Feature
Listening Up
Historical Truth, Beguiling Stories & Three Kinds of Hearers by Anthony Esolen
There once was a man.
Almost thirty years ago, the students at Alfred University, named for its small town of Alfred, New York, expressed their concern that a statue of King Alfred the Great, standing on campus, might be the wrong choice for a logo to advertise the school. One female student, a junior in English, noted: "If he was living in this day, would he endorse the education of women and minorities? Back then, education was just for the aristocratic males."
Well, it was not, really. Charlemagne himself, who inaugurated a minor educational and cultural renaissance in France, could read but not write. Alfred, who could do both, wrought a wonderfully earthy translation of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy into Anglo-Saxon. He, too, attracted scholars to his court. The scholars were not necessarily "aristocratic." They were churchmen. The Church was the educator of the West, and when she sought young men to become priests, she never limited herself merely to grease-eating ruffians who could ride horses and swing swords. One could never quite get the Holy Spirit to sign on to the plans of aristocratic families.
As for women, one wonders how you could manage to get convents of nuns to pray the Holy Office if none of them knew how to read. The German nun Hrotsvitha was writing poems and plays in Latin at a time when drama had long disappeared from the West. That was in the century after Alfred. Two centuries before Alfred, Hilda, the saintly abbess of Whitby, governing a monastery of both monks and nuns, welcomed the illiterate cowherd Caedmon into her community when he showed a sudden God-given talent for transforming stories from Scripture into Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry.
The Use of Stories
We might multiply such apologies for the people of the past, but they hardly address the question of that self-satisfied junior. It would be like asking whether a tribe of Eskimos a thousand years ago would have helped us save the whales. It would be like asking a nomadic shepherd of old, following the paths of the winter rains and the temporarily running streams, what he would think of hydroelectric power. It is not simply to ask a question about which he might reasonably come to the "wrong" opinion. It is to ask a question that would make no sense. To ask it bespeaks stupidity not in the ancient shepherd but in the modern student.
It is a special kind of stupidity, this. It is not so much a failure of the historical imagination to address persons and ways of life very different from ours. It is strong evidence that the historical imagination does not exist at all. Try to explain "green" to a color-blind man.
And yet this color-blind man is a ferocious partisan of absolute hues, whose existence he denies. In some measure he is honest about his denial, though incoherent. We can, I believe, understand the quality of both his stupidity and his muddled absolutism by considering what use a sane man makes of stories in general, and history in particular, and what use, if any, our incoherent contemporary makes of them.
The Study of Poetry
In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney says that it is more profitable to study poetry—by which he means the crafting of stories—than to study either philosophy or history. Moral philosophy can show us the right thing to do but cannot move us to do it; the knowledge remains notional, in the head but not the heart. History can move us with rousing stories of passion and conquest, but right does not always triumph. Poetry alone can both instruct and delight, reveal the truth and cause us to love it.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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