The Center for Western Studies kicked off the first month of the year with Homer’s Odyssey, C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and the first two chapters of William Fleming’s Arts and Ideas.
The foundation for our program is starting with Ancient Greek literature. Where else would you start with Western Civilization? This is where Homer’s Odyssey, and Arts and Ideas came in.
The Odyssey is the book that everyone has heard of, but I was surprised to know how little I knew about it. However, from this side of that epic poem, it was well worth the trek. After all the beautiful women, terrifying sea monsters, and raging gods of endless elemental power, the Odyssey gives a fascinating insight to the values of ancient culture. Behind all the smoke and mirrors of the twenty-year adventure of Odysseus lies a rather interesting foundation of heroic values and ideal character. During discussions, we wrestled with the idea that certain values run throughout most known cultures. The question prevailed: Why? Where did it come from?
Enter The Abolition of Man. C.S. Lewis paints the picture of the Tao, this overarching value system in nearly all civilizations and religions. Beyond explaining this sense of right and wrong in each human being since the beginning of history, he also notches an arrow at those of us today who seem to consider this value system a sort of binding chain. What does a world without morals look like? What tragic shift in perspective will occur after our ever-sought dominion of Science? I won’t lie--it took hours of processing to finally wrap my mind around everything we talked about. I couldn’t be more thankful that we drowned in the book, however. Looking back, I consider it more of a baptism.
Arts and Ideas, in all honesty, threatened to be horribly boring after weeks of epic Greek mythology and staggering theological philosophy. Yet it didn’t disappoint in the slightest. Hodges and Vowell took us through the Hellenic and Hellenistic periods of Ancient Greece, explaining that the idealist mindset behind the Hellenic period was considered Apollonian (after the god Apollo), and the Hellenistic period was considered Dionysian (after the god Dionysus). I wish I could unpack everything that those two words mean, but tragically, this is merely a newsletter and not a dissertation. Here’s the basic, mindblowing bottom line: Apollo was a god of song, order, the sun (hence, intellectual light, or Enlightenment), thus Apollonian periods in the arts focus on idealism and rationalism. What is man? He is a god. Dionysus, on the other hand, was the god of wine, debauchery, wild parties, thus Dionysian periods in the arts were fueled purely by emotion. Statues of the Hellenistic period portrayed man in struggle, facing foes, muscles tensed. Who is man? He is a warrior.
Thus the first month of the Center for Western Studies closes. I’m not sure if my mind can handle many more fireworks of knowledge, but ready or not, here I come.