The Classics Are For All

This was the year I finally got to see this amazing sight. Why has it taken me sixty-eight years to visit mainland Greece and see the Parthenon, Delphi, Olympia, Mycenae and other legendary places whose names are so familiar to anyone who treasures classical antiquity? I wrote a couple of blogs as I tried to reflect on what became for me a real pilgrimage and journey of discovery (you can find my thoughts here and here).

Never one to be without something to read, I'd downloaded the Iliad on my tablet and from time to time turned to it during the trip. It was decades since I had last immersed myself in this epic tale of the Trojan War. I guess you have to have lived for a while if you're going to see beneath the surface of the text and grasp something of what Homer was trying to convey about human life that gives this epic poem universal significance. I'm not saying I've "got it" yet (but Adam Nicholson's book Why Homer Matters was an enjoyable read just before we set out for Athens). But it was undeniably momentous to sit outside Agamemnon's tomb at Mycenae and read from it. I'll never forget it.

In Greece I found myself reminiscing about childhood. One of the earliest Puffin Books I remember reading was Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Greek Heroes (which you can now get in a beautiful Folio Society edition). I think I fell in love with the classics then. At the age of nine I began Latin at school. That too felt, for obscure reasons I couldn't have put into words at the time, like a big rite of passage. At the end of an introductory lesson in which our teacher told us why ancient languages still mattered in the nineteen fifties) he said (and I can still remember the exact words): "All this is why pupils at this school study Latin. Tomorrow we'll begin the actual task of learning the language: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. With that he swept out of the room, his MA gown swirling behind him. He knew how to make an exit. It was one of those dramatic moments of my schooldays.

The following year we began Greek. I relished both languages for the elegant architecture of their grammar and syntax. We had large-format text books specially produced by the school: the maroon Latin Book and its blue counterpart Outline of Greek Accidence. I loved the idea that we were studying "accidence" (the part of grammar that deals with the way words are inflected - conjugations, declensions, that sort of thing). "Principal parts" fascinated me (do today's students still learn them by heart, as we did?). Soon we were ready to read and translate simple prose texts: bits of Caesar, Livy, Xenophon. "Unseens" followed, passages of Latin or Greek we hadn't come across before and which we had to have a stab at translating. I still have my first Latin dictionary that my uncle gave me one Christmas. Not long afterwards, I found a copy of the giant "Liddell and Scott" Greek-English Lexicon for 6d in a jumble sale. I still have that too.

The time came for GCE O-levels and set texts for exams in both Latin and Greek. I can't remember what the prose Latin text was, Caesar probably: if I dug around in the attic, I'd probably come across the exam papers themselves that would remind me. But there was no forgetting the poetry text. This was Book V of Virgil's Aeneid that tells of the funeral games Aeneas organises on the anniversary of his father's death. It wasn't easy but with able guidance by someone who loved these texts ("you never forget a good teacher") we persevered. How rewarding it felt to have read one whole book from the pen of Rome's greatest poet!

In Greek, we had a section of Xenophon to study (Thalassa! Thalassa! The sea! The sea! - one of the greatest moments in all history writing). And for poetry, Euripedes' Medea. Looking back, I'm amazed that we were exposed as schoolboys of a tender age to all that cruelty and bloodshed (for Medea murders her own children as an act of revenge against Jason who has abandoned her). We were spared the choruses (really difficult Greek) but even so, the text felt like quite a challenge. I saw a dramatic production of it not long ago (in English), and was startled by the visceral power of this great tragedy. When you read the Greek tragedians, you feel that all of human life is there.

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Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to convey something of the lifelong effect studying classics at an early age had on me. At a practical level, it meant that I already had ancient languages in my knapsack when I came to study theology and read the New Testament and the Christian fathers in Greek and Latin. But the debt I owe is far more than this. I think the classics gave me three things above all. The first was the start of some understanding of how languages work. We all know how much English owes to classical languages, let alone Romance languages like French which we began to learn once we had some grounding in Latin and Greek. I became fascinated by the history of words and loved discovering how etymologies often cast light on how English words came to carry the meanings they have. I still do.

