The Aeneid as an Apologia

 

Dr. Andrew Dinan
Associate Professor of Classics
Ave Maria University
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
September 21, 2024
Video | Audio

 

The Aeneid as an Apologia

 

I am grateful to Dean Steven Cain, Mr. Daniel Gutschke, and the entire faculty of Thomas Aquinas College for your invigorating hospitality, and for your gracious invitation to speak this evening, which has brought me three enviable gifts: first, many stimulating summer hours with Virgil; second, some happy days with friends and my growing family in Northfield (as well as a taste of fall, which is foreign to Southwest Florida); and third, the almost unheard of opportunity of addressing an auditorium filled on a Friday night (!) with scholars disposed to hear about the Aeneid.

When I first visited your campus, to accompany my son who was enrolling as a freshman, I thought of verses from the final chapter of Joshua, which had just been read at daily Mass that August of 2019:

“I have given you a land on which you have not labored, and cities that you have not built, to live in them; vineyards and olive groves that you have not planted” (Jos 24.13).

Yet the impressive structures that your college wondrously inherited did require renovation, especially the chapel. Pews had to be cut and elevated, confessionals built, and in place of the dismantled organ a magnificent reredos was installed, with its serene and captivating statues. It all makes for one of the most pleasing chapels in the country, the more impressive because renovating presents more challenges than building from scratch.

It is good to ponder what we encounter everyday, such as the chapel. Consider that reredos. St. Thomas’s presence is expected, but his refreshingly lean physique and penetrating countenance, as well as the sublime Latin inscription, invite meditation. Compelling, as well, is the statue of John Henry Newman, who was canonized not quite two months after this campus opened. I hope that you students wonder about Newman’s presence on your reredos, and his juxtaposition with St. Thomas. Just as you rightly ask why a particular book occupies a spot in the curriculum, with the confidence that the ratio transcends custom, however valid custom may be, so too you can reflect with confidence (and humility) on the policies, practices, and yes, even physical features of your College. 

This is what I want to do with you this evening. I want to reflect on one of the books in your curriculum, the Aeneid, and I want to do so with the help of those two saints on your reredos, Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman. 

It is almost universally the case that students do not appreciate the Aeneid, at least at first. This was true for me, as a sophomore in a Great Books program more than three decades ago. Last November I received a blunt email from a former student who, some years out of college, to his credit, had decided to read the Aeneid. Here is what he wrote: “I was thinking about you because I just finished reading the Aeneid and I thought it was terrible! (I wanted to soften the blow, but I couldn’t) … In short Virgil attempts to combine the adventure of the Odyssey with the battles of the Iliad and what we get is a lame adventure with way too much killing. The first half of the book is a recount of the escape from Troy and some island hopping. The second half is just all war and details of spears going through shields and into body parts … I think my poor opinion of the book is missing something and before I write it off, I would really appreciate some analysis from [a classicist].” I do not think this courageous and honest alumnus is alone in this opinion.

Even those who do appreciate the Aeneid typically find it wanting by comparison with Homer, at least at first. On his wide-ranging and insightful blog, TAC alumnus and Cistercian monk, Pater Edmund Waldstein, comments: “When I first read the Aeneid I thought it inferior to Homer.”[1] (But more from Pater Edmund below.) Again, a sixteen-year-old C.S. Lewis matter-of-factly declared to his friend Arthur Greeves: “Homer is better than Vergil;” this, he explains, is “inevitable,” given that “the primitive type” is superior to a “reproduction.”[2] 

In the lecture I delivered here four years ago, which took the form of a scholastic dispute, I pinpointed some reasons why the Aeneid apparently (videtur quod …) does not merit a coveted slot on the reading list of Thomas Aquinas College:

1. not only is it derivative of Homer and not as profound,
2. but its excessive and apparently irrelevant particularity (so many names and places!),
3. its uninspiring hero,
4. and its lack of substance (“If you take from Virgil his language and metre, what do you leave him?” asked Coleridge[3]),

make the Aeneid unsuitable for the students of Thomas Aquinas College. Following a sed contra from T.S. Eliot, I attempted to defend the Aeneid, especially with respect to the Homeric epics. That talk bore the title “In defense of the Aeneid.”

I thought of titling my talk tonight “The defense of the Aeneid,” but I feared being charged with hubris. What do you mean, the defense? Is there only one? Who are you to give it? Anyways, didn’t you already give your defense? No, by “The defense of the Aeneid” I do not mean my defense of the Aeneid, but rather the Aeneid’s defense of something else. Just as one might say that Pope Benedict XVI’s life and work constitute a defense of, an apologia for theology, i.e., if you want to see a reason to study theology, to grasp what theology is capable of, or a justification for the entire discipline, look no further than Pope Benedict; or one might say that the Divine Comedy is a defense of Italian — it is reason enough to study Italian; so too, I believe that the Aeneid provides a defense, a justification, an apologia. For what? For the classics, the classical tradition and the Romans’ role in it, literature, and poetry, especially Latin poetry.

The Aeneid, I argue, affirms these things. In fact, I might say that it best affirms these things. 

So, rather than a defense of the Aeneid, tonight I want to show the defense made by the Aeneid.

Once again, I will employ the form of an article from the Summa.

Ad secundum sic proceditur.

Videtur quod Aeneis nullam defensionem suscipere possit. It seems that the Aeneid cannot undertake a defense of anything, because it is poetry, something unintellectual, perhaps born of inspiration or ecstasy, but certainly not of reason. As Socrates tells Ion, as long as a human being has possession of his intellect, he cannot be a poet (Ion 534b). At any rate, poems are too concrete to make arguments. According to the Jesuit Walter Ong, “a poem resists the very abstraction by which we would understand it,” or as the poet Archibald MacLeish puts it, “A poem should not mean/ But be.”[4]

Praeterea … Moreover, the Aeneid cannot mount a defense because its greatness comes from its style. The American poet and critic Allen Tate declared, “the meaning of Virgil is not the story; it is the style.”[5] Granted that Virgil’s verses are inimitable and his style sublime, nonetheless style per se is superfluous, superficial embellishment. How could it defend anything?

