Nine Corrupt Pillars of Classical Greece
Maybe you are a Christian parent looking for a curriculum for your child. You are considering a school that costs $5,000 a year. It offers what it calls a classical Christian curriculum.
Save your money. There is no such thing as a classical Christian curriculum. There never has been.
There is a fake hybrid of two rival systems of thought, politics, and culture. They are at war with each other. It is sold to gullible Christian parents by poorly educated school masters who either do not understand classical Greece or who are deliberately deceiving parents.
The Greece of classical Christian education is a whitewashed Greece. It never existed.
Let us say that I come to you with an offer. I tell you that I have a curriculum based on the ideals of classical Greece, meaning Athens. This is what "classical Greece" has always meant in the West: Athens.
You say you are interested, but first you want to know more about the worldview of classical Greece. What did they believe in? What were the foundations of classical Greek civilization? I offer you this list.
1. Pederasty. This is the homosexual union of an older married man with a teenage boy. The men often met the boys on their way to the gymnasium, the building in which the boys danced and played sports naked. The men then became the boys' lovers and teachers.2. Demonism. The Greeks were polytheistic. Greek family life rested on a system of sacrifice to demons that masqueraded as the spirits of dead male relatives. So did clan life, which became political life. These demons also presented themselves as underground gods and spirits, who demanded sacrifices and special rituals to keep from destroying people. On this point, see the works of the early 20th century archaeologist-historian, Jane Ellen Harrison. This never gets into the textbooks, although specialists are well aware of it.
3. Warfare. At the center of the literature of classical Greece was Homer's poem, The Iliad. It is the story of how Achilles' resentment against King Agamemnon raged because the king took his kidnapped concubine for himself. All the other men had concubines for the ten years they were at war. But no children are mentioned by Homer. Now that's real Greek mythology! Their wives stayed home and kept the ritual home fires burning -- to placate the family's departed male spirits. Athens destroyed itself in Pericles' needless imperial war against Sparta. Then the Macedonians conquered war-ravaged Greece. But the textbooks praise Pericles as a pillar of wisdom, reprinting Thucydides' posthumous version of Pericles' suicidal imperial oration.
4. Slavery. At least one-third of Athens was enslaved. The figure was as high in Sparta. Every household owned a slave. This provided leisure for their owners, who despised physical labor as beneath them -- servile. Slavery was a universal institution in Greece.
5. Autonomy. Greek philosophy was based on the ideal of man's mind as completely sovereign -- no personal God allowed. Well, not quite. Socrates claimed he was given guidance in his thinking by a demon (daimon). But rationalistic scholars, beginning with Plato, have always downplayed this. They have sometimes said this was just hyperbolic literary language. Socrates could not really have believed in a demon. After all, they don't.
6. Welfare State. At least one-third of all male Athenians were on the government's payroll in the time of Pericles.
7. Human Sacrifice. This was a basic theme in Greek literature. It was part of Athenian religious liturgy. There was no widespread movement to decry the earlier practice. The great expert here was Lord Acton, who wrote a long-ignored essay, "Human Sacrifice," in 1864. It is online here. It is included in Volume 3 of Selected Writings of Lord Acton, published by the Liberty Fund. From the day he published it in order to refute the great historian Macaulay, historians have refused to incorporate it in their narratives. It is way too embarrassing.
8. Cyclical View of Time. The Greeks did not believe in long-term progress or a final judgment -- just endless cycles forever: rise and fall, rise and fall. According to the historian of science, Stanley Jaki, this was why the Greeks never developed science, only technologies.
9. Female Inferiority. Wives were only for procreation. They could not be citizens. They had no legal rights. A man needed a male heir to perform the ritual sacrifices to feed him after he died. Women had no political influence except as prophetesses and mistresses.
You say that this is not what you had in mind for your child?
Yet for 1,800 years, well-educated Christians have returned over and over to Greek philosophy, Greek art, and Greek mythology as the basis of formal education. They have mixed together rival views of life -- God, man, law, sanctions, and time -- and have called it classical Christian education.