The second insight was how the world of antiquity has been so influential in shaping our own culture, and how classical studies unlocks so much that is referenced in the western canon of art, poetry and literature as well as philosophy, ethics, politics, science and the world of ideas. The Bible is an indispensable part of that too, and it's worrying that today's generation of students don't have the familiarity our forebears had with the texts and concepts that have come down to us from the ancient world. And my third reason for being grateful for a classical education is that it gave me a deep love of literature and poetry that has sustained me for a lifetime. You can't read Virgil or Euripedes and not feel you are in the presence of giants. I can't claim I necessarily felt it quite like that at the time. But in retrospect, I can see how the seeds were sown. And if I've acquired any ability to string words together as a writer and preacher, then I owe a large part of it to the classics.

This week I came across Classics for All on social media. This is a charitable organisation that provides funding and support for the teaching of classics in state primary and secondary schools. They say: classical subjects are a vital foundation for a modern education. We believe every pupil deserves to benefit from the learning, enjoyment and inspiration that classics provides. Their Big Give Christmas Challenge 2018 aimed to raise £45000 to support classics in schools in the Midlands and the North East. They want to bring classics to 72 schools in areas where there is currently little or no provision. My children were all educated in both these parts of England, so I have a definite interest here! I made a donation which was doubled by a generous corporate champion. Later that day, I learned that the target figure had been met. Which is a great achievement.

I'd love to think that young people today can find as much enjoyment as I have done in the classics. Classics teaching today is no doubt very different from what it was when I was at school. I guess it's a lot more interactive and inventive, and a lot of fun. I hope it does for them what it did for me, act as a key to unlocking the world in which we live by helping us to acknowledge our debt to the past. So that when today's students clamber up the Acropolis to marvel at the Parthenon as I did this autumn, they too will find themselves in a landscape that they can read, because it is already familiar, and maybe already loved. And those students in the North East who like me live close to Hadrian's Wall will appreciate their rich classical heritage all the more.

That Infamous Headline: a Question from Schooldays

Have we ever seen a more infamous headline in a British daily paper?

I mean the Daily Mail's front page on Friday 4 November. It was the day after the three High Court judges ruled that the government was bound by law to gain the consent of Parliament before invoking Article 50 and triggering Brexit. As we all know, it lined up mugshots of the three judges above the headline "Enemies of the People".

In a blog (here) the same day I spelled out what I thought was at stake in the High Court's ruling and the Prime Minister's rush to appeal it: respect for law, governance and parliamentary democracy. Many have defended the judges and many have dissented. Fair enough. Testing judgments is what legal process is for. But if you are going to dissent, it needs to be done intelligently. It's not enough to denounce, attack and stamp your foot. The Mail seems to me to be wilfully perverse in just not "getting" it. For this case in law has nothing to do with Brexit itself, whether Britain should or shouldn't leave the EU. It has everything to do with the legal process by which the referendum decision to leave is achieved. This, said the judges, was a matter for Parliament, not the Executive alone.

So the Mail's headline is based on the false premise that by interfering with the referendum Brexit vote, the judges were guilty of meddling in politics. But it's worse than that. To denounce them as "enemies of the people" is an offensive slur on their integrity and professionalism. They know the boundaries of the law's competence better than anyone. Straying beyond them in the High Court to play politics would be unthinkable. And if the judges have acted as enemies in upholding the role of Parliament in the Brexit process, that's tantamount to asserting that Parliament too is the enemy. If I were a parliamentarian, whatever my party or position on Brexit, I would be extremely angry.

This amounts to an implied attack on the independence of the judiciary. A free press is at liberty to disagree with judges just as it's free to dissent from politicians. But once it goes beyond that and starts saying, in effect, that the judgment should have found for the government because that was its business, the independence of judicial scrutiny is entirely subverted. The reality is that in the British Constitution, Prime Minister, her Executive and the Crown itself are all subject to the law of the land. It's the job of the judiciary to clarify what that law is. That's what the judges were doing as conscientiously as they knew how.

