The Wisdom of Aesop

     One of the best courses I had within my doctoral program was a study of Aesop's fables. We used the Babrius and Phaedrus edition in the Loeb series.  Of all of the fables, I was struck recently on the political and moral implications of one in particular. The Ant and The Grasshopper should be carefully studied by all people, especially political leaders that seem to have little sense of the past and absolutely no sense of the future regarding their current actions.

     Once there lived an ant and a grasshopper in a grassy meadow. All day long the ant would work hard, collecting grains of wheat from the farmer's field far away. She would hurry to the field every morning, as soon as it was light enough to see by, and toil back with a heavy grain of wheat balanced on her head. She would put the grain of wheat carefully away in her cupboard, and then hurry back to the field for another one. All day long she would work, without stop or rest, scurrying back and forth from the field, collecting the grains of wheat and storing them carefully in her cupboard.

     The grasshopper would look at her and laugh. 'Why do you work so hard, dear ant?' he would say. 'Come, rest awhile, listen to my song. Summer is here, the days are long and bright. Why waste the sunshine in labour and toil?'

     The ant would ignore him, and head bent, would just hurry to the field a little faster. This would make the grasshopper laugh even louder. 'What a silly little ant you are!' he would call after her. 'Come, come and dance with me! Forget about work! Enjoy the summer! Live a little!' And the grasshopper would hop away across the meadow, singing and dancing merrily.

     Summer faded into autumn, and autumn turned into winter. The sun was hardly seen, and the days were short and grey, the nights long and dark. It became freezing cold, and snow began to fall.

     The grasshopper didn't feel like singing any more. He was cold and hungry. He had nowhere to shelter from the snow, and nothing to eat. The meadow and the farmer's field were covered in snow, and there was no food to be had. 'Oh what shall I do? Where shall I go?' wailed the grasshopper. Suddenly he remembered the ant. 'Ah - I shall go to the ant and ask her for food and shelter!' declared the grasshopper, perking up. So off he went to the ant's house and knocked at her door. 'Hello ant!' he cried cheerfully. 'Here I am, to sing for you, as I warm myself by your fire, while you get me some food from that cupboard of yours!'

    The ant looked at the grasshopper and said, 'All summer long I worked hard while you made fun of me, and sang and danced. You should have thought of winter then! Find somewhere else to sing, grasshopper! There is no warmth or food for you here!' And the ant shut the door in the grasshopper's face.

     As we did in that doctoral seminar, I'll let you provide the best application.  There is tremendous wisdom in the fabulist tradition.  If you have not read them lately, it would benefit you.  Imagine proverbial teachings in short-short story form.  Let us rescue these wise teachings from the elementary school and pray our "highly educated" politicians read some fables.

Thomas Aquinas on Wisdom

     On occasion, but it should be with great frequency, within the context of a class discussion or even a lesson at Church, the topic of wisdom is discussed.  Frequently, but it should be on occasion, the definition is put forth as practical or applied learning.  It is at times like these I desired that Thomas Aquinas's definition of wisdom had won the day in Western civilization.  In truth, the Liberal Arts would have done much better through the ages if his definition had been the one people lived by and taught.  
     For Thomas, and most Philosophers until the modern world, Philosophy was essentially the "love of wisdom."  To engage in the the practice of philosophy was the faithful pursuit of wisdom wherever it might be found. The primary understanding of truth was saying of a thing what was and not saying of a thing what was not.  In a larger sense, wisdom was an understanding of the truth of things. Philosophy was not navel gazing and not ideological manipulation, but it was a diligent quest to understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful.  
     Thomas asserts (and I paraphrase) in the Summa Contra Gentiles I, 2: While humans are finite, among all the human pursuits, the pursuit of wisdom is the ultimate end, and it is the most noble, and the most useful, and that pursuit that can provide the greatest joy. Through Philosophy, we humans are more like God and can apprehend the truth of things which calls us to a better life.  
     It is also worth noting that among some of the greatest Philosophers in the Western intellectual tradition, there was no one more committed to prayer.  Thomas, as a grand example of this, not only sought wisdom as part of his brilliant, intellectual, and knowledgeable endeavors, also, daily, prayed for wisdom.
    This may surprise post-Enlightenment people that prior to the Enlightenment, wisdom was closely connected to reason.  For them to reason, reflect, imagine, conjecture, was part of what it meant to act faithfully in accordance with being in the image of God.  As it related to the four causes expounded by Aristotle and adhered to by Thomas, wisdom is an understanding of the final cause.  Sadly, this has all but been lost in science and philosophy today.  
     Is it possible that one reason Philosophy is ridiculed by so many today as irrelevant and outdated is because it lost its way a few hundred years ago and has never fully found the way back to the path.  If philosophy was still about the blending of the theoretical and the practical, the reflection and the proper moral action, one can imagine that there would be many who would come to love and live wisdom.
     