These well-meaning but terminally naïve Christian educators have always argued that the bad aspects of classical Greece were not part of this classical tradition. In other words, "by their fruits ye shall not know them." In other words, Christians should adopt a cultural tradition that was built on the nine pillars of classical Greece society, but then reject all nine pillars. They say -- but never show how -- the Bible can be substituted for these nine foul pillars.
Humanists teach that Western civilization grew mainly out of Greece and Rome. Western Civilization textbooks have always spent most of their early pages on Greece and Rome, not on Israel and the early church. There is a reason for this. Ever since the God-hating Renaissance ("rebirth"), humanists have sought to substitute classical culture for Christian culture.
CENSORSHIP AND INCOMPLETE TRANSLATIONS
Beginning in the eighteenth century, and accelerating in the nineteenth century, scholars began translating classical texts into English. The publishers sold these translations to the educated public. Because of the sexual perversity of Greek texts, and because of the debauchery of Latin texts, the publishers faced a problem: laws against obscenity. So, the publishers told the translators not to translate the salacious passages. Only highly educated readers could enjoy these passages. The censors went along with this: "no harm, no foul." This arrangement also applied to translations of early Christian texts in which the authors exposed the perversity of the classical authors by quoting them verbatim. So, in a translation, whenever you see Latin, you know that this is the debauched stuff.
For centuries, Christian parents who did not speak Greek or Latin were unaware of all this. So, they had their sons taught Latin and maybe Greek from age six in costly private academies, so that their sons could get into Ivy League colleges in order to waste four more years reading classical texts in the original languages. Why did parents do this? Because of academic tradition. Generations of Christian parents had been doing this ever since the late Middle Ages.
It was all a gigantic con job. It was partially a case of humanist wolves in Christian sheep's clothing. But mainly it was a way to screen out applicants for bureaucratic jobs in both church and state. It was a way to limit the number of applicants. This kept wages above-market for bureaucrats. In short, it was a form of occupational licensure.
This practice went back to Greece's Hippocratic oath, which began as follows:
I swear by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius the surgeon, likewise Hygeia and Panacea, and call all the gods and goddesses to witness, that I will observe and keep this underwritten oath, to the utmost of my power and judgment.I will reverence my master who taught me the art. Equally with my parents, will I allow him things necessary for his support, and will consider his sons as brothers. I will teach them my art without reward or agreement; and I will impart all my acquirement, instructions, and whatever I know, to my master's children, as to my own; and likewise to all my pupils, who shall bind and tie themselves by a professional oath, but to none else.
It was a way to create an oath-bound guild of oligopolists. The practice is still in force in academia. But at least it is no longer based on a reading knowledge of Latin.
THE MYTH SURVIVES
These days, only American Protestant evangelical parents fall for the myth of classical education -- a baptized form called classical Christian education. In contrast, non-fundamentalist parents do not want their children wasting years learning Greek and Latin, which are skills without any application in the modern world. The Ivy League schools figured this out, beginning in the 1870's. But Christian parents with third-rate educations are sold a bill of goods: classical Christian education.
I ask you now: Do you really want your child to spend a decade studying a curriculum based on classical education? If so, why?
As you can see, I am anticlassical.
Beginning in 1995, I have sounded the alarm on the phony hybrid called the classical Christian education. Here is my original article: //www.garynorth.com/Classical1995.pdf.
Nineteen years later, I was challenged in print by a man who makes his living selling what he calls a classical Christian curriculum. He had seen my original article in 1995. He ignored it. He was making too much money by then to stop publishing his home school materials. Finally, in 2014, he decided to respond publicly. We debated back and forth twice. Then I wrote this: //www.garynorth.com/public/12665.cfm. He never responded. What else could he say? Of course, he still sells his materials.
I remain anticlassical.
My warnings have done no good. Evangelical Protestant parents are suckers for anything that sounds like it came from Harvard. In this case, it really did. And Harvard got it from Cambridge.