Praeterea … Moreover, if the Aeneid is a defense, it is the meanest sort — propaganda. Virgil, we know, enjoyed privileged access to Augustus; Virgil’s patron, Maecenas, was Augustus’s trusted friend and advisor, and Virgil gave a private reading of parts of the Aeneid for the imperial family. Naturally, then, the Aeneid, for all of its noble sentiments, serves to justify Augustus’s ruthless regime. After all, Aeneas, Augustus’s prototype, is another Paris, stealing a woman and inciting civil war; he rejects the pleas of suppliants, perpetrates atrocities, and gratuituously and contemptibly kills Turnus, to say nothing of his behavior with Dido.

Sed contra est quod Johannes Henricus Newman dixit … But on the contrary, John Henry Newman defines literature as “the expression of thought in language” and a great author as a “master of the twofold Logos, the thought and the word.” He continues: “such preëminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such preëminently Virgil among the Latins.”[6]

Respondeo dicendum quod in primis … I respond that it must be said above all that the Aeneid constitutes an argument for rereading. 

This is what C.S. Lewis did. Three years after his facile school-boy verdict, Lewis was recuperating in a Red Cross hospital in France during WWI, and he requested that Virgil’s works be sent to him.[7] Two years later, he read Virgil again (in Latin).[8] By this time Lewis had changed, as had his opinion of the Aeneid. Years later he would write: “No man who has once read [the Aeneid] with full perception remains an adolescent.”[9] Lewis now reversed his earlier verdict — the primitive type was not necessarily better. “All poetry is one,” he wrote, “and I love to see the great notes repeated. Homer and Virgil wrote lines not for their own works alone but for the use of all their followers. A plague on these moderns scrambling for what they call originality.”[10] Over the years Lewis kept rereading the Aeneid — it was, he told a Benedictine monk, one of only two long poems (the other was Wordsworth’s The Prelude) to which he found himself returning again and again throughout his life[11] — and soon he began to translate the Aeneid into English, in rhymed Alexandrine couplets[12], portions of which were published over a decade ago.[13] In 1946, when Lewis was forty-eight-years old, he read the Aeneid again — he finished it on Boxing Day — and as he commented to Dorothy L. Sayers (who at the time was translating Dante), what most struck him now was “the immense costliness of a vocation” — he is referring both to Aeneas’s vocation and to Virgil’s — “combined with a complete conviction that it is worth it.”[14] Those of you who esteem The Lord of the Rings will be impressed to learn of Lewis’s verdict upon first reading the typescript of that newly completed work. In astonishing words of praise, Lewis wrote Tolkein, “the general aroma seems to me more like the Aeneid than anything else.”[15] In 1962, the year before he died, Lewis was asked by the magazine Christian Century to list the books that “most shape[d]” his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life.”[16] The Aeneid was third on his list of ten, the only book from classical antiquity. Not Homer, not Plato, only Virgil. 

I trust my point is obvious, but in case not: students, do not sell your books, especially the Aeneid; reread it, multiple times, until you see some of what Lewis saw. Someday you may experience what John Henry Newman describes in A Grammar of Assent. Literary passages that once seemed ordinary will, Newman says,

“at length come home to [you], when long years have passed, and [you have] had experience of life, and pierce [you], as if [you] had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then [you come] to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of [your] own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.”[17]

Newman’s words, I think, constitute a description of a classic. And the Aeneid, more than any other work, constitutes an apology not only for the classics but also for the classical tradition, in two senses. First, that the tradition really does exist; second, the disposition we should have towards it.

The Aeneid was an instant classic, even before it was published. The Roman poet Propertius, Virgil’s younger contemporary, exclaimed:

“Cede the floor, Roman authors, cede the floor, Greeks!
Something greater than the Iliad is emerging."[18]

We have more manuscripts, and better manuscripts, of Virgil than of any other classical author. People wanted to have Virgil’s writings! We even have two deluxe editions of his works — in exquisite letters with color illustrations. Only a few such manuscripts from classical antiquity have survived, the others are of Homer and Terence. But do not get the wrong idea. Virgil was not merely a “coffee-table” book or a collector’s prize. Words from the Aeneid appear as graffiti in Pompeii. St. Jerome speaks of priests who, shamefully, neglect the gospels and carry around Virgil.[19] Virgil was also a school text, along with Cicero, Terence, and Sallust — for centuries these were the most widely-read authors. You have a sense of this from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Students read, and reread, and studied, word by word, and acted out, and argued about, and memorized (even in spite of themselves) the Aeneid. Even during Virgil’s lifetime, public lectures were given on his works, and soon scholars were writing commentaries on them. According to one critic, “At the end of antiquity the poems of Virgil were regarded as the sum of all wisdom and all knowledge.”[20] Virgil even came to be seen as a prophet, as one who knew more than was humanly possible. Have you heard of the sortes Vergilianae? People would open the text of Virgil at random, with the conviction that the words they happened to encounter contained a message for them. People were already doing this in the second century, and they did it into the twentieth century.[21] Sacred artists depicted Virgil as a prophet. His likeness was found in a cathedral in Zamora among Old Testament prophets, as well as in a church in Rimini.[22] His verses appear on a pavement in the cathedral of Siena.[23] When Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was elected pope in 1458 he chose the then-unusual name Pius (the last Pius had been in the second century) and wondrously announced “sum Pius Aeneas,” thereby keeping his old name and signaling his great affection for Virgil (the phrase appears in Aeneid 1.378).[24] You may know that two lines from Virgil (including one from the Aeneid) are on the Great Seal of the United States of America and on the one-dollar bill (Novus Ordo Seclorum and Annuit Coeptis), and the state seals of Colorado, Oklahoma, and South Carolina bear Virgilian lines.[25] The 9/11 memorial in New York bears a line in English from the Aeneid: “No Day Shall Erase You from the Memory of Time,” which is how Virgil in Book IX commemorates the deaths of Nisus and Euryalus (9.447). In 2020 Pope Francis twice cited the Aeneid, in Latin, during an interview regarding the need for perspective and courage during the COVID pandemic; one was Virgil’s meminisse iuvabit (“perhaps one day it will be delightful to remember even these things;” the other was Cessi, et sublato montem genitore petivi (“I yielded, and having picked up my father I headed for the mountain”).[26] It has been said that Virgil is the most influential (non-biblical) poet.[27]