Christopher Dawson's "Outline of History"

     Teaching as one who desires to "think Christianly", the reality is that it is not merely the content, but the way one thinks about the content.  A Professor of Cultural History who is informed by Christian conviction will certainly cover many of the the same topics, eras, issues, and people that a non-Christian counter-part would cover.
    I remember hearing, years ago, about a rabid atheistic Professor of Philosophy who so disdained Thomas Aquinas, he refused to even mention him in his Survey class other than to dismiss the greatest Medieval Philosopher, arguably the greatest Philosopher of all time.  Obviously, his students were cheated of a full education.  Biases considered, as we all have them, when I teach Cultural History, my debt, respect, and gratitude is extended toward Christopher Dawson and explicitly stated..
     Dawson is most certainly correct when he expressed this conviction about the Christian view of history.  The Christian view of history is not a secondary element derived by philosophical reflection from the study of history. It lies at the very heart of Christianity and forms an integral part of the Christian faith. Hence there is no Christian “philosophy of history” in the strict sense of the word. There is, instead, a Christian history and a Christian theology of history, and it is not too much to say that without them there would be no such thing as Christianity.
    Due to the influence of Dawson's writings on my historical consciousness, I often begin by giving the widest parameters of Western Civilization by describing Pre-Christian; Christian; and Post-Christian phases. To provided more nuance, I again, borrow from Dawson's works. Any reader will note the central role that Religion, in particular, the Christian Religion, holds.  Dawson, like other great historians, spoke of discernible patterns or cycles in history.    The following is an outline of Western Civilization I have gleamed from several of Dawson's works.

A. Period of Growth. Dominance of the old synthesis in the young civilization.
B. Period of Progress. Disintegration of the old synthesis in the progressive civilization.
C. Period of Maturity. Rise of the new synthesis in the mature civilization.

