Teaching Western Culture

Twelfth-century monasticism and its chief proponent, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, are the morning's topic in the Julian Street Library of Wilson College. Soda cans and coffee cups in hand, a dozen students have convened for one of the thrice-weekly seminars they attend for "Introduction to Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment" (Humanities 216-217 / 218-219). Seated casually with the students are two professors, among the most eminent in their fields. Leading the session is John V. Fleming *63, the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English and a specialist in the literature of the Middle Ages. Sitting in is Theodore K. Rabb *61, a professor of history and an authority on the Renaissance and early modern Europe. As director of the course, Rabb routinely visits all the seminar groups to keep up with their progress and to represent the historian's point of view-significant in a course that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to the material.
Fleming begins with some basic questions about the day's reading, St. Bernard's Apologia. Bernard, a leader of the Western church in his time, argues against (among other things) the artistic adornment of architecture-a distraction, he claims, from the more pressing business of praying for humanity's salvation. How does this renunciation of material things, Fleming asks, square with the church's considerable treasures? "By the 12th century, the church at Cluny was the greatest church in Christendom," Fleming notes, his tie askance and glasses well down his nose. "Its treasures were fabulous! What is the tension between the splendor of the outward manifestation and the purity of the inward view?"
Several students agree there's a clear inconsistency, but one young man points out that churchmen weren't exactly living it up. "These monks," he says, "may have had some fancy stuff and gold on their altars, but they're getting up at three in the morning to go out in the cold and pray. It isn't exactly Club Med."
Fleming shares some of his insider's knowledge: No one at the time much liked Bernard, he points out, because there was so much blunt, discomforting truth in his pontifications. "There are few characters in history about whose death everyone breathes a sigh of relief," Fleming says. "With Bernard, it happened. He told everyone off. And it was all so true." Like a mother who's always right, Fleming adds, "Bernard was pretty hard to take."
Synapses begin firing as several students offer comments and attempt to tie in earlier readings and discussions, which have covered the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Cicero, and St. Augustine. James Forrest, a sophomore from Great Neck, New York, offers his piece: "This whole conflict between glorifying God with treasures and glorifying God spiritually goes back to the body-versus-spirit argument, flesh-versus-soul. I think it's Bernard's main point. The church has been trying to glorify God by making the physical church-the body-better, when he believes people need to be focusing more on the spiritual."
"A brilliant summary," Fleming responds brightly. "We ought to put that one in neon lights."