Let’s consider the way that Virgil composed the Aeneid. Without doubt he depended upon his predecessors, not only Homer, but Greek tragedy, Lucretius, and others. He knows that you know this. He expects you to know this. He signals it in the first three words — Arma virumque cano, and then on every page thereafter. To appreciate Virgil’s genius, you should know this. Far from being a knock against him, this rather indicates Virgil’s humility, his receptivity towards the tradition. Yet Virgil was also a master craftsman, and evidently a perfectionist. It took him eleven years to write the Aeneid — he averaged two and a half lines per day — and he never finished it. His hope of spending another three years revising it were dashed by his death at the age of fifty-one. Donatus, an ancient grammarian — and a teacher of St. Jerome — tells us that Virgil’s manner of composition was to dictate verses in the morning, which he would prune and polish later in the day.[28] He tried earnestly to have the Aeneid burned. These two qualities — his dependence on the tradition and his painstaking craftsmanship — go together. In Virgil one sees neither an artist creating ex nihilo nor an artist spontaneously or ecstatically effusive. It is worth lingering on this point. This stance is not unique to the Aeneid — in his other two works, the Eclogues and the Georgics, Virgil depended on Greek models. Nor is it unique to Virgil — in the twentieth century T.S. Eliot would be its premier champion.

The Aeneid is, more generally, an argument for the role of the Romans in the classical tradition. You should not move directly from the Greeks to Dante and the scholastics, and bypass the Romans. Dante himself is the most convincing argument why this should not be done. Dante recognizes Homer as the prince and lord of poets, but Homer is not his guide, nor is Plato, nor Aristotle, nor any of the Greeks. In his famous “Regensburg Lecture,” Pope Benedict XVI identified three “stages” in western history when certain persons or movements have wanted to eradicate Christianity’s Greek heritage. This, Pope Benedict showed, cannot be done, because the Greek element is, so to speak, part of Christianity’s DNA. Something similar, I argue, can be said about the Roman element in Christianity, and more broadly, the Romen element in western culture as a whole. One should not attempt an end-run around the Romans to get to the Greeks. For one thing, it is from and through the Romans that we have received Greek thought. But even if it were theoretically possible to bypass the Romans, the Aeneid is the best argument why we should resist doing so. At the very least, you would miss what so many others have held dear, thereby cutting yourselves off from penetrating this latter tradition. But even more, the Romans, and Virgil above all, demonstrate to us a fruitful model of cultural engagement, one that, is has been argued, is central to Europe’s identity, and even more so to the identity of the United States[29], and, I think, to what you are doing here in Northfield. For in the face of the cultural achievement of the Greeks, what did the Romans do? They did not stiff-arm, much less denigrate it, but they appropriated it, transplanting it, often reworking it for their own ends, and letting it bear fruit elsewhere. Virgil, the poet, did this, and his Aeneid shows the Romans’ ancestors doing this. That phrase sum pius Aeneas, which is how Aeneas describes himself to his disguised mother, is based on a passage in Odyssey 9, when Odysseus introduces himself to Alcinous. But while Odysseus says

“I am Odysseus, great Laertes’ son,
Known for my cunning throughout the world” (S. Lombardo trans.),

Aeneas highlights his devotion to the gods. Virgil closely follows, but pointedly and powerfully modifies Homer.[30]

But the entire Aeneid is an argument for this stance towards the tradition. Recall Anchises’s well-known exhortation to Aeneas in the underworld, prefaced as follows (6.847–850):

Others will, no doubt, hammer out bronze
That breathes more softly, and draw living faces
Out of stone. They will plead cases better
And chart the rising of every star in the sky (Lombardo trans.).

The Romans openly acknowledge the superior cultural achievements of others. 

But above all, think of Book XII, just before Turnus’s demise, when Juno finally acquiesces but not without securing privileges for the native peoples of Italy. The Trojans are to have a home in Italy after all, but they are not to keep their name, their language, their dress. This is anything but a wholesale transplanting of Troy — although this is what Aeneas had once thought would happen. The Trojans are rather to be “absorbed” by the Italians (12.835–836; Lombardo trans.). Or as another translator puts it:

“The Trojans will fade out
as they breed in” (S. Ruden trans.).

But the Aeneid’s apologia for the classical tradition goes deeper still. It is one thing to acknowledge the poem’s and the poet’s popularity and influence, and his admirable humility in the face of his Greek predecessors. But what is intrinsic to the poem itself? Why have so many found it so compelling? 

 On the one hand, Virgil and his Aeneid represent the summit of classical wisdom, “a synthesis of ancient civilization,” as one critic put it.[31] But even more, Virgil anticipated many things that were soon fully realized in Christianity. Let me give you some examples.

