(For details of our summer course, click here.)
For two and a half millennia, from Homer’s Iliad to Goethe’s Faust, the foundation of Western literature was the epic, and built upon it, the tragic and the poetic. The whole edifice was enveloped in a world of myth, by turns classical and Christian, in which the divine and the human met, in which the gods became as men and men as gods. These forms and these myths permitted the portrayal of greatness in a way which is hardly possible today.
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Our ten days together in the Vendee will take you on a tour that begins with Homer and the first epic poems. Then we will examine Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) and Plato’s writings on the death of Socrates. Latin literature will be represented by Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and St Augustine‘s Confessions. Dante’s Divine Comedy, a tour through Hell and Purgatory, will lead us through to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine and finally Goethe. These are books as powerful, thrilling, erotic and politically astute as any modern bestseller.
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Although we have an ambitious literary task to accomplish over our ten days, this is also about a great story: the story of the West. It is also about a conversation between us and our forefathers. We do not realise that even though the Greek and Roman classics and those of the medieval world are truly remote from us, our own minds and feelings are stocked with themes and attitudes rooted in those classics, so that even those who may be completely new to these books will find that they all seem strangely familiar.
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A sense of the sacred …
The backdrop of sacred order allows our writers a simplicity, a strength and a grandeur which is inevitably lost in the detail of descriptive naturalism and psychological realism, and also in the fascination with the mediocre and the mundane which begins to take over in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Compare, for example, Emma Bovary with Racine’s Phedre, Joyce’s Bloom with Homer’s Odysseus, Proust’s Marcel with Sophocles’ Oedipus or with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The themes, the dilemmas, the characters are of a different order.
The clue to the transition from literary greatness to modernity emerges in Faust himself. As he dies, the Earth Spirit notwithstanding, he cries out that he stands before nature as a man, alone. If we are men, alone, then there is nothing to imbue our lives with meaning, other than what emerges from our own psychology – the very domain explored so brilliantly and exhaustively in the nineteenth and twentieth century novel. As the Spirits sang to Faust earlier ‘you have destroyed our beautiful world’, the world, that is of Homer, of Virgil, of Dante, of our great books generally.
Maybe that world has been destroyed, and our condition is one of inevitable disillusion. This is one reason why the great books of the past are on many levels foreign to us and inaccessible. But that is also the reason why we should access them, on their own terms. Only then will we come to experience what we have lost. In doing this we will certainly discover something about ourselves, for bits of that lost world still resonate today. And, as in all renaissances, we might also discover that some of the lost greatness can, with patience and humility, be recovered.
The organisers of this summer course, motivated variously by Christian faith, love of culture or concern for modern society invite you to join them in working for the spiritual and cultural renaissance that our continent and our world so badly need.
