O Tempora, O Mores!

     Recently I've stumbled upon a book called Barrett's Grammar, written by an intellectual huckster named Solomon Barrett, back in the 1840's and 50's and 60's.  I say that because Dr. Barrett, Philologist for Hire, published his book in at least three editions, each time apparently augmenting its lessons and spiffing it up for sale.  In my Second Edition (1853), he has added a charmingly silly polyglot series of conversations at a shoe store, a butcher's, a tailor's, and so forth.  My favorite line of all is the German, in Gothic print, for "How much does this cravat cost?": "Was ist der Preis dieses Halsbinders?"  It should be pronounced as if Harvey Korman were doing an impersonation of Sigmund Freud.  I too often find myself wondering about neckbinders, what they cost, and to whom I should give one.

     Barrett also added a polyglot Gospel of Matthew, or at least chapters 2 through 10.  His Latin, it seems, is his own, not Jerome's; I am guessing that he was a good Protestant.  "In principio erat Sermo," he writes earlier in the book, to translate John 1:1.  I can't think that Jerome wrote anything other than "Verbum," though my Vulgate is 800 miles away.

     Why did he write his book?  To teach young people the classical and modern languages, obviously; as he puts it in a delightful bit of self-praise, to prevent young men from having to wear out the insides of the walls at college.  He thought he had a system for the simultaneous learning of Greek and Latin, and for reducing the notorious quirkiness of the Greek verb to regularity and order.  A young man must be really stolid -- that is the word, "stolid," -- wrote one of his reviewers, if he cannot manage to learn Greek in three months, using Barrett's novel instruction.  And in fact the second edition is prefaced by eleven pages of learned reviews, from the editors of the Rahway, N. J., Register, the Utica Gazette, the Poughkeepsie Sentinel, and other newspapers.  I do not have the book with me as I write this, or I would give you a sample of second-tier newspaper writing circa 1853.  It's astonishing.  As were the sales of the first edition: 17,000, in the first year of its publication (1846).  Think about that for a moment.  Polk was President; Texas had just been annexed; the population of America, I'm guessing, was somewhere around 60 million (I may be overestimating; it was only 179 million in 1950).  So, in one year, 1 out of 3500 people buys a copy of Barrett's Grammar.  It would be as if a grammar book -- a grammar book, now -- sold 85,000 copies today.

     Most unusual -- all those ignorant forebears of ours, wanting to learn Latin and Greek.  But the biggest surprise is in the back of the book, in handwriting, or rather in a woodcut copy of original signatures.  Dr. Barrett, whose book could only be bought by personal subscription -- not in bookstores! -- listed the signatures of eminent Americans who had subscribed.  The first page includes Millard Fillmore, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Hamilton Fish, and William Seward.  Page three includes several signatories from Harvard University, one Henry W. Longfellow among them.  I wish I could say I recognized more than one or two of the rest.

     Seward was an abolitionist from New York.  Clay was the Great Pacificator, from Kentucky.  Calhoun, from South Carolina, was the foremost defender of states' rights, in a bad cause.  Fillmore was the mildly pro-slavery Whig President, succeeding the deceased Zachary Taylor.  Hamilton Fish would become Secretary of State under -- I may be getting this wrong -- Grant.  Webster was the eminent defender of nationalism, from Massachusetts.  And what they all had in common?  They bought Barrett's Grammar.

     And what does that mean?  Calhoun had lost his faith in Christ as the second Person of the Trinity; he had come round to the Unitarianism of the elder Adams, alas.  I'm not sure about Seward on that score, either.  But bad theology aside, all these men believed passionately in our classical and Christian heritage.  They read the same works, and came sometimes to different conclusions; but they are all recognizably Americans, in the great tradition of the Christian west.

     Now can we imagine any work that Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Rush Limbaugh, and Toni Morrison would all buy?  Can we imagine what the Rahway Register would say about it, if the Rahway Register still existed, or the Utica Gazette?  Do you suppose the book would be a new edition of Thucydides?

Comments

[W.E.D. Godbold]

According to wikipedia the U.S. population was about 17 million in 1840 and 23 million in 1850. That would mean that your hypothetical best-selling modern grammar book would do about 255,000 copies today.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Whoops! It sould actually be a bit more--I was including the 3 million slaves who weren't likely to be in the position to buy such books. So roughly 1 in 1000 non-enslaved persons bought the book in the Unites States in 1946 (assuming there were ~20,000,000 total).

[Jeremy]

I know it is petty, but I think Millard Fillmore was a Whig President, not a Democrat.

[Kyle]

I think I've got it in PDF here.