For starters, I trust that most of you read the interview that His Eminence Cardinal Burke gave when he visited Northfield for commencement last May, which was printed in your college’s newsletter. He mentioned his own high-school reading of the Aeneid. His teacher, a priest, identified Aeneas’s filial piety as a “prefigurement” of one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.[32]

But this is not an isolated instance. Surely you were struck by Aeneas’s sense of mission, or vocation, the claims that were made on him. For C.S. Lewis, the Aeneid’s depiction of vocation is what especially sets it apart from Homer.[33] Aeneas’s life is not his own. Virgil is explicit about this. As Aeneas tells Dido, the fates do not allow him to lead his life as he pleases (4.340–347). Aeneas’s vocation comes to him from without, yet he was uniquely prepared for it, and somehow it deeply resonates with him. But the object of his mission transcends himself, his own glory, and even his family’s well-being or renown. Recall that in the Odyssey the greatest goods are family togetherness, with feasting and music (Odyssey 9.5ff). But Aeneas’s mission has a larger scope — an entire society, in fact a boundless dominion, at peace, well ordered, where the arts flourish (6.847–850).

Again, no doubt many of you were struck by the Aeneid’s portrayal of the afterlife, in which there are distinctions, and a place of tranquility — quite different from what we see in Odyssey 11 and what we hear from Achilles there. Today, especially, we should take note of the privileged lot of patriots. 

I wonder whether you were mystified by what happens to poor Palinurus at the end of Book V? Do you recall, he was Aeneas’s zealous and conscientious helmsman, who was attacked by Sleep and tossed overboard, rudder and all? Why did this happen? Virgil, it seems, has grasped something of the logic of sacrifice. After all, when anticipating Palinurus’s death, Neptune states unum pro multis dabitur caput, “one life will be given for many” (5.815). There are other such sacrifices, including that of Creusa, Aeneas’s wife. These are not just convenient narrative moves — as if Creusa had to be disposed of to free Aeneas up for remarrying — but intuitions of a profound truth, that sacrifice is somehow a necessary foundation for society.[34]

Perhaps, too, some of you were struck by Virgil’s declaration Dido’s demise was unjust. When Iris comes to clip a lock of Dido’s hair, Virgil remarks that she had not deserved to die as she did (4.696). When Aeneas encounters her in the underworld, he dubs her plight unjust (casu … iniquo, 6.475). What does this mean? Note, it is not simply an abstract declaration, a cold verdict, but Aeneas was shattered (concussus), and he gazed with pity and tears as she retreated to her husband Sychaeus. Why the tears? Guilt over his own role in her demise? Hold that thought for a moment. But it is worth noting that for Pope Benedict XVI: “the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life” (Spe Salvi 43). 

A slender volume appeared in Germany before the Second World War called Vergil, Father of the West, by Theodor Haecker — a convert to Catholicism, in part due to his reading of Newman — which explores some of these prefigurements.[35] For example, in addition to Aeneas’s vocation and his pietas towards his father, Haecker points to his pietas towards the gods, which bespeaks humility. Unlike other characters in the Aeneid — Turnus and Mezentius — Aeneas does not defy the gods, he never has contempt for them, even Juno.[36] He always yields to them.

Then, too, there is Virgil’s profound insight into fate, which is something quite different from what it is in Homer. Virgil never precisely defines fate — smartly, according to Haecker, because he humbly recognizes that he does not know exactly what it is — but he largely identifies it with one god, Jupiter. The etymology of the Latin word is significant: fate derives from for fari, to speak. Above all, fate is something that has been spoken. “By whom and to whom?” Haecker asks, and he replies: “that which is spoken by oneself to oneself,” and again “ultimate existence is something spoken,” which is roughly identified with truth.[37]

Think too of that famous line from Book I, when Aeneas and Achates behold the depictions of the Trojan War on the temple in Carthage and Aeneas exclaims, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (1.462). For Haecker, the first part of this line is “the most untranslatable of the Aeneid, indeed, in all of Roman literature.”[38] The Latin words, for Haecker, “contain an entire worldview.” They are not to be taken in a sentimental way, he says, but in an ontological way. Naturally, Haecker sees in this an intuition of the “vale of tears.”[39]

Without a doubt, Virgil’s depiction of the sadness inherent in this life is almost unparalleled. The Aeneid has long been considered a poem of loss. Think for a moment about the ends of various books. (And please know that, unlike the Iliad, which was put into its current twenty-four book scheme by scholars who lived many centuries after Homer, Virgil intricately arranged the books of the Aeneid. He himself designed these ends.) Let’s just consider the first half of the poem. Book II ends with the death of Troy and the death of Creusa. Book III ends with the death of Anchises. Book IV ends with the death of Dido. Book V ends with the death of Palinurus. And Book VI ends — although it is only implicit — with the death of Aeneas’s nurse, Caieta (who, I must add, gave her name to the modern town in Italy after which Cardinal Cajetan was named). So much loss. (Note, by the way, that Aeneas’s son is still with him.) In the second part of the poem, Virgil, surprisingly, manages to elicit pathos even for the Trojans’ enemies, such as Lausus, the loyal son of Mezentius. This youth, wearing a soft, golden tunic woven by his mother, was stabbed by Aeneas, but Aeneas then stretches out his hand in a show of compassion, groans in pity, and offers a tearful lament (10.811–832). 

But Virgil, some think, not only grasped the “vale of tears,” he also saw what lies beyond. Pater Edmund Waldstein says, “For Virgil mortal things touch the heart because of a nobility which comes from their being ordered to something greater than themselves.”[40] Haecker even sees Virgil as “receptive to and thirsting for the bloody tears of Gethsemane;” again, Haecker says, “tears are a constitutive component of this world” which make us long for something better.[41] Listen to Newman: “Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.”[42]

One final example of this. Consider Aeneas’s first speech in the poem. Shipwrecked, having scrambled ashore in North Africa with seven of his twenty ships, Aeneas procures food and then attempts to rally his demoralized crew (1.204–209):

“Through all sorts of perils, through countless dangers,
We are headed for Latium, where the Fates promise us
A peaceful home, and where Troy will rise again.
Endure, and save yourselves for happier times.”
Aeneas said this, and though he was sick
With worry, he put on a good face
And pushed his anguish deep into his heart” (Lombardo trans). 

