christianity is driven by denying this life in hopes of another
life. As someone with your worldview and background, what would your
response be to that?
JP: Nietzsche is another thinker that I find intellectually honest, let me just
state that up front. In other words, honestly, the despair that one reads in
Nietzsche is the despair one would expect if you truly believe that this life
is all there is. So I find him intellectually honest. For that I respect him. But
if I were sitting here with Nietzsche and he said to me: "You know, I think
Christianity is something conjured up in order try to extend your life, [to]
try to bring about immortality that doesn't exist"—I would ask him if it is
possible that his atheism is something that he came up with in order to
avoid or not face something that might exist. The question always needs to
be asked both ways. Very similarly, I often get asked as a follower of Jesus,
"Why, if God is a good God, is there so much pain and suffering in the
world?" And after I spend some time on that, I turn the question around
saying, "I'm not sure what your worldview is, but you need to answer the
same question within your worldview."
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Because one thing we can all agree to is that there is something broken
here. Different people with different worldviews will call it different names:
wrong desire, misplaced affection, brokenness. We all agree that something
is wrong. Now we all need to answer the question: Why? And what hope
do we have to remedy the brokenness we see? So, I really respect
Nietzsche. He is true to his convictions and the demeanor of his writings
demonstrates it. Quite frankly, my heart goes out to him and I would have
loved to have spoken with him.
KC: Similar, in many respects, in addressing the brokenness in the world
and the task of answering it, living within it—another thinker, one of few
that Nietzsche extends praise and withholds scorn from, is Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky's characters all confront and stand at the threshold of what he
calls the "crucible of doubt." That has been so important in my own life
and struck me in many of the conversations I have been a part of in the
Philosophy and Theology segment. It really seems you can only doubt
something you take seriously, a presence that confronts you as potentially
real enough to doubt. In other words, doubt is not at play for me with
respect to the existence of unicorns, but it is very much at play when I am
confronted by the existence of God or the life of Jesus. For you, as
someone who has lived very much convicted of a worldview, is there a way
in which coming to St. John's, reading authors that lay open questions of
doubt—have those experiences made you question in a deeper way the
reality of your beliefs?
JP: Yes, because all of the authors we read at St. John's ask really good
questions and provide wonderful insights. You know doubt and faith are
not exclusive. And faith is not, as many people think, believing something
that may not be true. If that were so, then a strong faith would be believing
something you are pretty sure is not true, while a perfect faith would be
believing something you're absolutely sure is not true. Faith is not that.
Faith is reason informed by evidence. You have evidence that something
may be true, the distance between the evidence you have and the ultimate
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truth you are trying to embrace is doubt. Reason examines the doubt and
[the] evidence, and says: I think the evidence outweighs the doubt, and I
am going to trust my reason and its conclusion to where the evidence
points—that is faith.
KC: At this juncture within civilization, faith gets used as an immediate
contrary to reason, contrary to evidence. A thinker that very much
discusses faith is Kierkegaard. The leap of faith found in some of his
pseudonymous works has gained a degree of infamy as divorcing faith and
reason. But reading Kierkegaard proves a far different experience. Faith
and reason are not treated as dichotomies within the leap of faith, or in
many instances the leap into sin, but very much as embracing the limits and
finitude of being human, living at the threshold of the crucible, the tensions
of doubt and reason. Once we make the leap, grace is on the other side.
Grace is very hard for us to understand, to see, to allow ourselves to
experience. But part of that leap of faith is not an abandonment of reason,
not an abandonment of doubt, but is very much trust. This strikes me as
so profound because it is very difficult to speak of trust independent of
reason, independent of there being evidence that there is something or
someone that is trustworthy. Such ruminations on faith have been
indispensable in my own life. Does that accord at all with your experience
of faith?
