The rise of the individual, with all the political and philosophical connotations implied by this portentous phrase, has long been recognized as one of the great themes of modernity. Burkhardt identifies this dynamic as central to the movement of spirit unfolding in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, when the contours of the perspective we now simply regard as “Western” begins to emerge. In what remains one of the most astute examinations of this phenomenon and its repercussions, he traced the manner in which the medieval perspective - through which “man was conscious of himself…only through some general category” - gave way to the modern concern for the distinctive features of personality.
With the pattern of this historical paradigm in mind, we can examine the artifacts of the late Middle Ages, and scan them for signs of this incipient revolution in self-understanding. Giotto’s frescoes in Padua’s Arena Chapel, for instance, will supply ample evidence that a concern for the distinguishing mark of the figure has become as much a preoccupation for the visual artist as the composition of the whole. In the “Kiss of Judas,” for instance, we find Christ beleaguered not only by the faceless rabble in the background, but by a crowd of differentiated bodies and faces, each gesturing or making an expression which suggests its own separate motive. The eyes of Judas, which seem to have just opened to the reprehending stare of his lord, suggest a man who intended to carry out some nefarious plot hastily, before his burdened conscience could impede his hands. The guard behind Judas, in the scarlet cloak, goggles at Jesus as though entirely dumbfounded to find himself apprehending this man of whom he has heard so much, and a little behind him, a high priest points incriminatingly at the same time he seems to shrink back from the sacred presence, an attitude of hatred and fear revealed in his posture. On the left, St. Peter lunges forward, knife in hand and rage in his features, while a hooded figure, who seems to be another of the guards, grabs at the cloak of a disciple. Each figure encompasses movements or facial features denoting its own separate psyche, composed of emotions and motives that are distinguishable from the emotions and motives of the others.
With our paradigm of history in place, mindful of the individualizing energies working themselves out through all the cultural and spiritual exertions of the period, we might observe this tendency imprinted upon Giotto’s figures, and notice nothing else about them. But in doing so, we would miss a countervailing dynamic at work in the painting which would be just as apparent to us were we to lay aside for a moment the interpretative framework we have derived from that historical paradigm. For in the middle of the scene, surrounded by a halo which undoubtedly gleams as the eye’s center of gravity in the composition, is Christ’s reprehending visage, marked by a stare of reproach mingling severity with an unmistakable touch of disappointment. Every other figure in the composition bears a meaningful relationship to that stare, beginning with Judas himself, whose garments envelop the body of Christ – even as his betrayal will consume the body of Christ – but not the moral witness registered in the still-visible face. Likewise, the astonishment of the guard and the intimidation of the high priest are a guilty response to the appearance of that face; the wrath of St. Peter a faithful one. The unique inner dispositions revealed through each separate figure only become explicable in light of their relationship to the single figure abiding in the center. What we see when we examine each figure are not just the individualizing features through which they are realized, but their status in a compositional unity which alone makes those features decipherable.
This careful counterbalance – or rather, harmonious intermingling – of specifying and unifying energies is even more readily observable in the famous “Lamentation” fresco. Here, the commonality of grief wrenched into the facial expressions of the mourners mutes the impression of specificity left by the picture, yet in the contrast between the hysterical grieving figure in the center (possibly St. John), flinging himself forward towards the deposed body of Christ, and the far more restrained figure to the far right knitting his hands and looking on with quiet rue, enough of the respective subjectivities of the figures emerges to create a genuine sense of drama among their grouping. But that drama is obviously magnified many times over by the angels writhing and lamenting overhead, confined to a sphere that is demarcated from the human but sharing in the very same dereliction. It is their presence above the human drama that bestows the greatest significance upon that drama, for the death being mourned is not that of any man, but, as Unamuno has put it, the death of the one man who ought not to have died. It is an event of unparalleled cosmic significance in which each of the figures takes part, and the full weight of the grief depicted in their specific gestures and expressions only strikes us through the theological context conjured by the angels overhead.
What we see in Giotto when we examine his works in light of cultural history are early shoots of an incipient individualism that would overgrow the entirety of the West’s cultural landscape in the centuries to come. But when we examine those same works in light of cultural form – of those principles of culture-making from which generalizable dicta can be extracted - then something much different comes to the fore. What is most striking about these frescoes in light of such principles is the peculiar aptness with which they marry the unifying and individuating energies in the work, such that each figure derives its most distinguishing marks from its status within the composition as a whole. What we see is not the discovery of a technique fitted for the realization of one kind of artistic energy and passed down to our era for its perfection, but rather, the application of a technique all but lost to us, through which certain intractable antinomies of form are triumphantly resolved. Perceived through the single lens of cultural history, Giotto’s style strikes us as an embryonic and half-realized vehicle for the expression of a spirit that his cultural descendants would bring to completion, but regarded simply in light of the possibilities of his art, his work appears quite unmistakably as a masterful consummation of those very possibilities.
The case of Giotto alerts us to the distortive dangers of regarding cultural artefacts through a strict, or even primarily, historical lens. By ensconcing pictures, texts, or buildings in a narrative of historical development or devolution, we inevitably fall into a trap of deriving the significance of those artefacts from their role in that narrative, and not from their own aesthetic or intellectual value. The vicious paradox involved in such habits, of course, is that no artefact ever concerns its author or first audience on account of its place in some historical sequence, since the future unfolding of that sequence always remains a matter of obscurity to contemporaries. One of the first casualties, then, of a historical cultural framework is an accurate understanding of how cultural artefacts were received in their own historical period. But what is really placed at risk by such a framework is our own present ability to encounter pictures, texts, or buildings in a manner that permits us to receive the complete range of insight or edification those artefacts might afford to us.
