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Volume VI
Fall 2019
Understanding and Freedom
in Descartes’ Meditations
Paul Tsavoussis
The Fellowship of Learning
William Pastille
Plato’s Parmenides: An Erotic Romp
Maxwell Anthony
Conversation with Michael Dink
Colloquy Editors
Four Poems
Louis Petrich
The Truth of Fiction in the Odyssey
Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
Jordi Rozenman
Ryan Shinkel
Conversation with Sheba Delaney
The Epidamnus Affair: A Verse Translation
Photography by Jaime Marquez
A Journal of the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College
�COLLOQUY
St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland
Volume VI: Fall 2019
Editorial Board
Jordan Poyner, Editor-in-Chief
Andrew Dorchester
Charles Green
Dimple Kaul
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.
©2020 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
ESSAYS
The Fellowship of Learning: Address to the Graduate Institute, July 19, 2019
William Pastille, Tutor .................................................................................... 4
Descartes on Understanding and Freedom
Paul Tsavoussis ............................................................................................... 9
Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of Plato’s Parmenides
Maxwell Anthony ............................................................................................ 31
Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
Ryan Shinkel .................................................................................................... 52
The Truth of Fiction in the Odyssey
Jordi Rozenman .............................................................................................. 74
CONVERSATIONS
Michael Dink, Tutor ............................................................................................... 15
Sheba Delaney .......................................................................................................... 66
POETRY
Four Poems
Louis Petrich, Tutor ....................................................................................... 39
The Epidamnus Affair: A Verse Adaptation
Gregory LaMontagne ..................................................................................... 61
Her, because of and despite
Matt Ely ............................................................................................................ 88
Artwork by Jaime Marquez and Samuel Hage
�Jaime Marquez
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers,
Conversation is the vital function of St. John’s and its approach to
education—and we understand that essays and lectures cannot replace it.
However, it is our belief that some ideas deserve elaboration and deserve to
be considered in their elaborated form. It is in this spirit that we have
approached the Fall 2019 issue.
For the sixth issue of Colloquy, the editors have tried to curate an issue that
comments on the principal subjects of the courses available this spring. The
essays here are provocative, carefully articulated, and discuss the nature of
understanding, truth, and the philosophical approach. We hope these
essays—and the journal itself—might serve as companions and catalysts for
conversations to come.
Colloquy is a unique space where students in the Graduate Institute may share
their intellectual and artistic labors. It is a space maintained by GI students
and, more or less, for GI students. By spring of 2020, nearly all of the current
members of the editorial board will be graduated. If you appreciate what the
journal does—or could do—we encourage you to join the editorial board.
–The Colloquy Editorial Board
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�The Fellowship of Learning:
Address to the Graduate Institute, July 19, 2019
William Pastille
The Fellowship of Learning here at St. John’s has been bustling, what with
the Graduate Institute working through its intense new summer schedule, the
Summer Academy delivering us two small hordes of high school students,
and many study groups meeting as well.
Until last week I was in one of those study groups discussing Virginia Woolf’s
novel called The Waves. The book is a tour-de-force of early twentieth-century
modernism, with six main characters speaking in an indistinguishable mixture
of interior monologue and external dialogue, all with the same mostly
dispassionate voice, the same diction, and the same vocabulary, distributing
their speeches over a plotless series of vignettes. Despite these severe
technical restraints, Woolf manages to pull off a remarkable feat of literary
prowess: she tells a mesmerizing story that helps the reader who is willing to
keep re-reading the book to see ever more deeply into life.
Now I know there is nothing more tedious than listening to a book report on
a book you haven’t read, and that most of you haven’t read The Waves. But
I’m willing to risk a little tedium because Woolf’s book brings out two
important truths about life. The first is that our identities, the hard shells that
protect us from the world’s darts, are permeable to the smallest words and
deeds of others. The second is that everyone suffers from the world’s darts
and we often have no idea whether those around us are suffering.
In regard to the first truth, Woolf demonstrates the permeability of identity
by having elements of the characters’ personalities flow from one to another
through images and word-patterns—what the book calls “phrases.” One
character needs to feel stability in the dizzying whirl of daily activity. The
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
phrase “fix the moment” arises to express that need. Another character needs
to preserve the sense of completeness that emerges when close friends gather.
The phrase “a chain whirling round” arises to express that need. These
phrases pass from character to character, enter into their souls’ storehouses,
and graft themselves onto their personalities.
And this, it seems to me, is really the way it is. Thousands of “phrases” broken
off from the being of others comprise much of our identity—perhaps much,
much more than we know.
One of my phrases, for instance, is the one I started with: the Fellowship of
Learning. I first began to hear myself saying it some three decades ago. I don’t
know whether it started as my own invention, or as something I heard from
a colleague, or something I read in a book. But today it steps forth of its own
accord from the soul’s storehouse to meet an appropriate occasion—like this
one.
What does it mean? It stands for all of us who know that learning has made
us what we are and that it can remake us to be better than we are. It is the
community of all those who, both as students and as teachers, try to keep
learning alive in themselves and promote it in others. We are all of us
members of the Fellowship of Learning or we would not be here.
Now on to Woolf’s second truth, that we generally do not know what others
are suffering. The Waves contains many encounters among the characters that
show this only too clearly. Here is one involving two of the main characters
when they are young adults. Neville goes to Bernard seeking validation of his
career choice: he wants to be a poet. Bernard seems to suspect Neville’s need,
but he cannot support Neville because he has no inner stability himself. He
is painfully distracted because he is in love and frantic about what sort of
persona he must project to impress his beloved. Neville ultimately bolts from
the room in frustration, throwing a poem at Bernard’s head. Bernard quickly,
and regretfully, identifies complexity and confusion in our inner lives as the
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�William Pastille / The Fellowship of Learning
cause of such painful events. “We are not simple,” he says, “as our friends
would have us to meet their needs.”
And this, it seems to me, is really the way it is. Everyone struggles internally
with life’s frustrations. Unless we are told about those struggles—and there
are many reasons why even our closest friends would not tell us—we cannot
know the suffering that someone standing right in front of us may be
enduring.
Nevertheless, Bernard immediately follows up with this remark: “Yet love is
simple,” he says. Hmm. We are not simple, yet love is simple? What does he
mean by “simple”?
In the History Tutorial, we have been reading authors who try to find
meaning in the succession of historical events. Augustine sees the City of
God shining through the excrement spattered upon the world by the misuse
of free will. Hegel smooths over the pointless waste of life in history with a
story in which Spirit is the protagonist who redeems all losses through selfactualization. Marx transforms Hegel’s story about Spirit into a story about
the transformative forces of inanimate matter working their effects on human
matter.
Those of you in other segments have encountered other authors trying to
attain similar ends. Plato’s world of Forms contains the clear originals of the
confusing images we encounter here in the sublunary world. In Homer’s
poems, the Fates weave a cohesive tapestry displaying a clear picture that links
together the seemingly haphazard actions of gods and men.
In all these attempts to find meaning, the authors look through what presents
itself as disorder in the hope of seeing order in the distance behind. When
they succeed, the bewildering chaos reveals itself to be foreground; the order
behind the chaos reveals itself to be background, the relatively simple skeleton
that supports the apparent complexity.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Something like this is what Bernard meant by “Love is simple.” The
complexities of life are foreground—a continual succession of apparently
disordered events that either run smoothly or grind with friction. But love is
background—the stable, if not always apparent, canvas on which all our life
activities are painted. Bernard and Neville may be at odds in this moment,
they may misunderstand each other and subsequently come to mistrust each
other in some ways, but behind it all stands love, love that makes meaning of
both trust and mistrust, cooperation and competition, closeness and reserve.
There is foreground and background also in the Fellowship of Learning. The
foreground is the Learning—the facts to be mastered, the ideas to be
comprehended, the lesson plans to be covered. These keep coming at us,
crowding up our days, rushing past at breakneck speed, and, sadly,
disappearing quickly into the past, mostly without effect.
But the background is the Fellowship. In the knowledge that suffering occurs,
the essential act of fellowship is consolation. In all our learning, whether we
are playing the role of student or teacher, we ought to keep our eyes on the
deepest concerns of human life, some of which are no doubt distressing our
fellow learners. We ought to direct our efforts toward deeper understanding
that may lessen the suffering. Calm rationality, mutual respect, good humor,
openness, offers of assistance, willingness to take up others’ questions as our
own—the ways we treat one another as we engage the Learning in the
foreground aids us in seeing through to the background. In the Fellowship
of Learning we console one another through repeated acts of intellectual
charity, solidarity, and sympathy.
And in the knowledge that anything we say may enter imperceptibly into the
storehouse of another’s soul, we should try to send out the very best of
ourselves to our fellow learners. When we speak, either as teachers or as
students, we should make our words as straight and as honest as we can, so
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�William Pastille / The Fellowship of Learning
that they will work no harm if they should take root in someone else’s
personality and become their “phrases.”
Does this sound difficult, like it requires a laborious artifice that will curb
spontaneity and truthfulness? I assure you that it is not. Only one thing is
required—love.
And—as Bernard’s phrase will now, I hope, always step forth to remind
you—love is simple.
William Pastille has been a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis since 1986. He has
also served as Assistant Dean and Director of the Graduate Institute.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
The Alumni Association of St. John’s College funds a prize for a distinguished graduate
tutorial essay written during the summer semester, which is awarded at summer
commencement. An ad hoc committee of tutors teaching in the summer term will consider
papers submitted by summer tutorial tutors. Award-winning essays are kept in the
Greenfield Library. “Descartes on Understanding and Freedom,” by Paul Tsavoussis
(AGI’20), is the 2019 award-winning essay.
Descartes on Understanding and Freedom
Paul Tsavoussis
Where does the faculty of understanding reside in Descartes’ Meditations on
First Philosophy and what does it elucidate in reference to free will?
Men are decisive creatures. From the moment we wake to the moments before
we fall asleep, we are inundated with stimuli that we must respond to: What
to eat? What to wear? Whom to love? How to act? What to believe? Inevitably,
we make bad decisions, but it is only through reflecting upon our decisionmaking process that we can limit the number of mistakes in the future, or at
least not make the same mistakes twice. In his Fourth Meditation, Descartes
attempts to discover how man errs. He concludes that man errs when his will
outpaces his intellect, deciding unilaterally, without instruction from the
intellect, what to affirm or engage. Throughout the meditation, Descartes
relies heavily on the faculty of understanding to demonstrate this point, but at
times it is not entirely clear where this faculty resides—in the domain of the
will or that of the intellect?
Descartes defines the intellect as a capability concerned exclusively with
perception. He states: “For through the intellect alone I only perceive ideas on
which I can pass judgement, nor can any error in the strict sense be found in
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�Paul Tsavoussis / Descartes on Understanding and Freedom
it when considered from this precise viewpoint” (40).1 The intellect is not the
active decision-making faculty of man, rather, it is the domain of perception
derived from God and therefore unerring, in the sense that what it does
understand is correct (42). For Descartes, the intellect is limited in that it can
only know what it knows, whereas the will is “unbounded by any limits” (41).
Through this distinction, it becomes evident that Descartes believes that the
faculty of understanding resides within the domain of the intellect. He claims:
“For if, for example, I consider the faculty of understanding, I immediately
recognize that in me it is very small and seriously limited” (41). Thus, given
that the will is unlimited and the intellect is limited, it makes sense that the
faculty of understanding, which is also limited, resides within the intellect. This
understanding is supported further by Descartes’ definition of the will:
“moved in relation to that which the intellect presents to us as to be affirmed
or denied, pursued or avoided, in such a way that we feel we are not being
determined in that direction by any external force” (41). The will does not
seem to engage in any understanding of what is affirmed and denied, but rather
is tasked with executing what the intellect has understood to be good and true.
This passage places the will in a somewhat subservient stature to that of the
intellect. Consequently, the faculty of understanding seems to remain
exclusively within the domain of the intellect.
Does the Will Understand?
This clear distinction (with the faculty of understanding on the side of the
intellect) is complicated by a discussion of man’s ability to recognize his
relationship to God. Descartes states: “it is chiefly on account of the will that
I understand that I bear a certain image and likeness of God” (41). This
sentence seems to contravene what was previously laid out. Based on our prior
reading, all ascertainable knowledge should be understood in the intellect and
the will should simply engage it. However, Descartes seems to posit that it is
“chiefly” through the will, and not the intellect, that man is capable of
understanding that he bears a certain image of God. It is important to note
1
All parenthetical citations refer to page numbers in the following edition: René Descartes,
Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans.
Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
that the text does not say that the will enables man to judge that he bears a
certain image of God, but even more so, that it is the will that enables man to
understand that he bears a certain image of God. The import of this is that
naturally there must be understanding before there is judgment, and if the
faculty of understanding resides in the will then it would be nonsensical for
judgement, which trails understanding, to be reversed back to the domain of
the intellect. Consequently, the will would be the exclusive decision maker of
man. It would appear from these definitions that the intellect simply perceives
the ideas, and it is up to the will to assess the information and decide on how
to proceed. Through this lens of the will, as the enclave of understanding, the
weakness of the intellect becomes more apparent. Descartes’ simple definition
of the intellect as perception, seems to be materially different from
“understanding.” When one perceives something that does not necessarily
entail that they understand it, in the same way that a man can perceive a hidden
figure in the shadows, but not necessarily understand what is there.
The Understanding Intellect
Although confounding, Descartes tacks back toward his original conception
of understanding, as related to the intellect, when he posits his reasoning as to
how man errs. He states:
The range of the will is greater than that of the intellect, I do not confine it
within the same limits, but extend it even to matters I do not understand;
and since it is indifferent to these, it easily falls away from the true and the
good, and this is both how I come to be deceived and how I come to sin.2
The most significant aspect of this passage is that Descartes seems to state that
all understanding occurs within the intellect. What surpasses the intellect exists
in the realm of the will. Additionally, what is understood by the intellect is true
and good. If the intellect does not understand a certain proposition, then that
proposition cannot be true and good; and the will is indifferent towards it.
Nevertheless, given the previous passage concerning the will’s capacity to
understand, it seems feasible that the will is more than just a subservient tool
2
Ibid., 42.
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�Paul Tsavoussis / Descartes on Understanding and Freedom
of the intellect but also engages in a degree of agency. Support for this theory
is evinced when Descartes claims:
It clearly followed that I existed, I could not indeed refrain from judging that
what I so clearly understood was true. It was not that I was compelled to this
by some external force, but that a great illumination of the intellect was
followed by a great inclination of the will; and in this way my belief was all
the freer and more spontaneous for my being less indifferent.3
Here, Descartes delineates between judgment and understanding. Judgment is
an act separate from understanding and what is understood to be good and
true is not necessarily judged to be so. The significance of this is that judgment
seems to be a faculty of the will, whereas understanding is a faculty of the
intellect. In the same way that understanding precedes judgment, so too is the
intellect “followed by a great inclination of the will.”