[Kyle]

Excuse me. Here.

[Stuart Koehl]

Most Americans and Englishmen could not speak or read Latin or Greek (Old joke: A good Latinist is someone who knows no Greek). On the other hand, most shared a common cultural frame of reference, the basis of which was Shakespeare and the King James Bible. That neither of these is required reading from elementary school has deeply impoverished both our common culture and the English language.

[Joe Long]

"Now can we imagine any work that Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Rush Limbaugh, and Toni Morrison would all buy? Do you suppose the book would be a new edition of Thucydides?"

No, but I could wish it was the Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Amazon delivered mine, and it is a wonderful book - and a great deal of fun. Kudos.

[DGP]

>>That neither of these is required reading from elementary school has deeply impoverished both our common culture and the English language.

You can go further than elementary. I've met MAs and PhDs in English lit who haven't read the Bible and who demonstrate no familiarity with it. One wonders what they think they understand of anything written before 1968.

[dj]

Contrary to some Op/Ed columnists, it is not the rise of talk radio that has fragmented our country but the loss of our "common culture" as referenced by Mr Koehl above. It should be a national goal to re-capture it before it is too late.
Oh, and I bought my copy of the PIG to Western Civ too and I must agree with Mr. Long's review.

[Andy]

Regarding the translation of John 1:1 ("in principio erat sermo...") Mr. Esolen hazards a guess that Dr. Barrett was a Protestant. I'll go one further: I wager that he was a Calvinist, or at least the intellectual heir of Calvinism.

I'd love to see the rest of Barrett's translation, but it sounds as though he lifted John 1:1 directly from John Calvin's Latin translation. Calvin certainly used "Sermo" in place of Jerome's "Verbum," and did it quite consciously, intending to equate Christ the incarnate Word with the Word preached.

I don't know offhand if Luther or any of the other magisterial reformers made the same choice.

[Beth in TN]

"I've met MAs and PhDs in English lit who haven't read the Bible":

I recall in grad school at a state university, in an American Lit course, every day our professor would ask about some allusion or other in _Moby Dick_. One other student and I would wait a bit, look around, finally raise our hands; he would call on one of us (he fell into choosing alternately), and we'd explain where it was in the Bible and what it was about. One day he walked in with a Bible, held it up, and told the class, "If you don't know this book, you need to get out of the English major. You can't possibly understand and appreciate literature without this book."

We need more like him!! (And no, he wasn't a Christian, just a scholar with integrity who loved his subject.)

[DGP]

>>We need more like him!! (And no, he wasn't a Christian, just a scholar with integrity who loved his subject.)

Scholarship, integrity, and love -- that's a potent mix. Sadly, our churches turn too many such men away. Often, we prefer reassuring bromides over scholarship, a facade of respectability or popularity over integrity, and indulgent tolerance over love.

[AMereLurker]

"I've met MAs and PhDs in English lit who haven't read the Bible and who demonstrate no familiarity with it. One wonders what they think they understand of anything written before 1968."

They don't care about anything written before 1968, unless it's to use as fodder for their pet-issue analysis. English Lit, at least in my graduate program, was in actuality a Cultural/Identity Studies program. It squashed my interest in academia in no time flat, to be sure. So, I got my degree and started staying home to raise my children.

[GL]

Beth,

Great story and oh so true. The same is true of other fields as well.

How can you possibly understand what so many philosophers and other important persons in history were talking about if you don't know the Bible? Anyone who has read Lincoln's arguments for democracy and against slavery would have a hard time fully understanding what he was saying if they were ignorant of the Scripture. I would go further and say that they would have a hard time understanding his prose without at least a passing familiarity with the Authorized Version of Scripture and with the writings of Shakespeare. And the writings of the Founders practically drip Scriptural references and phrasing which reflects a comfortable familiarity with the KJV/AV.

I would go further and assert that one cannot understand the American legal system, my field, without a familiarity with and a traditional understanding of Scripture -- the lack of which likely goes a long way toward explaining the mess which has been made of American law during the past century and especially the last half-century.

[DGP]

>>I would go further and assert that one cannot understand the American legal system, my field, without a familiarity with and a traditional understanding of Scripture -- the lack of which likely goes a long way toward explaining the mess which has been made of American law during the past century and especially the last half-century.

So which fields of human study or endeavor *require* knowledge of Scripture and/or Tradition for a thorough understanding? Theology and philosophy, of course. We've established literature and law. History I think is also obvious. Strong candidates: Fine arts, education. Disputed: Psychology, politics. Unlikely: Science, engineering, mathematics.