JP: To me, faith is reason informed by evidence. And it is where that
reason, informed by evidence, points. Every one of the authors we read
exercises some measure of faith. None of them are absolutely certain of
their conclusions. They all offer you the presuppositions and rationality of
their conclusions. I am trying to think of who it was—Hume?—who
appears so skeptical about everything and tears just about everything down,
but then says something at the very end perhaps allowing room for
something like divine revelation. What? Why didn’t he insert this at the
beginning of the work? I would have read this in an entirely different light.
But no, he put that at the end because he wanted me to experience all of
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the skepticism before he left room for divine revelation—and I just loved it.
All of our authors—and all of us—exercise faith regarding the questions
of why we are here and who we are. We have reasoned the projection of
evidence and exercise faith to where it points.
KC: Yes. I couldn't agree more. Speaking of pointing toward things—as I
know your time, lamentably, at St. John's is coming to an end and directing
you to other things—I've caught wind that there might be something
pointing you toward Oxford. Could you share what the next adventure in
life is for you?
JP: Well, a year ago I was enjoying this program so much and so stimulated
by the authors we discuss, and I said to my wife, "I can't help but to think
this is pointing to something." And she immediately said, "Oxford." And,
of course, she knew that I had Oxford in my heart and almost attended
there right out of the Naval Academy. And when I say Oxford, I mean an
Oxford type of education, which by the way, I think St. John's is. And that's
in part why I came here: thinking I have an Oxford in my backyard. But
anyway, my wife was really the one to say, "You should go." So I've really
spent a lot of time thinking about this and received a lot of affirmation
from friends and tutors. So, as I sit here right now, I have been accepted
to Oxford for post-graduate work in theology starting in the fall.
—
I will just tell you this. There is no way I would have had this type of
opportunity in my life without St. John's bridging the gap between an
engineer, and then a software engineer, and one who really wants to pursue
theology. There's no way I could have bridged that gap without St. John's
College. I'm truly grateful to St. John's for opening this door that I have
always wanted to go through, and it looks like now I will have the
opportunity.
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KC: That's wonderful. In wrapping up, is there anything you feel compelled
or would like to say about the Graduate Institute here at St. John's that you
think people should know, whether they are prospective students or
current students, or anyone else in the community?
JP: I have to praise the tutors. And I would like to list them, but I am sure
I would forget one and that would be tragic, because every tutor I have had
in these four semesters has been lovely, winsome, gifted, concerned about
the classes having meaningful discussions, and concerned about me as an
individual receiving from this short period of time the most I could
possibly receive. And through the personal interviews, through the
seminars, feedback on papers, through conversations in the hall or after
class, they have been just so encouraging. I cannot say enough about the
tutors I have enjoyed. I will just say this: literature was my hardest subject
in high school and as an undergraduate. I left both of those experiences
with a total lack of appreciation for literature. But through the Literature
segment at St. John's, I love literature. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the great
classics, the plays: I have got a whole new love and appreciation for
literature. And I owe that to the tutors.
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Moral Intuitions in Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Joseph Hiles
Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace combines an intimate portrait of Russian
life during the French invasion of Russia with a strikingly original
philosophical analysis of history. Through this wartime struggle, many of
Tolstoy’s characters grow and learn how to live meaningful, moral lives.
Yet how exactly one can live a moral life according to Tolstoy is never
explicitly spelled out in the novel. Accordingly, this essay will be an attempt
to better understand Tolstoy’s moral philosophy. The essay will use three
vignettes from the novel as lenses through which a better understanding of
Tolstoy’s moral philosophy can be seen. The scenes in question are: the
moment when Nikolai Rostov strikes the French officer with his sword,
Rastopchin’s order to kill Vereshchagin for the abandonment of Moscow,
and the execution of the Russian prisoners by the French. Through
analyzing these scenes, the essay will explore Tolstoy’s views about moral
intuitions and their role in guiding moral actions. These intuitions, for
Tolstoy, are heavily impacted by our proximity to the people our actions
affect, and supersede the place of reason in evaluating the morality of an
action.
