How to Tell a Barbarian, Part I

     In Pennsylvania, the state where I grew up, you can still stumble upon a diner in places like Kutztown or Lititz and hear people, and not old people either, jabbering away in the low German of their ancestors.  Most of these folks drive cars, whether or not they are Mennonites in the old garb.  At a mom-and-pop amusement park in central Pennsylvania I saw Hiram the Mennonite, one hand pressed to his stovepipe hat to keep it from flying off, whooping it up with his children as they all slid down a big water slide.  The dress may be old-fashioned and the people earthy, but I've always found the Mennonites to be courteous and gentle-mannered and, at least in the subtleties of human interchange, cultivated.  I don't think anyone would call a simple and hardworking Mennonite family "barbarian," merely because they don't let their trousers hang from the hipbone, don't watch American Idol, and manage to marry before they have children.  Those may be marks against them, to be sure, but barbarian?  Even a hardened secularist would hesitate to make that accusation.  The hobbits of The Shire are not barbarian, though they have no motorcars.  Saddam Hussein and his henchmen were, though they had motorcars and then some.

     If it is not any particular tool that distinguishes the cultivated from the barbarian -- as if you could give a cell phone to Attila the Hun and, shazzam!, instant Alistair Cooke -- and if it is not the wearing or watching or playing of what almost everybody else is wearing or watching or playing, then what is that mysterious smudge on the soul that reads, "Still Unfit for Civilized Life"?  I've been thinking about this for a while.  It's inevitable that I should think about it, seeing as I have to teach college freshmen about the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.  Apparently the nature of barbarism was not a topic at the recent medieval conference at Kalamazoo (thanks to Stuart Koehl for the link), where a few thousand medievalists showed up largely to indulge experiments in jargon, adolescent silliness, and careerist toadying.  Check out the session on medieval excrement.  No, it is not a humane and historically solid analysis of the sewage systems of medieval Europe.  It is an exercise in giggling and contempt.

     Here, then, is the first mark of the barbarian: the inability to appreciate the beautiful, the noble, or the grand.  Dante says that when the barbarians invaded Rome during the fifth century and caught sight of the church of Saint John Lateran, they went dumb with wonder.  Livy says that when the first Gauls invaded Rome and saw the streets empty and the great houses empty -- empty, that is, except for stern old men here and there within, dressed in the senatorial togas, awaiting their death -- they too were for a time stupefied.  Those barbarians at least had sense enough to be impressed, before they began their sprees of destruction.  In general, the barbarian, whether on the steppes of Asia or of the Capitol, has had a life ground down to mud by physical necessities or, perhaps, by stultifying indolence, and can manage only to be impressed by what is big or flashy or brazen, the subtle traceries of beauty escaping him altogether.

     So in Kalamazoo the barbarians congregated to have a pseudo-learned blast laughing and sneering at what they could not understand, or what they had not even the self-awareness and humility to confess that they could not understand.  The age that stippled the continent of Europe with buildings of incomparable beauty, massive and soaring and delicate all at once, that invented the university, and far-flung capitalism, and the chivalric romance; that gave us the great and wise Dante and the greater and wiser addle-pated Francis, that age had to be "honored" with papers on "fecopoetics" and "menstruating male mystics" and Xena, Warrior Princess.  If only a fireman from Ray Bradbury's incisive dystopia would show up, to put us all out of our jobs and our misery.  "Geoffrey Chaucer, eh?" he chuckles in his cockney patois.  "Lots of bleedin' potty trainin' in there.  No use.  Burn the dirty bugger."  It would be a better fate for that old customs officer, wouldn't it?  As it would be a better fate for the Nike of Samothrace to be ground at once to marble powder than to be made a mockery of, defaced and dissolved by barbarians passing by with their outlandish credentials, using it as a convenient post to relieve themselves upon.

Comments

[Nick Milne]

Borges had a marvelous story ("Story of the Warrior and the Captive") about a barbarian who, upon arriving at the gates of Ravenna (if I remember correctly) with every intent of sacking it, is so overcome by the beauty of the city that he declares that it is more important that such places should exist than that he or his own people should survive, and thus switches sides immediately, giving his life in the city's defense.

