Review of Jeffrey Hart's Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe. Toward the Revival of Higher Education. Yale University Press.

Jeffrey Hart’s spiritual cri de coeur was written long before Islamic extremists brought holy war to American soil, but I couldn’t help thinking as I was reading it that he must have known the assault was coming.

So confident is Hart’s voice, so full of the kind of quiet resolve that bespeaks true moral gravity, that he doesn’t even bother defining the "cultural catastrophe" that was already overwhelming America — at least until we were suddenly shaken from our lethargy in September. He simply declares, after surveying the "dark fields of the [American] republic," that "the catastrophe is evident to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear."

If you doubt the existence of this slow-burning "cultural catastrophe," I direct you immediately to the website of the New York Times. Assuming they haven’t erased it in shame, you will find archived there an article published on the cover of the Arts section on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 — the very morning suicide bombers rammed jet airliners full of hundreds of innocent people into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In this illustrated cover feature, Dinitia Smith, writing in the cheerfully ironic, wink-winking tone characteristic of Times-style liberalism, promotes as "coy," "ingratiating" and "daring" an autobiography written by the former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers. In his memoir, Ayers gleefully claims to have participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. Among other nuggets of this odious man’s "daring" radicalism are the following attributed quotations (cited without the slightest editorial comment by either Smith or her New York Times editors): "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at." How would you have felt after reading this at the breakfast table, if someone you knew or loved lost their life later that morning in the terrorist attacks?

And how did the New York Times, America’s most prestigious newspaper of record, turn into a cheerleader for terrorism, an oracle for immoral cultural relativism in its most pernicious guises? Well, here’s a guess: Its editors, journalists and reviewers were for the most part educated at America’s elite universities, where in recent years serious engagement with the moral philosophy at the heart of the western intellectual tradition has been neglected, mocked, and even exorcised by the high priests of postmodernism.

Exorcised? No, I am not exaggerating. When Jeffrey Hart retired several years ago from the English Department at Dartmouth College, his academic colleagues were rumored to have enlisted the services of a religion professor to exorcise his office of malign spiritual influences. Because, you see, Hart had been teaching the sort of serious, morally engaged texts to his students that occupy his attention in this book. How dare he ask English students to study the Old and New Testament seriously, to read Paul and Jesus along with Plato and Socrates, to invoke Jerusalem as a symbol of Judeo-Christian holiness without mentioning in the same breath the iniquity of American policy in the Middle East?

Sad as it is to say, it is daring to teach such works today in America’s elite universities, but that is no reason to shrink from the duty. Hart’s book provides an inspiring model for young teachers, such as myself, who are entering the academy today. It should also serve as an elegant, easy-to-read introduction to the classic works of western civilization for young students who hunger for more than they are often getting from frosh-year introductory lecture classes.

What sets Hart’s book apart from many with similar aims is its overarching theme of aspiration — to heroic endeavor, serious moral inquiry, higher spirituality and a well-lived life. Although he thinks the essential values of our western heritage have been all but forgotten in contemporary America, Hart sees no reason not to try to pass them along to anyone willing to listen. The true citizen, he declares, "is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization." Without living knowledge of what our "civilization" is, we are doomed to descend into barbarism.

What exactly makes up this "civilization" Hart is referring to? It is, first of all, a story, whose telling and re-telling allows us to understand who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. The story begins with Homer’s epics celebrating the heroic virtues of strength and eloquence. When combined together (as in the figure of Achilles) these attributes are known as areté. Achilles’ feats provided a heroic ideal for both mind and body, an archetype for generations of Greeks to emulate. Areté, however, is a deeply flawed ideal, blemished both by Achilles’ uncontrollable rage and the emptiness that awaits him in death. "The same honor waits for the coward and the brave," Achilles laments when contemplating his mortality, seeing no real gain won by his courageous conduct other than fame. At this juncture Homer’s epics reach a kind of dead end, posing questions that had no answers.

At roughly the same time Achilles lived, another Bronze age hero was living out a much different conception of the honorable life: Moses. In the stories of the Old Testament, which Hart suggests we call the Mosead, the stunning insights of monotheism were brought into the world. Moses showed it was possible to combine the heroic virtues of the warrior — and Moses was certainly a warrior — with a higher purpose, a stern and demanding code which demanded more of men than courage and intelligence. Moses, too, is flawed and capable of rage and cruelty, but when he obeys God’s injunctions and delivers the Law to the Israelites, he attains a greatness dwarfing that of Achilles.

Hart’s reading of the ten commandments has a special resonance in light of America’s recent declaration of a "war" on terrorism. The Sixth Commandment, he writes, has often been misleadingly translated as "Thou shalt not kill," and thus invoked, wrongly, as a blanket endorsement of pacifism. But Moses himself, Hart points out, under exceptional circumstances ordered blasphemers (such as the Hebrews who worshipped the Golden Calf) executed for a sacrilege which "insult[ed] the God of the First Commandment and seriously threaten[ed] the basis of the new [Hebrew] community." When a civilization acts to defend itself in a moment of crisis, Hart’s interpretation suggests, it may be necessary to kill — which is not the same thing as committing "murder."