The Hellenic world

Why Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked IS a Great Book

     On numerous occasions, Mortimer Adler wrote about the criteria that was used to determine which books of all the books written in the West would be placed within The Great Books of the Western World.  Contrary to confusion and many misstatements I've read over the years, Adler says it was essentially three criteria and they are as follows:
1) Contemporary significance - Even though historically valuable, these works address “issues, problems, or facets of human life that are of major concern to us today as well as at the time in which they were written.”
Numerous critical reviews when Something Wicked This Way Comes was published considered it a most important and timely work and it was ranked on the New York Tribune's best books of 1962. Many of the issues explored within the novel are timeless in their nature.
2) Rereadability - These are books “intended for the general reader that are worth reading carefully many times or studying over and over again...indefinitely rereadable for pleasure and profit.”
As I have confessed before in blogs and lectures, I re-read Something Wicked This Way Comes every year around Halloween. This has become my habit for the past several years, and it is with ongoing pleasure and intellectual profit that I have done this. In truth, this work is rich in content and form and has enough meaningful ambiguity to sustain numerous readings and a enriching conversation. Not this this would seal the deal, but even popular novelist Stephen King deemed Something Wicked This Way Comes as Bradbury's finest work.
3) Extensive relevance and something of significance to say about a large number of the 102 great ideas of the thinking and writing done by the authors chosen.
Of the 102 Great Ideas Adler explored, Something Wicked This Way Comes touches upon or explores in a meaningful manner the following: Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Courage, Custom and Convention, Desire, Duty, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, God, Good and Evil, Habit, Happiness, Honor, Immortality, Judgment, Knowledge, Law, Life and Death, Love, Man, Memory and Imagination, Mind, Nature, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Pleasure and Pain, Prudence, Punishment, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Senses, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Soul, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Virtue and Vice, Will, Wisdom, and World.
Additionally, Adler said that the list of Great Books needed to be regularly reevaluated. With this in mind, I hope that I have made the case for including this novel by Ray Bradbury and including it in the open and extended list Adler proposed.
As with other Bradbury writings, there is often an earlier life or version before the published date. While Something Wicked This Way Comes was published in 1962 (50 years ago and still in print), there were earlier kernel versions in short stories - "The Electrocution" 1946, "The Black Ferris" 1948, a screen play entitled "Dark Carnival" 1955, another screen play "The Marked Bullet" 1956, as well as an unpublished first-person novel Jamie and Me.
     Something Wicked This Way Comes should be read as a companion story to Dandelion Wine .  Even Bradbury clustered these two stories with Farewell Summer and called these the Illinois trilogy.  
     Whether read as a moral fable, Christian allegory, or a moralistic horror tale, this is a novel that should be rescued from the middle school reading list and the bin of literary obscurity and given due attention.  Beyond being a masterfully crafted exploration of numerous humane themes, it is a delightful, at times, but ultimately light, tale about the sin of narcissism and the possibility of human connectedness in the presence of that most damnable of sins.

Ray Bradbury R.I.P.

     I begin my lectures and presentations about Ray Bradbury with a confession.  The confession is simple and one of which I express a deep sense of loss and a degree of shame.  I did not start reading Ray Bradbury until a few years ago.  I did not read him because I judged a book by its cover.  There was a sense that I knew what his books would be about because the covers of his books told it all.  One cannot be more wrong.  
     It was an endorsement I read on a Russell Kirk book that came from Ray Bradbury.  I thought, if Ray Bradbury liked Russell Kirk, then maybe, just maybe, I might appreciate Ray Bradbury.  After going to the local bookstore and buying Something Wicked This Way Comes and reading it, I was hooked.  My repentance took the form of reading The Martian Chronicles and the delight and feeding of my mind was tremendous.  I then went out and bought Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and a collection of his short stories.  I have never been the same since.  As a matter of fact, every Halloween season for the past six years I've re-read Something Wicked This Way Comes, and every first day of the summer for the past several years I have re-read Dandelion Wine.  
     Ray Bradbury's passing brings to my mind numerous scenes in his novels and short stories where a character comes to the realization that life is a precious gift, and that gift is to be enjoyed.  On numerous occasions, Ray noted his favorite novelist Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol makes this profound point when Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed by the ghosts that had visited him.  That moment of "I'm alive, I'm alive," is what it is all about in literature and life.  For Bradbury's own unique twist on this, read the short story "Jack-in-the Box."
     For the past few years I have been blessed to visit The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and gain such insight of Ray's life and writings from the top two Bradbury scholars in the world (this is not an exaggeration), it has been equally as exhilarating giving lectures through the Big Read Events where thousands of people read, think about, and discuss Fahrenheit 451.  A number of you who have read my blogs know that I even have a section "All Things Bradbury" as a partial testament that as a Professor of Great Books, I consider his writings as worthy to be added to the canon of the best books penned by the human hand.
     One of my summer blog projects is to make the case that the novels of Ray Bradbury need to be rescued from middle school reading lists and make their way among serious readers.  With Bradbury's death, the hope is that now more literary scholars will give attention to his genius and explore his literary output and recognize that some of his writings deserve the designation of "masterpiece," "classic" and "Great Book."
     Sad is the reality that now with Ray Bradbury's passing many will give him proper attention and proper respect for being the extraordinary figure he was and is to the life of letters.  If you have never read anything by Ray Bradbury, do what I did and go out and get some of his books and short stories.  Be delighted, and receive a literary prompt to "live," to really live before you die. 
      

Russell Kirk's Divine Commedy