Why Western Thought Still Matters

by Stella M. Baer

Just what is lost when the Western canon is no longer taught? Professor of English emeritus Jeffrey Hart uses his new book to remind us of what used to be the core of every liberal arts education, before the multiculturism movement, before classes where every evil known to mankind is inevitably blamed upon a villain who is "white, male, Western, racist, imperialist, sexist or homophobic – or, with luck, all of them together." At a time when all that the West stands for is on trial, Hart takes us back to our beginnings, lovingly and carefully going through the classics that have made our country—and the beliefs that gave birth to it—worth fighting for.

A few pages into his discussion of the pursuit of the heroic in Athens, Professor Hart pauses to comment that just as Virgil looked to Homer in his Aeneid, Dante looked to Achilles and Odysseus in the Divine Comedy, and he notes that "the greatest books tend to talk with one another in continuous dialogue." Indeed. Much of Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe is precisely that; Hart opens to us a continuous dialogue between the books themselves. Carefully tracing what the greatest works of the West have to say to one another, he brings us to the tension that he believes gave birth to Western thought.

Hart quotes C.S. Lewis when he writes that "humanity does not pass through phases as a train through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving and yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sense we still are." From start to finish, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe reminds us of this very point; it brings to consciousness how and why the greatest works of western literature have influenced our minds, and why they’re worth studying. In Achilles, Moses, Paul, Augustine, Gatsby – in all the terrifically imperfect human beings immortalized in the halls of great literature – we see ourselves.

Hart begins his book with a discussion of Athens and Jerusalem, citing Herman Cohen, who once wrote that "Plato and the Prophets are the most important sources of modern thought." Hart proceeds to go through the texts themselves, the pursuit of truth through cognition and questioning on one hand, and truth through faith in God on the other.

Socrates, whose quest for truth "necessarily was based upon questioning all previous assumptions," becomes the epitome of the heroic in cognition and "the iconic figure of Western philosophy and science." Seeking to know what was behind all things, "independently of religion, myth, and received tradition," he stood on the shoulders of the pre-Socratics whose powerful questions had ignited the first embers of Western philosophy and Science and becomes "a hero superior to anyone in Homer."

Jesus Christ brings the other side of the scale to balance. Fulfilling the Law of the Old Testament and not only aspiring to, but embodying, perfect holiness, Jesus is perhaps the single most influential human being in the Western tradition. Appealing to the "wide discrepancy" between the voices of the narrators of the Gospels and Jesus Himself, Hart maintains that "Jesus could not have been created as a fictional or semi-fictional character even by men who were close to him but virtually had to be part of a recollection they shared, however, derived, of an extraordinary person. Those who wrote the narrative prose could not have imagined the man who spoke as their central figure." Jesus demands of those who profess to love God "not only good behavior but a radical purification of being"—He asks that "nothing stand between you and the ideal perfection of your soul."

Between these two men—the man who claimed he knew nothing save the fact he knew nothing, and the Man who claimed to be One with He who knows all—the underlying tension of Western civilization is strung. It is Hart’s argument that the tension between the aspiration to truth through cognition and the aspiration to truth through faith, and the persistent refusal of the West to choose between the two, has led to the dialectic that underlies modern Western thought. As he puts it, "the irregularities of history and the quest for holiness, on the one hand, and the drive for generalization and scientific truth, on the other, express different agendas but neither displaces the other; they remain in ever-shifting tension." It is to this "ever-shifting tension" that Western civilization owes "the glory of its science; the depth of its insights; the special character of its art; its development, uniquely, of the theory and practice of representative government; and its often tormented pressing of questions about ultimate meaning, the destiny of man and the nature of Being,"—and even freedom itself.

With this laid as his foundation, Hart lays text upon text, moving through Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Moliere’s Tartuffe, Voltaire’s Candide, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The light he sheds upon what lies behind the mysterious "Oxford man" has received particular praise from critics: Hilton Kramer has called it not only "brilliant," but the best discussion he’s ever read of Fitzgerald’s American classic. Hart brings The Great Gatsby into the dialogue with the idea of magical transformation, which he believes "constitutes a parallel and rival religion competing with Christianity." According to Hart, Fitzgerald surrounds Gatsby with magic and mystery, and money is his magic wand—the means by which he thinks he can transform himself and his world. Gatsby believes that he can turn back the hands of time, "that crime and idealism can really coexist, that he is an Oxford man." He is, of course, terribly mistaken; while money can be an agent of transformation, being a "consecretization of freedom," it cannot change the past. The Great Gatsby thus stirs "currents of resistance against the empirical worldview" from which the novel itself was born – and in doing so, strengthens the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.

In each great work Hart takes his point a bit further, revealing how the author is either responding to, choosing between, or adding to the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. He does so not without taking note of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Iliad and the Odyssey, The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Jack Kerouac… Hart provides a truly comprehensive look at Western literature, and though he laments the many great works he does not bring to the table of his discussion, he manages to digest a tremendous amount, all with a sense of humor and love for the book at hand that one might expect from a lecture of his at Columbia, or in a luncheon conversation with him over a bowl of French onion soup.

Rather ironically, Hart notes that multiculturalism itself is a purely Western invention, in the end amounting to little more than "a form of anti-Westernism. That is, all cultures are to be respected and valued except the civilization of the West, to which, not surprisingly, the actual inhabitants of those other cultures are trying to migrate in large numbers." Hart believes that the aim of education is to transform the student into a citizen, one who "understands the vital components of that civilization as well as its history and is thus located in time as well as place."

A citizen himself, Hart shows a great understanding of the West, and thus is able—even in the face of catastrophe—to smile.