Descartes believes that man has a natural inclination to that which the intellect
deems correct and the more correct it is, the freer it is, since we are not
indifferent to it. Indifference can be understood to mean the absence of a
directive from the intellect. Essentially, we are indifferent to matters we do not
properly understand because no perception or understanding of truth exists
to attract the will to one view or the other. On its face, this conception of
freedom does not seem all that free. If man can ascertain the truth through
the natural workings of the intellect in a “great illumination” and then act upon
it, where exactly is the choice? Wouldn’t it seem like there is more choice or
more freedom if the answer was less obvious, and more choices were available
to choose from? I may be conflating quantity of options with freedom, yet the
point still stands that the intellect (which does not err when it does understand
the truth) will not exactly create the conditions in which choice is necessary.
Freedom
Descartes makes clear that the will is synonymous with freedom of choice. He
claims: “It is only the will, or freedom of choice, that I experience in myself as
so great that I can form the idea of none greater” (41). The primary implication
3
Ibid.
12
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
of this is that, for Descartes, the intellect is not a constituent aspect of freedom
of choice, rather it is solely within the bounds of the will that individual
freedom for man exists. Nevertheless, Descartes seems to believe that the will,
even if it chooses the true and the good, is misusing free choice if it does so
unilaterally without the intellect. He claims:
But if I either affirm or deny, then I am not making the right use of my
freedom of choice; and if I adopt the view that is false, I shall be altogether
deceived. Yet if I adopt the other view, although it happens to be the true one,
I shall still be at fault, because it is manifest by the natural light that a
decision on the part of the will should always be preceded by a perception on
the part of the intellect. The privation in which the essence of error consists
lies in this wrong use of free choice.4
Descartes maintains that the will is synonymous with free choice, yet if the will
or free choice does not follow the intellect, then it is less free or a “wrong use
of free choice.” Although this is a thought experiment and exists to a certain
extent in the vacuum of Descartes’ mind, the belief that the intellect should
always precede the will, especially to be the “right use of freedom” seems
untenable. If the intellect is not able to provide an understanding, and the will
still moves forward with a decision, how is this a perversion of freedom?
Necessarily, it is best to know what is good through the intellect and engage it
with the will, but matters of love and life oftentimes do not provide our
intellect with enough understanding and the will must compensate. Is this still
not a proper use of freedom?
A possible reconciliation is tenable when we consider Descartes’ previous
mention of the will as understanding our likeness to God. Descartes’
characterization of the will as understanding, and not just as a faculty of
judgment, makes possible the idea that in judgment there must be at least a
modicum of understanding in order to ascertain how to judge. Judgment is
predicated upon understanding the options available and the merits behind
those options. Therefore, maybe the will also has a faculty to understand.
4
Ibid., 43.
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�Paul Tsavoussis / Descartes on Understanding and Freedom
Descartes’ main point when claiming something is less free or more free is
that the ideal form of freedom is that in which the will does not need to
understand through judgement, but is pulled toward the truth of whatever the
intellect is claiming without any hesitation. It is an emotive, natural freedom,
where there is no consternation or debate, but rather the will is moved simply
by the blatant obviousness or “natural light” of the understanding of the
intellect.
Paul Tsavoussis (AGI’20) is a second-semester student in the Graduate Institute. He is a
Georgetown University alumnus interested in political theology and existentialism.
Jaime Marquez
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
Colloquy: How does somebody—a young man no less—decide to leave
Harvard and go to St. John’s?
Michael Dink: Fortunately, this is a story I’ve rehearsed many times. As a
high school student in Cincinnati, I had an English teacher who had attended
Notre Dame and had done the Liberal Studies Program at Notre Dame. So he
was an advocate of great books liberal studies programs and thought of St.
John’s as the best program, and so he would often try to get his students to go
to St. John’s. So that’s how I heard about St. John’s in the first place. But I
thought it wouldn’t be so different to go to another school and major in
philosophy. So I applied to Harvard and managed to get in, so I thought I may
as well go there. In fact, I didn’t even apply to St. John’s I’m ashamed to say.
So I went to Harvard and I discovered that, first of all, their philosophy
department had little or no interest in the great books of philosophy. They
took, by and large, a 20th Century analytical problems-oriented approach to
philosophy, so that they didn’t usually offer courses that were focused on the
great books of philosophy. So this was kind of a rude awakening and a
disappointment for me, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about that. And I
also, I think, did not find fellow students who shared the interest that I had in
reading and studying and talking about these things.
—
So at the end of freshman year, we were required to declare a major and having
been deprived of philosophy as my effective major, I wasn’t sure what to do.
I spoke with two St. John’s alumni—one was Rogers Albritton, who was a
professor of philosophy [at Harvard] and I had actually sat in on a class which
he taught called “Humanities Five,” which was a general education class, not
a philosophy class. So he did actually assign and talk about some of the great
books of philosophy in that class. He was an alum from the 40’s. The other
was a graduate student in the history of science, who was a recent St. John’s
alumnus (Bruce Collier). What I was considering was trying to make up my
15
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
own major, which is something you could petition to do at that time at
Harvard, and that would try somehow to imitate St. John’s. So Professor
Albritton said that is the one thing you don’t want to do: that would be the
worst of both worlds. He said: “fish or cut bait.” I don’t know if you know
that expression—choose one thing or the other, don’t temporize. The other
guy said, “what do you want to be at Harvard for? It’s just another mediocre
university with a lot of very bright people walking around.”
—
So, nonetheless, I retreated a little bit. I got into this major called History and
Literature, which was a special major that allowed you to take courses in
different departments toward your major, although it still required some kind
of concentration—either in a particular country or in a time period. So I sort
of randomly picked Early Modern, because it seemed to me to be sort of in
the middle—maybe I should have picked Medieval. And I returned [to
Harvard] for my Sophomore year. But on the way back from home, from
Cincinnati to Boston, I decided to go through Annapolis and visit St. John’s.
So I did a prospective visit and I met a student there who was at St. John’s
under duress, because his father made all of his children go to St. John’s and
he wanted to be at Princeton. So here I was a Harvard student thinking about
going to St. John’s and he was a St. John’s student wishing he were at the Ivy
League. So I did my prospective visit, I was intrigued, I was interested, I was
thinking about it, but I went back and did another semester at Harvard. And
things weren’t really getting better.
—
So I went home for winter vacation and on the very last day of winter vacation
I called up this old high-school English teacher and asked to talk to him. We
had a long talk and when I left I decided I’d apply to St. John’s for what used
to be called the February Freshman Class, which was a class that started in
February and did the first semester of freshman year during the second
semester and the second semester over the summer so as to catch up. I would
thereby lose only one year starting over. And at that time both St. John’s and
Harvard didn’t finish their first semester until the end of January. That’s why
there were February freshmen then. Harvard had this thing called Reading
Period for three weeks after you come back from winter vacation, unless you
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
were in math and science classes—in which case your classes went on. But for
other classes, classes were suspended and you were writing papers and
preparing for exams. So I took the first week of Reading Period and wrote my
St. John’s application, which at that time required five essays, and sent that in.
After a little while I heard back from them that I’d been accepted and they
told me what the financial aid offer was. So at this point I finally decided to
tell my parents.
CQ: So they were completely in the dark ‘till this time? Wow.
MD: And it was the case that we were needy, so that at Harvard they were not
paying anything. I had a contribution from summer work and [an] on-campus
job and there was a loan, but there was not a parental contribution. The offer
from St. John’s was not so generous, so there was a gap that they would have
had to fill. They were very understanding and did not object to my leaving
Harvard to come to St. John’s, but they said “we have no money to contribute,
so we can’t help you with this.” So I called St. John’s back and said, “sorry, I’d
like to come but I can’t do it financially.” So a couple of days later, half a week
later, they called back and got in touch with me and said: “we found a little
more money to offer you.” It still wasn’t quite a complete filling of the gap,
but I thought that I would be able to manage, I would be able to work
enough—if I earned more by working than I was getting from my on-campus
job at Harvard then I could fill the gap. So I came.
—
There was one other complication: this was January of 1972. My entering
college class or graduating high-school class was the last class to get student
deferments from the draft at the time of the Vietnam war. And the lottery had
been instituted so that you got a number which gave your likelihood of being
drafted if you didn’t have a deferment. So there was one number for each
birthdate and my number was 38. So if I lost my student deferment, it was
almost a certainty that I would be drafted. There were plenty of draft
counselors in Cambridge at the time as you can imagine and I spoke to some
of them, but nobody knew what to predict because in order to keep your
student deferment you were supposed to make normal progress. So one can
17
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
easily imagine that a draft board would regard going from being a sophomore
to being a freshman as something other than normal progress. So I took a
leave of absence from Harvard, so I had not burned my bridges. I went ahead
and took all my exams and I arrived on campus a few days after the first
classes, so I missed my first few classes and my first Seminar. I think pretty
soon I was convinced that I had done the right thing. I waited about a month
and wrote to my draft board. I got a letter back saying: “what’s going on Mr.
Dink?” So I asked the Dean here at St. John’s—it was Robert Goldwin at the
time—to write to my draft board and explain my situation and he did. I didn’t
know what he said. He was someone who had some political connections: I
didn’t know whether he had used them or not. But I did then get a letter from
my draft board saying “ok, you can keep your student deferment.”
Left to right: Michael Dink, Dimple Kaul, Jaime Marquez
18
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
CQ: When did you get [the letter]?
MD: I don’t remember how long I had to wait.
CQ: That period must have been like “Oh My God! What’s going to happen?”
MD: Yes, it was a little worrisome. But the funny thing is that later when I
was dean—from 2005 to 2010—they were cleaning out some of the old
correspondence and they came upon the letter that Dean Goldwin had written
to my draft board. And it was just perfectly straightforward explaining, you
know, that everyone has to start over at St. John’s and that Mr. Dink was doing
very good work academically here, and they thought he deserved to keep his
student deferment or something like that. Still don’t know if he could have
done anything else.
CQ: How did you know when you began at Harvard that you wanted to pursue
philosophy? At that age, how were you so interested?
MD: Well I went to a Catholic parochial school in Cincinnati and part of that
was you had a religion class every year. So [in] the religion class in maybe it
was just senior year—I’m not sure whether it was junior or senior year—we
read some existential philosophy. So that’s what piqued my interest and I said
“well this is what people are talking about now, but there’s a whole history
stretching back—I should figure out how they got there, what other people
had to say about these questions.”
CQ: Were you a voracious reader as a child? Were you into reading?
MD: Yes, I was a pretty active reader. Mostly things like mysteries and sports
books and things like that.
CQ: So school influence brought philosophy into your life—at home what
was the whole environment like? Would you discuss books with your dad and
mom or your siblings?
19
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
MD: Not so much. My dad did have a college degree: it was in agriculture.
And he had a blue-collar job working for the Postal Service. My mom did not
have a college degree and was a homemaker—four kids. But they were
concerned that we get a good education. So they scraped money together to
send us to parochial school. And sort of made sure we did our homework, and
monitored our grades and everything. So they were concerned that we get a
good education. And they did take us to the library, the public library, but there
were not a lot of books in the house.
CQ: I don’t have nowhere near the amount of time that you have devoted to
the great books. One thing that I have experienced while here at St John’s is
that I have read [the] Meno more than once. My attitude, my understanding of
it has changed with every subsequent reading. And so that is the question: have
your views on what makes an eminently great book great changed for you over
the years? Did that make sense?
MD: Yes, although I was surprised—I thought you had shifted a little bit. I
thought your first question [was]: “Do I change my readings of particular
books from one reading to another?” That’s what I thought you were going
to ask.
CQ: Say that the first time you read The [Theory of] Moral Sentiments—okay, I
think this book is great for the following reason. And then you read it again
and now, well, I still think it’s a great book, but it’s for a different reason. So
then not only your engagement, your interaction, your perception of the
book—pick any book—how has that changed? Or has it changed?
MD: I am not sure that I change my idea of what makes makes it great. I think
I am sort of flexible about that. There are different ways of being great.
Although, by and large, I think it’s mostly raising fundamental questions in a
deep, complex way that is carefully articulated. So I think probably for the
most part I think what happens is that I refine my understanding as I go
through. It is probably not so frequent that I have a radical reorientation of
how to read a book, but that may happen to some extent, from time to time,
20
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
although I don’t know that I have a great example off the top of my head to
give you about that.
CQ: What I had in mind. This is going to be a silly example, but when I hear
musical pieces from Bach or Beethoven and you hear it repeatedly and
suddenly you say “God! I never heard that note before and it was there all
along.” Then that’s the sense in which to what extent the great books have
done this for you.
MD: Again it seems to me differences, right? You could say that I hadn’t heard
it before and it changes everything. That’s one thing. Another thing is: “Oh, I
hadn't noticed that before.” That shifts a little bit or adds something. So my
sense is adding, refining is more the normal response and that radical
reorientation is less common. But I wouldn't say it never happens, but I don’t
have a good example of that happening to me.
CQ: This is not exactly like a subsequent question, but I was wondering: when
tutors come here, they would come as specialists—like a PhD in something—
and then over a period of their stint at St. John’s, I would like to believe they
are more of generalists. I’m told they take all courses and no tutor is there who
is not taught almost all subjects. So how does this transformation happen?
MD: You just learn by doing. I think most tutors come from roughly a
humanities background where the focus is reading books and thinking about
them. So for most of us the challenge is learning to do the math and science
classes. But you know, we’re doing them from original texts, so part of that is
just another instance of careful reading. And the program is structured so that
things build upon one another, right? So you start with freshman math: it’s
Euclid, it’s not fundamentally more difficult than high school geometry. It’s
done with an emphasis on proofs and the rigor of proofs much more so than
high school geometry, but it doesn’t presuppose anything. So doing Euclid
you can just read the book and follow the logic, and it doesn’t presuppose any
prior preparation in mathematics.
21
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
CQ: So stick to the text is what helps basically?
MD: Yeah and start from the beginning in some way. And then Ptolemy builds
on Euclid. There are elements of observation and familiarity with the skies and
so forth. So there’s a bit of supplementing that we try to do with that. But
again it’s basically intelligible building on Euclid. Roughly that’s the way it
works: if you go sequentially through the program, what you need for the next
step—the foundation has been laid down in the previous steps. So Tutors
work their way through, learn along with—or slightly ahead of—the students.
And again it’s crucial that the students don’t expect us to be the experts telling
them how it works, but they have accepted the situation that it’s a group
enterprise and we’re trying to figure it out together. And, in general, I think
they are more likely to be upset with a Tutor who tries to tell them too much
than with a Tutor who admits that he doesn’t understand something and needs
to work it out with them or go to a colleague and get help.
—
Now all this said, I have to make a shameful confession, which is that there is
a class I have not taught and that’s the sophomore Music Tutorial. And I feel
particularly intimidated at that prospect, feel particularly—it’s an insufficiency
of my childhood education that I never learned to play an instrument, did not
have much instruction or experience with music. And I feel like I have no ear.
I did the St. John’s Music Tutorial as a student. I spent a sabbatical auditing it,
being a full-fledged student, writing papers and everything. So I have some
familiarity with what it contains and what the issues and questions are. I just
feel that I, myself, do harmonic analysis very slowly and painfully, and without
any facility and without [the] ability to translate very well what I’m analyzing
into hearing. So I feel all these things are an obstacle to my doing what I ought
to do, which is to teach the Tutorial.
CQ: Do you think that soon anytime you might remedy that situation?
MD: I don’t know. I won’t promise it! I toy with the idea, but I might have to
be semi-retired and clear the decks of everything else if I were to take it on.