Here, then, a great reduction: There are only two fields of human thought -- religion and mathematics. Everything else is some combination or application of these two.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Fr. DGP,
I'm dubious of that assessment. You can't get biology out of religion or mathematics. (I'm not saying that mathematics isn't extraordinarily useful for modeling certain systems, but it gives no clue about the tremendous variety of living things or the underlying molecular intricacies.)

[DGP]

>>I'm dubious of that assessment.

It is a reduction, I admit. However:

>>You can't get biology out of religion or mathematics.

It depends on what you think mathematics is. Most people, who never make it beyond college math, think of it as glorified counting. However, upper mathematics is all about structures of knowledge, both in the sense of criteria for knowability and truth, and in the sense of patterns and models through which we know things.

A conventional way of putting it: Biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics.

[GL]

As to the law, DGP is correct, law is applied morality and ethics or, as he puts it, religion. Those who say that we can't legislate morality do not understand what either law or morality is about. All law reduces to an application of morality, either directly (e.g., laws against homicide, theft, racial discrimination, restricting or permitting abortion, forbidding or permitting same-sex "marriages" etc. are direct applications of the moral code) or indirectly (e.g., laws regulating the economy or raising tax revenue have within them moral principals even though their immediate aim my not be to enforce the moral code). For example, much of the tax debate revolves around "fairness," e.g., is a flat income tax fairer or less fair than a progressive income tax or is a sales tax more or less fair than an income tax. "Fairness" reduces itself to "what is right." That is a moral question.

Even such mundane legislation as to whether to build a road and, if so, where, involves moral questions. Is it right to take from workers the bread they have earned by the sweat of their brow and from families money which could be used in the household so that an interstate connecting Washington, D.C. to New York can be built or so that a bridge to nowhere can be built. We support the first piece of legislations because we believe the common good outweighs the individual harm and rail against the latter piece of legislation because the individual harm outweighs the common good. Assessments of what makes up the common good and the individual harm are either utilitarian evaluations or moral ones and utilitarian evaluations carry with them a moral component, e.g., an assumption that it is right that collective or individual wealth be maximized.

And since politics is about making and implementing policy and since the instrument by which that is most often done is law, politics too reduces itself to morality and ethics -- i.e., what is right.

In the end, legislating morality is not only possible, it is inescapable.

[DGP]

>>And since politics is about making and implementing policy and since the instrument by which that is most often done is law, politics too reduces itself to morality and ethics -- i.e., what is right.

You're right about politics requiring moral philosophy, and moral philosophy comes back around to religious cult, but there's also a fair amount of revelation- or tradition-based piety directly involved in politics, even in East Asia. More so elsewhere.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Fr. DGP,
I think this is neglecting "emergent properties" of both chemical and biological systems. You can't predict the sorts of ways that molecules will combine from physics and you can't predict what organisms are going to do from chemistry. Knowing molecular biology doesn't allow you to grasp how the immune system or (God help us) the brain function. (This isn't to say that molecular biology hasn't been tremendously helpful in figuring out how parts of these systems function.)

[DGP]

>>I think this is neglecting "emergent properties" of both chemical and biological systems. You can't predict the sorts of ways that molecules will combine from physics and you can't predict what organisms are going to do from chemistry. Knowing molecular biology doesn't allow you to grasp how the immune system or (God help us) the brain function.

Neither can I predict the course of history, nor the development of law and philosophy, nor the writing of novels, no matter how much I know about religion. And yet, once I've studied these former things, I perceive them to be asymmetrically dependent on the latter.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Okay, I may have been misunderstanding you. I fully acknowledge that biology is asymmetrically dependent on chemistry and chemistry on physics, but this does not mean that the former "reduces" (as you stated above) to the latter. (I may be dense, but I just don't see it. Alternately, you may be using a vocabulary that I'm not used to.)

Also, do you mean "religion" or "theology"? I've got some sympathy with D.B. Hart's criticism (in a review of Dennett's atheist tract in FT) of the protean quality of the term "religion".

[Bobby Winters]

>>A conventional way of putting it: Biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics.<<

Mathematics has language that is useful for describing some aspects of physics, yet physics has its own language. Similarly, the language of physics can be used to describe some aspects of chemistry, yet chemistry is its own practice with its own language, and so forth.

When I cry at a man's funeral, I don't do this because it evolved as a part of my culture in order to create stronger tribal bonds. I cry because I remember my father's death. It's not because of a motion of particular brain chemicals; it's because I'm sad.

[DGP]

>>Okay, I may have been misunderstanding you. I fully acknowledge that biology is asymmetrically dependent on chemistry and chemistry on physics, but this does not mean that the former "reduces" (as you stated above) to the latter.