Strong Moral Intuitions
In each of the three vignettes outlined above, the moral intuitions of the
characters kick in either immediately as—or within seconds after—the
action is committed, alerting them to the fact that they have violated some
hard to define moral code. For example, despite years of wishing for glory
in combat, at the very moment when Nikolai Rostov bravely chases down
the French dragoon officer and strikes him with his sword, “all Rostov’s
animation suddenly vanished...some unpleasant feeling wrung his heart.
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Something unclear, confused, something he was unable to explain to
himself, had been revealed to him” (653-654).1 What was this unpleasant,
unclear feeling that was wringing Nikolai Rostov’s heart? It is likely that he
feels guilty for striking the officer, despite the fact that this is the very kind
of action he would have hoped for earlier in the novel. He finally gets the
thing he wanted—glory—and yet it makes him feel unpleasant. Indeed,
further indication of Rostov’s guilt comes after the moment of action, once
he has had time to think it over. There Tolstoy writes that “Ostermann’s
flattering words and the promise of a reward should therefore have been a
joyful surprise for Rostov; yet the same unpleasant, unclear feeling
nauseated him morally” (654). It is significant that Rostov’s feeling of guilt
is just that, a feeling. From the first moment to the last, it is a feeling that
wrings his heart, a feeling that he cannot understand, and a feeling of moral
nausea. These feelings are not the result of a calculation or philosophical
analysis of his actions, but instead spring from inside of him organically.
The language of feeling and moral guilt is mirrored after Rastopchin
heartlessly orders the Russian peasant mob to attack Vereshchagin,
blaming him for the fall of Moscow. In the aftermath of this event, Tolstoy
writes that “fresh as that memory was, Rastopchin felt that it was now
deeply, bloodily engraved in his heart. He felt clearly now that the bloody
trace of that memory would never heal, but that, on the contrary, the longer
he lived, the more cruelly and tormentingly that terrible memory would live
in his heart” (893). Like Rostov, Rastopchin feels as a result of his actions;
Tolstoy uses this word twice in these two sentences. Although the word
guilt is never used explicitly, the fact that the memory would live “cruelly
and tormentingly” inside of him is a clear signal that he feels guilt for what
he did. Much like Rostov, this guilt comes not from a calculation of precise
moral reasoning, but rather from a feeling deep inside of him.
1
All parenthetical citations refer to page numbers in the following edition: Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Books, 2011).
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Lastly, in describing the execution scene where French soldiers are
commanded to shoot Russian political prisoners, Tolstoy writes that Pierre
looked upon the “pale, frightened faces of the Frenchmen, who again were
doing something by the post, pushing each other with trembling hands”
(966). The Frenchmen who were carrying out the execution, and not at all
in harm's way, looked frightened, their hands trembling. What then was
frightening them, causing their hands to tremble? This look of terror must
be an unintentional response to what they are doing, a kind of involuntary
disapprobation of their own actions. Further evidence of this comes when
Pierre recognized that “on the faces of the French soldiers and officers, on
all without exception, he read the same fear, horror, and struggle that were
in his heart...‘They’re all suffering just as I am’” (966). The executioners
appear to be suffering because they are being forced to carry out an order
that feels unnatural and immoral to them. Finally, this feeling of moral
failing is expressed most explicitly when Tolstoy writes that the
executioners “all obviously knew without question that they were criminals,
who had to quickly conceal the traces of their crime” (967). The
perpetrators of the execution “knew without question” that they had done
wrong. Where did this knowledge come from? There is no suggestion that
they needed to think hard and reflect to come to this conclusion about their
own moral failing. They knew their guilt from the moment of the crime, in
a kind of intuitive and unambiguous way.
