A Grand Tour.(Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe-Toward the Revival of Higher Education)(Review)

Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe-Toward the Revival of Higher Education, by Jeffrey Hart (Yale, 271 pp., $26.95)

The author is especially well known to the readers of this journal, having served as a senior editor for over 30 years. He is also a syndicated columnist, the author of seven books, and an essayist, widely published in the academic journals. What he has here is surely a crowning achievement.

Jeffrey Hart, as an undergraduate, never got over what he saw on climbing the marble stairs leading to Columbia's Butler Library. He stared up at the names carved in stone on the library's frieze: Homer, Voltaire, Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe.

It was a nice idea, somewhere along the line, when the artists/architects/designers resisted what must have been somebody's impulse, to list these ineffable men chronologically, or (God forbid!) alphabetically, as would have been required if William Morris was their agent. They're just there, and who cares that Aristotle had already passed on when Voltaire came around? Hart celebrates his writers and philosophers individually; but he also supplies a narrative, and its lodestone is Athens and Jerusalem, the two great poles of human attention, Athens celebrating, above all, cognition; Jerusalem, the soul.

This is hardly a disjunction devised by Professor Hart, who has traveled from Columbia undergraduate to Columbia Ph.D. to professor of English at Dartmouth, where one year he was acclaimed in a poll as one of the best teachers in town. The terms were used as paradigms by Tertullian, no less (3rd century a.d.), who attempted in a historical tug of war with Clement and Origen to stress the claims of God as exclusive. He failed, and the Athens-Jerusalem dialectic took root in the West.

So, Hart's crystallizations are under way. Achilles and Moses were fundamental to their civilizations, "both flawed, both heroic and exemplary." That heroic virtue of Achilles would be "internalized by Socrates as heroic philosophy." The commandments of Moses would be "internalized by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as heroic holiness." On to Paul, Augustine, Dante, Hamlet, Moliere, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Scott Fitzgerald.

In the end, the Church didn't throw Athens overboard, instead, legitimized it. Dante's sublime architecture brought together in uneasy synthesis Rome (i.e., Athens) and Jerusalem. And then Shakespeare. "I conclude that Hamlet's undoubted greatness as a tragic hero consists not in anything he does but in everything he says. He is a Prince not of Elsinore-at that he fails-but of eloquence, and composes his appropriate epitaph in his last words: 'The rest is silence.'"