As for the conference itself, a friend of mine who was in attendance offered similar impressions of the confusion and infamy that reigned. There is a great strand of trouble of this sort in our academy at present, though we might take some small comfort from the fact that it is hardly new. I am reminded of C.S Lewis' lament in An Experiment in Criticism concerning students of the sort here condemned:

"This is where the literary puritans may fail most lamentably. They are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. I have listened to an undergraduate's paper on Jane Austen from which, if I had not read them, I should never have discovered that there was the least hint of comedy in her novels. After a lecture of my own I have been accompanied from Mill Lane to Magdalene by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverant suggestion that The Miller's Tale was written to make people laugh. And I have heard of another who finds Twelfth Night a penetrating study of the individual's relation to society.

We are breeding a race of young people who are as solemn as the brutes ('smiles from reason flow'); as solemn as a nineteen-year-old Scottish son of the manse at an English sherry party who takes all the compliments for declarations and all the banter for insult."

For my own part, I have done my best to avoid such wretchedness no matter what subject I am enjoined to address, and I am happy to say that my advancement in academia has not yet evidently suffered because of it. It has even occasionally proven advantageous, as when I delivered a paper on certain religious and historical elements in Robert Frost's "The Black Cottage" (from North of Boston) earlier this year. The other three papers in that particular workshop were of the standard modern type and very difficult for non-specialists to understand. "A Return to the Final Dianoetic Laughter: The Foundering of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian Forces in Beckett’s Words and Music" was especially baffling.

But there is hope. The conference had many papers that were both well-wrought and well-received, and particular praise must be given to Dr. Matthew Carter for his truly excellent paper on Msgr. Ronald Knox's Greek translation of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a poem now treated with such ironic seriousness that its author must be laughing even in his grave.

Anyway, we need not let the po-mo's win, when it comes to the academy. Truth can be pursued. Wisdom can be cherished. It can be done. All we lack is the will.

[labrialumn]

Is it a SCA meet, or a RenFest? I don't care for crudity myself, but I have a suspicion you are failing to appreciate parody.

[Clifford Simon]

I say something refreshingly non-barbaric today. At one of the main outdoor, public stages here at my university, there was a marathon reading of "Tristram Shandy." Everybody walking through the food court got to hear it being read aloud by students. The reading began at 8:00am and continued until 8:00pm. Under the stage, there were hand-drawn posters featuring scenes from the book - one illustrating the concept of "biography ad ovum," for instance - and there were copies of the book being sold (or perhaps given away). One poster simply advertised how many pages, and how many asterisks.

The usual fare on this stage is either sorry, wanna-be rock-and-roll acts, or The ^&!)*@ Monologues (the latter being performed and heavily advertised multiple times over in the space of the year).

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Is it a SCA meet, or a RenFest? I don't care for crudity myself, but I have a suspicion you are failing to appreciate parody.<<<

It was neither. It was a scholarly conference of academic medievalists. As I remarked to Tony, when I sent him the link, this is why I do not regret not pursuing my postgraduate education. Why would I want to associate with such unserious people?

[Stuart Koehl]

Historiography repeats itself, first as farce, then as an academic thesis. The current state of medieval studies apparently got its inspiration from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Peasant woman (sitting in the mud): Who was that?
Peasant man (also sitting in the mud): That was the king.
Peasant woman: How can you tell he's a king?
Peasant man: He's the only one not covered in s--t.

[DGP]

The same ability to appreciate "the beautiful, the noble, the grand," just happens to be the anthropological foundation of religiosity. Man's religious nature can't reach its fulfillment apart from God's condescension. Perhaps it is also sparked by the same condescension. But on the experiential level, religion begins with wonder, and wonder is receptivity to beauty.

[Rob G]

There's a great short story by William Maxwell (I forget the title) in which an American man revisits France after a decade or two, wanting to stay at the same hotel he stayed at originally, because of the beautiful surroundings. When he goes back, he finds things much changed, and he's especially appalled by the fact that a lovely medieval-age garden on the grounds has been "developed" for the supposed benefit of the tourists. His sorrowful response is "What kind of people would allow such a thing to happen?"

Seems to me we have a lot of this sort of "internal" barbarism going on around us. People are indeed growing deaf and blind to true beauty because of the ubiquity of sheer ugliness in the surrounding culture.

[Rob G]

In the interest of academic accuracy and not out of any appeal to the merely pedantic, allow me to tweak Stuart's cultural reference in an effort to make it conform more accurately to the source wherefrom it was taken:

Peasant 1: Who's that then?
Peasant 2: I dunno. Must be a king.
Peasant 1: Why?
Peasant 2: He hasn't got s--t all over him.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>But on the experiential level, religion begins with wonder, and wonder is receptivity to beauty<<<

Indeed, to paraphrase one obscure Russian writer, "It is beauty that will save the world".