In all three of these cases, feelings of guilt and shame arise mere moments
after the actions they follow. No mental reflection occurs to bring these
emotions about. The most plausible explanation for these feelings is that
Tolstoy gives these characters strong moral intuitions that instinctively
recognize immorality and flare up—in the form of feelings of guilt—when
those intuitions have been transgressed. One final piece of evidence
corroborates this assertion: Tolstoy references the heart as the place of
anguish and struggle in each of these three anecdotes. For Rostov, “some
unpleasant feeling wrung his heart”; for Rastopchin, his memory of the
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event was “now deeply, bloodily engraved in his heart”; and for the
executioners, Pierre “read the same fear, horror, and struggle that were in
his heart” (653, 893, 966). In literature and in life, the heart is considered
to be the realm of feeling, while the head is considered to be the place of
thinking. Almost no thinking occurs in the minds of these characters during
their respective actions. Yet they still know “obviously...without question”
that what they have done is wrong. This knowledge comes from the heart
and does not require logical reasoning.
While the circumstances of these situations are quite different, the
responses of the characters to their own transgressions and Tolstoy’s
descriptions of their resulting feelings are remarkably similar. These
analogous responses suggest to the reader that Tolstoy is making a claim
here not just about the characters in the story, but about all people, about
how all humans would respond to striking someone with a sword or being
forced to shoot a prisoner in cold blood. Further evidence that Tolstoy is
making a universal claim is that these three situations involve characters of
dramatically different social classes and upbringings. These feelings of
moral failure, for Tolstoy, are not dependant on an education in the
Classics of Western philosophy. They appear to be present both in
educated upper class officials like Rastopchin and privates in the military
like the French executioners. Now that the presence of strong, heartfelt
moral intuitions in these characters has been identified, further
investigation is necessary to show how they operate and what qualities they
have.
Proximity
In War and Peace, the moral intuitions of the characters appear to be deeply
affected by proximity to the ethically questionable act. Something changes
when they are up close and personal, and can see the faces of the people
they are hurting. For instance, in the episode with Nikolai Rostov, Tolstoy
writes that “Rostov sought his enemy with his eyes, to see whom he had
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vanquished” (653). At this moment Rostov does not yet feel guilt; he only
wants to see who he has overcome. But something significant happens
when he looks upon the poor soldier, who is “glancing up at Rostov from
below with an expression of terror. His face, pale and mud-spattered, fairhaired, young, with a dimple on the chin and light blue eyes, was not at all
for the battlefield, not an enemy’s face, but a most simple, homelike face”
(653-654). This line directly precedes the line about how an “unpleasant
feeling wrung his heart”—consequently the reader can infer that observing
these attributes of the officer is the proximate cause of Rostov’s guilt.
Rostov feels guilt once he sees that this person he has harmed is more like
an innocent child than the menacing enemy he likely imagined.
The reader gets further confirmation of this through Rostov’s thoughts a
few days later, when he thinks: “‘they’re even more afraid than we are!’
[...]‘And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes?
But how frightened he was! He thought I’d kill him’” (655). While again
expressing surprise at the innocence of the officer with his “dimple and
light blue eyes,” Rostov further observes that his enemies are “even more
afraid than we are!” In this moment Rostov realizes that this particular
enemy and, by extension, the whole French army are equally or even more
frightened than the Russian army is. This realization could be boiled down
to a simple phrase: they are just like us. Whereas before he had evidently
imagined the French to be terrifying and aggressive, unlike the young and
disorganized Russian forces, the recognition that they were just as afraid as
the Russians obliges Rostov to see all that they have in common with the
enemy: their common humanity. It is in the observation of the enemy’s
face and his fear that these conclusions are reached.
It is noteworthy that, by this point in the narrative, Nikolai Rostov has been
in the Russian military for years, and has presumably shot at enemies many
times before this event. But given his surprise when he realizes that the
French troops are just like the Russian ones, it is clear that this is a new
revelation for him: this shows the role proximity plays in Rostov’s moral
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intuitions. Before he could clearly see the faces of the people he was
fighting it was easier to dehumanize them and think of them as monsters.