Among the many remarkable aspects of this scene — his self-possession, fortitude, solicitude for others — is Aeneas’s conviction of a destination, a home, granted him by the fates, where he, his companions, and descendants will enjoy peace. Aeneas is heading somewhere (tendimus in Latium), but he does not know exactly where. He knows the name of the place and the direction where it lies, and he has picked up some details. Yet despite never having been there, somehow he knows that it is his patria (1.380, 4.347, 7.122). How can one never have been to one’s home? How can one not know the way home? When Aeneas says these words, his own pater has already died and lies buried in Sicily. His own city, Troy, is in ashes. His patria, then, is only in potency. It is only destined, promised. Moreover, he cannot obtain it on his own. To reach it, he needs his father’s help — he has to go to the realm of the dead — and he needs superhuman help. 

For my part, I cannot help connecting this situation to lines from St. Thomas Aquinas’s poetry. Think of the end of “Panis Angelicus” 

Per tuas semitas
duc nos quo tendimus,
ad lucem quam inhabitas. 

And think of the end of “O Salutaris Hostia:”

qui vitam sine termino
nobis donet in patria. 

Christians, too, are bent — tending — towards a patria, but we need to be led there by God, along his paths — tuas semitas. We too have a home where we have never yet lived, that transcends family ties and birthplace.

The situation in the Aeneid is closer to what Aquinas describes than is the situation in the Odyssey. Often one likens the first six books of the Aeneid to the Odyssey, but really they differ fundamentally. Odysseus is trying to return home, to reclaim his domain, to reaquaint himself with family. But Aeneas is heading to a place he has never been. This is why Msgr. Ronald Knox titled the story of his conversion to the Catholic Church A Spiritual Aeneid rather than A Spiritual Odyssey. As he says, “an Aeneid involves not merely coming home, but coming home to a place you have never been in before.”[43] This is a peculiar plight.

All of this, I argue, constitutes an apologia for the study of literature. Why? Listen to what Newman says in The Idea of a University about literature.[44] Apart from theology, literature, along with science, constitutes the most essential element in a university education. Literature manifests human nature — man or woman as a moral and social being. It records his mind and heart, his passions, ideas, aspirations. It forms mankind’s collective autobiography. Literature, Newman tells us, “stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.”[45] So the study of literature, the discipline of literature, studies nature — human nature. To exclude from a university education the study of literature, even pagan literature, even literature that depicts man in his sinfulness, literature in which, as Newman puts it, “the old Adam smelt rank,”[46] will have grave consequences. Literature does indeed express sinful man — it is “the Life and Remains of the natural man, innocent or guilty.”[47] Yet, Newman cautions, a university is not a convent or a seminary, and “it will not answer to make light of literature or to neglect its study,”[48] because the great authors, the “masters of human thought,” are an excellent preparation for the world.[49]

Virgil and his Aeneid depict nature in an exemplary fashion. According to Newman, Virgil and other classic authors have “a catholic and ecumenical character, that what they express is common to the whole race of man, and they alone are able to express it.”[50] To be sure, Virgil does express sinful nature, yet he also depicts a nature disposed, in some way open, to a fullness. Haecker came up with a name for this. Virgil, he said, was “an adventistic pagan,” who flourished right on the cusp of the Incarnation, and marvelously anticipated much of what Christianity brought. Virgil offers an excellent natural foundation for the faith. Borrowing a phrase from Tertullian, Haecker puts this another way: Virgil, he says, was “a naturally Christian soul” (anima naturaliter Christiana).[51]

Perhaps you are not persuaded by this — some of you may be thinking “thanks very much, but Aristotle does this, and does it more succinctly and clearly.” I would not quarrel with the estimate of Aristotle. But I do want to urge you to consider that Virgil too does this, quite differently of course, but powerfully, profoundly, and, I think, more beautifully.

The Aeneid, indeed, is an intricately fashioned and deeply meditative work, which both pleases and rewards scrutiny. Let me give just one example. You all recall the tragedy of Dido, which culminated in her death on the pyre at the end of Book IV. On the one hand, it is an all-too-human theme — a jilted lover, wrangling, deceit, name-calling, despair, a dying curse. Certainly it has appealed to artists. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was staged on this campus a few years ago. But consider the many layers of meaning in that episode. It is not simply a pathos-laden tale. Aeneas’s sojourn in North Africa evokes Julius Caesar’s and Mark Antony’s dalliances with Cleopatra, and Augustus’s war with Antony and Cleopatra. More generally, it evokes the Romans’ fear that eastern luxury would impinge upon the mos maiorum. Then, too, the episode evokes Dido’s descendants, the Carthaginians, especially Hannibal, and the three Punic Wars. But there is more. Carthage, it has been argued, stands for the allure of Epicureanism.[52] One basis for this is the nature of the after-dinner song that the bard Iopas sings there — cosmology without the gods. Or, it has been said, Carthage represents the insidious exaltation of economics over politics.[53] Do you recall the role of money in the foundation of Carthage? Additionally, the Romans knew Carthage as a place where ritual child sacrifice had been perpetrated, where living children had been offered to Moloch.[54] Now it is not necessarily the case that each of these themes is taken up by the Aeneid. But it is certain that events in the Aeneid are always about something more. The Aeneid is laced with historical and philosophical thought. This multilayered quality, again, is what distinguishes it from Homer, and invites rereading. 