The Daily Mail has in the past won awards for its reporting and investigative journalism. So let's not disparage what the Mail has achieved just because we're at odds with it (not for the first time). But that doesn't excuse serious lapses of judgment. Cheap headlines like this are unworthy of a responsible paper. They don't clarify, they aren't truth-seeking, they don't foster serious debate and they don't help us to "disagree well" to use the Archbishop of Canterbury's phrase. All they do is to raise the temperature and fuel mistrust. They are more at home in regimes where the judiciary is in the pockets of dictators or powerful paylords, not in constitutional democracies like ours. "Enemies of the People" may achieve a dramatic effect (who will forget it?) but it's meretricious and unprincipled.

Now, the editor of the Daily Mail is Paul Dacre. I was at school with him in the 1960s: I think we were exact contemporaries. A writer rang me up a while ago to ask if I remembered him from schooldays. I replied that I hadn't known him well, but I did have a clear memory of one thing: his prowess on the rugby pitch. How I envied sporting ability like his! I was the clumsiest rugby player you ever saw and no better at cricket. Those who won their colours were like gods to me. I imagined there was nothing they could not and would not achieve in life. And becoming editor of a national newspaper is indeed a pretty big achievement.

You may have got the impression that he and I went to a typical public school where old-fashioned values were shaped by the classics, chapel services, corporal punishment, the playing field and the corps.  Well it wasn't like that at all. True, it was an independent (day) school where we did study classics and did play rugby. But our school had been founded by far-seeing and enlightened men in the early nineteenth century in pursuit of a vision for society shaped by utilitarian ideas and free of religious ideology. In the prep school I found myself in Bentham House. That says it all. For Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), virtue in a society meant "the greatest happiness for the greatest number". It has proved to be a profoundly influential idea throughout the English-speaking world thanks to the writings of John Stuart Mill.

Because of this, my parents decided to send me there. My father and mother were a mixed marriage of non-observants, Anglican and Jewish. They believed religion was a source of division and conflict in the world, and wanted their children educated in a liberal environment free of religious obligations and loyalties. (How ironic that it was at school that I found my Christian faith as a teenager, or rather, it found me. God moves in mysterious ways.) They wanted us to be good citizens of a world where religion, politics and ideas were debated in a tolerant way that was not afraid of diversity, and instead of invoking dogma, looked for understanding. They wouldn't have put it in quite that way. But it's what they were feeling for.

I realise how much I owe to that education. It's true that for a while, the conservative evangelical Christianity I'd embraced threatened to eclipse the liberal outlook I'd been formed in. I'm grateful that by the time I was ordained in the 1970s, I was able to see things in a larger context. I began to understand that if humanity is to survive, let alone flourish, we must all learn to live as adults in a world of religious, political and ideological differences. It's not that there's no place left for conviction or passion. It's how we express them and embody them that counts, and (just as important) how we listen to other people's passion and conviction. It's part of finding our place in the world where tolerance, understanding, generosity and trust are everything.

This was the school both Paul Dacre and I come from. So you'll see why Friday's headline poses a question for me. If our school influenced me in the ways I've described, I'm wondering how it influenced him too. For the editor of the Daily Mail presides over a paper that seems to me to have taken on Friday a rather different approach to the week's events from the one I'd thought he and I were schooled in. "Enemies of the People" is just not the way his education and mine taught us to do business. It tried to help us learn that we don't scream with rage or impugn one another's integrity; instead, we listen and try to understand; we argue it out, and if we differ it's without rancour. There's no place in the public discourse of a civilised society for shrillness. It brings no credit to a responsible newspaper that claims to be proud of our British values and ways of doing things.

So because I'm interested in human nature (it's my job to be), I'm intrigued by what motivates the thinking of this powerful and able man who for so long has sat at the helm of the Daily Mail. Perhaps my old school contemporary will tell us how his mind works nowadays, half a century after he and I parted company for the last time.