My original use of the word was to concede that I was writing reductionistically, in the negative sense, to say that there are only two fields of human thought. To put it that way is too strong. However, I might stand by the claim that everything else is a combination or application of these.

>>Also, do you mean "religion" or "theology"? I've got some sympathy with D.B. Hart's criticism (in a review of Dennett's atheist tract in FT) of the protean quality of the term "religion".

Yes, "religion" is problematic, but that's what I intended. I suppose I mean by the term any account of the world derived from revelation -- "revelation" in turn defined broadly as sacred text (e.g. Christianity), sacred tradition (e.g. practical Confucianism), or personal apotheosis (e.g. Buddhism).

>>Mathematics has language that is useful for describing some aspects of physics, yet physics has its own language.

Mm, but the relationship is subtler than that. Mr. Godbold was closer when he described "emergent properties," which occur when we are dealing with two distinct planes of phenomena. He rightly shied away from the notion of reduction, but the dependence is much stronger than simply one of "useful" language.

>>When I cry at a man's funeral, I don't do this because it evolved as a part of my culture in order to create stronger tribal bonds. I cry because I remember my father's death. It's not because of a motion of particular brain chemicals; it's because I'm sad.

It's all four of those things (bonds, father, brain, sad) and more. The tribal bonds, for example, are not unimportant simply because you do not advert to them in the midst of grief. Recall Joseph Bottum's masterful essay on death and politics in last year's FT.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Aha! I buy the revelation/sacred tradition/personal apotheosis part for "religion"--at least as we speak about it, but looking at them they do seem like very different things.

[DGP]

>>Aha! I buy the revelation/sacred tradition/personal apotheosis part for "religion"--at least as we speak about it, but looking at them they do seem like very different things.

It's easy: Religion is everything other than what is derived from human reason -- i.e., mathematics. ;)

More seriously: Of course, they look very different, but they are procedurally similar. Religious approaches involve fixing one's attention one one particular thing or set of things (words, customs, persons) and recognizing it as divine.

Perhaps I should have identified the example of a religion of sacred text as Judaism, because Christianity is in important respects *all* of these religions, fixed as it is simultaneously on a Person, a Text, and a Tradition.

Sciences other than mathematics depend not only on mathematical resoning and modeling as a substrate, but also on the recognition of a distinct plane of reality. Such a recognition derives from emergent properties, yes, but also from the spirituality of the observer: We recognize the arrangement of the celestial bodies as something more than mathematics (probability waves identified as particles interacting on astronomic scales), and so discern physics. We recognize the formation of the earth as something more than physics, and so discern chemistry. We recognize in life something more than mere chemicals, and so discern biology.

All this is really a reverberation of religiosity. It involves something different than the mechanical application of reason -- namely, an openness to recognition of other (higher?) qualities of the created order. In that sense, it is spiritual.

By the time we get to psychology or literature or fine arts, the gig is up: Our recognition is fundamentally spiritual, and depends only in the most mundane ways on structures of human reason. We perceive the possibility of personhood, purpose, and beauty. At this point, we await only one further "recognition," the self-revelation of the One who is spirit and the source of spirit.

Mind you, I don't mean that this all transpires chronologically. (No Hegel for me, thank you!) I mean only to describe an order intrinsic to human thought, not an account of how thought actually progresses. Thus: Every field of human study is strung somewhere between the poles of mathematics and religion.

It was all just a throw-away line above, but that's what I was trying to describe.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

DGP: Sciences other than mathematics depend not only on mathematical resoning and modeling as a substrate, but also on the recognition of a distinct plane of reality. Such a recognition derives from emergent properties, yes, but also from the spirituality of the observer: We recognize the arrangement of the celestial bodies as something more than mathematics (probability waves identified as particles interacting on astronomic scales), and so discern physics. We recognize the formation of the earth as something more than physics, and so discern chemistry. We recognize in life something more than mere chemicals, and so discern biology.

All this is really a reverberation of religiosity. It involves something different than the mechanical application of reason -- namely, an openness to recognition of other (higher?) qualities of the created order. In that sense, it is spiritual.

This is nicely put. I think I see what you mean, now. The same rules apply when you "move up" but completely new arrangements require more appreciative powers to perceive the new rules. And some structures are so complex (the brain) that we are only now beginning to pick out the rules. (Recalls to my mind what little I know of Godel.)

But one sees how a merely naturalistic conception of the universe threatens to smash all this down to two dimensions. Besides being intellectually incoherent, it screams of corrupt aesthetics.