But his nearness to the dragoon officer precluded his ability to frame the
situation in this way. If he had killed this officer, he could see that he would
be killing a young, scared Frenchman who likely had no interest in fighting
in the first place. This is not to say that Tolstoy believes it is somehow
more ethically justifiable to kill people from far away with a gun or a cannon
than it is to kill them up close with a saber. Proximity does not change our
moral obligations. Rather, it clarifies them, cutting through our proclivity
to redirect our attention to something less appalling. As a test of the
morality of an action it is not enough to ask: will you feel guilt at having
done something? This test is insufficient because it fails to take into
account that we can trick our moral intuitions by looking away, or being
far enough away in the first place that we cannot see the damage we have
done. The real test of the morality of an action that Tolstoy seems to be
advocating for would be the following: will you feel guilt at having done
something while you stare into the eyes of the person you are doing that
thing to? Henceforth, this will be called the proximity test of morality.
This test, or something that closely resembles it, actually occurs in the pages
of War and Peace. Before the execution scene, Pierre is questioned by the
French general Davout, “a man known for his cruelty” (963). Davout
contends that Pierre is a Russian spy, an accusation that, if borne out,
would almost certainly lead to Pierre’s execution. Yet while Pierre is
frantically attempting to exculpate himself, something remarkable happens:
Davout raised his eyes and looked fixedly at Pierre. For a few seconds they
looked at each other, and that gaze saved Pierre. In that gaze, beyond all
the conventions of war and courts, human relations were established between
these two men. In that one moment, they both vaguely felt a countless
number of things and realized that they were both children of the human
race, that they were brothers (964).
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In this touching moment of human contact, the proximity test of morality
is inadvertently thrust upon Davout. In attempting to evaluate Pierre’s
guilt, Davout is forced to look him in the eyes. He is forced to recognize
who exactly he will be killing if he orders his execution: a brother, a child
of the human race. This is something that they both “vaguely felt” rather
than precisely reasoned. Without a doubt, Davout would have treated
Pierre differently if they had not been in the same room, if a human
connection had not been established. But now that Davout has stared into
this man’s eyes, he understands that he will feel guilt if he sentences him to
death.
All of this is spelled out by Tolstoy in the next line, where he writes that:
At first glance, for Davout, who had only just raised his head from his list,
where human deeds and life were known by numbers, Pierre was only a
circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without taking a bad act
on his conscience; but now he had seen him as a human being (964).
When Pierre was “only a circumstance” and existed only on the pages of
Davout’s list, he was as removed from Davout as the enemy soldiers
Rostov shot at earlier in the novel. But once Davout makes eye contact
with Pierre, and Rostov looks at the young face of the dragoon officer, the
certainty of a guilty conscience compels them to have compassion. Further,
by pointing out that Davout is famous for his cruelty and then showing
him soften once he is face to face with Pierre, Tolstoy is undoubtedly
suggesting that this is the universal human reaction to the proximity test of
morality and that these instincts are present in everyone, even the most
brutal of generals. The means of clarifying the morality of an action which
Tolstoy appears to advocate for—the proximity test—raises interesting
questions about the efficacy of another test of morality that is more
typically used to decide the ethical ramifications of an action. The next
section of this essay will deal with the place of reason in Tolstoy’s moral
framework.
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Reason
As was noted earlier in the essay, in each of the three chosen vignettes, the
morality of an action was decided not by a calculation or the application of
a philosophical system—rather, characters were overcome by a feeling of
guilt after they acted wrongly. Nowhere in these scenes does Tolstoy show
characters—at the point of action—thinking hard about their moral
obligations, or attempting to weigh the pros and cons of various actions.
In other words, the evidence from the story points to a view of morality
that relies entirely on moral intuitions, discrediting the place of reason in
morality. The reader can infer this assertion from Tolstoy’s depictions of
these scenes. If only the executioners had followed their intuitions, they
would not have killed the prisoners. If only Davout had been face to face
with all the people his orders harmed, he might not have been famous for
his cruelty.