f cultural conservatives are to be believed, elite schools like Princeton are increasingly disinclined to teach what in effect are courses in Western civilization. They point to a recent imbroglio at Yale University, which wound up returning to Texas oil billionaire Lee Bass a gift of $20 million to enlarge its program in Western studies. Yale said it rejected the money after Bass insisted on veto power in the selection of faculty for the chairs he intended to endow. However, a different theme emerged in the media coverage of the controversy: Yale, it was claimed, would rather give up $20 million than teach Aristotle and Augustine. The headline in Newsweek called the debacle "The Fall of Western Civ." At Dartmouth College, meanwhile, conservative alumni have founded the independent Hopkins Institute to promote a Western civilization curriculum at their alma mater. "You can actually major in English without reading a single play by Shakespeare," the institute's vice-president, conservative pundit Jeffrey Hart, charged in USA Today.
The death of Western civilization? Try telling that to the 30 students in the new humanities course at Princeton, who have been plowing through three hundred pages of Western classics each week over the last two semesters. While the culture wars have played out elsewhere, Princeton has quietly launched an ambitious new humanities initiative that is re-emphasizing the Western canon with vigor-and without apology. The course, which debuted in the spring of 1994, is essentially a quadruple offering-a double course running over two semesters. According to Fleming and Rabb, no protests have been raised in the name of multiculturalism. "We've been quite fortunate at Princeton in that we've avoided the controversy and polarization that have happened at some other places," Fleming says. "Contrary to what some people may expect, we're not teaching this course as a political statement. We're teaching it as a body of coherent and relevant cultural material; I'd be very suspicious of courses in Western civilization that are put together by people who do have a political ax to grind."
Nor has there been a shortage of interest among students. Forty-five applied for the 30 slots available. The eventual class members were chosen on the basis of an application that included a statement of their reasons for wanting to take the course.
Western civilization, of course, had been taught at Princeton all along in various courses across several departments. But since the mid-1980s, Rabb had dreamed of something out of the ordinary-a course that would provide a comprehensive, intensive grounding in Western civilization for a small group of students willing to devote a significant part of their college careers to the enterprise. He knew he wanted it to be interdisciplinary, to include history, art, and religion as well as literature and philosophy. The hope, Rabb says, was to demonstrate the conflict of interpretations that he believes is at the heart of the study of the humanities. "From the first, I'd hoped we could get senior figures teaching this," he says. "The major problem was prying loose people's time."
Rabb eventually found influential allies in Fleming, Professor of Comparative Literature Robert Hollander '55, and John F. Wilson, the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion (and also dean of the Graduate School). Their efforts were buoyed by a university initiative to put more senior professors in classrooms with freshmen. Rabb and company worked through the Council of the Humanities and finally pulled together the resources for a one-semester pilot offering in 1993. Pleased by the results, they expanded their scope to two semesters and made some adjustments to the readings, including the addition of one non-Western text, the Koran. The humanities council gave its seal of approval, and the new course was officially born.
"We felt this kind of course could serve as a magnet for the best humanities students, people who were looking for this kind of intense experience," says Carol Rigolot, the executive director of the Humanities Council, under whose auspices the course is offered and administered. "We think this can make the difference between someone's choosing Princeton or going elsewhere."
One such student was Jonathan Tze '98. During his senior year in high school in Blacksburg, Virginia, after he'd been admitted to Princeton but before he had decided where to matriculate, Tze received a special advertisement for the course, a one-page flier featuring a reproduction of Rubens's painting Cupid Supplicating Jupiter alongside two quotations representing radically opposed interpretations of the painting's meaning. The flier stood out, Tze recalls, from the piles of materials he was receiving from Princeton and other schools.
"I remember holding that piece of paper and thinking, 'Hmmm, interesting,' " Tze says. "I thought it was definitely something different, something my grandfather would have pursued. Mom and Dad went nuts over the offering. I knew that these world-famous professors would not just be dropping by to enlighten the seminar group once a semester, but would actually be teaching the class. Suddenly, Princeton looked more appealing."
The prospect of close contact with the professors also appealed to Elissa Kristin Doyle '98, who valued the "personal" setting at the small, private high school she attended and wanted the same in her college education. The chance to wrestle with the classic texts in depth and in their entirety also appealed to her. "From the moment I first learned about this course, I was certain that I wanted it to be a part of my Princeton career," she says.
In the absence of any Bass-style gifts, the new humanities course at Princeton has been created almost entirely out of existing resources. The Humanities Council has essentially borrowed the services of the professors from their home departments in exchange for "full-time equivalents" (FTEs), a form of currency that enables the lending departments to hire someone to fill the vacated slots. Besides Rabb and Fleming, the course has been taught in the current go-round by Richard P. Martin, a professor of classics, and Frank B. Ordiway, an assistant professor of English, with the help of administrative assistant Evan Haefeli, a graduate student in history. To secure the four professors, the Humanities Council had to spend about half its budget of FTEs, which has meant fewer resources for the dozen other courses on the roster of the Program in Humanistic Studies. Despite the expense, the Humanities Council has pledged to support the new course for two more years, according to Rigolot. "We hope very much," she adds, "that a donor will then adopt it. We cannot continue offering it this way forever."

alfway through the morning's seminar discussion, Fleming and his students are in the thick of it. Bernard's writings have lured them into an issue that runs through much of the semester's material, beginning with Plato. It's a question of the upper versus the lower, the divine versus the vulgar. Tze offers an example. Where music is concerned, classical Christian imagery favors string instruments over wind instruments, he points out; lutes and harps are superior. Fleming agrees. "Angels play harps. You will never find angels playing the saxophone," he says. "If you read Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, one of my many favorites, you'll find that the one leading the pilgrims is a drunk miller playing bagpipes. We're talking about flesh versus spirit, mind versus body, as Mr. Forrest said."
The conversation segues to the question of guilt and redemption. Tze is curious about the elite in Bernard's time, those wealthy but not-so-pious men who financed the monasteries. Were they trying to save just their own souls, he wonders, or everyone's? "Every place had a big monastery at the top of the hill," Fleming replies, "paid for by rich people, some of them famous for all sorts of sordid stuff, who thought it was a sound investment."
To live Bernard's monastic ideal was, after all, a very hard sell. Eventually, even clergy would start marrying, Fleming notes. "What do you think of asceticism?" the professor asks the group. "Are you shocked? Bored?"
"I've always had serious problem with this obsession with asceticism," Lawrence Choi '98, of Tullahoma, Tennessee, replies. "I don't believe Judaism is nearly so hung up with it; Judaism is more interested in the question of how to live. When Christianity comes up, I still don't understand the point of asceticism. I fail to understand the sheer logic. Why would someone want to do it? It seems utterly futile to me."
Choi stalls, but Rabb, seated immediately next to him, urges him on. "Come on, Lawrence," he urges. "What's the punch line?"
Emboldened, Choi continues. "Maybe I've had too much biology," he says, "but it seems to me asceticism goes against nature. After all, we're all just amino acids."
To Rabb and Fleming, it's a golden seminar moment, and they savor the comment: We're all just amino acids. "Maybe we're only half acids," Fleming quips. "David, can you rescue us?"
"By looking to logic, you're missing the whole point," answers David Bell '98, of Decatur, Georgia. "It's not city planning through religion. It's an ideal. It's trying to live up to an ideal of perfection that's been around since Plato and before."
"We ought to congratulate Lawrence," declares Rabb, "for stimulating an epic moment of seminar discussion."