One other aspect of Virgil’s remarkable influence deserves to be mentioned — his role in religious conversions. Yes, it is a remarkable fact. From an early day, Christians have framed their own conversion stories in terms of Virgil. Perhaps this is because the Aeneid itself depicts interior change. Aeneas is not static. Perhaps, too, it is because of what I mentioned earlier, that Virgil seems to see beyond the veil, or at least to have dimly pointed towards some reality just beyond him. Or perhaps it is simply Virgil’s unique gift for beautifully summing up an experience. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that Vergil has so gripped the imaginations of his readers that they have seen their lives in Vergilian terms.

Let me cite four examples, persons whose names I have already mentioned tonight. I will not even discuss the case of C.S. Lewis, about whom one author says, astonishingly: “it is no exaggeration to say that Lewis’s acceptance of Christianity was based in great part on his acceptance of the possibility of Virgil being a proto-Christian.”[55]

First, St. Augustine. Most of you will recall what he says in the Confessions: in one of the most poignant lines in Latin literature, he reproaches himself for weeping over Dido’s demise: Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei. “What is more pitiful than a pitiful person not pitying himself and weeping over the death of Dido, which occurred from loving Aeneas, but not weeping over his own death, which occurred from not loving you, God, the light of my heart” (1.13.21). But that is by no means Augustine’s last word in the Confessions regarding the Aeneid. One of that work’s great themes is God’s providential care for Augustine, which becomes apparent after the fact. This is nowhere more clear than in Confessions V, when he describes his move from Carthage to Rome. Remember, he had been teaching rhetoric in Carthage, earning a decent living, but he decided to accept a teaching job in Rome because he heard that the students there were more orderly and disciplined; they did not barge into professors’ classes in which they were not enrolled or commit acts of vandalism. There was one problem. His impassioned mother did not want him to go. She followed him to the port, tugging on his clothes, begging him not to go or to take her with him. What was he to do? Like Aeneas, he planned to deceive her, to slip out of town unawares. He told his mother to pray at the nearby shrine of St. Cyprian, which she did, only to emerge and find that her son had absconded for Rome, without her. Of course you see the parallels. Augustine saw this action in terms of the Aeneid.[56] Other passages in the Confessions reveal this, too. Even the conversation between Augustine and his mother in the port of Ostia, awaiting passage back to Africa, has been regarded as a rewriting of Aeneas’s meeting with Anchises in the underworld.[57] Perhaps more surprising, it is clear that Virgil formed a significant part of Augustine’s pre-baptismal preparation in the summer of 386, his RCIA program, we might say. Every day at Cassiciacum, the rural retreat outside of Milan, he used to read Virgil along with family members, friends, and students. In fact, a recent study of his time in Cassiciacum bears the title, Augustine’s Virgilian Retreat.[58]

Example two is Dante. Virgil is at the end of that marvelous chain of grace that includes Beatrice, St. Lucy, and Our Lady, which rescued Dante, lost in the dark wood, and brought him to a salutary path. Virgil assists with Dante’s rescue, his conversion. I will say no more about this.

Example three is St. John Henry Newman. At a critical point in his Apologia pro vita sua, when he is about to describe his break from Anglicanism, Newman invokes Virgil. Let me read the paragraph, so that you can savor his description and spot the echoes of the Aeneid. Here is Newman:

“And now that I am about to trace, as far as I can, the course of that great revolution of mind, which led me to leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many strong and tender ties, I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from the attempt, till the near approach of the day, on which these lines must be given to the world, forces me to set about the task.”

In case you do not yet get it, he cites some Latin a few lines later. Listen to a bit more:

“yet again, granting that calm contemplation of the past, in itself so desirable, who could afford to be leisurely and deliberate, while he practices on himself a cruel operation, the ripping up of old griefs, and the venturing again upon the ‘infandum dolorem’ of years, in which the stars of this lower heaven were one by one going out? I could not in cool blood, nor except upon the imperious call of duty, attempt what I have set myself to do.”[59]

Yes, Newman is Aeneas in the palace at Carthage, having been asked by his hostess to recount the fall of Troy and his subsequent wanderings, as though his griefs were after-dinner entertainment! Doing so will elicit deep wounds, yet Newman feels duty bound. Once again conversion, once again the Aeneid. According to Pater Edmund Waldstein, these citations demonstrate that Newman “was following Virgil at a deeper level; he was trying to convey the same vision of the deep sadness in greatness of mortal life in its relation to the divine.”[60]

Example four is Msgr. Ronald Knox, who is the most explicit of all, with his work A Spiritual Aeneid. Knox, like Augustine, was reading the Aeneid in the days leading up to his reception into the Catholic Church — he finished it the night before he was received. Each chapter of A Spiritual Aeneid bears an epigraph from the Aeneid, which depicts Knox’s status or frame of mind at the different stages of his movement towards Rome. Knox was a lifelong lover of Virgil — his lectures at Oxford on the Aeneid have recently been published.[61] Following his reception into the Catholic Church, when Knox wrote the Jesuit C.C. Martindale to inform him of the event, it was enough for him merely to cite a line from the Aeneid: Iam tandem Italiae fugientis prendimus oras (6.61),[62]

“Now at last we have in our grasp
The ever-receding shore of Italy” (Lombardo trans.).

Finally, the Aeneid is an apology for poetry. Lewis says “With Virgil European poetry grows up. For there are certain moods in which all that had gone before seems, as it were, boys’ poetry.”[63] A more recent assessment is only slightly less bold: “So enormous has been the influence of Vergil on subsequent Latin poetry — and Latin literature in general — that it would not be too much hyperbole to claim that, as all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, so virtually all Latin poetry after Vergil is a commentary on arma virumque canō.”[64]

But what really is poetry? What is it doing on your syllabus? Outside of school, poetry is not much read, and only occasionally written. Few of us can define poetry, much less relate it to literature as a whole or to other disciplines. 