22
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
CQ: That’s a formidable task it seems. Music is formidable—can you
imagine?—for somebody who thinks philosophy is so obvious. This is so
interesting.
MD: Yeah, philosophy, math, and science—those are not so hard.
CQ: This is really a very different insight into human psyche, thank you for
being so candid with us! I was just wondering if there’s a difference in the
approach with the undergrad students and the GIs because I’m sure at both
levels you’re dealing with a different level of maturity and the emotional
quotient is different. So even though the undergraduates could have a higher
IQ, so how does one do that? And how does the Tutor cultivate this entire
persona, aura, and demeanor of being a participant while at the same time
being in control? So two questions.
MD: That’s a lot. Let me take the second one first. The important thing is that
the Tutor really see him or herself as a fellow inquirer, right? That we’re all
trying to figure something out. You may be farther along the road, you may
be more familiar with the material—you may have read it before, come to
certain conclusions before or noticed certain things before—but you always
are open to learning new things from it and from the class. In a certain way,
the more you’ve worked with a book, in some ways, the more open you can
be to different possibilities coming from the students. So you can say, “Oh
yeah, that’s interesting, we could pursue that. I see what you’re getting at, I see
a path we could go down there: let’s work on it together.” I think, again, there
are different styles.
—
As I get older and become a more experienced Tutor, I am probably not as
good at stepping back and just letting the conversation go. I find myself drawn
to intervene more, though I try to tell myself that I’m [intervening] with a
positive response to what the students are saying. I’m trying to follow up the
line of inquiry they are initiating, not driving it myself away from what they
want to talk about. There is an interplay: the students set an agenda by the
questions they raise, I might then influence the way it goes, because I see a
23
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
way in which that line that they have raised could be pursued. And maybe it’s
not exactly the way they were thinking of pursuing it—I don’t know. Other
Tutors may be better—maybe I was better when I was younger, maybe not—
at sitting back and letting the class go, especially in Seminar.
—
Now as to the difference between undergraduates and Graduate Institute
students: undergraduate students have four years, so one can afford to give
them some time to learn from their mistakes in a way. And there’s a definite
process in freshmen classes whereby they are learning to be St. John’s students.
They need to learn it by experience in some way and to find out what things
do and don’t work. And you can help to show them, rather than tell them for
the most part. Sometimes you have to tell people some things. But show them
that certain ways of being in class are productive of good and interesting
discussions in class, and other ways of being in class are counterproductive. I
think there are some problematic tendencies that are more common in
freshmen than in Graduate Institute students. There’s a kind of student who
kind’ve wants to show off and is most eager to tell people what they’ve already
figured out, rather than to engage in a common inquiry. Occasionally one
comes across that in a Graduate Institute student, but I think it’s not quite as
common. This is not [just] an age difference but a structure difference: you
have a mixture of new students and continuing students in every Graduate
Institute class. So there are some people who have experience with it and they
can help to model behavior.
CQ: In terms of the students, either GI or undergraduate, has there been a
been a significant change since you have been here?
MD: That's a hard question. Partly because any change that would happen
would be gradual, over a long career, and you're seeing, you’re observing from
year to year, it's hard to go back and remember what it was like thirty years
ago.
CQ: In terms of, say, your enthusiasm?
24
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
MD: I incline to the opinion that Johnnies are pretty similar through time and
space. Other than appearance, once you're in a class that kind of drops away.
I don't know if I could tell what decade I was in if you put me in a time machine
and plopped me down in a class.
CQ: In the Hartle Room, when we look at photographs of the students, they
look different, if nothing else in the outfits.
MD: Right, right.
CQ: I was just wondering if they were more serious in general—in their
attitude towards life or concerns for society. And, you know, they dress the
part. Whereas if you were to take pictures of today's students, we would look
very different than the ones from those pictures.
MD: I would hesitate to draw that conclusion. I would hesitate to correlate
the mode of dress with the seriousness of the student. I had a friend, as an
undergraduate at St John's, who was kind of notorious for going around
campus in his sock feet: shoeless, but not sockless! A very serious student.
CQ: We as students, our degree of excitement and engagement towards the
great books has not—from what you’ve seen—has not changed in any
appreciable way.
MD: No.
CQ: Do you find any difference between the domestic and international
students in both undergrad and [the] GI?
MD: Well, not really in general. There's one specific area where I've noticed
something which I think has been a good thing. I taught sophomore
Seminar— three out of four years in the past five or six years. And this was
during a period when we had a larger proportion of international students than
we had in the past. In the past, it was [often] a kind of issue in sophomore
25
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
Seminar—where we read biblical and other religious texts—of people bringing
their religious convictions to bear in a way that, you know, means they don't
listen to each other as well as they could. They can be defensive and sort of
polarized, and so forth. I think having a larger proportion of international
students, who don't come from a Judeo-Christian or even Abrahamic
background, has been helpful in that respect. They are more of an impartial
spectator to these disputes. They can read the Bible more naively, openmindedly, and say: “who is this character, God, and why is he behaving this
way?” I think that really helps the other students to see: “oh yeah, we don't
have to read this the way we learn to in Sunday school or we don't have to be
hostile because we've rejected all that.” So that I think has been a great benefit
that I've experienced in sophomore Seminar from having more international
students.
CQ: So you have also been a part of the Santa Fe campus for four years.
MD: Yeah, a long time ago.
CQ: But if you were [to] just compare your initial years there and your initial
years here, [is there] any perceptible difference or do you think it's just the
same thing? That St John's is the same everywhere?
MD: I think the sameness is more fundamental than any differences. It's very
hard to separate—you tried to set it up so there was my youthful years in Santa
Fe versus my youthful years in Annapolis, right? It's also complicated because
I was a student in Annapolis, so there were still tutors that I had been a student
under here Annapolis, where it wasn't so much the case in Santa Fe. So I really
don't want to go there, to try to draw comparisons.
CQ: But now Annapolis is home, almost?
MD: Yeah, I certainly still enjoy visiting Santa Fe. When I was dean, I was
there a lot for meetings and my son went to the Santa Fe campus partly
26
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
because I was dean in Annapolis when he was a student. And I was there this
summer to teach Summer Classics for the first time. I think I will go back.
CQ: I think the reason I also brought up Santa Fe is because they have that
Eastern Classics program—have you taught any of those books?
MD: I have not taught the Eastern Classics, no. I’ve done a few little things in
what used to be called the Executive Seminar and now the Year of Classics.
The Bhagavad Gita and some Confucius, but not with as serious of an
approach as they do with the Eastern Classics program.
CQ: You have a Western civilization [program] and an Eastern civilization
[program], but are we ever going to, in the future, look at an overall Human
Civilization program, which is integrated and comprehensive and
chronological?
MD: How many years do you think this will take? [Laughter]
CQ: That’s my question! Is it possible?
MD: I think it's very difficult. I think it's difficult to do justice to any of these
traditions, even in four years. So that's the tough question and the tradeoff,
right? Would you do no justice to either of them—or any of them—by trying
to do all of them in some limited space of time, like four years? I think, although
I haven't taught the Eastern Classics: it looks from the outside like it's a pretty
serious program. It's pretty good, it's doing something like what we do here:
going sequentially and building up the traditions. But I don't know. You know,
what we do is just a slice of the Western tradition. What they do is just a slice
of the eastern traditions, right? There’s more: there's the Islamic tradition,
which we don't do justice to, we don’t do anything from. So there's a lot. Yeah,
there are a lot more great books worth studying, but they do tend to be parts
of traditions that it's—I think it’s important to read them in the traditions or
conversations in which they flourished or were written. To just pluck
27
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
something out—pluck things from different traditions and juxtapose them—
I think is not the best approach. So, I think it's a very great problem.
CQ: You don't think it's feasible because of the context?
MD: Yeah, I mean we don't have an academic mode set up to accommodate
this. If you spent eight years—if you did four years in the Western great books,
four years in the Eastern great books, I don't know, four years in the Islamic
great books, but no: there isn't an academic structure to do that in. And
because of the distinction that people make between undergraduate and
graduate school, if you go on to graduate school, they're not going to want you
to start all over again with another tradition. They want you to specialize within
a tradition. There’s an Islamic undergraduate great books college that's called
Zaytuna College in California, where that's being developed. And I think
there’s also an eastern, maybe Buddhist-based one whose name I forget. I
think probably in California too. And I think Ms. Brann is interested in getting
us all to talk together about doing these different great books programs. So,
you know, if somebody wanted to go sequentially through these three colleges
it would take twelve years and a lot of money. [Laughter]
CQ: Is there any particular book that you feel could have been a part of the
curriculum, but is not because of certain reasons?
MD: That's a difficult one too. We make choices. There are authors who wrote
more than one book that could well have been included, and some have more
than one book, but others don’t. I mean, obviously, I think Adam Smith’s [The]
Theory of Moral Sentiments is a worthy book. Maimonides is read in [the] Santa
Fe undergraduate curriculum, but not here. We just switched from Spinoza’s
Theologico-Political Treatise to his Ethics. I would like to have both of them. And
the whole question of what to do with—I mean, senior year now has some
things from the 19th century, some things from the 20th century, and now
we're in the 21st century. So I think there is, again, a difficult question about
what are the great books of the 20th century. And how do we select them?
How would we find a place for them, how do we fit them in? I think we’re
28
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
starting to think about that, but it’s a difficult question. I'm sure there are 20th,
and maybe even 21st, century books that we should be reading, and [we]
haven't figured out which ones are the right ones and how to fit them in.
CQ: I just wanted to get your reaction to something that I think I perceive.
And it has to do with the extent to which the orientation of the GI emanates
from [the] Meno: this issue of recollection—Meno loves the allegory of the
cave, Meno loves dialectics—and the extent to which my sense is that what St.
John’s offers, or has done for me, is not just the great books. I mean, I can go
and read them on my own. So, it's a combination of the great books and the
conversation.
MD: Exactly.
CQ: And I wouldn’t say that all of it stems from [the] Meno, but if we wanted
to go and trace the books that shaped, at least the GI, I think [the] Meno has
to be in it. And then I say: “why is the GI introducing all the students through
[the] Meno, if not to expose us to—to be curious about questions that seem
obvious?”
MD: It seems to me a couple of things about the Meno: one is just the fairly
obvious thing that teaching is not just handing something over, not just
transmitting something. And therefore it's not something passive that the
learner suffers at the hand of an active teacher. But that activity is required of
the learner, so that learning is more fundamental than teaching. Teaching is—
if there is teaching, it's kind of assisting learning, right? Or trying to set up the
conditions for learning. So, you might say, the priority of learning over
teaching or teaching is ancillary: whatever teaching there is, is ancillary to the
fundamental activity which is learning. And then, of course, secondly: that
realizing that you don't know what you think you know is the precondition of
learning. So those things seem to be the kind of obvious takeaways. And I
think the doctrine of recollection as something specific is relatively less
important. But there are those lurking questions about incommensurability in
29
�A Conversation with Michael Dink, Tutor
the mathematical example that maybe not everyone sees at the first reading.
So that’s something that takes a little more Euclid to get at.
CQ: If you were to describe the crux of St. John’s and why you think a learner
should come to St. John’s, what would you say?
MD: I think it's the opportunity to think about fundamental and important
questions with other people who are concerned with those questions and want
to think about them and talk about them. It’s hard to find such people, so part
of it is just bringing together those people.
Mr. Dink was born in Louisville, Kentucky and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended
Harvard College, earned his BA at St. John’s College, Annapolis, and earned his MA and
Ph.D. in Philosophy from Catholic University of America. He has taught on both the Santa
Fe and Annapolis campuses, and has served as Athletic Director, Graduate Institute
Director, and Dean of the College. He has lectured on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau,
Adam Smith, Milton, and Molière.
30
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of Plato’s Parmenides:
An Erotic Romp
Maxwell Anthony
Since finishing my Master’s Essay on Plato’s Euthydemus1 a string of
associations has led me to this only half-flippant hypothesis: the Parmenides is
Plato’s most erotic dialogue. Here I will first present the string of clues from
Plato’s dialogues that led me to this conjecture and then offer some thoughts
about the Parmenides’s dramatic presentation that I think corroborate my
suspicion.
In my Master’s Essay I explicate the central image of the Euthydemus: Socrates
and his interlocutor Cleinias appearing like children chasing after larks. A
point that occurred to me after finishing the essay is that the obvious goal of
chasing after a bird is to capture it. I remembered how, in my freshman year
of college, a sparrow was loose in the halls of my dormitory. One student
attempted to take the bird into her hands and deliver it to safety. Somehow
she managed to charm the bird into her clutch, but, being held, the little
sparrow let out such a scream that I never again doubted the evolutionist’s
claim that dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds. The girl let the bird
go, and the bird went.
Children chasing after birds do not intend to catch them. They enjoy the play
of chasing without the goal of acquiring. Although such chasing does not aim
at acquiring the thing it plays to seek, it does acquire something—the pleasure
and play of the activity itself. Socrates says that he and Cleinias appeared like
children chasing after larks. Is there a mature way to chase after larks? This
question led me to think: does mature bird-catching involve learning to mimic
1
Maxwell Anthony, “Chasing After Larks: the Justice of θυµός in Plato’s Euthydemus,”
(2019), available at the Greenfield Library.
31
�Maxwell Anthony / Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of the Parmenides
the bird’s song? However, if in Socrates’ metaphor the birds represent
knowledge of particular arts, how could a bird ever be fooled by something
it is not?
It occurred to me that the purpose of chasing after larks might not be to
capture the bird, as if philosophy were simply an acquisition of external
‘knowledge’ or ‘ideas’ or ‘things’ out there, but that by imitating the bird’s
song we draw out of ourselves and make ourselves into the thing we pursue.
This point led me to consider the image of the soul growing wings and taking
flight in the Phaedrus but also caused me to wonder: how is it that the brothers’
imitation of Socratic philosophy in the Euthydemus does not strike us as an
image of children “chasing after larks?” In the Euthydemus my favorite
Platonic character, Ctesippus, dismisses the brothers as cold stiffs. This aside
caused me to think that somehow Ctesippus sees a parallel between the
brothers’ abstract sophistry and their being cold, which reminded me of
Plato’s Seventh Letter and the sudden kindling of a soul by the flame of another.
Plato’s language of catching fire (πῦρ2) in the Seventh Letter reminded me of
Socrates’ famous description of himself taking the flame (φλέγεσθαι) as he
glimpsed under Charmides’ cloak. This connection led me to see that the
Euthydemus is, in a certain way, an image of the Charmides. In both dialogues
Socrates talks with a beautiful youth encircled by a crowd in a public space.
However, in the Charmides, Socrates is explicitly a young man, and in the
Euthydemus he is explicitly an old man. So, I wondered, what is different about
Socrates’ interaction with Charmides and his interaction with Cleinias.
Although Socrates’ interaction with Cleinias in the Euthydemus occurs in the
Lyceum’s changing room—recalling Chaerephon’s suggestion that
Charmides strip—Socrates does not report to Crito in the Euthydemus that he
“caught the flame” (Charmides 155d). Is Socrates any less erotic as an old man
in the Euthydemus than he is as a young man in the Charmides? Thinking about
this question, I remembered the following statement by the Athenian
Stranger in Book Seven of the Laws: “May a seductive, erotic love of bird
2
All Greek is from Perseus.tufts.edu.
