Liberty & Literature The Great Books and the Politics of Western Civilization
The Great Books of Western Civilization are not merely artifacts to be respected and revered. They are also, and crucially, the means by which each new generation takes up the Great Conversation with the giants of the past. They are the very voice of tradition, which as Chesterton reminds us, is the extension of the franchise through time, the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn:
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death…. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.
Embracing tradition and accepting this qualified understanding of democracy, let’s remind ourselves of the contribution that the Great Books have made to our understanding of political philosophy in general and of political liberty in particular.
In terms of the very foundations of political philosophy, we need look no further than Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, each of which has helped to set the parameters within which political discourse and notions of liberty have been framed. In addition, Sophocles’ Antigone reminds us, as it reminded the Greeks, that there are limits to secular power and that political and religious liberty must be protected and preserved whenever the secular power overreaches itself.
Moving into the Christian era, concepts of political philosophy have permeated literature since the earliest days. Augustine (354-430) in his masterful dissection of paganism in the City of God establishes a tradition in which the values of the ‘world’ and that of Christianity are set apart in such a way that Christendom emerges as the new order rising from the ruins of the old Roman empire. In his work On Christian Doctrine, Augustine lays the philosophical foundation for the reading of reality allegorically, thereby inspiring generations of future writers to employ allegory in all its forms in the literary defence of liberty.
The first great work of literary allegory was The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 475-524) in which the author converses with his ‘nurse’ Philosophy in both prose and verse. Written during the author’s imprisonment and shortly before his execution for alleged treason against the Gothic emperor Theoderic, The Consolation of Philosophy highlights the mutability and transience of all earthly fortune and illustrates that true security is to be found in virtue alone. In its insistence upon the dichotomous chasm that separates true satisfaction from the elusive and ultimately illusory pursuit of pleasure in the worldly sense, Boethius’s classic established a leitmotif which recurs in literature thereafter. The Consolation of Philosophy was hugely popular and influential throughout medieval Europe, and its light shone in the work of many later writers, most notably perhaps in that of Dante and Chaucer, the latter of whom translated Boethius into English from the original Latin.
Chaucer was not, however, the first Englishman to translate The Consolation of Philosophy. Five hundred years earlier, it had been translated into Old English by King Alfred the Great (849 – c. 900), who, as a Catholic ruler, had sought to practice what Boethius preached. Apart from saving Christian England from complete destruction at the hands of the Pagan Danes, King Alfred sought to promote the good of his people in accordance with Christian principles. It is, therefore, no surprise that, apart from Boethius, he also translated the Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great into English.
Anglo-Saxon England, prior to the Norman Conquest, was so subsumed within the wider culture of Christendom that those poems from the period that have survived – The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Seafarer etc - exhibit concepts of human society entirely in harmony with the philosophical consolations offered by Boethius.
Moving to the late Middle Ages and to Dante’s Divine Comedy, we discover that the poet’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is awash with socio-political commentary seen through the eyes of a poet who is, in turn, looking through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. With Aquinas as his literal mentor and guide, as Virgil is his literary one, Dante examines the abuse of political power and the injustice it causes in the light of a fully integrated understanding of the human person and human society, placing politics within the wider domain of theology and philosophy. This timeless manifestation, in art, of the perennial nature of human society, rooted in an understanding of human personhood, retains its relevance. Modern political commentaries on Dante, and particularly Dorothy L. Sayers’s own notes to her translation of the Comedy, continue to shed light on contemporary social and political problems. Dante is not merely an incomparable poet and a fine theologian and philosopher, he is also a master of the socio-political.
In England, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance by an unknown late-fourteenth century writer, highlighted the decay of mediaeval knightly virtue into the merely formal and pharisaical decorum of chivalrous courtesy. Although the anonymous writer does not condemn chivalry and, indeed, treats it with due deference and courteous decorum, his purpose in the telling of the tale of Sir Gawain’s temptation is to point out that chivalry is distinct from, and must be subservient to, virtue. The highest goal to be achieved by knight and commoner alike is sanctity, which is to be achieved by keeping one’s sights on eternal verities as opposed to transient social conventions, however worthy the latter might be.