[Stuart Koehl]

I submit that those barbarians were not quite as barbaric as some of our so-called cultural elites. Elsewhere, I quoted the Visigothic king Theodoric, who said, "Every worthy Goth aspires to be a Roman, but it is a very poor Roman who aspires to be a Goth".

[Beth]

Labrialumn, rest assured that the academy has very nearly placed itself beyond parody. I no longer even *think* "parody" when I hear of some new wretchedness, because, believe me, it is undoubtedly possible that it is real.

[Bob]

Just goes to show, you can tell a barbarian. . .but you can't tell him much.

[Jeff Sawtelle]

One thing I took away from the only course I ever had on medieval history:
Since most people in those days were illiterate, they conducted their business verbally and sealed their deals with oaths. As a result, they had great respect for solemnly given pledges. Whereas today. . . .

[Michael D. Harmon]

For those not yet aware of it, I recommend this book:

http://www.ignatius.com/ViewProduct.aspx?SID=1&Product_ID=369&AFID=12

[Michael D. Harmon]

For those not yet aware of it, I recommend this book:

http://www.ignatius.com/ViewProduct.aspx?SID=1&Product_ID=369&AFID=12

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Just goes to show, you can tell a barbarian. . .but you can't tell him much.<<<

A barbarian? Or a Harvard man? Oh, wait a moment. . . never mind.

[Bill R]

A couple of weeks ago I took the family to the Renaissance Faire here in Los Angeles, something we haven't done for more than a decade. If one's notions of the middle ages were formed by this parody, one would conclude that medieval life was nothing more than crude excess and a fascination with bodily functions (the middle ages as one big frat party). It struck me that the biggest difference between the ersatz medievalism of the Faire and the real Merry Old England was the virtual absence of anything that smacked of religion. Out of the thousands of visitors (most in costume), I saw no religious whatever (my kids said they caught a glimpse of a nun or a monk), and only one character dressed as a bishop. But this absence is understandable, for such characters would represent beauty and goodness, qualities in very short supply in the imaginary world of the RenFaire.

[Bill R]

As fellow Mere Commenter Bobby Winters could attest, central Kansas, like Pennsylvania, is home to a number of Mennonite colonies. During the years my parents lived in Kansas, I had a fair amount of contact with Mennonites, and I had a uniformly positive impression of them, particularly of the women. My mother used to love to frequent a Mennonite cafe because she loved the staff and the way they treated people. (Mom really wanted to set me up with a Mennonite girl, but couldn't quite figure out how to do it, short of becoming Amish herself.) There was something exceedingly feminine and beautiful about their simplicity, but it was a femininity and beauty that never seemed sexual. You rarely saw that quality outside the Amish.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

We got *lots* of Mennonites here in central Virginia. There's a big colony near Harrisonburg. There is a small "Church of the Brethren" on my way to work on a particularly winding stretch of road. I see them frequently at Sam's Club as well.

[Judy K. Warner]

We have quite a few Mennonites in our area of Maryland. We love to deal with them. Many of them have small businesses and we've bought a shed, a chicken house, plumbing services, maple syrup and grass-fed beef from various branches of one family. They are straightforward, honest, hardworking and very pleasant. I think most of them home-school their children.

Also in Maryland is one of the biggest Renaissance festivals in the country. It has become quite bizarre, with people coming in any kind of costume you could imagine, including Jedi knights. They sell weird perverted costume things like pointed metal bra-tops and horse-tails for women, and bawdiness seems to be the main characteristic of the whole thing. But then there are also wonderful singers and dancers, a concert on a massive outdoor pipe organ, and a few other things that make it worthwhile going.

[T. Chan]

I just wanted to point out that the Congress does have sessions for serious Catholic intellectuals--they may not dominate the atmosphere, but they are there. It's not a complete loss, though probably only worth attending for those who already have jobs in academia, and not struggly grad students.

[Paul Arblaster]

In a paper on medieval French farce one would hardly expect "a humane and historically solid analysis of the sewage systems of medieval Europe." One would expect a literary and/or cultural analysis of the farce (hopefully without too much jargon - but that's another issue entirely). Plainly medieval people thought excrement was hilarious; there's a very good passage in Christopher Derrick's "Reader's Report on the Writing of Novels" precisely about the swings of the pendulum in public taste for the scatological (and there's an Austin Powers gag ("How dare you fart before me?") that I first read in a 17th-century jestbook of high, edifying Counter-Reformation tone); and in medieval times the "reading" of urine could make or break medical careers; and on and on the examples could be multiplied - this isn't "giggling and contempt", it's recognizing that some things about the Middle Ages were different, and that to understand Dante and Chaucer, and Aquinas (who does talk about sewage), it can be useful to be aware of some of these differences, or we might get hold of the wrong end of the stick. Condemn academics for using jargon and hammering square texts into round theoretical frameworks as much as you like, but do it when they're talking about Dante or Aquinas; if you do it when they're talking about excrement in farces you just look po-faced (no pun intended).

