The Division Between Art and Science, And the Decline of the Study of Greek and Latin

This is one of those posts where I offer no answers, but simply pose a question which has struck me recently. In this case the question is: can the division between the arts and the sciences in Western society seem natural only to those who have not studied ancient Greek and Latin?

In case there are readers to whom it is not already obvious: I have no idea whether the art-science split has occurred in other societies, nor how it might seem to observers from other parts of the world.

Back within the western world, I have greatly admired admired contemporary and recent authors, such as Bronowski and Pynchon, who clearly reject the notion that art and science are incompatible. I don't know how conversant those two are in the Classical languages, but when we go further into the past, there's often no longer any doubt: Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche were all very familiar with ancient Greek, and all three published in Latin. And none seemed to have the slightest inclination to separate the arts from the sciences. 

Travel back a bit further in time, to the 17th century, and Galileo wrote sonnets, and Milton wrote treatises in logic. These efforts have not become famous, non-one seems to consider them particularly brilliant, but no one of their contemporaries found it strange that they crossed the art/science divide. It takes a more recent perspective to find it strange. It requires a more recent perspective to see any divide between art and science. 

Back farther in time, to the 16th century, and we have the archetypal "Renaissance Man" -- archetypal from the point of view of some more modern commentators, that is: Leonardo da Vinci. And we are told -- by some recent and contemporary pundits -- that it is no longer possible to be such a brilliant artist, and at the the same time such a brilliant scientist. 

But who exactly is telling us this? And who goes a bit further still, in some cases, and tells us that the decline in the study of Greek and Latin was a necessary outcome of the rise of science brought about by people such as Leonardo?

Was the decline in competence in Greek and Latin necessary? Is it a good thing? 

I'm not saying that no people who are fluent in Greek and Latin have accepted such assertions. Obviously, many have. But I'm asking whether these ideas could have spread and taken hold to begin without mistaken ideas being aggressively spread by people with no knowledge of Latin or Greek, and, therefore, no idea what they were talking about, no idea of where art or science had come from.  

 Books by J Bronowski on Amazon: https://amzn.to/424W3Qu

The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

Teubner, Foremost Among Classical Publishers

Before 1851 many publishers had already produced volumes of the Greek and Latin classics, but Teubner, in Leipzig, was the first to dedicate a series entirely to them. The series, called the Bibliotheca Teubneriana or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, started in 1851 and it's still going. People call the series Teubner, although the publisher Teubner is not confined to this series of Classical texts. In fact, the publisher Teubner no longer publishes the Classical series Teubner: in 1999 Teubner sold the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana to the publisher KG Saur, and in 2006 the publisher De Gruyter acquired Saur. But through all that, and also through a period between the end of WWII and German re-unification when some of the volumes of the Bibliotheca Teubneriana continued to be published in Leipzig while others were published in Stuttgart, the series has remained very much a unified, consistent and continuous thing.

From within a very few years after its beginning until today, the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana has offfered a greater range of Classical titles than any other publisher. It's probably also maintained the highest reputation for Classical scholarship and quality among publishers. It's true that in the cases of many individual titles, the Osford Classical Texts will offer was is considered by most to be the standard text. And within the past few decades, Loeb and Bude have begun to compete for that prestige, and in some cases one of them have offered the preferred text. Still, I think, Teubner must be considered the pre-eminent publisher in their field.

A few decades after the Bibliotheca Teubneriana started publishing in 1851, someone had the idea of giving the covers of all of the volumes the Greek texts one color, and the Latin texts another. In Teubner's case, from the late 19th century until today, it's been orange for Greek and blue for Latin.

This idea has caught on with other publishers, so that now we have Loeb volumes with green covers for Greek and red covers for Latin, and orange for Latin and green for Greek for the Medieval texts in Brepols' series Corpus Christianorum.

The Oxford Classical Texts started in the 1890's and the oldest volumes in that series, both Greek and Latin, have orange covers which make them look very much like Teubner's Greek titles.

Today, the Oxford Classical Texts, also known as the OCT, all have black covers, but the Greek titles have blue dust jackets and the Latin titles have green ones.

