How to resurrect what the Ivies killed.
Why is Harvard’s motto in Latin? On the current coat of arms, printed on three open books, is the inscription VE-RI-TAS: “Truth.” Through Harvard’s history, there have been several other mottos, including in Christi Gloriam and pro Christo et Ecclesia (sometimes appearing alongside the original Veritas). The current one-word version, stripped of references to Christianity, was adopted in the early 20th century.
Would it be so surprising, given its current trajectory, if Harvard finally decided to remove the word entirely, like an annoying wisdom tooth? While the Trump Administration’s recent ultimatum to Harvard has drawn critiques not just from the Left but even the New Right, there is still broad consensus that something must be done to halt the decay of America’s prestige institutions.
However cringe it may seem to some, the administration’s demand that Harvard implement “viewpoint diversity” in admissions and faculty appointments at least recognizes, in official print, that our nation’s reputedly elite institutions have largely put themselves in service of a left-leaning political patronage industry. It is hard for many people to see how this conduces to Veritas.
Instead, what these institutions seem to aim at is what R.R. Reno, in Return of the Strong Gods, describes as the “open society consensus.” The term comes from Karl Popper’s 1945 Open Society, with its influential screed against “closed society” proponents like Hegel, Marx, and Plato(!). Reno describes this “consensus” as a broad movement in post-war America (and Europe) to weaken the credibility of every meaningful institution—state, nation, religion, metaphysics, heck, why not the family too?—which might strengthen the supposed authoritarian tendency latent in all humans.
In place of such natural organizing principles, we have not ended up with an open-minded utopia, but instead the totalitarian rule of experts attempting weakly to manage and manipulate a populace linked only by the weakest of ties, robbed of a common culture, and deeply suspicious, because largely ignorant, of any historically rooted principle that predates World War II.
Can the sickness afflicting our once-great universities like a temporary fever be reversed with treatment? Or is it more akin to a rabies infection, which has irreversibly taken over the body of a once-beloved family dog—and therefore we must acknowledge it is no longer the same cherished animal? Time to find a new pet?
One way or another, Americans will rebuild their intellectual tradition, inside or outside these institutions.
Harvard’s vestigial Latin motto still points to one of the strongest gods the postwar consensus has toppled: the Classics. Even the fiercest opponents of Christendom’s moral order, from French Enlightenment atheists to late 19th-century American liberal progressives, have long recognized how central the Greek and Latin Classics were to the foundations of the healthy society they disliked.
In Christianity, Greek and Latin have an obvious status, alongside Hebrew, as divine languages used in key texts of revealed religion, liturgical worship, and theological treatises and church councils. But the early Christians also mastered Greek and Latin for a more secular set of reasons, especially once they began to enter positions of high political authority, from Constantine onward. Greek and Latin were the languages of power in the Roman world, and the literary and philosophical traditions they represented gave Christians the practical vocabulary of authority and wisdom necessary for governing the Roman Empire. Their world was religiously diverse, but the Classics were a common ground on which they could share a practical life with pagans, Jews, and yes, even heretics, schismatics, and atheists. (See Peter Brown’s classic 1992 study, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity.)
Greek and (especially) Latin remained the common intellectual languages of Christendom through the Scientific Revolution. Men like Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the father of modern taxonomy, continued to write their most important works in Latin. Even some of the most famous challenges to Christianity’s perceived excesses were made from within the classical tradition, such as the works of Machiavelli, Bacon’s Novum Organum (in Latin), and Hobbes’s Leviathan (written in English but later translated into Latin by the author in order to reach broader audiences).
Alas, the current state of education has surpassed the wildest dreams of the American progressives who campaigned to remove the Greek and Latin entry exam requirements at Ivy League universities in the late 19th century. Graduates of Classics programs, especially at prestige universities, are extraordinarily rare as it is, and most would likely fail the rigorous language exams once handed to unremarkable 16-year-olds. Even among many professional scholars, translation is seen as a daunting task, never to be undertaken without a hefty dictionary. And thank God nobody will ever ask you to compose any piece of writing in Latin or Greek, much less expect you to speak a sentence of it, or to pretend to understand when it is spoken to you.
Classicists have largely lost faith in the value of their discipline’s key skill. My alma mater apparently doesn’t even require language skills of its Classics graduates anymore. The tacit assumption of most classicists, rarely uttered forthrightly, is that the only reason anyone would devote serious time to studying Greek and Latin is because they aspired one day…to get a job teaching Greek and Latin. This means, let’s be honest, nobody has to be very good.
There is little real conviction nowadays, even among the discipline’s leaders, that reading Homer, Plato, or Horace in the original language is a morally improving or genuinely inspiring activity, much less a civilizationally important one. Furthermore, it’s hard! Yet people of widely varying professional pursuits, from Robert Oppenheimer to Werner Herzog, used to enjoy unmediated access to the Classics throughout their lives as a constant wellspring of creative insight and practical wisdom.
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has shown the profound importance of speaking and hearing comprehensible input for competence and mastery in any language. Generations of older Europeans can tell you stories of how the Greek and Latin faculty, even of backwater secondary schools, used to conduct their after-hours meetings in Latin.
But as a Classics faculty member once told me when, as a young student, I expressed interest in actually speaking Greek and Latin, “That won’t make you better at scholarly interpretation.” Besides the important fact that this is not true, his statement reflects the general consensus that these are “scholarly languages” most useful for scholars who want to write scholarly articles for other scholars to read. No wonder all the cool kids left the room long ago.
To acquire Greek or Latin to a level at which it becomes enjoyable and lends vitality to life requires strong convictions of the sort unwelcome in most university humanities departments. Understandably, the backlash to this demoralizing, incompetence-breeding, “scholars-only” attitude began outside prestigious institutions of secular learning. In the latter 20th century, figures like the Vatican Latinists Reginald Foster and Luigi Miraglia, founder of the Accademia Vivarium Novum, slowly gathered disciples by speaking Latin with living fluency and insisting that doing this—and engaging the great works in their original language—was a good thing for anyone with a serious attitude toward life.
Their torch has been taken up in more recent years by initiatives like the Paideia Institute and the Ancient Language Institute. What began as a tiny niche has grown to a modest-sized niche, and has started to nip at the fringes of the consensus in professional classics.
Recently an entire institution was founded on the principles laid down by the living ancient languages movement: Ralston College. Ralston, admittedly, is dedicated to reviving the humanities as a whole, mainly through the medium of English. But I visited Ralston recently and was regaled at dinner by a student reciting from memory the entire first chapter of the Gospel of John in Greek. The next day I attended a class in which students sat at a seminar desk, reading and discussing Plato’s Republic in Attic Greek. These students were already beyond the skills of many PhD students—at least in one surpassingly important respect—and they had only begun studying the language four months earlier. At the time, Ralston was only offering Greek, but they have recently started a Latin program, too.
Pontius Pilate is supposed to have asked Christ at his judgement, Quid est Veritas? (What is Truth?) More likely, he was speaking Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman East (and the original quote does come from the Gospel of John, written in Greek). The Greek word for truth, aletheia, means either “not forgetting” or “not letting things escape your notice” (or both). Our English word “truth” shares an Indo-European root with the Latin word durus, meaning “hard,” and the Greek word drus, “oak” (whence “Dryad”).
The classical languages represent an indispensable aspect of the mission to resurrect Veritas and unforget its crucial role in our culture. Greek and Latin give unmediated access to the unchanging hardwood floor of our civilization, and the cold realism of the principles on which it was built. If we have hope of refounding our intellectual tradition, this is a good place to start.