Still, the commandments — like America’s later Bill of Rights — were essentially negative, proscriptions of wrongdoing which did not really spell out how Hebrews should ideally behave. In this sense the teachings of Jesus Christ, especially as transmitted to us by Paul, made possible a great leap forward in the moral civilization of the West. As Hart points out, "it is not terribly difficult to go through life without committing murder, stealing, committing adultery, bearing false witness, and so on." Jesus, going far beyond Moses, demanded also that we avoid all kinds of temptations and strive for inner holiness, for a mental discipline so powerful we are able to resist mankind’s natural impulses towards fear, selfishness, and vengeance. In Hart’s witty formulation, Moses required "only a Pass degree, Jesus a First."

Jesus, in his martyrdom for holiness, set down a demanding moral example for those who embraced Christianity in the West. In much the same way, Socrates, whose story was bequeathed to us by Plato, died for his intellectual beliefs and in so doing established a rigorous ideal of pursuing truth through scientific cognition. The archetypes for living the good life represented by Socrates and Jesus, respectively, Hart labels "Athens and Jerusalem." It is, of course, not impossible that these two ideals — scientific inquiry and inner holiness — will come into direct conflict with one another in an individual’s mind, but the natural tension between them often produces a powerful intellectual synthesis. A good example of this productive synergy, in Hart’s view, is Paul’s epistles, which combine cognitive metaphors drawn from Plato (such as the idea that human eyes can only "see as in a glass darkly") with the prophetic moral voice of Jesus.

Hart views this "Athens-Jerusalem" dialectic as fundamental to the greatness of western civilization. It is true, as Hart concedes, that the Greek philosophical heritage disappeared from western Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire, even as it continued to thrive in the Muslim world. But somehow Islam never really succeeded in fusing together theology and science in the peculiar combination that arose in Europe during the Renaissance. Like the Chinese, whose civilization also produced tremendous early achievements in science and engineering, Muslims in their classical age insisted on maintaining science and philosophy "in an intellectual compartment separate from" religion. In the West, by contrast, universities developed under religious control, with philosophical inquiry understood as beneficial to theological understanding. So it was that the great Christian universities at Bologna, Paris, Oxford and elsewhere in Europe allowed modern science to be "institutionalized and perpetuated" with the support of the Church.

I’m sure that Muslims could take issue with Hart’s argument about the singular origins of western science, pointing out that it was Islamic theologians and scribes who actually transmitted most of the Greek philosophical heritage to the West through Spain and Byzantium. But the dialectic Hart speaks of undoubtedly contributed to the greatness of western civilization. Our greatest achievements, he writes, combine the "science of Athens" with the "spirituality of Jerusalem." Examples of this potent mixture include the soaring cathedrals of France, the music of Bach, and even modern architectural masterpieces such as the Empire State Building. In each of these cultural triumphs, the material and spiritual work together hand in hand to impress the senses and serve the soul.

Hart’s own concern is mostly with literature, as opposed to music or architecture, but even here his "Athens-Jerusalem" theme provides valuable insight into the western mind. In essays on works as seemingly dissimilar as Voltaire’s Candide and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, among others, Hart demonstrates how the conflicting aspirations to scientific philosophy and holiness inspire literature to sublime heights. Usually an author’s sympathies lean in one direction more strongly than in the other, but as Hart shows, the "dialectic" is always present. The character of Raskolnikov, for example, serves for Dostoevsky as an example of everything that goes wrong when the scientific rationalism overrides Christian morality — he murders two innocent people to serve an abstract political goal. But in order to demonstrate Raskolnikov’s immorality, Dostoevsky is obliged to take up the philosophical arguments of Enlightenment rationalism in order to refute them. In this way the "Athens-Jerusalem" dialectic contributes to the spiritual richness of Crime and Punishment, surely one of the greatest novels ever written.

Not all of the "great works" discussed in Hart’s book, of course, nor all the achievements of the "West," can really be reduced to this dialectic. One of the most stunning western contributions to the advancement of civilization, for example, was surely the "apotheosis of the ideal woman" which Hart ascribes to the medieval troubadours of Provence and Aquitaine, whose romantic tales inspired Dante’s Beatrice in The Divine Comedy. When Hart suggests that the legacy of western chivalry can still be seen today "when one compares the position of women in the West today with their position in Asia or Africa," I am inclined to agree, but there is no evidence the French troubadours who invented chivalry spent much time reading either Greek philosophy or Christian theology.

Hart’s instinct to praise the distinctiveness of western civilization, though, is truly refreshing in this age of cynicism and relativism, even if his often over-ambitious arguments do not always hold together. Sometimes, too, his literary commentary falls flat, as in his disappointing essays on Hamlet and The Great Gatsby. And Hart’s use of superlatives often seems excessive — nearly every book he encounters seems to have several passages he finds "astonishing."

What is really astonishing, though, is Hart’s enthusiasm for his subject, which is the teaching of the great works fundamental to western civilization. That he can still summon up, at his age (Hart is in his 70s), an almost youthful passion for books he has already read, and taught, many times before, is an inspiration to all of us who wish to summon similar energy in our teaching careers. Hart’s retirement was clearly a great loss to Dartmouth. His former office in the English Department may have "exorcised" by hateful postmodernists, but his influence lives on in the hundreds of students inspired by his example, many of whom, such as Dinesh D’Souza and Peter Robinson, have gone on to become distinguished writers in their own right. The rest of us may have missed out on Hart’s greatness in the classroom, but we can still join him in Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe.