Start with the Pagans

By Jonathan Wanner

Given the long-standing antagonism between Greco-Roman pagans and early Christians, it is somewhat ironic that the classical education movement, which is ever gaining momentum in Catholic circles, exalts pagan poets. How easily theologians extol sky-minded Plato and real-eyed Aristotle as precursors of Augustinian and scholastic thought, but with much greater effort must the Catholic poet muster an equal defense of Ovid and Homer. Their stories are, after all, so… sensual. Plato himself forewarns that his poetic peers “destroy” the soul’s “calculating part” by driving man’s passions into an irrational frenzy: “If you admit the sweetened muse in lyrics or epics,” he predicts, “pleasure and pain will jointly be kings in your city instead of law.”¹ Christians must agree that the pagan Muses don’t always sing a moderately-tempered tune. Homer’s Odysseus, despite his valor, commits adultery with a goddess (Calypso) and an enchantress (Circe) before returning to his wife, Penelope; Ovid’s Metamorphoses catalogs an extensive index of rapes and crimes of the flesh;² and Augustine regrets that he wept over Dido’s death when he could not shed a tear for his own sins.³ Not to mention the worship of many and false gods, acts of divination, and the scandal of gratuitous violence. In the face of such barbs and brambles, we might wish to pursue poetic knowledge along a less injurious footpath: Holy Scripture, saint stories, or the many Catholic lyrics and legends that never seem to make it into the Norton Anthology. Surely a nothing-but-the-truth education would be just the rudder a student needs to keep within the moorings of truth, goodness, and beauty.

As attractive as a truth-only education seems, the teacher will inevitably confront a laundry list of difficulties when conveying eternal truths to immature youths. Consider the Bible: despite being plainly written, its several interpretive senses (literal, typological, moral, and anagogical) demand both logic and faith; it features a variety of literary genres framed within large-scale rhetorical structures (e.g. acrostics, chiasms, tricolons, etc.); emblems and metaphors throughout communicate wisdom through covert figures; stories repeatedly require some knowledge of historical context; and it includes scandals of lewdness, incest, sacrilege, murder, idolatry, and divination, among other brutalities (the Israelites, as it happens, often acted like the very pagans they opposed). Paradoxically, the Bible is supremely complex even in its simplicity. Children may never be too young to hear about the Last Supper, but they are not always old enough to extract from it proofs of transubstantiation.

For this reason—the difficulty of sacred poetry—St. Basil recommends that immature students prepare for divine truths by first reading virtuous pagan poets:

Into the life eternal the Holy Scriptures lead us, which teach us through divine words. But so long as our immaturity forbids our understanding their deep thought, we exercise our spiritual perceptions upon profane writings, which are not altogether different, and in which we perceive the truth as it were in shadows and in mirrors.⁴

Notice that Basil presumes there are enough similarities between pagan literature and the Bible to make a classical education worthwhile. Although he does not spell out these similarities, we would do well to chart several characteristics that epic poetry, myth narratives, and other lyric poems share with the Bible:

1. Figurative tiers of meaning reveal moral and speculative truths.
2. Large-scale rhetorical structures communicate less obvious truths.
3. Sentences are built upon harmoniously ordered words.

Consider Hesiod’s notorious myth of Pandora. On a literal level, the tale is basic: after creating Pandora, the first human woman, Zeus forbids her from opening a certain jar. When she disobeys him, every kind of evil imaginable spills out so that humanity henceforth must suffer corruption and death. With a little elbow grease, we can translate these particulars into moral and speculative truths: that disobedient curiosity killed the cat; that evil is a consequence not of a divine will, but of the human will; that humanity enjoyed an original state of incorruptibility. Drawing our attention to the overarching structure of the narrative, we can develop these truths further. Like a mirror, the second half of the story repeats and inverts the content of the first half:

   A. The Creation of Pandora

      B. Mankind enjoys a state of paradise

         C. Zeus commands Pandora to keep the jar closed

         C. Pandora opens the jar

      B. Evil corrupts paradise

   A. Destruction: Man becomes mortal

The myth, from this bird’s-eye view, moves from creation to destruction, from a paradise to a cursed land, from divine law to disobedience. It now bears a striking resemblance to the biblical account of the Fall if we treat Genesis 2 and 3 as one unit:

   A. The Creation of Adam

      B. Fertility: Adam tends the garden of paradise

         C. God warns of the forbidden tree

         C. Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden tree

      B. Barrenness: Evil corrupts the garden of paradise

   A. Destruction: Man becomes mortal

In both narratives, sin, to some degree, literally undoes a divine being’s act of creation and sterilizes the world: like Eve, Pandora’s “original sin” has public ramifications, and that public even includes nature. To top it off, these truths are vaulted within the pleasant encasement of wit (Pandora literally means “All-Gifted”), metrical rhythms (dactylic hexameter), and parallel structure (πλείη μὲν γὰρ γαῖα κακῶν, πλείη δὲ θάλασσα [for earth is full of evils, and the sea is full]),⁵ among other schemes and tropes. Given this share of truth and beauty, we must at least entertain the possibility that Plato and Aristotle were not the only pagans who prepared the gentiles to receive Revelation: even Hesiod had a hand in the matter.

St. Basil, of course, would not have us pretend Hesiod’s works share an equal dignity with Genesis. Even if we cast the matter of divine inspiration aside, there are other marked differences between the two: Zeus creates Pandora to punish the Titan Prometheus, whereas God creates Eve to be in communion with Adam; and while Pandora sins out of curiosity, Eve desires to become a god. As with any pagan author, reading Hesiod means chewing gum and walking at the same time. We can admire the truths he grounds in natural reason even while disavowing his errors. Reading is always an elaborate process of discernment, but forked works such as Hesiod’s demand a mindfulness St. Basil likens to a bee:

For just as bees know how to extract honey from flowers, which to men are agreeable only for their fragrance and color, even so here also those who look for something more than pleasure and enjoyment in such writers may derive profit for their souls… for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination… but rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go. So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest.⁶

Such flower hopping is not only a necessary labor for students: teachers and parents, as the front guard of education, ought to seek out the most virtuous and wise pagans. For “since [secular] writings are of all degrees of excellence, you should not study all of their poems without omitting a single word”;⁷ we ought, rather, to prioritize those works that are more true, more good, more beautiful. As Basil aptly puts it, “So, from the very beginning, we must examine each of their teachings, to harmonize it with our ultimate purpose, according to the Doric proverb, ‘testing each stone by the measuring-line.’”⁸

Considering the vast swath of heresies and classical poets, this process of selection may seem daunting. If you are unsure of where to begin, St. Basil recommends Hesiod, Homer, and Theognis. St. Jerome, “the Christian Cicero,” had an extensive familiarity with Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Quintilian, Terence, Lucan, and Persius.⁹ Among these, he took Virgil as his chief classical model, not for theological knowledge, but for a knowledge of “literature, art, science, prosody, [and] mythology.”¹⁰ Jerome even went so far as to call the poet “not the second but the first Homer of the Romans.”¹¹ St. Augustine, “the Christian Plato,” had an even deeper admiration for Virgil, labeling him a Messianic prophet and quoting him more than any other author.¹² The Saint also draws upon Homer, Horace, Cicero, Lucan, Claudian, Ennius, Perseus, Terentianus Marus, Terence, Valerius Soranus, Apuleius, and Aulus Gellius.¹³ Alongside the Church Fathers, Catholic and Catholic-adjacent poets venerate their pagan counterparts. Dante singles out Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan as the most virtuous pagan poets, granting them a seat in Limbo (Inferno, Canto IV); Shakespeare routinely imitates and alludes to Ovid, Homer, Virgil, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca; and Gerard Manley Hopkins structured his masterpiece, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” as a Pindaric Ode. Similar influences extend to Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, St. Thomas More, Cervantes, Richard Crashaw, John Dryden, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Richard Wilbur. Indeed, we would not have The Divine Comedy without Virgil; we would not have Romeo and Juliet without Ovid; and we would not have The Silver Chair without Homer. In style and philosophical ideals, pagan sages continue to influence Catholic poets to this day through the Horacian lyrics of Ryan Wilson and the Homeric allusions of James Matthew Wilson. It is no exaggeration to say that if you want to converse with Catholic poets of any era, even if only in the tape player of the mind, a cocktail-party knowledge of the classics is a minimal prerequisite. If your ambition is to be a poet of philosophical or sacred themes, then a more thorough awareness is a near-necessity.