32
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
hunting, which is hardly a liberal pursuit, never come over any of the young.”3
Well, Socrates, in the central image of the Euthydemus, chases after larks, and
the apparent drama of the Euthydemus is Socrates’ effort to get Cleinias
chasing with him. We see the tension starkly and playfully between Socrates
and the Athenian Stranger in comparing these two passages. The Athenian
Stranger is obviously talking about philosophy and Socrates, in the
Euthydemus, is just as erotic chasing after larks, like a child, as he is catching
the flame in the Charmides. Socrates chasing after larks with Cleinias is the
image of philosophic eros. How does this erotic aspect bear on the memetic
quality of chasing after larks? This question drew me to the Parmenides.
In its most basic look, the Parmenides is most similar to the Symposium,
Theaetetus, and Phaedo, as these four dialogues appear to us as inherited
narrations. The Phaedo is closest to the events depicted as Phaedo himself
relates what he witnessed at Socrates’ death, and the Theaetetus is mediated by
Socrates’ narration to Euclides, Euclides’ writing, and the slave boy’s reading.
Simply as objects of inherited gossip or memorized speech, the Symposium and
the Parmenides are the most similar of Plato’s dialogues. This similarity is the
initial clue that now draws my interest to the Parmenides. We should approach
the Parmenides with the same excitement and anticipation as someone asking
for the story of the Symposium from Apollodorus. However, whereas in the
Symposium there are apparently varied and garbled versions of the speeches
on love, there is something of a clean and direct transmission of the
conversation in the Parmenides. Although both dialogues reveal something
erotic behind the oral transmission of events, the different transmissions
seem to suggest something different about the content of each conversation.
This likeness to the Symposium suggests that the Parmenides must be
approached with the question of its form as an inherited narration, and the
motivation behind that inheritance in mind. The Symposium is one version
among other garbled narrations, whereas the narration of the Parmenides is
3
Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), 823e.
33
�Maxwell Anthony / Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of the Parmenides
exact and explicitly demanding. The motive for the transmission of each, and
the effect of that motive on the transmission of each, seems to be a clue about
the erotic nature of philosophy. Given the extremely abstract and awesome
majesty of the Parmenides, both as it appears to us and in its Neoplatonic
legacy, I wonder: is the Parmenides an example of philosophy? What even is
the Parmenides? The dialogue announces itself to us with the heading Cephalus.
Just as there is something apparently “heady” and reverently senior about the
Cephalus of the Republic, there is a similar duality with this Cephalus of
Clazomenae. Both Cephaluses are loathsomely pretentious. The Cephalus of
the Republic puts forward a moral pretense of escaping from sexual desire and
advances the disgustingly dull view that the best we can hope for is a
moderately burdensome old age.4 Something about the orderly and wellcontented view of life presented by the Cephalus of the Republic is mirrored
in Cephalus of the Parmenides’s narration. The head abstracted from the body
is a perversion and degradation. Plato’s challenge seems to be for us to see
how and why this “image” of philosophy is distorted.
So we must ask: what do we know about the character of Cephalus of
Clazomenae and what does his character suggest about the drama of the
Parmenides—the drama of the form and content, the dialectic of the human
and the things humans say. The first thing we know is that Cephalus came to
Athens with a group. He meets Adeimantus and Glaucon in the marketplace.
Adeimantus takes Cephalus’s hand and says, “Welcome, Cephalus. If there is
anything you want here that we can do for you, please tell us” (126a-c).5
Cephalus asks that Adeimantus show him to Adeimantus’ and Glaucon’s
half-brother Antiphon, who is also Plato’s half-brother. Cephalus explains,
“These men are fellow citizens of mine (πολῖταί τ᾽ ἐµοί εἰσι), keen
philosophers, and they have heard that this Antiphon met many times with a
friend of Zeno’s called Pythodorus and can recite from memory the
discussion that Socrates and Zeno and Parmenides once had, since he heard
4
Plato, Republic, 329d.
All quotations of the Parmenides are from: Plato, Parmenides, trans. Mary Louise Gill & Paul
Ryan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996).
5
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
it often from Pythodorus.” We are confronted with the duality of Cephalus’
pretense and his actual activity.
His pretense is that he and his troop are “keen philosophers” and that they
want to hear this famous conversation. Desiring to hear the speech is certainly
a philosophic impulse. But, there is also something suspiciously unphilosophic and repulsive about Cephalus’ request. First, to include oneself
in a troop of “keen philosophers” (µάλα φιλόσοφοι) is suspicious. If
Cephalus and his troop are such keen philosophers, why do they have to
travel to Athens to hear a speech? Their own conversation and friendship
must be so insufficient that it requires going all the way to Athens. While
there is something searching and erotic about this going out, it disguises a
deeper flaw and pose. I suspect that Cephalus, although deeply invested in
the conversation he requests, also wants to impress his “keen philosopher”
troop by dipping into the string pool of his prior association with Plato’s
family. Cephalus cannot remember Antiphon’s name but asks that Antiphon
recite from memory the conversation. Cephalus’ memory is insufficient and
he wants to supplement his insufficiency with the inheritance of a memorized
speech. In short, Cephalus’ desire is that he be a philosopher by simply
memorizing arguments. Just as the Republic is a critique of political idealism,
the Parmenides is a critique of “heady” formalism.
Adeimantus says that, “When Antiphon was a young man, he practiced it [the
conversation] to perfection (εὖ µάλα διεµελέτησεν), although these days, just
like the grandfather he’s named for, he devotes most of his time to horses”
(126c). So, somehow we have it that a troop of self-proclaimed philosophers,
who are really “citizens,” are going to hear a recitation from someone who
spends his time with horses. Antiphon’s preference for horses leads me to a
series of associations: Socrates as a gadfly biting the horse Athens, Hippias’s
political service as an ambassador,6 and Ctesippus acting as guardian of
Socrates. The horse and the city go together. Something about Cephalus’
6
Plato, Greater Hippias, 281a.
35
�Maxwell Anthony / Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of the Parmenides
expectation and Antiphon’s careful practice of the conversation go together
and suggest the relief of philosophy.
The group goes to Antiphon’s house and finds him “engaging a smith to
work on a bit of some kind” (127a). He initially “balks” at reciting the
conversation. “It was, he said, a lot of work,” reports Cephalus, “But finally
he narrated it in detail.” According to Adeimantus, Antiphon, as a young man,
practiced the speech with great care, seemingly bringing his recitation to
perfection as though it were the poetic object of a craft like horseshoes or
bridles. However, Antiphon turned from this care to the political concern for
horses, following his grandfather’s ancestral example. Evidently recitation, no
matter how profound, careful, precise, or perfect is not sufficient for turning
one’s attention from the gentlemanly political concerns of “engaging a smith
to work on a bit of some kind.” Moreover, Glaucon’s silence throughout this
episode reminds us of Socrates’ apparent preference for conversation with
him over Adeimantus, the more assertive and political of the brothers in the
Parmenides.
Cephalus reports: “Antiphon said that Pythodorus said that Zeno and
Parmenides once came to the Great Panathenaea. Parmenides was already
quite venerable, very great but of distinguished appearance, about sixty-five
years old. Zeno was at that time close to forty, a tall handsome man who had
been, as rumor had it, the object of Parmenides’ affections when he was a
boy (καὶ λέγεσθαι αὐτὸν παιδικὰ τοῦ Παρµενίδου γεγονέναι)” (127a-b).
The provided English translation is an interpretative rendering of the more
exact: “and it was said that he became Parmenides’ darling (παιδικός).”
παιδικός is an erotic word, implying that, according to rumor’s distortion, the
relationship of Parmenides and Zeno might have been pederastic.7 So, the
first hint of the erotic we find in the dialogue, after Cephalus’ dubious
introduction of his philosopher friends, is in the educative relationship of
Parmenides and Zeno. Moreover, this sense is presented between speaking
7
Thanks to Jeffrey Ulrich for pointing out this implication.
36
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
(λέγεσθαι) and having become (γεγονέναι). I take this presentation as a clue
to a general theme following from my thoughts on the mimetic character of
the erotic “chasing after larks” in the Euthydemus. What is the relation of eros
and the coming into being of speech?
The Parmenides is perhaps the most mimetic of all the dialogues, and
something about its coming into being is like Thrasymachus’ precise speech.
But this precise recital and memorized speech is haunted by eros. At a deeper
level, the dialogue’s arguments involve becoming in regards to unity.
Recalling Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, we must wonder: what does
the form of the arguments presented in the Parmenides suggest about unity
and eros? The Parmenides, although perfected and rehearsed in its
transmission, is broken in its content. Cephalus’ tyrannical impulse to the
simple unity of rehearsed speech is at odds with the discussion of the one
with the young character Aristotle. The Parmenides is itself an image of eros,
of the togetherness of unity and difference, against the formal perfection of
recitation. The only explicit mention of eros occurs when Parmenides, like
Antiphon, hesitantly assents to give a demonstration (137a). The parallels of
Parmenides’ journey across a “sea of words,” and Cephalus’ journey from
Clazomenae, and Parmenides’ citation of Ibycus’ poem and Antiphon’s
business with horses, suggest that the mere recital of speeches is not simply
philosophical, but that there is a link between recital and rejuvenation,
especially seen through Zeno, that is easily corrupted and mistaken. Perhaps
the reflection of Zeno’s and Parmenides’ relationship in speech mirrors the
recited transmission of the conversation itself.
The Parmenides is, moreover, Plato’s presentation of Socrates at his youngest.
As a start to a study of the dialogue, we have to consider the different routes
that the conversation took. Whereas Socrates takes the route of an erotic life,
“chasing after larks,” the conversation as presented to us took the route of
Cephalus’ deadened imagination and gentlemanly unerotic reproduction. He
is like the cold, monstrous “dual” of brothers in the Euthydemus. The
Parmenides is Plato’s most erotic dialogue because it is the one most haunted
37
�Maxwell Anthony / Thoughts on an Approach to a Study of the Parmenides
by eros. Plato’s challenge is for us to fall in love with it. I suspect that he
presents the dialogue as he does in order to inspire rather than discourage our
love, so that—overwhelmed if not repulsed by the presentation’s precision
and abstraction—we recognize Cephalus’s temptation to an image of
philosophy and re-approach the dialogue accepting error in ourselves and the
world, asking questions.
38
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Four Poems
Louis Petrich
Gratification
I must act grateful, grab that greater self:
so if as beggar I’m half-bent to burn
the houses down that eat up hoped-for wealth,
or reach for throats that down my thirsting turn,
or curse the looks that once I thought were mine—
I’ll taller stand to overcome my state
and staff from underworld the thoughts I pine
to spring, and though no bodied soul’s my mate,
one fate enwraps us thankful for the sea
that laps the shore, where life first dared to walk
long stretches breathing air, becoming free.
Just think: from water one day came this talk,
these puffs that would like bolts illumine you,
to gratify by your eyes green, mine blue.
39
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
Ode to the New Person
Man’s partner at her making was no twit,
and he consisted like of her, full store—
no brows down-turned in standing boredom’s fit,
no back looks baiting followers galore.
Now palms turn prey to images on pods,
new Bacchae!—trained for net of lightsome gods.
The glut that glistens screens their eyes conscript.
Hairs tingle, aired with electricity
of nerves connecting all in committee.
She speaks to me of this amazing age,
affections sweeping, all the world engaged:
“I pass my days in lovely tapping fingers—
they are to me the only digits!—linger,
dear friend, they never do—
diminished yours perforce, yet ever true
to here while there
now then shared
one turned two
(in novels three) yet so much more of me
to thin—that when dim words leave you desponding,
consider prefab motives—
trickling colored corresponding!—
mine’s higher than normal all the time,
I angle but to dangle,
language mangle,
. . . maybe tangle!
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
So bow attention, service options grow,
and you will love the lists, concocted dough,
whose yeast inside us rises anxious news—
these buttons tilled make darling fecund stews—
click slick machine, come twitter, fill the pews!”
I must have blenched like Adam at the fall.
“For shame no—link, don’t blink—
skim
scroll
lap looks
and buy something delivered—
(get the shipping free!)—
bloodless hooks, these multi-windowed tubes—
you peer in private—handmaids hind the stairs—
or boys, no bias—so eeaasy makes it good,
but there’s no doing
without our secret-kept identities
that every few months change—
(security)—
this flushes craven parlor purity!”
She sees me stead her, makes clean breast of it:
“O why receive I never revelation
that tells me I am loved in all creation
so I can stop this wanting more of mention
this losing of attention and my mind?
When will some god please message me? I pine.”
.........
“Please stimulate me more now, leash me kinder
the whirligig of time goes faster wider
41
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
deep cave me—four-walled stories to the point—
and bind my sedentary balling joints
to virtually what—I do not know—
no circling stairs we once were meant to go
and now that God yields rule o’er His creation
all times and places don’t suffice the nations
America retools for paradise.”
All this she says in person, born again.
Yield souls to gadgets
spooning orifices of want
with rivers emptying as fast
in oceans churning senses
bloated dumb.
The shield Achilles only could uphold,
containing all the world as glory’s price,
now sized like apple, skittish little hands
keep flourished—since we’re equal, says the man.
The sporting games have just begun their fires,
to celebrate the funerals—
every buyer’s.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Samuel Hage, oil on canvas, 9.5”x7”, 2019
43
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
Words and Things
How many weary months, by thoughts alone
lives man for shining eyes, and forgets home.
Winds crack open hues
as wet streaks agonal
cut cheeks in palette
smeared of words and things
—up rise remembered words:
impediments,
halt not, nor turn
by them differed,
on tempests look
unshaken starred,
fool bear
doom error,
prove love
you let me
recall your list
above all missed,
sweet seekers after
golden clime
where marriage
of true minds
outedges
serrate time.
Found dangersome, said ascent!
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
fallen from the sky
red and black to earth,
low horizon eyes
bent uprooting mirth
—stick deep semantic things:
necklace lifted on me shining shoulders waving luster lent
suitors dogging stakes down picnic tumblers emptied thirst unquenched
telltale vibes my sun eclipsing hats off baby moon braves tan
call it fate which stay late—
burn up wrongs writ in me
sign old names duty’s haste—
say no more gone to sea.
Son’s wild despair
hied him afar
from faces that he loved.
Come home awhile
more lean and sad
in school of verse he’s shoved.
Too much for me
how things make words
outdo themselves,
how words make things
undo themselves.
Obtuse am I?
Pour on, she says—
I do, so vet.
It gives us thrills—
both grateful, sure.
Still, five of me to one of her is not so good arithmetic.
45
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
Lear summons experts: speak love’s quantity—
All my love
—let ring to two
undoes the thing.
Those loving hers
who serve fat words
take fangish turns
fordoing king.
In wind and rain love’s quality comes clear:
Nothing
—true spoke to one
outdoes all things.
Who screens his love
like stocks to vest
centurial nights
cracks vault of being.
Without equality
there’s similarity
or probability
maybe, but mostly
neither
place
time ‘til feeling
‘til feeling
mined
neither
place
nornor
time
equalequal
mined
coinciding,
we toe-plow
common
sands,
forfor
coinciding,
we toe-plow
common
sands,
broken
lines
incom-our fingers
our fingers
intertwined
broken
lines
andand
incomintertwined
patibilities,
round
sifting
treasured
hands.
patibilities,
round
sifting
treasured
hands.