My main concern about Teubner is the same as with publishers of Classics in general: the volumes get thinner while the prices go up. Well, and also, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, along with getting thinner the Teubner volumes keep getting taller and wider, and therefore more and more impossible to fit into any pocket. That too is inconvenient.

Taking Other People's Word About Some Linguistic Aspects Of The Middle Ages

As Confucius said, "The more I learn about people, the more I like dogs." People are very often unreliable in the things that they say. It's well known that the more expert a person is in a given area, the more likely he or she is to become infuriated by news coverage or depictions in movies of that particular topic, because the newspeople or moviemakers are getting it all wrong.

The more I learn about history, the more I learn that people tend to talk non-stop mess about it. Very often in this blog I've railed against people *coughcough Paulkovich coughcough* who present themselves as experts on a given subject, and in the process betray an almost complete unfamiliarity with that topic.

If you believe, as I do, that the study of history is important, this is discouraging. If you study history to a certain degree, you will find that the people blithely chattering nonsense about it very often include those academics who are supposed to be the experts about history.

Academic historians tend to be much, much more accurate than some others *coughcough Vridar, Carrier coughcough* who present themselves as experts. But they still leave a lot to be desired.

Take for example some widespread notions, widely spread not by New Atheist bloggers but by history professors, about the Middle Ages: we have been told, for example, that between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, when many people suddenly started to insist that good Latin meant imitating Cicero's prose, the quality of Latin declined to a miserable state, and that the knowledge of Greek practically disappeared from Western Europe, and that the West became re-acquainted with writers such as Plato and Aristotle when texts which had been translated from Greek to Arabic were in turn translated from Arabic into Latin.

It's easy enough to clear up that last one: BUZZERSOUND, untrue. It's true that a lot of Greek medical knowledge made its way to Western Europe by going from Greek to Arabic to Latin. But there were not a lot of Latin manuscripts of Plato or Aristotle which translated from Arabic translations. I doubt if as much as one entire volume went this double-translation route.

As far as Medieval Latin being miserable in quality: yeah, a lot of it was. I for one am certain that a lot of ancient Latin was also miserable in quality, and that the very bad ancient stuff has for the most part disappeared. For the *coughcough Nepos coughcough* most part. Along with the badly-written Medieval Latin which has been preserved, however, a lot of very well-written Medieval Latin has also survived. For example, the works of Boethius, Isidore, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, John Scotus, Anastasius, Notker, Orderic, Abelard, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, to name just a few of the brightest highlights, and so many other very good writers that it really makes you wonder just exactly how so very many people who were paid decent salaries to spend their entire careers looking into such things could manage to fit their heads so far up their own asses. Makes you wonder how many of the people who are supposed to be our authorities for Medieval history and culture can actually read Latin. If you're wondering whether reading proficiency in Latin is important in order to be in a position to tell other people what was what in the Middle Ages: stop wondering. It should be the first priority. And if some tenured full professors of Medieval Studies disagree, well then some of those professors are full of shit.

It seems that over the course of the past century, this notion about Medieval Latin having been uniformly very poor in quality has been corrected to a great degree. Whether this is because over the past century a great many professors of Medieval Studies have read great Medieval Latin literature, or because they've just happened to take the word of authorities who are more accurate on this point, I don't know. I certainly hope it's the former.

All of the Medieval Latin writers listed above had at least some interest in ancient Latin literature. And it's difficult to have any interest in ancient Latin literature without becoming quite curious about Greek culture and the Greek language. Indeed, quite a few of the ancient Latin authors quote so much Greek in their works that it's very difficult to understand them without some mastery of Greek.

When it comes to how widespread knowledge of Greek remained in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, I have to take other people's word for it, because my Greek isn't good enough for me to look at the relevant primary sources for myself and see what was up. And the authorities don't all seem to be in complete agreement. And when they are in agreement, their statements are so often so close to word-for-word identical that I have to wonder whether they're all taking the word of one person.

If great hordes of Medieval scholars were completely fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, we wouldn't have these kinds of problems. (I imagine that a great many, these days, are in fact fluent in Latin. But I don't know. I'd bet on it but I don't know.)