There is, of course, a hidden irony in all this: just as pagan poetry disposes us to the truths of Revelation, Basil’s Revelation-based wisdom disposes us to the truths of pagan poetry. Reason and faith are, after all, “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”¹⁴ While pagan poets are not necessary for our salvation, they help us a great deal not to fly lopsided. To use St. Basil’s metaphor, if we think of our souls as linen robes, our pagan precursors are one of the many fixatives that bind us to the dye of Revelation:

Just as dyers prepare the cloth before they apply the dye, be it purple or any other color, so indeed must we also, if we would preserve indelible the idea of the true virtue, become first initiated in the pagan lore, then at length give special heed to the sacred and divine teachings.¹⁵

Even with the mordent of Ovid and Homer, we may fix our fibers to the ultimate purple: Christ’s royal blood.

Endnotes

¹ Plato, The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan Bloom (New York, Basic Books: 1968), 10.605b3-4, 10.607a5-6.

² As when Hades abducts Persephone, Apollo pursues Daphne, or Zeus violates Europa.

³ Augustine, Confessions, translated by F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), I.XIII.

⁴ St. Basil the Great, “Address to young men on the right use of Greek literature,” from Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry by Plutarch and Basil the Great, translated by Frederick Morgan Padelford. (Yale Studies in English, 1902), 15: 103.

⁵ Hesiod, “Works and Days,” from The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (London, William Heinemann Ltd.: 1914), line 101.

⁶ St. Basil the Great, “Address to young men on the right use of Greek literature,” from Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry by Plutarch and Basil the Great, translated by Frederick Morgan Padelford. (Yale Studies in English, 1902), 15: 105.

⁷ Ibid., 104.

⁸ Ibid., 105.

⁹ Harrison Cadwallader Coffin, “The Influence of Vergil on St. Jerome and on St. Augustine,” The Classical Weekly, 17, no. 22 (1924): 171.

¹⁰ Ibid., 172.

¹¹ Ibid., 171.

¹² Ibid., 173-174.

¹³ Ibid., 173.

¹⁴ John Paul II, Fides et Ratio [Encyclical Letter on the Relationship between Faith and Reason], The Holy See, September 14, 1998, preface, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html

¹⁵ St. Basil the Great, “Address to young men on the right use of Greek literature,” from Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry by Plutarch and Basil the Great, translated by Frederick Morgan Padelford. (Yale Studies in English, 1902), 15: 103.

Image sources

TITLE IMAGE: [Ted, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St. Basil the Great, St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church, Dayton, Ohio.jpg

HESIOD: [Carole Raddato, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monnus Mosaic, detail of Hesiod (ESIO-DVS) from a Roman Domus in Augusta Treverorum (Trier), end of the 3rd century AD, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, Germany (30038562895).jpg] skewed.

HOMER: [TimeTravelRome, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vichten Roman Mosaic IMG 20210517 111439 (51184089762).jpg] cropped.

VIRGIL: [Carole Raddato, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monnus Mosaic, detail of Virgil (VERGILLVS MARO) from a Roman Domus in Augusta Treverorum (Trier), end of the 3rd century AD, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, Germany.jpg] skewed.