Must she augment? Or I diminish?
Darcy sized his Lizzy up
by one tremendous letter
reaching perfectly the finish:
God bless you!
She felt in time the very man was He.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Great authors can make water wine, seem true.
The greatest begged us ending, set me free.
Our French sage teaches
freedom and equality
possess together
under God,
with much enlightened work
committee spent
by citizens
accomplishing desires
while motioning
towards higher ends.
Can lovers that way steer
in currents strong as seas?
Our lower ends to leisure volunteer—
he worried much about their tyrannies.
Our words do bodies want,
we actors know and how
to risk bereft our hands,
impeach impossibles
to make them real,
addicted yes
to loosely named
applauded love—
me!
for I give you,
you!
47
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
He took her air in greedily,
she charged him keep its sounds
to catch his falling paces.
Excellent the breathing there!
No running out—her speech, her buoyancy—
at first; thereafter, sought he them in poems,
their shadows followed everywhere, not her,
to teach him how to curse and bless,
same words, all things, promiscuous.
Her image—lithe, enskied—but bears this sting.
Take vow of silence, stern ascetic trust,
so must we keep integrity from rust.
Against my mediated banishment
to portholes, runways, squeezed-in in-betweens—
I wonder—how could such diminishment
become us ever decent to assume,
we full-paged, bound together, handsome wholes?
So why diminish—at all—in the roll?
Abatement theirs, live still largesse my soul!
Odysseus much practice took
from storied cares and beds,
‘till beggar suited, youth forsook,
he wandered home to stead—
love her, diminish not,
of blood make theirs forgot.
His goddess exercises mind of noon
as anxious teaser plots his dead by hand;
48
�Colloquy / Fall 2019
on him shines glory phasing like the moon’s,
its bastard light the fames he once full-manned.
His wife for comic plot will overlook
some things, and with his image marriage make
to rear up life again for telling sake.
In tragic plot he overreaches want,
their tested oneness, rooted deep, defers
as death transfixes memory in words—
oh why could he not keep her standing by
in rising river, holding fast the line?
This present plot . . . I know not what to call,
betide some author to untie its knots,
free yes and no to straightway touch the goal.
But since the waiting
is the readiness,
is the ripeness too,
is the all-in-all
this present must the bowstring bend to slay
all thronging swilling arrogating longings—
so wrath diminish not
‘till fires make cries forgot.
I must feel grateful to my heart for not yet killing me,
though designating mind as enemy, whose rightful state
it occupies as suitor climbing high in peril tree,
in wait for leave from her upstairs in years to plow new fate.
Now given how I’ve given self away—
49
�Louis Petrich / Four Poems
as long my care for her
became my learning—
what would be left
she gone away,
no greatness booked
would make me stay,
to practice going
traveler-like,
my journey almost done.
Fare well, oh former Dearest Mine of Me,
your needed here-now atoms, gone a spree.
Oh, bother!—
still wonderful
against all currents other
though stars scribe err
put barks at variance
I’d reign my chariot
yours
soft hairs fist strong
low gentle words
my shores.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Confused and Certain
You pulled off there a coupling rare to see.
Descartes let senses go for certainty
in counting thoughts, but you feel surety
turned upside-down and need no purity
of math to graft with pleasure new mind’s mates.
Old Socrates gave up Athenian life
for much confusion spreading: and his bait?—
questions—tyrannical in appetite
for shrugging wisdom, Sisyphus’ stone.
Not so your lithesome shrugs that hearten hands
to touch the light on hunch-less shoulders toned
by hairs spread warm as lips wine-drunk for man.
I wonder if your skeptic brush can fix
green eye and fleece me black . . . oh, to know your kicks!
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
51
�Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
Ryan Shinkel
None may see the face of God and live to tell the tale, or so God likes to tell
his prophets. The Lord, it turns out, likes to hide from his seekers. The
stranger Jacob wrestles asks to be let go as the sun rises, but Jacob refuses
until he receives a blessing. Renamed Israel, he proclaims, “I have seen God
face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:24-32).1 This blessing—which
must be spoken—is not recorded, nor is it said if it was before or after
daybreak, when light reveals what is hidden. Jacob is left seeing things anew,
as he tells Esau, upon receiving his hand: “for therefore I have seen thy face,
as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me” (Gen.
33:10). While this Patriarch sits in the front row, the prophet gets to go
backstage.
Having found grace before Yahweh and being known by name, Moses asks
to see “thy glory” (Ex. 33:17-23). As God bestows grace and mercy as he
wills, not as men will, he shall instead “make all my goodness pass before
thee” as a proclamation. Moses cannot see his face, “for there shall no man
see me, and live.” As a substitute, “while my glory passeth by,” God will
shield Moses with his hand: “thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall
not be seen.” Yahweh is a hidden God who discloses his glory at his pleasure.
Here, God acts esoterically. Moses and Aaron have heard the word of the
Lord, but the people see Moses and hear Aaron (Ex. 4:27-34). Even when
God appears as a fire to the people—as he did to Moses—it is from far away,
not in a nearby bush, but “like devouring fire” on the mountaintop as seen
by the children of Israel (Ex. 24:17). Yahweh is an esoteric deity, open to the
few and hidden to the many. Tickets are not publicly sold.
1
The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, with an introduction and notes by
Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Tradition reflects this phenomenon in scripture of noting distinctions
between those to whom God is exoteric or esoteric. When St. Augustine,
being troubled by a Manichean literalism, heard St. Ambrose preach, he
“judged the Catholic faith” could “be maintained without being ashamed of
it.” This case especially concerned “various passages in the Old Testament
explained most frequently by way of allegory, by which same passage I was
killed when I had taken them literally.” The letter kills, but the spirit gives
Augustine life: “when many passages in those books were explained
spiritually, I now blamed my own despair” at deeming “the law and the
prophets” defenseless against their critics.2 The literal reading of scripture is
a basis for allegorical readings as well. One levels supports another. The
records of divinity are, in a sense, veiled by letters on the page. The letter
protects the spiritual.
This textual clothing for the gods occasions for pagans as well as Jews and
Christians. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle presents his argument from motion
for the existence of the Unmoved Mover, but this being is without any
providence which is usually ascribed to deities. The eternal mover originates
motion as the primary object of desire and thought. As pure actuality, God is
a changeless and living being who is perfect, transcendent, and simple. “On
such a principle,” he writes, “depend the heavens and the world of nature.”
The whole imperium of heavenly spheres move towards this Mover whose
contemplation constitutes pure idea: thought thinks thinking, “for this is
God.”3 This cosmological argument extends to the stars: “since there cannot
be an infinite regress, the end of every movement will be one of the divine
bodies which move through the heavens.” As there is one prime mover, there
is one heaven where all movements are for the sake of the divine stars: an
ancient secret. But what hides, shall be revealed.
2
St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY:
Image Books, 1960), 5.24, 131.
3
Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard
McKeon (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 1072a-b.
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�Ryan Shinkel / Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
Here, Aristotle discloses that, rather than a God whose revelation is in a
hidden form, the poets kept secret within their embellished tales a secret
knowledge of gods in nature. The forefathers of the remotest ages handed
down to posterity a tradition disguised as a myth: that “these bodies are gods
and the divine encloses the whole of nature” (1074b). The rest of the tradition
came later—in mythical form—to persuade the multitude for the sake of
expedient law and utility by giving human or animal form to these gods. The
poets, in this account, were de facto philosophers. They disguised their
teachings of natural philosophy in the guise of marvels and fables to protect
their work and society. First came the discovery that the heavenly spheres are
divine, and then came the noble lies to disguise this teaching for the many.
Still, for Aristotle, the early wheat can be separated from the added chaff.
Aristotle writes: “that they thought the first substance to be gods, one must
regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art
and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again
perished, these opinions, with others, have been preserved until the present
like relics of ancient treasure” (1074b). Only this far is the opinion of the
ancestors and earliest predecessors clear to the living. Aristotle rarely gives
credence to the poets, but there is scientific truth in this kernel of inspired
story, that first substances are divine, since the arts and sciences have
progressed and perished, but this relic of ancient treasure has persisted. There
is a further instance of poetic inspiration for Aristotle. Many other thinkers
postulate many governing principles for the cosmos. However, against these
confused views, he charges: “they give us many governing principles; but the
world refuses to be governed badly. ‘The rule of many is not good; one ruler
let there be’” (1076a). This Homeric quotation (Iliad 2.204) is an example of
inspired utterance: Homer is a lyre of metaphysics. Within the poetry hides a
revelation of divinity, one which even philosophers may appreciate.
But the gods and their poets are not the only ones who can act elusively.
Their critics, the philosophers, can play that game as well. René Descartes
prefaces his Meditations with a contrast of two kinds of readers. Without
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
expecting “any popular approval” or “wide audience,” he urges nobody “to
read this book” save “those who are able and willing to meditate seriously
with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all
preconceived opinions” (9).4 If many are called to read this book, few are still
chosen, as “such readers” as these “are few and far between.” The few are an
intended audience, while they who make no attempt to grasp the proper order
and connection of the arguments—“but merely try to carp at individual
sentences, as is the fashion”—will benefit little from the book. This many
“might quibble in many places,” but will not be able to produce worthy
“objections” (9-10). Despite the fact that “nothing is older than the truth,”
nevertheless in “philosophy” it is believed that “everything can be argued
either way” (5). Thus “few people pursue the truth, while the great majority
build up their reputation for ingenuity for boldly attacking whatever is most
sound.” A lover of wisdom is rare, but dialecticians and sophists are
commonplace. Descartes waits for perceptive readers. He who has eyes, let
him read with care.
One example of perceptive writing is, on the very first page, a rewrite of
scripture. As Aristotle reinterpreted Homer and company, so Descartes
reinterprets the Bible. He says all theologians assert that God’s existence is
naturally demonstrable and more knowable than most created things. As a
prooftext, he claims: “in Romans, Chapter 1 it is said that they are ‘without
excuse’. And in the same place, in the passage ‘that which is known of God
is manifest in them,’ we seem to be told that everything that may be known
of God can be demonstrated by reasoning which has no other source but our
own mind” (2). Thus Descartes later inquires as to how it is that the
knowledge of God is more certain than knowledge of the world. Yet the
passage has very much the opposite meaning: “Because that which may be
known of God is manifest in them,” St. Paul writes, “for God hath shewed it
unto them.” The reason is that, he continues, “the invisible things of him
4
Citations of the Meditations refer to the original pagination of the Latin text as given in: René
Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol.
2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
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�Ryan Shinkel / Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are
without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20). In this passage, the visible works of creation
show the invisible powers of God. It begins not with idealism, but experience
elucidated by metaphysical insight. We know by natural reason upon creation
that God is.
What the Apostle says, as St. Thomas Aquinas comments on this scriptural
passage, “would not be unless the existence of God could be demonstrated
through the things that are made; for the first thing we must know of anything
is whether it exists.”5 Instead, Descartes revises Romans 1. It is traditionally
understood to mean the knowledge of the infinite creator God from his
powers manifested in creation. With Descartes, it instead means a logical
proof in the mind. But such a scholastic point, as is made here, is one of “the
large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood,”
showing “the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had
subsequently based on them.” Thus, “it was necessary, once in the course of
my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the
foundations” so “to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable
and likely to last,” (Meditations 17). Descartes’ methodical doubt shall cleanse
these impure opinions away, much like clearing away the anthropomorphic
embellishments in poetry in order to find truly inspired utterances. One must
doubt to believe. As St. Mark records: “And straightway the father of the
child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”
(Mk. 9:24).
Perhaps one need not doubt in order to believe. This is shown in another
example of elusive philosophy: David Hume. He doubts not for grandeur in
belief, but for moderation in skepticism. The arguments of this Pyrrhonian
skeptic have great force, even though their conclusions are blunted by the
5
St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican
Province, Second and Revised Ed. (1920), http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html,
1.2.2.
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necessities of common life. Twice Hume begins a part of his Treatise with an
epigram by Tacitus from his Histories (1.1): “Rara temporum felicitas, ubi
sentire, quae velis; & quae sentias, dicere licet,” which is translated as, “The
rare good fortune of an age in which we may feel what we wish and say what
we feel.”6 Further, he begins his third part with an epigram by Lucan from
his Civil Wars (9.562-3): “Durae semper virtutis amator, Quaere quid est
virtus, et pasce exemplar honesti,” which means, “A lover of austere virtue,
you should at least ask now what Virtue is and demand to see Goodness in
her visible shape.”7 Only at this time is it possible for a philosopher to feel
what one wishes and freely express it. Yet Hume published his Treatise
anonymously, as he says in the Advertisement to his Enquiry of “that juvenile
work, which the Author never acknowledged.”8 Hume did not find a large
audience, but only a few acerbic authors. Yet even in such circumstances,
Hume still takes measures to couch his criticisms of religion in terms of piety:
the act of faith is itself a miracle – and thus a violation of the laws of nature
as attested by the accustomed experience of conjoined events.9 Some would
charge Hume and his ilk exhibit “a century-long degradation and devaluation
of the concept ‘philosopher’,” lacking “real spiritual power, spiritual vision of
real depth—in short, philosophy.”10 Human, all too human, is truly humean,
all too humean.
So Friedrich Nietzsche charges. Persons with spiritual power and vision are
few and far between. “Every exceptional person instinctively seeks out his
fortress, his secrecy, where he is delivered from the crowd, the multitude, the
majority, where he is allowed to forget the rule of ‘humanity’, being the
exception to it,” he writes of the free spirit in Beyond Good and Evil (26). Since
only very few can achieve independence, “a prerogative of the strong,” the
6
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1, 179.
7
Ibid., 3, 290.
8
David Hume, “Advertisement,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter
Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.
9
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 10.41, 95.
10
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. & ed. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), section 252.
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�Ryan Shinkel / Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
man who attempts it by right but not need is “probably not only strong, but
bold to the point of recklessness” (29). This man, so far from the quarrels of
human conscience, reaches the point where, if he dies, he perishes across a
canyon from human pity and feeling, “and he cannot go back again!” This
spirit of independence in philosophy is reserved for freer spirits on high.
It is meant for the few, not the multitude. “Whenever our loftiest insights
inadvertently reach the ears of people” not “constituted or destined to hear
them,” these insights should “sound foolish,” if not sometimes “even
criminal” (30). For “earlier philosophers”—from Indians and Greeks to
Persians and Muslims, “people in short who believed in hierarchy and not in
equality and equal rights”—had “distinguished what is exoteric from what is
esoteric.” While “the exoteric philosopher stands on the outside, and sees,
estimates, measures, and makes judgements from the outside rather than
from the inside,” for “he sees things from down below—whereas the esoteric
philosopher sees things from above!” Exoteric philosophy is distanced from
what it observes, but is therefore beneath it, while esoteric philosophy is
above it all. From the viewpoint of these spiritual heights, “even tragedy
ceases to have a tragic effect” and this higher philosopher, “taking all the pain
of the world together,” might decide upon “redoubling the pain.” From this
outlook, things are topsy-turvy. One goes all the way down the rabbit hole.