But the force of these inferences pales in comparison to the strength of the
rebuke against reason that comes after Rastopchin commits his crime of
ordering a peasant mob to vent their anger over the fall of Moscow by
murdering a political prisoner. Tolstoy writes that in the hours after the
crime, “Rastopchin calmed down physically and, as always happens,
simultaneously with physical calm, his mind also devised causes for him to
be morally calm” (891). Right off the bat the reader can tell by Tolstoy’s
word choice that Rastopchin is doing something dubious and problematic
here. The word devise implies that he is inventing reasons to feel better that
are not actually true. What are these causes to be calm that he devises?
The thought that calmed Rastopchin was not new. As long as the world
has existed and people have been killing each other, no one man has ever
committed a crime upon his own kind without calming himself with this
same thought. This thought was le bien publique, the supposed good of
other people (891).
108
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Rastopchin convinces himself that his actions were justified because they
were done for the “supposed good of other people.” In other words, he is
using a rational consideration, something like a utilitarian calculation, to
pacify himself and attenuate his guilt. By positioning himself as someone
who is working for the public good, Rastopchin can absolve himself of
responsibility by conceiving of his crime as an action where the ends justify
the means. Continuing in this way of thinking, he even reflects: “‘I didn’t do
it for myself, I had to act that way. La plèbe, le traître...le bien publique’”
(893). He is instrumentalizing reason itself to feel better about what he did.
Much like the list that Davout had, where “human deeds and life were
known by numbers,” the application of reason in this way is a means of
creating mental distance from the criminal action, to get around the
proximity test of morality. Tolstoy undoubtedly views reason used in this
way to be quite sinister.
At this point, the reader might ask: clearly Tolstoy denounces the use of
reason after a crime to justify it, but what about if reason is applied before
the action has been carried out, as a way to evaluate the consequences of
the act? Tolstoy responds to this question conclusively, putting the final
nail in the coffin of morality by way of reason when he writes that: “for a
man not gripped by passion, that good [the public good] is never known;
but the man who commits the crime always knows for certain what that
good consists in. And Rastopchin now knew it” (891). By saying that the
public good is never known to man, except when he is in a fit of passion—
in other words when he is not reasoning—Tolstoy is telling the reader that
a truly rational system of morality is inaccessible. When man is abstractly
reasoning he can never know what is in the interest of the public good. For
Tolstoy, man does not have the capacity to arrive at moral truth through
the medium of reason.
109
�Joseph Hiles / Moral Intuitions in Tolsoy’s War and Peace
War
The primary implication of Tolstoy’s far reaching moral analysis is that war,
and especially modern war, is the worst of human evils because it takes
away our only standard of discerning between right and wrong, and
replaces it with the standard of obedience to authority. Almost by
definition, every act of war goes against our moral intuitions. Regardless of
how noble the cause we are fighting for, it will always be contrary to human
nature to wound and kill our fellow man. At every turn, war systematically
tricks and erodes these moral intuitions. For example, all of the long-range
weapons that are used in modern combat eliminate the need to look the
enemy in the eye as you attack them. The proximity test of morality never
comes into play when the people you are shooting at are hundreds of feet
away. At this distance, the strength of our moral intuitions is greatly
reduced.
At the same time, repeated contact with death and violence desensitizes
combatants to the horrifying acts they are carrying out. One particular
moment in the execution scene perfectly illustrates this point. While Pierre
is gazing upon the frightened French executioners, all but one of them
rejoins their companies. One soldier is too paralyzed with horror to carry
on as normal:
A young soldier with a deathly pale face, his shako pushed back, his
musket lowered, went on standing across the pit in the place from which he
had fired. He was reeling like a drunk man, taking a few steps forward,
then back, to support his falling body. An old sergeant ran out from the
ranks and, seizing the young soldier’s arm, pulled him into the company
(968).