[labrialumn]

Stuart; yikes!

Things are bad when they parody themselves just by being. . .

The Theodoric quote has additional meaning these days. . .

Would it be helpful to distinguish between the Barbarian and the Savage? Theodoric as the Barbarian. This conference as the Savage? The Savage cannot appreciate the high and the beautiful. It is all "dust and ashes out of elfland."

I agree with all that Rennfaires ought to be quite different than they are, starting with the village church in the center of the village, where it ought to be, and the bells pealing the Hours.

[Sandra Miesel]

It's been twenty years since I attended a Kalamazoo conference. My friend Charlotte Allen did point out that it's changed quite a bit since then, due to the triumph of Post-Modernism with its excreable jargon. But she wasn't trying give relative percentages of absurd versus legitimate presentations. Short of counting catalog titles, you can't tell. Time was when Kalamazoo was one place to see a large number of Catholic academics gathered for Mass--celebrated by the local bishop. There were lots of monks and nuns in habit. (Cistercian caramels were one of the treats of the conference.)With hundreds of sections, I daresay the most discriminating TOUCHSTONE reader could have still found many edifying papers.

[Stuart Koehl]

I was going to send you Charlotte's article, Sandra, but I forgot in the press of high school graduation preparations.

[Art Deco]

There is a small "Church of the Brethren" on my way to work on a particularly winding stretch of road.

The 'Church of the Brethren' are followers of the teachings of Alexander Mack, not Menno Simons. Their overseas volunteer service is (I believe) fairly vigorous and the Brethren aspect has yet to be fully leached out of the seven colleges the denomination has founded, but they suffer from some of the same malaise that grips liberal protestantism generally. Some of the men continue to follow old regulations on dress and grooming (long and untrimmed beards are their signature), but that is unusual.

[Tony Esolen]

Dear Mr. Arblaster,

I'm well aware that the medievals used excrement as a topic of humor. You're telling a Dante translator that the poets dabbled in scatology? But that is simply not the point. The point is that the presenters were interested in neither the poetry as such nor in the human problems of what to do with waste. (By the way, the comment you quote had nothing to do with the paper on urine in the wine, but with the whole project of "fecopoetics," which Ms. Allen says the gentleman discussing the French farce did not himself propose.) But my post would remain true had there not been a single paper presented on scatology -- and the folks who read these posts know that I have if anything a too robust taste for the bawdy. Just this last year I slogged through about a hundred applications for a job in medieval literature at my college. I don't think contempt is too strong a word to describe the default position of most of the candidates, unless they were elevating some deservedly unknown poet or some misinnterpreted woman mystic to mascot status. Read the whole of Ms. Allen's article.

The allegiance of the literary critic, even when discussing what gets tossed out the postern gate, must be to whatever greatness and truth and beauty the writers of the age were privileged to attain to. But if professors themselves spend most of their time belittling their subjects, or squeezing them into convenient packages for their own cultural agendas -- and kindly refrain from telling me that this is not commonly done -- then I can only paraphrase the good Parson of the Canterbury Tales, that shame it is, and let the dons take keep: a shitten teacher, and a clean sheep.

[Maureen]

One of my life's most pleasurable sights was to see a crowd of Mennonite teenagers (in a sort of humongous group dating opportunity) and adults wandering through the Air and Space Museum in DC. I don't know why it was so perfect, but it was.

I was disappointed to hear bad things of K-zoo, since it has long been presented to me as a sort of forbidden paradise for bookbuyers. (Forbidden by the fact that I need to pay rent and eat, and thus would be insane to venture within.) However, some of the behavior Ms. Allen complains about is more properly considered that of the nerd or geek than the barbarian. Dancing enthusiastically though spasmodically is not usually the domain of those contemptuous of life, for example. Such persons usually think themselves too cool to dance.

The crucial difference probably is motivation. If you really really want to talk and argue about Beowulf or the grave depths at Funkyvikingname-ness, you're a medievalist geek or geeky scholar. If you really really want to be so clever as to decline to argue anything that can be disproved or argued against, you're a sick excuse for a person masquerading as an academic.