What nourishes and refreshes a higher type of person is poisonous to an
inferior type. The virtues of an ordinary person are vices of weakness in an
uncommon philosopher. What occasions ruin and degeneration for this
overman would be, paradoxically, a state of affairs where he is “revered as a
saint in that lower world into which he sank” (30). If the esoteric philosopher
were to descend to the masses, he would be worshipped like a god. Shown
here is an inverse relation of what is good and bad for higher persons, and
good and evil for lower ones. Some books “have an inverse value for body
and soul” if “they are used by the low sort of soul” or by “the higher and
more powerful.” For the many, “they are dangerous, erosive, disintegrative
books,” while for the few, “they are calls of a herald, challenging those who
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are most valiant to attain their valour.” One can tell by the sense of smell:
“Books for the masses are always bad-smelling books: the odour of little
people clings to them.” This stink congregates “wherever the common
people eat and drink, and even in their places of reverence.” As Nietzsche
wryly comments, “Do not go into churches if you want to breathe clean air.”
Among the children of Israel a higher being is denigrated, and among the
multitude a divine fire is made anthropomorphic. Likewise, an esoteric
philosopher in church would stink and have little room to breathe. One needs
fresh air, on a mountain with burning bushes.
This lesson is not necessarily a new one—as nothing is older than the truth.
Do not be afraid of teachers, Jesus of Nazareth tells his disciples, “for there
is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be
known” (Matt. 10:25). Even so, the order of who knows what is inverse: “I
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,” Christ prays, “because thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes” (Matt. 11:25). Those who learn sacred mysteries are valleys exalted,
while those who do not are mountains and hills made low. The few and the
many trade places. If everything hidden shall be revealed, but what is made
known is hid from the wise and prudent, then all things are made known—
but in a veiled fashion. Thus St. Matthew writes: “All these things spake Jesus
unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them:
That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open
my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from
the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:34-35). Here is a higher type taking
on a human nature, one who is to be revered by a lower world into which he
sank. How could it be otherwise?
A higher being entering a lower level of being is not seen in full, but only in
part. The pattern is akin to Dante writing his own person into the Divina
Commedia as its protagonist narrator. We characters do not directly see the
author directly. How may one approach He who was named by the angel to
Moses as “I am that I am” (Ex. 3:14)? One cannot see the unveiled face of
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�Ryan Shinkel / Elusive Gods and Esoteric Philosophers
God and live without mediation. There is a tabernacle for that: “Καὶ ὁ Λόγος
σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡµῖν” (Jn. 1:14). The Koine Greek
translates: the Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us. Tabernacle is
a verb predicated on the subject Logos. He who hath ears, let him hear.
Ryan Shinkel is a historical researcher and writes from Annapolis. His master’s essay is
to be on St. Augustine, and he is currently writing a book about how Achilles became Steve
Jobs.
Jaime Marquez
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
The Epidamnus Affair 1
Gregory LaMontagne
[To the Athenians]
CORCYRA:
When neighbors reticent hail unforeseen,
And not in haste collecting bounty due,
They must needs qualify their audience
Upon two points, advantage and reward.
If should entreaties fail on both accounts,
Or even if but one such argument
Should lose support, then guest importunate
Finds hosts alike aloof from his collapse.
Therefore, we stand before you for we stand
Secure in doubly reinforced request.
But first, as honesty marks what is fair,
As much, and only after, what is foul,
We must our motivation model bare,
So Athens first may mark how we did err.
By Zeus, 'twas not in wickedness we camped
Unyielding in our isolation thus;
Instead, belike a stalk atop a hill,
Allotting not the sunbeams nor the dew,
Absorbing all for profit, we resolved
To ally not was but to aid ourselves,
And notice how our policy proved true
When singly did we conquer Corinth's ships.
Alas, success as fortune's evidence,
Imprudently we kept our favored course,
1
In one of the incidents which ignited the Peloponnesian War, Corcyraean and Corinthian
heralds meet to plead their cases in an Athenian assembly. This is a verse adaptation of
Thucydides’ telling of the event (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.32.1-1.40.6).
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�Gregory LaMontagne / The Epidamnus Affair
And thinking skies would e'er auspicious be,
Late desert winds reprove our fortune's lack;
For now, as Corinth and her cohorts surge,
Fraternal drought yields none with which to merge.
Abreast of all, advance we our request:
Permit us solace in confed'racy.
Our tardiness we said does much us taint,
But ripe the bounty is for recompense:
Because we call as victims full abused,
Redeeming us endears you publicly,
And wins you all which we have still to prize:
Our naval power is best—excepting you—
With ample store of men and currency;
Indeed, was e'er alliance smoothly drawn,
The power of pledging honorable guard,
The pledge with power to guard the hon'rable?
Now might be urged our gain is but in war;
A rightly boon for nigh 'twill be in store.
He's more than blind that sees no conflict near,
Not even Corinth could perceive the less—
Shortsighted though she be in state and arms—
Must needs we mind you of her friend your foe?
Why else would she send hasty envoys here
Where only treaty will entreat her stays?
By staying our united forces, she
The better force our sep'rate forfeitures.
Though known that Corinth is our motherland,
Prefer you'd call us orphan than her spawn,
For vilely did she perpetrate her claim,
Enslaving kin, forgoing trial for war.
If tyrant to those closest bound by seed,
Beware ye, Athens, only bound in deed.
Pursuing treaties, lest you fear a breach
'Tween you and Lacedaemon's thinning ties,
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Our past indifference should embolden you;
Provisioned neutral states may join whoe'er.
And even if Peloponnesus smarts,
The wiser you for doubling your defence.
Conjoined, your navy first, ours just behind,
Horizons four were bridled by but two;
Third best at sea, yon Corinth—lately smote—
Yet shunning victor's arrogance, take heed
That fortified she'll bankrupt every bet,
O'ertaking second's reigns, attaining first.
Old counsel is the longest-lived advice:
With foes of foes is friendship founded twice.
Advantages discussed, hear our reward:
No currency has yet been smelt than that
Which could repay in drowning galley hulls
The debt owed justly keeping freemen free.
In truth, there is no recompense.
Instead like dangling grapes to prunèd arms,
All trophies we could mount were daises,
Forever fruitless save in constancy.
In sum, with much at hand, and more at stake,
States worldliest as fit must bear the world.
Encompassing all birds and bones and smoke,
Your verdict will proclaim our prophecy:
Recline, you forward our enslavement foul;
Attack, we both promote the sovereign owl.
CORINTH:
'Tis not our way to press with charm or stent,
But let the blunted ram of reason sway.
Corcyra, late concocting tragic scenes,
Beguiling passions, hoped to win their case,
And thus, though we prepared apology,
Our precedent requires plural refute;
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�Gregory LaMontagne / The Epidamnus Affair
And as more argument usurps more time,
What shortly planned proves long when unrehearsed.
You heard tell crime of misabuse, a lie;
You heard confession of a vice, a truth
Befouled by counterfeit remorse, and last
You heard a bugbear more befitting youths,
That war is braced though long have treaties held.
Now Corinth rights you what's been wrongly spelled.
A colony is like a husband's heir,
Bestowed with raiment, duly nourished,
Entitled sanctuary, sure beloved,
And asking in return just loyalty.
When all such sons spurn father commonly,
Indict the latter with mismanagement;
But tribute honored barring only one,
Lament the sire beset by selfish seed.
In siege secure did they press then for trial;
In fearful straits do they now beg acquittal;
What further evidence must needs contemn?
Bereft of friends—our other subjects sate—
Corcyra flees to strangers ne'er'fore met,
For previous pride seclusion did beget.
By this they played their part with learned remorse,
But tainted tears resoil where pure ones wash.
The lonely weed they spok'st, all rain, all sun,
It sucked, devoured, bares their nature true:
They justified withdrawal as liberty;
Yea, rapine free from guilt or oversight.
Retreated, they, from every settlement,
But not so far removed to lack a port,
And thus they sat and drained each tired guest
Whom fate would spurn and cast their woeful way,
As much a host should run such hostelry
To put all bandits out of busyness.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Are these the friends you trust contracted peace?
Are these to trust when pleasant trade times cease?
And cease they will if Athens votes for shame;
Not Corcyra, but Corinth treaty binds,
And planting hopes outside of bound'ries is
The surest way to sew condignèd blight.
They claim that war portends; fulfill their seers
This same day by assenting. We'll see to't.
For comrades close to foes are far from friends;
Choose Corcyra, you herald us opposed,
You rift war's net and spill his pinioned wrath.
Our allies justly will attend our sides;
Can you, oathbreaking, count on sim'lar vows?
Distrust begets distrust, revolt, revolt;
You'd gain a friend to lose a sundry more.
The godless sacrifice no gods restore.
So soon you'll vote what late we passed ourselves—
Against the wishes of our allies—said
We: powers are right to punish colonies,
And thus was Samos, unassisted, quelled.
Intruding not, intrude not, mark the law:
Give like to like; if fairness moves you not,
Be stirred what profits all: impartial wit,
Neutrality's epitome, imparts
That straightest paths lead swiftest to reward;
Abet not wayward crooks who drag repute;
Conduct yourselves but wisely, and you'll learn
How kind shores kind more fast than any ship.
Decision's simple when decisive's tough:
Let leave us, Athens, and 'twill be enough.
Gregory LaMontange (AGI'19) is a transplant from Houston, Texas who thwarts his
natural desire to tell you everything about himself by way of keeping all autobiographical
writings to a one-sentence minimum.
65
�A Conversation with Sheba Delaney
Colloquy: We at Colloquy are really delighted to be having this conversation
with you, Ms. Delaney. Thank you for doing this! Before we move into the
specifics, it would be wonderful if you could, for the benefit of our readers,
tell us something about yourself.
Sheba Delaney: Hi! My name is Sheba Ross Delaney. I'm sixty-seven years
old. I grew up in Houston, Texas. I've lived in New York City for about fifty
years. I went to art school and had a career as an editorial illustrator for
magazines and newspapers. I've also been a fine arts painter most of my adult
life and still am. And now I'm also a sophomore at St. John's.
CQ: Interesting! How did a sixty-seven year old fine arts student, who has had
such a wonderful career, find St. John's?
SD: I heard about St. John's when I was in art school. I was always a book
person and I was intrigued by the idea of it. But I was on a different path at
that time and didn't think about it seriously. But it was always in the back of
my mind. Now I have other interests that I would like to pursue and I felt that
a solid foundation in the evolution in Western culture would be a good thing
to have. Where else but St. John’s?
CQ: Being somewhat different from the average profile [of a student] applying
to St John’s, how was the experience of the admissions process?
SD: Well, we do have a fair number of students who are not eighteen-yearolds straight out of high school. In my sophomore class, we have someone in
their forties, who's had a fantastic career as a musician, and people who are in
their mid-twenties. But I'm definitely farther away from high school than most!
—
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
So as far as the admissions process went, I was just as nervous as anybody else.
I went through the process normally. I came to the school and interviewed,
and I submitted my essays and my information. It was a little challenging
getting high school transcripts. I had to go find an Ancient Cave of Transcripts
from high schools that no longer exist... But I managed to track them down
and I was really thrilled to be admitted.
CQ: Was it easy for you to get into the groove, especially as the programme
here at St. John's is a little different from the rest of the country?
SD: Well, I don't have a comparison to make because I never went to any kind
of academic college program. I [only] went to art school and left early to start
my career. Putting myself into a structured environment where one is juggling
several different and difficult tasks simultaneously was definitely challenging
for me. I’ve always been a monotasker!
CQ: You have been a voracious reader. Did that make the reading, which we
are supposed to do before any Tutorial or Seminar, easier?
SD: I’ve always read a lot, but reading critically in preparation for discussion
is different from reading for pleasure. I wouldn't say it's a strain because I love
to read, but reading carefully—and the volume of reading that has to be
done—is a challenge.
CQ: The format of discussions is such that you read the text, stick to the text,
have questions and explore answers from the text itself—without any
interpretation of your own. How has that experience been and how easily
could you accustom [yourself] to it?
SD: I've never read as a group activity before. So it took some time in the
beginning. I think [that] for all freshmen it’s a process to learn how to listen
and engage in the conversation. I mean, it's one thing to read and have your
ideas and just come in with those ideas, but the goal is to be an active
67
�A Conversation with Sheba Delaney
participant in the discussion. It took a little practice, but I feel pretty
comfortable with it now.
CQ: Do you think that the body of experience that you brought to the table
gave you some confidence and reassurance, or did you go with an open mind,
eager to learn from whatever everybody around the table could offer?
SD: I didn't feel like I had any advantage. What we are doing, we were all new
to. It was a learning process and I was learning along with everyone else. So I
feel very much on the same level as my classmates and am really interested in
what people have to say. I’m amazed at the insights people have that I would
never have thought of. So, no, I didn't feel any advantage or a disadvantage. I
just kind of felt we were all on the same level.
CQ: You have shared that there are people across age groups and experiences
in the College. What was the response of your classmates to your presence
initially? Do you think that they were open to you?
SD: Yes, I’ve felt very accepted. My classmates have been really kind and really
accepting. Maybe a little startled at first! But after the first few weeks
everybody was just trying to get their work done and get on with it. It’s a great
community. It’s been fun.
CQ: Have you [already] read any of the books included in your freshman year
or sophomore year? How was the experience?
SD: I’ve read pretty widely, so, yes, I have read quite a few of the books that
we cover. But a lot of them I read a long time ago, so it’s great to revisit them
again in this context.
CQ: For any of the books that you have [already] read, did you ever feel that
there was a change of perspective towards the text or a new interpretation of
the text on account of the discussions that ensued in the classroom?
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
SD: Oh, I think the classroom discussions definitely enrich my understanding
of the text. And I learn as much from my classmates as I do from the text.
CQ: Do you think that you would like to pursue any other language—let's say
Greek as an additional language—beyond the curriculum?
SD: You mean after St. John's, or maybe even now? I probably will be too
busy keeping current with the program going forward. I don’t know if I could
study two languages at once. But what I do feel is that I've had an introduction
to Greek that gives me a good foundation to continue with later if I want to.
CQ: In addition to reading, reading, reading, and discussing, is there any other
activity on campus that you've participated in or been a part of?
SD: Last year, I went to the creative writing group. I've gone to a few one-day
study groups. There are so many things that look like fun! But to be honest,
staying on top of my work is my priority. So I try not to get too involved in
too many things.
CQ: You mentioned attending creative writing club last year. You are already
a columnist, aren’t you?
SD: Yes, over the years I have written a number of columns on religion for
The Episcopal New Yorker, which is a diocesan newspaper.
CQ: We heard that you also wrote for a couple of college magazines. Tell us
about that, please.
SD: Well, one of the unexpected things that happened last year was that a lot
of what we’re doing triggered my sense of humor. So I found myself writing
humor pieces on the side. A couple of them went into The Gadfly and I had a
comic strip on Greek pronouns in the last issue of Energeia. And a poem
coming up in the next one. So that’s been fun.
69
�A Conversation with Sheba Delaney
CQ: Would you like to contribute to Colloquy in the subsequent issue?
SD: Sure, if I come up with something worthwhile!
CQ: Let’s talk about essay writing. How easy or difficult has it been for you
to write an essay on, say, mathematics? How did you go about it?