“Reeling like a drunk man,” this young soldier has responded how any
normal human being who is not accustomed to the violence of war would
respond to being forced to execute people. The reader can infer by his
110
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
young age that this soldier is intended to represent a person uninitiated in
the art of war. Yet while this young soldier is crippled by guilt and fear, the
other soldiers attempt to rejoin their units as if nothing happened. The
young Frenchman is saved from embarrassment and punishment by an old
sergeant who runs out and pulls him back into the company. In this
moment, instinctual human feelings like guilt and horror that arise out of
our moral intuitions are either deliberately inhibited by the other soldiers
so as to not appear weak, or they have been unwittingly attenuated over
time through constant contact with violence. Either way, the process of
being a soldier in war gradually degrades the effectiveness of our intuitions
in clarifying and motivating ethical action. War perversely incentivizes
soldiers to forget their intuitions and do as they are told.
In the pages of War and Peace, Tolstoy weaves together a compelling and
complex moral system that relies on the moral intuitions that he evidently
sees in all human beings. These intuitions can be invaluable tools for
clarifying how we ought to act. But unfortunately they can be deceived and
eroded, and, as a result, precautions must be taken to preserve their
effectiveness. To address this concern, Tolstoy implicitly suggests a
standard of moral evaluation that hinges upon proximity to the person
one’s actions will affect. In this proximity, where one must stare into the
eyes of one’s adversary—and see firsthand what will be lost if lethal action
is taken—right and wrong become clear through our feelings. All we must
do then is act according to our heart.
111
�The Cliffs of Moher
Patricia Harden
What is it about the Cliffs of Moher?
Where carboniferous ridges
Of shale and flagstone rise
A steep seven hundred feet
Above the Atlantic roar
Where the rhythmic flight of birds blends
With the ebb and flow of the waves,
As seagulls drift and dive, and shorebirds skirt
The swirling sea foam bath
Where century after century,
Irish folk and foreigners
Wander, watch, and wonder
Awed by Time’s imposing sculpture
Where musicians play and passersby
Throw a pence to a fiddler’s case,
For sad sweet tunes resonating feather light
On the breeze of salt sea air
It is but this, my friend:
Where stone and sand and sea
Command each soul’s repose—
A moment to reflect on one’s immortality
Safe within the harbor of eternity.
112
�Colloquy / Spring 2019
Patricia Harden
Cliffs of Moher
113
�Jaime Marquez
114
�You can find more work by the artists featured in Colloquy at:
Adam Hurwitz: spacewaves.me
Jaime Marquez: jaimemarquez.com
This issue of Colloquy is made possible by the generous support of:
The St. John’s College Office of Advancement
The St. John’s College Bookstore
The Colloquy Editorial Board is sincerely grateful to Ms. Emily Langston,
Mr. Paul Ludwig, Mr. Louis Petrich, and Mr. Brandon Wasicsko.
If you would like to participate in the mission of Colloquy, consider
donating. Checks may be mailed to the following address:
ATTN: Colloquy
The Graduate Institute
St. John’s College
60 College Avenue
Annapolis, MD 21401
�The Graduate Institute
60 College Avenue
Annapolis, MD 21401
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Colloquy
Description
An account of the resource
A journal for the Graduate Institute Community of St. John's College in Annapolis, MD.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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paper (bound book)
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114 pages
Dublin Core
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Title
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Colloquy, Spring 2019
Description
An account of the resource
Volume V of the Colloquy, published in Spring 2019.