Before I attempt to give somewhat of a definition, let me make two observations. First, although we do not read poetry much, we still somehow sense that poetry best expresses what needs to be said. Why else would the 9/11 memorial have a line from Virgil? Why do lines of poetry serve as epigraphs for books or chapters of books? Second, often we seem to appreciate poetry even irrespective of the overall meaning of a work. We will take pleasure in a line from Romeo and Juliet, even without taking a stance on the meaning of that play. We will savor a line from a Shakespearean sonnet without being conscious of that sonnet’s argument. 

One helpful way to grasp the nature of poetry is to contrast it with science. Newman did this poignantly in an essay called “The Mission of St. Benedict,” in which he contrasts three great religious orders, the Benedictines, who have a poetic charism, the Dominicans, who have a scientific one, and the Jesuits, who have a practical one.[65] Newman draws a sharp contrast between poetry and science. Science aspires to grasp things, even master them, by means of analysis, and it aims at a system and at progress. On the other hand poetry, which “is always the antagonist to science,” “recedes” rather than progresses. It addresses the imagination and affections rather than the reason, and it elicits “admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love.” Now we may not accept this distinction, but perhaps there will be little quarrel with Newman’s statement that poetry and science “belong respectively to two modes of viewing things.”[66]

Walter Ong, whom I mentioned above, offers a succinct contrast, following St Thomas in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics.[67] Both poetry and science address the speculative intellect, and both have to do with truth, but a scientific work aspires to communicate something independent of the words used in communication; in poetry, on the other hand, the truth does not exist independently of the language.[68] For example, in a Euclidean proof, one savors the logic but not individual words or turns of phrase, much less sounds and rhythm. But in an ode by Tennyson, one does savor turns of phrase, individual words, sounds, rhythm. 

Now it is possible for a poet to aim only at being a wordsmith or a jingle-man.[69] But an excellent poet is one who, in Newman’s words, “always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much;” still more, “he expresses what all feel but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech;” again, he “has something to say and knows how to say it.”[70] I think I have already made the case that Virgil had something to say. Let me say something about how he says it. My contention is that the failure to appreciate the Aeneid is often due to a failure to appreciate it as poetry. You cannot divorce the Aeneid from its words. You have to savor the sounds of the Aeneid. In my experience, even as most first-time readers of the Aeneid in English find it lacking, rarely does one who reads even small parts of the Aeneid in Latin fail to appreciate it. 

Allow me, once again, to savor some of Virgil’s sounds with you.[71]

At the most basic level, we have alliteration, consonance, assonance, and at times onomatopoeia. Here is Virgil’s characterization of the rumbling sea in Book I: interea magno misceri murmure pontum/ emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus et imis (1.124–125). Or listen to the sibilants, like cicadas, as night descends on the banquet in Carthage: praeciptat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos./ sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros (2.9–10). Or the “eerie” w-sounds of Dido’s moribund grief: velleribus niveis et festa fronde revinctum:/ hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis/ visa viri (4.459–461).[72] One need not ask what these sounds mean. They are pleasing.

As you all know, Latin, an inflected language, enjoys marvelous flexibility in the positioning of words. Virgil exploits this. In the opening sentence, after arma virumque cano, he offers an unusually long relative clause, which stretches for seven lines and includes forty-five words, the first of which is Troiae and the last Romae. No accident — this clause is a synopsis of the entire poem.[73]

Then there is elision. Listen to how Virgil depicts Juno’s fear that Ilium will seamlessly, or effortlessly, blend into Italy: Ilium in Italiam.[74] The last syllable of Ilium does not hold place.

Then there is rhythm, the cadence of the dactylic hexameter, epic’s meter since Homer.[75] As many of you know, Latin words have a stress accent, yet classical Latin poetry was based not on stress but on quantity — how long you hold a syllable. A dactyl was one long syllable followed by two short ones — - -. The hexameter consists of six of these, although a spondee ( — — ) could substitute for a dactyl, and the sixth foot always consists of only two syllables. At times a word’s accent coincides with the initial long syllable in a foot, at other times it does not. Too much coincidence, and the audience is lulled to sleep; but not enough coincidence, and the audience is lost. Virgil was the master of this meter, producing rhythms that were enormously pleasing and suggestive. Here is his description of an Ethiopian priestess drugging a beast with honey and opium: spargens umida mella soporiferumque papaver (4.486). Very regular. Here, on the other hand, is his description of Entellus, the victor in the boxing match, sacrificing a bull: sternitur exanimisque tremens procumbit humi bos (5.481). The monosyllabic ending produces a “violent effect,” which one translator succeeds in rendering as follows: “Sprawling, quivering, lifeless, down on the ground the brute fell.”[76]

So some of this can be conveyed in English translations. But before I conclude I do ask that you indulge me just a bit on this very point.

What is to become of the legacy of Latin poetry? Not just Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and the classics, but what about the treasures of the breviary and Latin hymnody more generally? I am not only thinking of Ave Verum Corpus, Dies Irae, Stabat Mater, Te deum laudamus, or those four utterly remarkable eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas. I am also thinking of St. Ambrose — the father of Latin hymnody — Prudentius, Pope St. Gregory the Great, not to mention the numerous anonymous authors whose hymns have been chanted daily for centuries. It is a remarkable fact that the Church has incorporated these non-scriptural hymns into the opus Dei, the worship of Almighty God. The tradition of writing Latin hymns was alive until quite recently. In the late 1800s Pope Leo XIII contributed three hymns for the newly-established feast of the Holy Family; in the middle of last century the Jesuit Vittorio Genovési contributed three hymns for the office of the Assumption. What is to become of this tradition of Latin hymns? It is one thing for connoisseurs to savor them, but might they have a greater role? Ought they have a greater role?