SD: Writing comes pretty naturally to me, as long as it's something that I'm
interested in. But I’m not very comfortable with math, and writing a math
paper was a completely alien concept! So my first math papers were actually
creative writing pieces using math concepts as characters. And that was a lot
of fun and my math tutor, Ms. Ekholm (thank you, Ms. Ekholm!), was quite
patient with me! But after we got well into the year and I settled into Euclid a
little bit I was ready to write a proper math paper. And I did.
CQ: Would you say that you have understood what a Johnnie essay is and
what it takes to write one?
SD: No, actually, I didn’t really want to learn to write a Johnnie essay. I think
in the beginning I was a little worried because I thought I should write a Johnnie
essay, whatever that is. And then I thought: “I better stop thinking that way,”
because it was just completely intimidating me. So I decided to just think about
what was interesting to me and go from there. The tutors are helpful in
organising your thoughts. But, basically, I'm super interested in a lot of what
we do here. And it's fun for me to try and turn that into a coherent piece of
writing.
CQ: Now that you're in your sophomore year, what advice do you have for a
freshman coming to St. John's?
SD: Pace yourself, show up for class, take it one day at a time, and get as much
sleep as you can. And take time to have some fun!
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
CQ: Do you think that there is enough exchange or interaction between
undergraduate and Graduate Institute students on campus? How was your
experience been?
SD: Actually I'm a gregarious person, so I tend to talk to a lot of people. So I
have met some people in the Graduate Institute, but I think it would be nice
for there to be more interface. Maybe some school-sponsored social event.
We are one community after all, and it’s nice for people to get to know each
other.
CQ: I get that you're not from Annapolis, or anywhere close to this region.
How was the change for you?
SD: Big. After forty-five years of living in New York City coming to Annapolis
was really a very big change, but it was a welcome change. I came here with a
purpose and I have a reason for being here, and it's a lovely community.
Definitely quieter and slower paced than New York City, but I like it. I'm
enjoying my time here.
CQ: Are you also juggling a career with your studies or have you taken a break
from your full-time career?
SD: No, I'm focusing on school right now. I am continuing to paint but it's
definitely at a slowed-down pace while I'm in school.
CQ: Do you think that we might have an exhibition of your paintings anytime
soon in our own Mitchell Gallery?
SD: Well I was honored to be part of the Community Art Show last year. The
Mitchell Gallery does such a great job putting together interesting shows. I’d
be happy to be part of anything they thought was appropriate.
CQ: After the undergraduate program, do you have any plans for further
studies or will you be taking it a little easy?
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�A Conversation with Sheba Delaney
SD: Well, I’m taking it one day at a time but am hoping to go on and do a
Master’s in theology.
CQ: That is brilliant. And would you be considering St. John's or do you have
any other institutions in mind?
SD: Not St. John’s, but don’t know where yet. That’s still down the road.
CQ: What is it about theology that inspires you to pursue it academically?
SD: Everything.
CQ: Is it possible that one day you would write a story of your own—perhaps
on your observations of life, a particular phase of your life, or even St. John's,
for instance?
SD: I never know what I’m going to do next.
CQ: Is there anything else that you would like to share with people keen on
starting afresh in life, probably wanting to pursue something that they thought
that they could not do? We are asking because it takes a lot of courage, and
your decision to go back to college after so many years would have taken a lot
of thought and courage both. Do you have a message for people who want to
do something of that sort in life?
SD: I think people should do whatever they want to do, whenever they feel
like doing it. We should always be creating the future for ourselves that we
want. How long that future will be isn’t relevant.
Ms. Delaney worked for many years as an editorial illustrator for many publications,
including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Esquire, Money Magazine, and
The Times of London. She has exhibited her oil paintings in various gallery and
museum shows. She has written frequently on religion for The Episcopal New Yorker.
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�Colloquy / Fall 2019
Jaime Marquez
73
�The Truth of Fiction in the Odyssey
Jordi Rozenman
The Odyssey overflows with life. Vitality sparkles from its pages as does the sun
from the sea against which Homer sets his masterpiece. The work is as full to
the brim with vim and vigor as is the man himself, loved, hated, unable to be
ignored: Odysseus. But what does this mean, after all? What does it mean that
a work of fiction—of lies—can be truer to life than some of the most earnest,
and driest, attempts of the philosophers in our program? By the same token,
what does it mean that a protagonist so full of fictions—of lies—can offer a
different self, a different history, to different people, and can create the
valuable effect of truth for his listeners through his lies? What does this teach
us about the nature of truth itself? What is it that we are actually looking for
when we are, we think, trying to get to the bottom of things? Part of the
Odyssey’s depth of honesty and aliveness comes from the true-to-life,
exquisitely intricate web it weaves around and between its characters, so that
no one is ever moving in a vacuum—not of time, place, or people. They push
and pull at strands of the web that connects them to each other, to gods and
humans, to the past, to their home. They move in concert with or against each
other and their own desires, but never in empty space. Even while they find
themselves entangled in the web that Homer weaves, however, the characters
themselves spin their own strands and add to the web in which they exist.
They are held by it and they help build it; they are acted upon and active—and
in the Odyssey some of the most memorable moments of agency come in the
medium of lying. Where do we find truth, both in the story and in the mode
of fiction itself, and how do we know when we’re getting it?
The dazzling, dizzying array of stories that Odysseus, many-minded, reveals
and fabricates about his past throughout the narrative can leave one gasping
for breath, just as one might feel if one were Odysseus himself, tossed violently
about on the sea over and over again until he has lost control over which way
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is forward and which way behind. One sees the web at work here; it is a fitting
mirroring of form and content every time Odysseus spins a new tale. When
Odysseus, after many a literal and figurative maelstrom, finds himself washed
up on the island of the Phaeacians, we see him eloquently attempt to regain
control of his life by trying to control time: that is, by trying to effectively make
the past past. How do we do this? How do we make an event into something
we have been through, instead of something that we are going through? We
turn it into a story. We tell the story that has already happened, and when we
finish the story it is over. Before Odysseus can effect this transformation of
his deeply lodged experiences, however, he knows instinctively that it will
require a powerful trigger, and so he asks for help.
Odysseus may not even realize until this very point—when all ears are politely,
continually waiting for him to tell his story—that he has reached a turning
point in his odyssey, and that he is, in fact, at a point where he can do some
looking back instead of living through. Of course, these phrases (“make the
past past” and “looking back”) beg quotation marks in one sense. The past
does not leave us. It becomes an influence, sometimes consciously, sometimes
unexpectedly (hence Homer’s web, and the narrative’s twists in and out of the
present at every turn and through multiple characters). Nonetheless, there is a
difference between enduring and reflecting, and this long-awaited, perhaps
often-doubted moment affords Odysseus at least a temporary opportunity for
rest and reflection. Still hiding, still unaware that he is no longer in the ordeal
of a traumatic sea voyage but beyond it, yet “happy listening,” in the friendly
society of fellow humans, Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing him his own
song (8.368-369 & 8.487-499).1 We can’t be sure what Odysseus’s motivation
is here, but the place and the timing suggest that on some level, subconsciously
perhaps, he is looking for an emotional release. His request is to be reminded
of his self prior to his misfortunes at sea, of the man that his friends and his
family knew. He is looking, in this moment, to be known. He has not been
known for such a long time. He has not been recognized in all his humanity—
that is, his childhood, his adolescence, his marriage, his fatherhood—by any
1
All quotations of the Odyssey from: The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 2018).
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of the mythical creatures he has encountered in his travels; he has not been
familiar to them. So he asks for Demodocus to “‘sing the story / about the
Wooden Horse, which Epeius / built with Athena’s help. Odysseus / dragged
it inside and to the citadel[...]. / If you / can tell that as it happened, I will say
/ that you are truly blessed with inspiration’” (8.493-499).
However, our master of disguises has bitten off more than he can chew in this
moment, and the emotional release he experiences is of such force and
violence that he is unable to praise the poet for the fact that he “was melting
into tears” (8.521). The extraordinary simile that follows—which takes up nine
lines of its own, switches to present tense and becomes its own full story—is
stunning for its vividness and the depth of feeling it carries, enough to cause
confusion as to whether we are still discussing Odysseus. So deeply felt is
Odysseus’s grieving in this instant that Homer mistrusts our ability to grasp it
without momentarily directing our full attention to a more immediately violent
story. Conspicuously, like a woman whose life will forever be altered, “in that
same desperate way, Odysseus / was crying” (8.531-532). Why? Why at this
moment are his cheeks “wet with weeping, as a woman / weeps”? As she
watches her fallen husband gasp and die: “She shrieks[...]. The men are right
behind. / They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her / to slavery”
(8.522-529). Clearly it is not simply Odysseus’s crying that is of import here: it
is how he is crying, and we must examine this catharsis.
It is catharsis in the strictest sense of the word as Odysseus listens to a dramatic
story artistically delivered and experiences it vicariously while safe in the palace
of Alcinous. The difference is, of course, that Odysseus has also experienced
this particular story in actuality, in reality, personally: he is, in this moment,
being known. In listening to Demodocus, everyone else in the hall pleasantly
takes part in the art of the devastation the “‘gods / devised and measured
out[...] / to make a song for those in times to come,’” as both wisely and
insensitively explained by Alcinous, distant as he is from any personal
connection to the war (8.578-580). What everyone else present is experiencing
as art, Odysseus is experiencing as truth. Perhaps we begin now to circle back
to our earlier question: what is it we are looking for when we say we are looking
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for truth, and how do we know when we have found it? We are, this episode
suggests, looking to be known, or to know intuitively and personally what we
have heard (not to learn, but to “recollect,” to put it in the terms of Plato’s
Meno).2 Is this what is at the core of truth? Is Homer in accord with Socrates
here? He seems to be suggesting an inverse of truth as offered in the Meno.
Rather than posit that we know we have encountered truth when we recognize
it deep in ourselves, Homer suggests that we know truth when we recognize
ourselves in it deeply. To further consider this and to understand the
remarkable sharpness and poignancy of Odysseus’s cathartic moment, we
must contrast it with that of Penelope in Book Nineteen.
The Odyssey, in its gorgeous, complex web, offers us more than one instance,
more than one character with which to investigate any number of life’s eternal
questions. And in the case of the nature of truth, fiction, and self, we would
be remiss if we did not pair Odysseus’s desperate catharsis with the moment
that mirrors it in his wife. It is hard to say which of these moments of
emotional release is more fascinating, and when examined together they yield
an incredible richness of possibility. Penelope, utterly faithful and
continuously grieving for two decades, has not been able to manage the suitors
without deceit because she cannot bear the thought of marrying a man of a
lesser quality than Odysseus. She, like Odysseus in the example above, may
not even quite realize by Book Nineteen just how deep a toll the years of selfimposed stasis and living simultaneously on both sides of an unknown have
taken on her. She has been enduring her own odyssey, an odyssey of waiting
and waiting for something and, in the meantime, never allowing herself to look
one way (which would mean Odysseus is dead) or the other (which might
mean remarrying, only to discover later that he is alive). She cannot move
forward; in effect, she cannot move. And yet the days come and go, and come
again: she is “‘weighed down by grief’” (19.96). The discomfort and pain of
living this way is immense, yet, mirroring her husband, she cannot afford to
reflect on this while she is in it. By the time Odysseus has returned to his home,
Penelope has not had the opportunity to truly, consciously consider exactly
2
Plato, Meno, 81c-e.
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how much she needs relief, nor of how small a word or event could break
down the wall—offering the pain and relief of catharsis. Such is the context
for one of Odysseus’s most important fictions.
Disguised as a beggar and spinning sundry tales for all who are near, Odysseus
sneaks into his home undetected and spends several days there gathering
information before he wrests his household back from the suitors. In large
part, he avoids Penelope altogether. On the night before the contest of the
bow, however, Penelope requests the beggar’s presence. Eager to speak with
him, partly because she has heard him mention Odysseus’s name more than
once, she knows there is something he can offer her—though what it is she
doesn’t know. What he offers her, what he feels he must, at this point, offer
her are lies. In character as Aethon from Crete, he tells her that Odysseus and
his crew stayed for twelve days with him because “‘A storm had driven him
off course / [...]although he yearned for Troy’” (19.186-188). Eager though
they were to reach the war, “‘a mighty north wind trapped them,’” giving this
Aethon some time to get to know Odysseus (19.200). It is a lie, among
Odysseus’s many other lies, with enough force to lure even the reader into
forgetfulness that it is Odysseus who is speaking and that this never happened.
In this stillness before monumental action, in this room with a curious
Penelope and a disguised Odysseus, and the sweet pause that tension creates,
it is easy to lose the thread of what’s really going on while trying to follow the
thread of what Odysseus says is going on. In other words, Odysseus and
Homer are working in perfect harmony here: Odysseus is in full control of the
characters with his fictions, Homer in full control of the readers with his. The
peculiar power of this instance may be due to the inclusion of a real event in
Odysseus’s history (the Trojan War), or simply to the power required for
Odysseus to deceive Penelope. Either way, it colors the narrator’s next
comment with layers of meaning. In this instance, as nowhere else, “His lies
were like the truth”—what impeccable placement for such a comment in a
narrative full of lies (19.205). However, as in the scene with Demodocus, here
it is not only the story which elicits catharsis, but Penelope’s reaction, which
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heightens the whole scene and makes the narrator’s apt exposition replete with
meaning.
“His lies were like the truth” not only for their well-constructed detail and
believability, but for the viscerally personal effect they have on Penelope, who,
“as she listened, [...]began to weep” (19.205-206). “Her face”—exactly as
Odysseus’s 200 pages earlier—“was melting.” Linguistically this is the exact
same moment. Because Odysseus has lost more people and bears more of a
burden, the simile that follows for Penelope’s catharsis is less violent and more
pleasant (it is a reunion, after all, even if she remains unaware of the fact). It is
less sustained than the gut-wrenching one before, but equally poignant: “like
the snow that Zephyr / scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus /
thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell / and flow again” (19.207-209). We
are in the act of watching Penelope’s heart thaw and release, something it could
not afford to do during twenty years of limbo if it was to survive at all. Thus,
it is not so much that the lies themselves are “like the truth”; rather, the
narrator more precisely could have related that the effects of the lies were the
same as those the truth would have had on Penelope. Something very
important is happening here: Penelope experiences an honest reaction to
lies—a true emotional release. There is something true in her response, and,
moreover, there is in fact something true in what Odysseus tells her. What can
that be? We know that what he says never happened, he makes it up. There
are no facts in the story with which he supplies her. We must now return to
the question of fiction, of what we look for in truth, and what it is we feel
when we think we have found it.
The story Odysseus tells Penelope here is indeed a fiction, but there is truth in
fiction regardless of whether there are facts. The truth that Penelope responds
to in this moment is the truth of being known, the same truth Odysseus
responds to in his own moment of release. The truth of this moment is not to
be found in the story that is delivered, but in the deliverer himself, and
probably in the nature of his delivery as well. Just hearing Odysseus’s name
and any information about him may be emotional for Penelope, but she has
heard many such references and many such stories since his departure, and
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has mistrusted them. Penelope cries, lets down her guard when she hears this
fake story about Odysseus on Crete, because the person telling it to her knows
her and knows what she needs to hear, and how she needs to hear it. Truth in
the Odyssey is an experience of being known, deeply. It almost does not matter
whether Penelope in fact knows the truth of the identity of the beggar before
her, because he knows hers, and this she feels genuinely, honestly. This
particular set of lies, and only this set explicitly according to the narrator, is
“like the truth” not because of what the teller says, but because the teller
knows the heart of his listener.