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In Praise of π

It was always going to be irresistible. When my daughter told me that today was a unique Pi Day 2016 (14 March, 3.14.16) I knew I would want to blog about it. Indeed, given the part mathematics has played in my life, I'm surprised I haven't blogged on it before.

I owe a lot to π. Not so much to the number itself, for all its irrational, transcendental qualities (those are technical mathematical terms by the way, not just the blogger's purple prose). But to what it symbolises and represents in the world of thought, in the structure of the universe, and not least in my own life.

For autobiography comes into things today. I can remember that even at a tender age I used to long to make sense of the arcane mathematical symbols that littered the books I pulled off the school library shelves: all those xs and ys and Σ signs and long swirly Ss which I can't do on this keyboard but which I later learned to know as symbols of integration, and dy/dx, and e and most of all, because it seemed to crop up everywhere, π. 

I think I fell in love with maths when I finally got to understand what π stood for. Calculating a circle's circumference and area was where it all began of course. But as I went on to do A level maths, it seemed to me miraculous that this innocent Greek letter could work so hard. It featured in places where I least expected it such as working out the period of a pendulum or the movements of the planets or how the hours of daylight change as we travel through the year. And more and more surprises the deeper I went.

I went on to read maths at university. There I began to penetrate the mysteries of algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, number theory and formal logic. (From this some readers will deduce that my inclinations were very much on the 'pure' side of mathematics. I was never much good at 'applied' maths or statistics, though of course π makes plenty of appearances in those areas too.) I loved what I was studying. I loved mathematics for itself, its elegance and beauty, its endless capacity to model worlds we know about and worlds we can never know. I loved it because it seemed to draw me into the deep structures of the universe itself. Was it an art or a science? I used to wonder. I still do. Maybe it doesn't matter. 

And I loved maths for how it was teaching me to think. There are various theories of what mathematics is in itself. Philosophers differ, for instance, about whether it has some 'eternal' (God-given?) existence outside ourselves, whether it is a product of the human mind and its patterns of thought, or whether it is an elaborate game played according to set rules or axioms that govern how we handle signs and formulae on the screen or page. But all agree that logic lies at the foundation of mathematics. And I was finding that my own habits of thinking and speaking, arguing and debating were being profoundly moulded by a desire at least to try to be rigorous. 

I wish that after I graduated with a (not very distinguished) maths degree, I'd kept up my love of the subject. I never did apart from reading popular books on the subject from time to time - which I still do. However by then my vocation to be a priest was beginning to change the way I was thinking about my future. So I turned to theology and took a second degree in what used to be called 'the queen of sciences'. I loved that too. (Perhaps I'm lucky enough to be one of those insatiably curious people who can love almost anything that is interesting enough.) And I realised, when I started to write my first faltering essays, that I owed a huge amount to my mathematical studies. 

When you study theology, you realise how easy it is to be careless about your assumptions and ways of working. Not all the textbooks were models of clear, disciplined, rigorous argument, I used to feel. As I said, maths taught me something of how to think. And as I now see, thought is so basic to who and what we are as human beings. There's much more to be said about Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am'. There's more to human life than simply thinking. But he was on to something pretty important. And I reckon I started to glimpse it when I was studying maths as a schoolboy and a student. In that respect, π changed my life, if you'll allow the figure of speech. 

My daughter is about to marry a high school maths teacher. He loves what he does, both the subject itself, and the art of teaching it and exciting young people in their journey of mathematical discovery. I was fortunate to have teachers who lit up mathematics for me too. It's true: you never forget a good teacher. The shortage of good maths teachers in our schools today is worrying. Mathematical literacy (which is more than simply numeracy) is one of the basic foundations of education. As Einstein put it, the point of education is not to impart facts but to teach us how to think. There's no better discipline than maths for helping us to do that. Maybe Pi Day is a chance not only to celebrate mathematics and mathematicians, but also to think about how we are going to train up the next generation of children for whom π will be as alluring as it once was for me.