We see the worst effects of this approach to culture in the parodies of the American founding that now hold sway in the academic world, and shape the predominant interpretations of the Constitution. By shoving that document into place in a juvenile myth of progressive historical development, vast numbers of our contemporaries have come to regard it as, at best, an early though woefully inadequate attempt to enshrine a progressive understanding of rights and freedoms in the law, or, at worst, a manifestation of a “Euro-centric” worldview from which latter, heroic political efforts have steadily liberated us. What gets lost almost entirely in the accounts of those who adopt this historicist framework is any insight into the way this document might serve to regulate the exercise of power for our own generation. This is why we routinely observe representatives of the progressive left referring to the Constitutions as a kind of obstacle to be overcome, rather than as a resource to be cultivated.
This is certainly an example of what happens when one applies the most simplistic and nakedly ideological of historical frameworks to discrete cultural artefacts. We should not deceive ourselves, however, into believing that the distortive effects of the historical lens are merely a result of ideological stupidity. Even in the hands of the most astute cultural historians, and even in those cases when the historical framework does bring to light aspects of an artefact’s significance that would otherwise remain hidden to us, there is always the danger that some other aspect of the artefact’s significance will be suppressed in order to preserve the coherence of the narrative. I am thinking particularly of a work like Carl Trueman’s justly admired The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which provides a compelling genealogy of many of the cultural ills besetting our own times. In the course of this narrative, he reflects on the work of Romantic poets like Shelley and Wordsworth, regarding them, on account of the expressive bent of their work, as representatives of “cultural tendencies that stand in positive relation to some of the pathologies that are of great significance today.” Unquestionably, that inclination towards self-expression is at the root of many of our cultural ills, but it hardly constitutes the primary or most interesting thing to be found in the work of these poets. To reduce that work to so many emblems of a single strand of thought – destructive as it might be - treads dangerously close to lampoon. And this, in the hands of one who has clearly reflected wisely and fruitfully upon the course of history.
If these sorts of distortions are an inevitable consequence of contemplating cultural artefacts in light of historical narratives, then this is a tendency to which classical educators must be particularly mindful. I believe I am correct in saying that the dominant, if not entirely exclusive, framework for organizing humanities instruction in secondary classical schools is historical. Most of the curricula I have seen start freshmen off with a study of the Ancient World, move them into the Medieval and Renaissance period, then to the Modern World, with the American content covered in a separate year and isolated somewhere within this paradigm. In many cases, this framework simply serves as a useful tool for organizing texts the Humanities Teacher would want to cover anyway, and need to cover in some order: the Iliad freshman year, the Divine Comedy sophomore year, and so on. But in many other cases, these works tend to be presented as representations of spiritual or intellectual forces at work in the historical epoch from which they arose: the Iliad as an expression of an archaic warrior code, the Divine Comedy as an expression of the Medieval conception of a unified cosmos. While such presentations can bring interesting facets of these works to light, they also have a tendency to mute their direct relevance to the students’ present development, to the wisdom ever present in that code and that conception. So there is a danger that in the most common manner classical educators present Humanities’ texts to their students, they vitiate the potential of those texts to transform the lives and characters of their students.
In writing this, I am critiquing no one’s pedagogy so much as my own. No one is as convinced as I am of the value of the study of cultural history, and no one strives to prioritize the presentation of such history in the classroom as much as I do. My own favorite genre of book is what might be called the “genealogy of modernity” – works like MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Taylor’s Secular Age, or Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. I am certain I have acquired tremendous insight into the prevailing cultural forces of my own day and age from these works, and I am equally certain that students need this kind of insight to successfully navigate the moment of history into which they have been thrust. My students repeatedly hear me harangue them on the importance of “knowing where their world comes from;” I repeatedly invite them to make the sorts of connections between literature and religion and political affairs that might cohere into a compelling narrative about how our world came to look the way it does. I routinely intersperse lessons on the reign of Charlemagne with readings of the The Song of Roland or recount the story of Brunelleschi constructing the dome of Santa Maria in the context of tracing the rise of the Florentine Republic. So I am the last person in the world to be dismissive of the importance of cultural history, or to deny that it might provide the central organizing principle for a secondary classical curriculum.
What I am suggesting is corrective in nature. Granted that our students derive tremendous insight into the cultural artefacts they study by encountering them within a historical framework that allows them to perceive the relationship between those artefacts and the social or religious impulses which gave rise to them, it remains the case that other important aspects of those artefacts might be simultaneously withheld from students as a result of that very same framework. What is required is some counterbalancing approach built into the curriculum, that allows students to encounter works through other frameworks than the historical. In the second part of this essay, I want to suggest a few such approaches that might compliment the historical framework of classical Humanities’ study.
One of the best essays I’ve read on Substack in a long time! I can’t wait to read the follow up, Mark. I share your concern about limiting our readings of ancient texts to the strictly historical--or worse, comparing them to some inane value of “progress” and finding them wanting. Increasingly, I’m learning to read phenomenologically. In other words, I’m striving to receive the text in the way it “wants” to be received. How does one do this? Of first and foremost importance is the reader’s posture. I must be docile and ready to learn from the author. Even more so, I must be ready to be changed or transformed in some way. I must be willing to encounter the “thou” of the author speaking to me. As much as I can, I try to cultivate empathy with the author--to try to transcend the distances of time and place and see the author as a real, sympathetic person. It comes down to doing my best to understand the author on *his* terms--and that, in a spirit of good will.
You cited Barzun. Well done.