Geeks who love truth have thus their own beauty.

However, it is clear that the lowest common denominator for geeky behavior has fallen pretty far in certain crowd situations. This is not a good sign; and it depresses me.

[Rob G]

When the Catholic charismatic movement broke out in Pittsburgh in 1967, one of the first non-Pentecostal Protestant churches to experience similar things and to welcome the Catholic charismatics was the Pittsburgh Church of the Brethren, pastored by Russell Bixler. Bixler's church hosted large (and lengthy) charismatic praise services on Sunday evenings to which people of all denominations were invited.

[Joe Long]

"Also in Maryland is one of the biggest Renaissance festivals in the country..."

Virginia has always gone in for that sort of thing. (Surely Stuart can back me up here.) Many a future Reb cavalryman went to "jousts" in his youth, and romanticized medieval pageantry was always in good taste and enthusiastically received. They even held some "jousts" during The War, and the ever-meek and humble Stuart appeared in tableaus as an armored Crusader. (Um, J.E.B. Stuart, not the other Virginian Stuart who posts here, and who of course is equally meek - but a superior strategist, I think.)

Dr. Esolen: "mascot status"? The rest of your posting here was great, but I think that phrase was positively brilliant. It perfectly describes those unfortunate, deservedly obscure mediocrities who suffer unsought and undeserved elevation, like reluctant spirits summoned from some pit to do the nefarious bidding of modern academic identity-politics witches. Football teams may no longer have entertaining mascots; literature departments must have dreary ones. The horror...

[Stuart Koehl]

Maryland had the first RenFest around here, of which the Virginia Renaissance Festival near Fredericksburg is a pale imitation. In fact, JOUSTING is the Maryland State Sport (I suppose if you are Maryland, you prefer jousting to rigging elections or playing the lottery).

J.E.B. Stuart, by the way, was a pretty mean strategist, and definitely would have made a better corps commander than either Dick Ewell or A.P. Hill, but Lee probably slept better at night knowing that Stuart was in charge of his pickets.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Thanks A.D. for the correction--for some reason, I had always assumed that Mennonites attended Brethren Churches. They seem to dress the same around here (with the white bonnets for the women and the beards for the men).

[Bobby Winters]

>>>Thanks A.D. for the correction--for some reason, I had always assumed that Mennonites attended Brethren Churches. They seem to dress the same around here (with the white bonnets for the women and the beards for the men). <<<

To see it the other way round, you have to go to 'Frisco--so I am told.

[Beth]

There is a Mennonite group called "Mennonite Brethren" -- but they are modernized in every way, including a fair amount of theology (last I heard, several years ago, they were only a few votes away from women's ordination). Tabor College in Hillsboro, KS, is a Mennonite Brethren college; their seminary is in California somewhere. Anyway, that could be where the confusion of names comes from.

[Judy K. Warner]

I once talked to one of the vendors at the Maryland Renfest about the great job they do with crowd control. No matter how many people are there, you don't feel mobbed. It is really well planned. He told me that the people who run it used experts from Disney to set it up.

[Dennis Martin]

Actually Pennsylvania Dutch is derived from High German (Swiss-Alsatian-Palatine) rather than Low German (North German). Mennonites qua Mennonites (those arising around Menno Simonszoon) were Dutch and Low German but they interacted with Swiss Anabaptists up and down the Rhine in the 16th and 17thc (that's where the Amish division came from--the Dutch _Menno_nites had a very strict, "shunning" approach to church discipline and the Swiss Anabaptist refugees in the Alsace did not; when the two systems confronted each other, some Swiss adopted the strict discipline and were excommunicated--their leader was Jakob Ammann.)

Most Pennsylvania Anabaptist immigrants were Swiss-emigrant Palatines (via Alsace) from 1712 onward but the earliest group was Low German from around Krefeld (1680s). The Swiss emigrants in Alsace were attracted to the Palatinate after the French-German wars of Louis XIV's era ended--Swiss Anabaptist farmers from the Alsace were tolerated in the Palatinate for their farming skills. Since most of the Reformed and Lutheran Pennsylvania-German immigrants of the formative decades were also from the Palatinate--the middle Rhine area around Mannheim, Heidelberg etc.--"Pennsylvania Deutsch" as it established itself in the 1700s was a High German-derived dialect. At the same time, these Palatine Anabaptist Swiss-origin folks became known as "Mennonites" (a Low German movemetn) because of the smaller 1680s lower Rhine (Krefeld etc.) emigration that preceded them.