The classics, Christianity and the closing mind

In 1987, a noted philosopher at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, published a book called "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students." The author deplored what he saw as a drift in academe from immersion in the great classics of Western thought into a chic, relativist culture in which everything was equally important and interesting. His apocalyptic vision of intellectual rot in the collective American psyche emerged from his own deep learning in the school of Leo Strauss, recently represented as the godfather of today's militant neoconservatives. The supposed filiation from Strauss to Rumsfeld is grossly unfair to the memory of the discerning scholar known to anyone who has ever actually read Strauss' work, but there is no doubt that the self-appointed guardians of the Western tradition who once sat at his feet have had a remarkable influence.

Bloom's view that neglect of the Western cultural tradition, steeped in Greek democracy and philosophy, was shutting down the American mind resonated with classical scholars as well as historical theorists. The historian of ancient warfare Victor Hanson and his classicist colleague John Heath in 1998 asked the profession, and the world at large, "Who Killed Homer?" The book's subtitle gave its agenda: "The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom." Smug professors ensconced in research positions were held accountable for an imagined loss of contact with Greek genius. Although no one had ever disputed the greatness of the Greek legacy in art, literature and thought, Hanson and Heath seemed disappointed that their own generation had awakened to the reality of slavery in the Greek world, its oppression of women, its indifference to human rights. Critics pointed out what their appeal for a return to the Greek ideal would really mean. We have learned from the mistakes of the Greeks as well as from their achievements. Strauss knew that, even if his epigones did not.

The closing of a collective mind is a serious if ultimately unprovable allegation. It presupposes a kind of rupture in history that is as hard to credit as to document. The world's most famous exponent of decline and fall, Edward Gibbon, lived long enough, as he wrote his immortal work on the Roman Empire over the course of more than 12 years, to discover that its title was a misnomer. Although he had originally not intended to do so, he found it necessary to carry his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" all the way up to the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453.