I suppose it might reasonably be countered that very few people give a rat's ass about such things. I believe that the study of history is very important, but I realize that not everyone does. It would be even more reasonable to opine that I sound rather odd for a 54-year-old man who didn't begin to study Latin intensively until his 40's, and who knows very little Greek. Yes, given my biography and skills, It might very well be said that I am being quite unreasonable, angrily denouncing people for leaving undone things which I myself have left undone.

Anywho: there's seems to be little if any disagreement with the assertion that Boethius (c. 480 – 525) was highly fluent in Greek. It seems that the opinion that Isidore (c. 560–636) was a master of Greek is much less widely-held than it used to be. (Because more people with great expertise in Greek have looked into the matter lately, or because people are now taking a different authority's word for it? Probably the former. I hope it's the former.)

Bede's level of competence in Greek seems to be somewhat controversial. John Scotus (815-877) and Anastasius (810-878) seem to be acknowledged, at least by some, to have been the greatest Western scholars of Greek of their time, but the level of their skills in the language seems to be under dispute. And it seems -- that is to say: I am taking other people's word for it when I say -- that a great spread of Greek scholarship in the West began, not with the Renaissance in the 15th century, but long before that, with the spread of universities beginning in the 11th century.

And to make all of this just that much more wonderful: measurement of linguistic skill remains, of course, irreducibly subjective. And prejudice, along with evidence, may influence the judgements of even the most authoritative authority, in this as in all human things. For example, a Christian apologist may want to portray the early Middle Ages in a very positive light, and as a part of this he or she may want to portray Isidore as being more learned, or the instruction in the earliest Medieval universities as being more advanced, than the evidence shows; or, an atheist historian may wish to portray the entire Middle Ages as a Christian disaster, and may also highly prize ancient Greek culture, and may therefore want to portray Medieval familiarity with Greek as being more tenuous than the evidence shows. Subjectivity is everywhere in human discourse, distorting away. Everywhere. In this blog too. I try to overcome it, but I hardly believe that I succeed entirely.

Perhaps Winston Churchill Will Not Help Us Revive The Study Of Latin And Greek

"And when after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be for not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that." -- Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: My Early Life, Scribner's, 1930, p 17. See both pages 16 & 17 for the full context.

My thanks to DubFilm on the classics subreddit of reddit for finding this one. My memory certainly distorted that quote. I thought I had read something more like, "Latin should be taught to all children, and Greek kept as a treat for the cleverest ones." I thought I remembered a plea, by someone, not Churchill, to teach Latin to all children of both sexes, not merely to all boys, something I could heartily second and a quote I could trot out in debates over education policy, whereas actually Sir Winston was advocating thorough instruction in English to all boys, and if anything, he was ironically mocking the emphasis then given to instruction in the Classics.

And it's not entirely clear to me whether he meant all boys in the British Empire (much too anglocentric for my taste, both the universal requirement of English and the Empire itself), or all boys in England, or just all boys at Eton and Harrow. His advocacy of whipping schoolboys is disturbing as well; but, as he says "The only thing I would whip them for would be for not knowing English" (my emphasis), perhaps he was pleading for less whipping in a time when public school boys were still roundly and routinely whipped for deficiencies in all subjects.

Or perhaps Sir Winston was about as bad as so many people tell me he was -- which is to say: a reactionary monster -- and I've had a distorted view of him because the only volumes of his I've read are the 6 volumes of his history of WWII, which was perhaps the only time during which he was truly great. (A less-bad monster needed at the time to slay the monster Hitler.)

But I should read more of his work and more about his activities and statements, before removing that "perhaps." In any case, it appears he's going to be little or no help reviving the Classics. That certainly makes me much more disposed to regard him as a monster, but perhaps that's a little unfair on my part.

Multilingualism

If you've been reading my blog and so far been unimpressed by my praise of learning languages besides one's native language, perhaps you will become intrigued when I tell you that learning a language is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument. There are a few lucky geniuses who can master many musical instruments or many languages with ease. For most people, however, certainly including me, studying music and studying languages involves a lot of excruciatingly hard work, especially at first. But if you persist long enough in studying music or a language, eventually you will achieve some measure of mastery, and achieving even a little of that is wonderful and thrilling in a way which is very difficult or impossible to explain to someone who hasn't. So if you can play an instrument, or several instruments, believe me: the rewards of studying a languages, or languages, are comparable.