he focus on western civilization is not the only thing traditional about the new humanities initiative. Those who worry that the academy has gotten soft can take heart; this is one demanding course. In addition to a three-hour final exam and the three hundred pages of reading a week, the students write six short papers and one long paper each semester. They attend two lectures a week as well as the three seminars. An added bonus is a series of field trips. An "enrichment fund" donated by Thomas Barbour '43 provides for outings to theater productions and museums. Altogether, Tze estimates, the course required about 25 hours a week of his time, not counting the hours spent in extracurricular discussions with his peers and professors, often via E-mail messages sent in the early-morning hours. To see undergraduates stimulated enough to wrestle with the material for the sheer joy of it is particularly pleasing to Rabb and Fleming, who feel that today's students too often approach college as a 9-to-5 job.
"It's enormous fun seeing them come to terms with some of these things for the first time," Rabb says, "and to see them realize that issues they thought they'd invented have been around for two thousand years-things like the relationship between men and women, the nature of the family, ambition versus contemplation. What's exciting is their realization that these aren't dead issues they're reading about, that what they're worrying about right now in their own lives also engaged the great thinkers of antiquity. We hope this brings into their lives the perspectives of those tremendously brilliant people."
The course does cover a handful of women, including Sappho, Heloise, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan. But it is not lost on Elissa Doyle, one of the women in the course, that the authors are predominantly male. She says she accepts the plain fact that most enduring literature prior to the 18th century was written by men. More important, she says, is the content of the works. "This class has been one of the high points of my career at Princeton and my education as a whole," says the Princeton native. "I believe that this class will serve as the basis for the rest of my intellectual pursuits. I'm certain that whatever major I choose-and it most likely will not be classics-I will return again and again to the foundations I've built in this class. By lending perspective on the past, these texts enrich my studies of more modern works."
Tze, who is eyeing biology and the Woodrow Wilson School as possible majors, says he found something remarkable in nearly every one of the readings he tackled last spring, though Boethius, St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Homer engaged him the most. "I thought St. Augustine's work was brilliant in both form and content," he says, "and it was particularly appealing for me because I was working with it during a time of religious crisis in my own life. His heart-felt observations and clear, precise writing in Confessions really hit home. I read it twice, annotating the text with blotches of blue ink and yellow highlights." The Iliad, he adds, "was marvelous. I gloried in the depictions of the colorful speeches and angry warfare, which seemed to leap off the page in full Technicolor. It was pretty vivid."
By concentrating a relatively small number of students in so many discussions over so long a time, Fleming says the humanities initiative is helping revive the preceptorial, a Princeton institution that he believes has suffered in recent decades. "Since it's a limited-enrollment course with a relatively small number of students, they get to know each other very well," he says. "What this has done, in a certain sense, is to rescue the precept model. Because they're with each other so much, the quality of the discussion, I find, is much, much better than it is in an ordinary precept. Because they know one another, they've built up a kind of intellectual history together. They get to know us very well, too, and they begin to see that we professors are not in any kind of lockstep at all about the meaning of these texts or how to interpret them. So they see a good example of a mature plurality of opinion about texts and respectful disagreement. Maybe even disrespectful disagreements sometimes," Fleming adds with a laugh, "but always good-natured disagreement."
"I'm delighted that this has finally happened at Princeton," says Rabb. "It's a very heartening experience. To me, this is really what universities are all about, and I think it's something that will remain. It's been a great experience for us on the faculty, and it's something that will stay with these kids, too. They are now a group, and my guess is that even 20 years from now there will be a very special body within their larger Princeton class that will be bonded by the horrors and suffering and long nights, as well as the passion and engagement, of this course. I hope so. It's important for universities to have bodies of people like that, who are joined not because they're all football players or actors or musicians in the orchestra, but because they have had this formative, shaping course together."

Tom Krattenmaker, a former university staff writer and a frequent contributor to paw, is the director of public relations at Swarthmore College.