Creator
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Dorchester, Andrew (editor)
Greene, Zachary N. (editor)
Marquez, Jaime (editor)
Poyner, Jordan (editor)
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2019-05
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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text
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pdf
Language
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English
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Colloquy Vol 5 Spring 2019
Graduate Institute
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Commencement Programs and Addresses
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Addresses given at commencement and programs of events related to, and including, the annual commencement ceremonies at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />The College Archives holds programs and/or addresses for the following years:<br />
<ul>
<li>1796</li>
<li>1835-1836</li>
<li>1842</li>
<li>1852</li>
<li>1856-1857</li>
<li>1870</li>
<li>1878</li>
<li>1880</li>
<li>1890</li>
<li>1893</li>
<li>1895</li>
<li>1897</li>
<li>1907</li>
<li>1910-1918</li>
<li>1920-1924</li>
<li>1928-1929</li>
<li>1932</li>
<li>1936-1937</li>
<li>1939-1945</li>
<li>1947-present </li>
</ul>
Click on <strong><a title="Commencement Programs and Addresses" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=18&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the Commencement Programs and Addresses Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
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commencementprograms
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
7 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Commencement Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2016
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the commencement address for the Graduate Institute given by Peter Kalkavage at the end of the Summer 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the seriousness of play or the importance of not being Earnest".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kalkavage, Peter
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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2016-08-05
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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CommencementAddressGISummer2016
Commencement
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Addresses
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
convocation
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Word doc
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
7 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2019
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Spring 2019 semester on January 7, 2019 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Joy of Recognition".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Langston, Emily Brooker
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-01-07
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Convocation 2019
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Colloquy
Description
An account of the resource
A journal for the Graduate Institute Community of St. John's College in Annapolis, MD.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
54 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Colloquy, Fall 2018
Description
An account of the resource
Volume IV of the Colloquy, published in Fall 2018.
Creator
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Dorchester, Andrew (editor)
Marquez, Jaime (editor)
Poyner, Jordan (editor)
Trovato, Jenifer (editor)
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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2018-11
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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Collquy-Volume IV-Fall 2018 Reduced Size
Graduate Institute
Student publication
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 34 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GI Catalog 2003
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, Program Statement, Liberal Arts, Eastern Classics
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2003
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the year 2003.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
iv, 20 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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GI Catalog 1996-1997
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1996-1997
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1996 to 1997.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GI Catalog 1991-1992
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Bulletin of the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College 1991-1992
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1992-1992
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1991 to 1992.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 22 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1989-1990
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, 1989-90 Bulletin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1989-1990
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1989 to 1990.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1988-1989
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Bulletin of the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College 1988-89
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1988-1989
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1988 to 1989.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 22 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1988-1989 Bulletin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, 1988-89 Bulletin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1988-1989
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1988 to 1989.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 16 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1986-1987
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College 1986-87
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-1987
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1986 to 1987.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 20 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1984-1985
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College 1984-85
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1985
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for the years 1984 to 1985.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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dc20a91725fb0413e06dc43a8baf7721
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1983
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1983
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1983.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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abb89a6bcf467722f6510132125dc7f1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
ii, 18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1982
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1982
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1982.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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4291e7f934ae532a6a7d4e6b2fa8023f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
12 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1978
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland 1978
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1978
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1978.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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96a5cc7aef62505690fb943bb9177dda
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1976
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico 1976
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1976
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1976.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
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db634185836357e1efb70b3593f25b61
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
20 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1975
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1975
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1975
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1975.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0801b20030ac14ce704ae16e91be19d.pdf
4b998f651ed1f553ffb50b8bc68befdb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
18 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1974
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1974
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1974
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1974.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/79e14c85b1ce74645cc7794afbe3d551.pdf
5824b76126341ca3d2b74d7622556829
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
College Catalogs and Statements of the Program
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Statements of the Program are published each Academic Year. They provide an overview of the program and historical information about the college. <br /><br />The titles of these publications have changed over the course of the College's history. From the 19th century through 1971 they were titled Catalogue. During this period, some Catalogues were distributed as issues of <em>The Bulletin of St. John's College</em>. The title changed from Catalogues to Statement of the Program with the 1972-1973 publication. <br /><br />Also included in this collection are Graduate Institute catalogs and promotional publications about the St. John's program. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="College Catalogues" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=10">Items in the College Catalogs and Statements of the Program Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
collegecatalogs
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
13 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Catalog 1973
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, St. John's College in Santa Fe 1973
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1973
Description
An account of the resource
GI college catalog for summer 1973.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Catalog
Catalogue
Graduate Institute
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