The term "barbarian" was coined by some ancient Greek who didn't speak any languages other than Greek, wasn't interested in learning any more languages, and didn't listen very carefully to anyone speaking anything other than Greek, because the original definition of a barbarian was someone who didn't speak Greek, but did speak some other language which sounded like "buh-buh-buh," and there is no language that's all b's. When Rome conquered regions from present-day Greece to Egypt to Syria in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, some of which had spoken Greek for over 1000 years and others of which had been conquered by Alexander, the Latin language didn't spread into the eastern part of Rome's dominions, as Latin had become dominant in all of the western regions; the Greeks who were the majority population in some of those areas and the ruling class in the rest kept right on speaking and writing in Greek, and a great number of Romans acquired Greek as a 2nd language. Politically, Rome had conquered Greece, but culturally, Greece conquered Rome.

Paradoxically, the Greeks acquired the disadvantage of monolingualism from this cultural dominance. From the 17th to the early 20th century, French culture dominated Europe, resulting in a similar paradoxical disadvantage for French people: many more English and American people spoke both English and French, many more Germans spoke both German and French, many more Russians spoke both Russian and French, etc, than the number of Frenchmen and -women who spoke French and anything else. And today, the US is the political and cultural leader of the world, resulting in the paradoxical disadvantage for the US and other English-speaking lands of a paucity of people who speak anything other than English, compared to the numbers of, for example, French people who speak both French and English, or the number of Mexicans who speak both Spanish and English, if not an indigenous language and Spanish and English. A century ago it was still considered quite wise for Americans traveling to most other parts of the world to learn at least a little French before they traveled, and ideally much more than a little. Today, not so much.

This paradoxical benefit of being conquered culturally is very real. But as I mentioned above, I don't know any way of telling you how great that benefit is if you don't learn other languages and see for yourself. In the meantime all I can think of to do is to urge you to believe me when I tell you that the benefit is immense.

People Who Doubt The Authenticity Of The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife Seem To Be Grasping At Straws

(Before I begin here, let me try to be as clear as possible: "authenticity" means that the famous postcard-sized piece of papyrus containing the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife is ancient, that is: more than 1000 years old, and perhaps over 1600 years old, and not a 19th-or 20th-century forgery. No serious academics are saying that this text records the actual words of Jesus, talking about his wife. None of them are saying this proves that Jesus was married. What Prof King has said all along, consistently, is that this document may perhaps show that one group of early Christians thought of Jesus as having been married. It's a real shame that so many people are somehow managing not to hear her.)

Professor Karen L King, who came under heavy criticism in 2012 when she presented the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife to the public in 2012, when critics said it was a modern forgery, and not a 4th-century Coptic translation of a 2nd-century Greek text, seems to have been at least partially vindicated.

But some experts are still skeptical:

"Brown University Egyptology professor Leo Depuydt [...] points to grammatical mistakes that he says a native Coptic writer would not make"

If Depuydt is right about that: so what? King says this is a 4th-century translation of a 2nd-century Greek text. There's no reason why a native speaker of Greek in the 4th century couldn't have translated something into Coptic, making mistakes no native Coptic speaker would have made. Ideally translations are made by native speakers of the language being translated into. Ideally, but certainly not always, as countless people of many different natives languages have discovered when they've had great difficulty trying to decipher texts in their own native languages in owner's manuals for appliances.

Depuydt says, "the text … is a patchwork of words and phrases from the [...] Coptic Gospel of Thomas."

And again I say: if Depuydt is right, so what? A 4th-century translator could've been familiar with the Gospel of Thomas, which was not officially condemned by the Orthodox authorities until the 4th century. If his or her native language was Greek, it would be only natural for him or her to depend on words and phrases which he or she knew from a Coptic text, such as, for example, the Gospel of Thomas.

Depuydt is not convincing me at all that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a modern forgery. If this is the best that the skeptics have, then I say, forget 'em, and consider the artifact to be authentic. (And forgive me for being a broken record, but please be sure you understand what is meant here by "authentic," as explained in italics and bold print at the beginning of this blog post.)