If, at its highest, chivalry could be seen as synonymous with sanctity, at its lowest and least worthy, it was an excuse for the rationalizing of sins such as pride or adultery. Courtly love had evolved from the cult of Our Lady to the cult of the Lady (meaning any Lady) until, in the final decay of amour courtois, it had become a form of ritualized seduction or adultery, merely cultivation of the Lady for the purposes of self-gratification. On a societal level, this decadence manifested itself in the replacement of chivalry with the humanism of the Renaissance and its self-professed switching of emphasis from the divine to the merely human. In the process, Europe had passed from the veneration of the Virgin to a venereal adoration of Venus.
By the time that Thomas More was writing his satirical Utopia in the early years of the sixteenth century the decay had really set in. This work, the subtlety of which continues to confuse its readers half a millennium after it was first published, exhibits a brilliant and cultured mind musing over the problem of politics – and not merely the politics of its own day but politics in the abstract and perennial sense à la Plato and Aristotle. The employment of irony throughout the work makes a literal reading dangerous, and the deliberate obliquity makes any reading of its true meaning difficult. Furthermore, it is clear that the novel’s narrator, Hythlodaeus, whose name translates from the Latin as a ‘dispenser of nonsense’, should not always be taken seriously. It is equally true, however, that More allows him to say things, on occasion, that we are meant to take seriously. The trick to achieving a true understanding of the work is, therefore, to discern when to take More and his narrator seriously and when to simply enjoy the joke he is having at the expense of the follies of his age.
As with Boethius and Dante before him, More is seeking to hold a mirror to fallen human nature so that we may see and know ourselves better. As a true philosopher in the classic tradition, he knows that it is necessary to ask questions before we can know the answers. In this sense, Utopia begs more questions than it answers. It is not a blueprint but a touchstone. It does not seek to show the plans of a future utopian society but seeks to show us how to judge our own society from the perspective of eternal verities.
Mirroring Thomas More’s subtlety and obliquity, William Shakespeare dealt with political themes in a way that implies sympathy with the plight of religious ‘dissidents’ in the totalitarian atmosphere of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Many of the plays deal with treachery, tyranny and deceitful intrigue, but it is the recurring theme of self-sacrifice and the consoling power of virtue in an unjust world which makes Shakespeare’s work perennially popular and perennially important.
Moving to the period of modernity, G. K. Chesterton’s novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, championed small businesses and small nations against the power of cosmopolitanism, distilling localist ideas and metamorphosing them into romantic literature. This novel, along with Belloc’s The Servile State, would have a significant influence on the young George Orwell who regurgitated their gist in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday was a reaction to moral decadence and nihilism in both its philosophical and political guises. Its employment of a dark and nightmarish scenario to administer a hopeful antidote to the poison of nihilistic despair was emulated by T.S. Eliot in 1922 with his employment of similar dark imagery to relay his own hopeful message of Christian restoration in The Waste Land. Eliot’s critique of the evils of modernity, both politically and culturally, was informed by a disdain for philosophical materialism and its consumerist ramifications.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings combined the localism he had learned from Chesterton with his own disdain for technolatry to forge a myth of unsurpassed power. An imaginative mirroring of Lord Acton’s maxim that ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely’, Tolkien’s epic does not merely condemn the abusers of power but offers a positive vision of subsidiarity, the way that power should be used and the limits of its legitimate usage.
Tolkien’s friend, C.S. Lewis, also wrote many works in which he used the medium of fiction to ‘smuggle’ political and theological ideas into the minds of his readers. The influence of Tolkien, as well as Chesterton, is evident in Lewis’s work, not least in the condemnation of modernism and in the implicit embrace of localism, especially perhaps in the critique of the demonic scientism of ‘progressive’ ideology in his science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength.
Throughout the centuries, from the days of pagan Greece to the postmodern daze of our own times, the Great Books of Western Civilization have inspired resistance to tyranny and have aspired lovers of liberty to work towards the restoration of authentic political freedom. May their light continue to shine in the darkness of every age.