What does all of this have to with Virgil and his Aeneid? St. Ambrose and Prudentius knew Virgil well.[77] St. Thomas Aquinas likely studied Virgil while a student at Monte Cassino.[78] St. Robert Bellarmine, whose hymn to St. Mary Magdalen was incorporated into the Breviary, had memorized the Aeneid — he used to stay up late into the night doing so — and he boasted of writing Latin poems that only used Virgil’s vocabulary.[79] Virgil was the favorite poet, and lifelong companion of Pope Leo XIII, perhaps the last great papal Latin poet[80]; as a child Leo used to commit Virgil’s verses to memory[81], and he won a prize for writing the most Latin hexameters within a span of six hours — 120, or about one every three minutes![82] Ronald Knox was reading Virgil in Latin at the age of six, and he was writing Latin poetry by the time he was ten.[83] It is almost certain that, if there is ever to be a revival of Latin hymnody, Virgil will serve as catalyst or inspiration.

 

Ad primum dicendum quod 

To the first — that poetry cannot mount a defense because it is not intellectual and resists abstraction — it must be said that, although poetry is the lowest part of the art of logic, behind the judicative, dialectical, and rhetorical, nonetheless, according to St. Thomas, it does pertain to philosophy and it does have to with reason.[84] Poetry is not irrational. 

Although a poem does resist abstraction, it would technically be possible to make a syllogism out of a poem, but unlike a Euclidean proof, where one statement necessarily follows upon another, the connections between the members of this so-called poetic syllogism would be more “tenuous,” because they are in fact made by the poet himself — the word “poet,” derives from the Greek word “to make.”[85] Nonetheless, a poem does have an argument. And a poet does indeed have an intention. According to St. Thomas, it is the task of a poet to lead an audience to something virtuous by means of a fitting representation.[86]

As for the statement from MacLeish, that a poem should not mean, but be — if this is taken to suggest an inherent contradiction between meaning and being, it is false; yet it is true in the sense that the poetic art produces works for contemplation; any didactic or rhetorical elements are secondary.[87]

Ad secundum dicendum quod

As for the Aeneid being style rather than substance — here one must strive to imitate St. Thomas’s unfailing charity, because the charge is so absurd. I have already indicated some of the robust themes the Aeneid takes up.

But I question the premise of the objection. It is true that Virgil’s stylistic excellence — really preeminence — has been almost universally recognized, even by his occasional detractors, but it is a mistake to think that style can be divorced from content. Newman wrote an entire essay refuting that notion. As he says, “thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language.”[88] In support of this, Newman points to the Greek word logos, which means reason and speech, “both at once.”[89] Style, then, is not a superficial, extrinsic addition, “as if,” Newman says “language were the hired servant, the mere mistress of the reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house.”[90] Rather a great author writes beautifully because he thinks beautiful and lofty thoughts; in fact, Newman says, “his language expresses not only his great thoughts, but his great self.”[91]

Ad tertium dicendum quod

The third objection — that the Aeneid is unsavory propaganda — would require a separate lecture. 

Briefly — I have tried to demonstrate tonight that the Aeneid is a deeply meditative poem, and that, as such, it cannot be reduced to propaganda. Insofar as the Aeneid is poetry, it is primarily ordered to contemplation; rhetorical elements, which are designed to persuade, are indeed present, but they are secondary. 

Now as for Aeneas’s unsavory deeds — there is no denying them. Book X is filled with them, especially Aeneas’s vengeful aspiration to commit human sacrifice. But already in Book II, Aeneas can be faulted for donning Greek armor and acting like the Greeks, i.e., deceitfully. Aeneas is far from a flawless character. As Newman says: “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man.”[92]

But Aeneas’s unsavory deeds do not invalidate his vocation, or Rome’s vocation, which was for the good. Admittedly, the conclusion of the poem is one of the more challenging passages in all of literature. Virgil, clearly, designed it to be such. After all, why does Aeneas pause before killing Turnus? My contention is that a good way to make sense of some of the violence in the Aeneid is to view it in light of an important passage in Book VIII, when Aeneas journeys up the Tiber and hears from Evander the story of Hercules’s violent subjection of Cacus, which was a necessary condition for the peaceful settlement of that very spot, where Rome, the Eternal City, would one day stand, which, as Dante extols, was

 set

firmly in place to be the holy throne
where the successor to great Peter sits” (Inferno, 2.23–24 trans. A. Esolen).

As I mentioned in my last lecture, Aquinas’s articles in the Summa do not end with a flourish. So here I will depart from the Angelic Doctor to offer a concluding exhortation.

Looking back on my own Great Books education, for which I am grateful, one deficiency was the lack of integration of Latin into the curriculum. Two semesters were required, yet Latin seemed not germane, but a tired holdover from an earlier era. Here at Thomas Aquinas College, I know, the experience is different. Latin, like Euclid, is foundational, and your tutors give considerable thought to how it should be taught. This is admirable. It is my conviction that language transmits culture, that Latin is the central language in the Western Tradition, that learning a language is a lengthy labor (of love), best done in a community, under the tutelage of wise guides. So, students, persevere with Latin, and consider persevering with it even when your required courses come to an end. For centuries reading the Aeneid in Latin was a culmination of, an incentive for, and a justification of, the study of Latin. This could be true for you too.

I commend you students for applying yourselves so diligently to the fine curriculum offered at Thomas Aquinas College, a place where happily the Aeneid is taught; where, if not universally loved, it is at least respected and well-considered. I applaud your tutors, and I am grateful to the founders and governors of your college, who have defended, and will continue to defend this curriculum in the face of future challenges.

 

 

 

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