Having investigated the catalysts for each character’s catharsis (catalysts that
seem opposed in nature, but in fact have their roots in the same source of
truth), we must examine what these two moments can tell us together about
the truth-as-being-known via their explanatory similes. It is nothing short of
fascinating that Penelope’s moment of release is not that of a woman weeping,
“as she falls to wrap her arms around / her husband, fallen fighting for his
home / and children” (8.522-525). No—this is Odysseus, in Book Eight!
Penelope’s catharsis is not a release of grief over death; hers is a release of pain
in order to come back to life. In this lovely moment, “her lovely cheeks /
dissolved with tears”—all the more stunning because “She wept for her own
husband, / who was right next to her” (emphasis added)—we must ask what the
author means by mirroring the two moments and by mirroring truth and
untruth (19.209-211). What does it mean that Odysseus sobs in a way that
would be perfectly appropriate to his better half at home, an actual wife who
at all costs has been trying to avoid imagining herself wrapping her arms
around her fallen military husband? What does it mean that Odysseus does
this instead, for her, and that Penelope honestly, for the first time with relief,
weeps for an absent husband only when she is actually in his presence? It is
further evidence of the tie that binds both moments and the concepts of truth
and fiction in the Odyssey. Odysseus cries in the manner we would have
expected Penelope to, and Penelope cries—in truth—both for Odysseus and
with Odysseus, both in mind of him and in sight of him. The analogies
highlight brilliantly the fact that the pair’s honest emotions are not dependent
on what they know (if Odysseus is alive, if Penelope thinks of him, that
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Odysseus is right next to Penelope). Rather, they depend on how well they are
known by the one who affords them their moment of truth.
In fact, the effect Odysseus’s truth-delivering (without being truth-telling) has
on Penelope is the same effect it has on everyone with whom he comes into
disguised contact, from the suitors to Eumaeus, Odysseus’s loyal slave.
Whether it is an audience listening with fear or affection, we can watch the
same strange change begin to settle over everyone the beggar Odysseus
encounters. It may be Amphinomus, “[pacing] around the house, / troubled
at heart, his head bowed low,” after a disguised Odysseus gives him calm and
serious cause to consider leaving (18.152-154). It may be, in a ripple effect of
truth, Penelope laughing after “Telemachus sneezed loudly and the noise /
resounded through the hall” (17.543-545). Eumaeus has explained the beggar’s
ostensible friendship with Odysseus to Penelope, prompting her giddily to
remark that “‘if Odysseus comes back / [...]he and his son / will soon take
vengeance for [the suitors’] violence’” (17.540-542). What can Telemachus,
still green in the art of concealment, do after hearing this except sneeze? And
what can Penelope, under the influence of a powerful presence, do after the
sneeze except laugh? It is a lighthearted gesture so wildly out of character for
the Penelope we have known throughout the rest of the narrative that we may
well believe it has been out of her character for the last twenty years.
Accidental foreshadowing, sneezing, and laughing take place in direct
sequence immediately after Odysseus walks back into his home. In this
instance and in the several days that follow, not only Odysseus’s words but his
very appearance are a lie; the physical lie he gives to all involved obscures the
facts. Neither the suitors, Penelope, nor Eumaeus know the true identity of
the man in their midst, but, as stated before, Odysseus knows theirs, and this
is the experience of truth in the Odyssey. His presence alone, the repeated use
of Odysseus’s long-dead name, the reference to home as “‘the palace of
Odysseus,’” the beggar’s oddly brazen refusal to leave—all of these things
begin to covertly breathe life (and laughter!) back into the thought of Odysseus
in his own home, and the truth of his presence there, even as the inhabitants
are being lied to overtly (18.27). This is possible only because Odysseus knows
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“in his heart” with whom he is dealing and thus can give them the experience
of truth in the way Penelope experiences it as she cries in the beggar’s presence
(22.500). The truth of his presence is something the people around him feel,
because they are being known, and their actions only become more heightened
and dramatic as Homer progressively builds the tension that begins the
moment Odysseus steps through his own door.
Odysseus, in his web-spinning, shape-shifting glory, is a message from (and
perhaps at times a stand-in for) his creator on the nature of truth. If Odysseus’s
and Penelope’s catharses serve as specific examples of this message, we
confront an overarching comment about it in pairing Book Fourteen with the
story of the curious sea god Proteus in Book Four. When Odysseus arrives at
Eumaeus’s home, having just recently experienced his own catharsis and told
his complicated story to the Phaeacians, he knows he will not be able to repeat
the experience in his own home, with those he loves. Entering in disguise, in
deceit, he will not be able immediately to share his story, his self, with loved
ones such as Eumaeus—at least, not in words or in facts. But we have now
seen that for Homer, and for Odysseus, there are other ways to share oneself,
other ways to deliver truth, as long as one feels deeply known. For this reason,
the tale Odysseus spins for Eumaeus reads like a bizarre, distorted version of
his actual odyssey, peppered with the truth of his character and his hard-won
wisdom. He cannot speak facts, but he is compelled to unburden himself to
this true friend. His men “‘indulged / their own aggressive impulses, and
started / willfully doing damage to the fields / of Egypt,’” rather than the cattle
of the Sun God or, perhaps, the Cicones (14.260-264). He stayed seven years
in Egypt, instead of on Calypso’s island; a year in Phoenicia (instead of Circe’s
island); and even, in this story, sends “‘Odysseus[...] off / to Dodona, to ask
the holy oak / what Zeus intended,’” for “‘He had been too long / away from
fertile Ithaca’” and “‘He wondered / how best to get back home—in some
disguise / or openly’” (14.286-333). The Sun God, Calypso, Circe, Hades, and
Tiresias (as Dodona) are implicitly present. And the similarities abound in
other stunning ways, from Zeus’s plan “‘to destroy the crew’” to a kind king
who “‘helped me without expecting recompense / because his son had found
me all worn out, / chilled by the morning air’” (14.316-319). These details
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correspond exactly with Alcinous, Nausicaa, and her discovery of an utterly
“worn out” Odysseus emerging from under a pile of leaves. Shapeshifting just
as the sea god Proteus when Menelaus holds him and waits for him to “‘change
shape / to every animal on earth’,” before “‘At last he [assumes] again the
form’” in which he must tell the truth, slippery Odysseus speaks to Eumaeus
as different versions of himself (4.415-421).
Notably, Eumaeus in his steadfastness is the only person who knows, or at
least who verbalizes, that Odysseus is “‘telling silly lies’”—that is, not speaking
facts (14.363-364). But also because of his steadfastness, this does not prevent
Eumaeus from giving his home and full heart to disguised, deserving Odysseus
for the next several days. There Eumaeus offers Odysseus the experience of
being known, of truth as it exists in the Odyssey, exactly as Odysseus needs it
in this moment. For here, Odysseus is not trying to give Eumaeus an
experience of truth; he is trying to reap such an experience himself, testing
Eumaeus in a way he was not testing Penelope when he offered and allowed
her catharsis. Eumaeus succeeds with flying colors, and in the evenings that
follow, shares with Odysseus the kind of truth and “‘magical’” knowing of
character that he needs: “‘let us, you and I / [...]take some joy in hearing how
much pain / we each have suffered. After many years / of agony and absence
from one’s home, / a person can begin enjoying grief’” (15.397-402). This is
exactly the kind of truth Odysseus needs right now. Eumaeus exists almost
outside the web the author and the other characters continually spin for
themselves. His integrity is such that he remains essentially untouched by it,
and thus can refract back to Odysseus the kind of truth and knowing Odysseus
is mining for in the telling of his own honest fictions. Like Proteus, Odysseus
requires some pouncing on, some wrestling, some holding down before he
can assume the most revealing (can we say most truthful?) version of himself.
There are only a few characters capable of doing this and Eumaeus is among
them.
We must then, finally, ask ourselves which character can pull Odysseus’s truest
self into the light, can give him his own fullest experience of truth. We have
seen the kind of catharsis Odysseus, in secret, has offered to his loved ones
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upon his return, and the influence of honesty he has exerted over all rooms he
has entered since his return to Ithaca, regardless of his words or appearance.
Does this mean that all versions of Odysseus, many-minded, are equally true,
and that whatever he offers in each given context is appropriate and true to
the moment? Is the self of Odysseus relative to his situation, or is there an
absolute self and, if so, how will we recognize it? In one of the story’s most
beautiful and most truly epic statements concerning being known, we will
recognize that self at his core in the same way Odysseus himself recognizes it:
it is at home. It is Ithaca alone which can give him his fullest experience of
truth, his truest experience of self. If truth in Homer’s epic is an experience of
being deeply known, then this is why Odysseus has to get back, this is why he
turns down goddess after goddess, a life of perfect ease on lush, magical
islands, immortality itself. He knows that he is turning down false lives and
journeying back to his self, to his truth, where he left it twenty years ago. We
see this most deeply reflected in Penelope in Book Twenty-three, and in the
pregnant, textured silence, warm “in firelight,” of Penelope and Odysseus’s
first reunion in which both of them know the other (23.88-90). “He sat beside
the pillar, / and kept his eyes down, waiting to find out / whether the woman
who once shared his bed / would speak to him” (23.90-93). What a wide
distance, what a past and possibly future closeness expressed in one sentence.
“She crossed the threshold / and sat across from him beside the wall, [...]in
silence, stunned,” and neither of them could speak until Telemachus—who
knows less truth than they do at this moment—broke this rich silence (23.8893). Words fail both Penelope and Odysseus in this instance, because
Odysseus has found his way back to his home, where his truth and his self
have been waiting for him. The experience of being known in this moment is
of such a depth for both of them that no words are necessary, or perhaps no
words are adequate.
Slippery, sea god-like Odysseus gives way to his most authentic self, due to his
most deeply being known in Ithaca. We see this brilliantly when Penelope
elicits from Odysseus the strongest instance of shock and outrage in the
Odyssey. She is the only one strong enough to make the great Odysseus forget
himself, slip out of character and his tireless manipulation of the scene:
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“‘Woman! Your words have cut my heart! Who moved / my bed?’” he
sputters, and goes on to sputter for the next twenty-two lines (23.183-184).
Almost frantic, he pleads, “‘But woman, wife, I do not know if someone— /
a man—has cut the olive trunk and moved / my bed, or if it’” (our love, he
might as well be saying) “‘is still safe’” (23.203-205). An Odysseus who has
lost control of the dialogue, the situation, and himself, is an Odysseus we have
never seen. He is shocked out of character and into his most honest self by
the one who loves him best and most truly. A modern reader in particular
might wonder how Penelope and Odysseus genuinely will slip back into a
happy marriage, a happy ending, after twenty years of absence and suffering
on both their parts. Odysseus has been through war, shipwrecks, captivity, loss
after loss of loyal friends; surely he is not returning the same man he was when
he left? Let us reframe slightly and say that the Odysseus that left Ithaca will
find himself on Ithaca again, and this is thanks to Eumaeus, his nurse
Eurycleia, Telemachus, but mostly to Penelope, who knows him best. Even if
he is coming back changed, he is coming back to himself.
What is it about Odysseus which allows him to accept truth without words,
and to offer truth with untruths? What is it about his particular story to
Penelope in Book Nineteen which is uniquely qualified as “like the truth,”
which can qualify as fiction rather than simply as lies? What is the difference?
What is noble in a work of fiction such that it can become a great book in the
way that a work of philosophy or science can? The Odyssey makes an important
point about the nature of fiction and why it can be (and usually is) more truly
alive than its counterparts. Many of Odysseus’s and Penelope’s greatest
moments of agency come when they lie. Or, we can say, when they create
fiction to serve a purpose for the listener they know, in the same way that we
write fiction and poetry. It is an act of love. What we are actually doing is
giving sense, and giving order, to a world that on its own does not make sense.
So we create myth in order to create truth and, when we read it, we are known.
I used to imagine that our experience of encountering, to borrow a phrase
from Salinger, “the rising of a truth” in fiction was the experience of the Meno,
of recognizing something that was already deep within ourselves and which
the book helped to elicit or remind us of. I think now, though, that truth in
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fiction is more likely a case of Homeric truth: not an experience of knowing,
but one of being known. We know we’ve stumbled across it when a sentence
or a paragraph smiles up at us from the text and we stop, stunned, wondering
how the author who has never met us knew this deep part of our nature or
experience with enough familiarity to give us words for it.
“If the learner is to obtain the truth, the teacher must bring it to him,” rather
than bring him to it, affirms Kierkegaard.3 He must even do more: along with
the truth, “he must provide him with the condition for understanding it,” as
Demodocus does for Odysseus, as Odysseus does for Penelope, as Odysseus
does as soon as he walks into his house. The condition is being known. Truth
in fiction is an experience of being known, and it is this that gives the Odyssey
its sparkling brilliance: this knowing that makes it pulse with life, rich
ambiguity, and truth.
Jordi Rozenman (AGI’20) is a former English teacher and college counselor who dreamed
about coming to St. John’s for seven years, and can’t believe she’s almost finished. She is a
dancer, baker, and published poet. But she’s got nothing on Homer.
3
Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. & trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), IV 184, p.14.
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Jaime Marquez
87
�Her, because of and despite
Matt Ely
That hair, like so much prairie grass, familiar with her shoulders. Her laptop on
my lap, a secondhand groin encounter. Using my dollars for her train pass, her churro,
her obligation. The thrill of hearing my first name, like something she
kept in her closet for Easter. Her apologizing, eyes-askance; my not
having to. Her tardiness. My timeliness. The unspoken
threat of my fixation. Her smile, eroding with the tides,
a coral reef face. My threadbare, unhelpful scarf, a Christmas gift from her
among others. Her midday Sprite and pretzel breakfast; such coquettish insomnia!
The diminishing weekends I have left to give her before I need some
permanence in exchange. My insistence she doesn’t need to decide
right now. The fact that she describes me as a friend, but mostly that
she describes me. That hair, removed from her shoulders, removed from
my expectations. My undelivered emails, all impersonation and id.
My fear there is only one of every kind of connection, that no might not mean
not yet. The unlikely hope that this is rising action, not denouement.
Her indifference to my plans. My confidence she would change.
88
�Continue the conversation at colloquysjc.com,
the official blog of the Graduate Institute.
You can find more work by Jaime Marquez at
jaimemarquez.com.
The Colloquy Editorial Board is sincerely grateful to Ms. Sheba Delaney, Mr.
Michael Dink, Mr. William Pastille, Mr. Louis Petrich, and Mr. Brandon
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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
54
�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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�Three Précis
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
�
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Colloquy, Spring 2019
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Volume V of the Colloquy, published in Spring 2019.
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Marquez, Jaime (editor)
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Colloquy Vol 5 Spring 2019
Graduate Institute
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Colloquy, Fall 2018
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Volume IV of the Colloquy, published in Fall 2018.
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Dorchester, Andrew (editor)
Marquez, Jaime (editor)
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Trovato, Jenifer (editor)
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2018-11
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Collquy-Volume IV-Fall 2018 Reduced Size
Graduate Institute
Student publication
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