Phi Beta Kappa and the Grecophilic Tradition

Remarks at Phi Beta Kappa Induction Ceremony

My first order of business this evening is to congratulate all of the new inductees into Phi Beta Kappa. Speaking on behalf of the Chancellor, the faculty, and all members of the University of Tennessee community, I want to convey to you our admiration for your work and our appreciation for your exemplary accomplishments on our campus. Students like you make our jobs very fulfilling. Sometimes during the course of our work administering, teaching, and dealing with students, we lose sight of the reason that we are here. Your achievements remind us of the life of the mind, of the central place of the liberal arts in a college curriculum, and of the satisfaction that comes from education at the highest levels.

As you well know, only the most outstanding students every year are inducted into Phi Beta Kappa; nationwide only one percent of students are invited to join this honor society. These students have to demonstrate a tremendous intellectual commitment to their studies, excelling not only in one area of knowledge, but across the entire spectrum of the liberal arts. Tonight you can count yourselves as fellow members of an elite group in American society. From John Quincy Adams in 1787 and Daniel Webster in 1801 to Samuel Morse in 1810 and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1825, from Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1861 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1880 to W.E.B. DuBois in 1890 and Felix Frankfurter in 1902, and from Pearl Buck in 1914 and Paul Robeson in 1919 to Lamar Alexander in 1962 and Ashley Judd in 1990, you join the ranks of a very select group of former students in our nation. You are truly very special individuals, and you richly deserve the honor that you receive as new members of Phi Beta Kappa.

In exploring the history of Phi Beta Kappa in preparation for this talk, I learned some rather interesting facts about the society. As you may know, Phi Beta Kappa is older than our country and was intimately involved with its birth. Shortly after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a group of enthusiastically patriotic students at the College of William and Mary, the second oldest institution of higher education in the United States, came together to discuss the political situation in the colonies. On December 5, 1776, five students at William and Mary formed the first Greek letter organization on an American campus. Like all secret societies it originally had a secret handshake, an oath of allegiance, Latin and Greek mottoes, and a rite of initiation. Most of these formalities fell away over time. The society was disbanded by the British in 1781, but by that time Phi Beta Kappa had begun to spread to other colonial colleges: to Harvard and Yale in 1779 and then to Dartmouth in 1787. Eventually the organization evolved from a social and honorary society to one focused solely on academic achievement. The first women were elected in 1875; the first African Americans became members in 1877. The Epsilon chapter at the University of Tennessee was initiated in 1965.

An interesting aspect of this history for me is the appearance of Greek letter societies in the eighteenth century. The Greek letters Phi Beta Kappa stand for Φιλοσοφία Βιοῦ Κυβερνήτης. philosophia biou kubernetes, which means “philosophy (literally love of wisdom), the guide of life.” And the question arises, why do we have Greek letter societies arising to celebrate academic achievement, freedom from foreign domination, and university activities? Why didn’t the students at William and Mary simply name their association the “philosophical society” or the “American honor society”? Why did they select Greece, an intellectual tradition in Europe from which they were presumably trying to liberate themselves politically, as their beacon and symbolic foundation? Certainly one simple reason may have been that the ancient Greek language was a mandatory part of every student’s academic preparation in the eighteenth century (and well into the nineteenth century as well). But there must have been other qualities associated with the ancient world that led these young men to Greek letters and a Greek slogan for their academic undertaking.

Here is the point at which the history of Phi Beta Kappa intersects with some of my own intellectual interests. The first book I published took up the topic of Grecophilia in the German tradition. The word Grecophilia, or love of Greece, is something that the students at William and Mary also felt, and I believe a short examination of this tradition will indicate why students at the time of the American Revolution thought that their political and intellectual aspirations were most adequately reflected in the world of ancient Greece.

Undoubtedly the most important individual in the German tradition for the eighteenth century veneration of ancient Greece was Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He is also someone who is exemplary for academic achievement, since he was born into poverty, but became one of the most celebrated art historians and archaeologists of all times. In his seminal text from 1764, The History of Art in Antiquity, Winckelmann provides exemplary descriptions of classical works of art, presenting them in a manner that is both accessible and that evidences the enthusiasm he felt for this subject. In our context perhaps three aspects of Winckelmann’s thought are most significant. For him Greece was the cradle of Western civilization and the society that had produced works of lasting and incomparable beauty. The oft quoted slogan “edle Einfalt und stille Große” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) summarizes the quality that he found in the artworks of the ancient world. But he also saw in ancient Greece a counterpoint to his own contemporary world. Winckelmann emphasizes the freedom of Greek society, the democratic spirit that informs greatness in the arts, and the implicit contrast to his own world was evident to many of his contemporary readers. Finally, although Winckelmann, like many commentators of his time, advocated imitation of the ancients as the pathway to genuine artistic achievement, he did not favor a mere copying of antiquity. Rather the Greeks show us moderns the proper method for approaching the natural world and creating something beautiful. Our task is not to slavishly ape past accomplishments, but to follow our own times in celebration of human forms and the natural world.

Winckelmann found eager disciples in the eighteenth century world of letters. The two most noted German authors from the latter part of the century, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, are usually considered part of a movement known as classicism, which consciously adopted Winckelmann’s views of Greece and of artistic excellence in keeping with antiquity. For his part Goethe, during his classicist phase, composed poetry and plays that sought to capture the ancient world for his own epoch. The focus on harmony and plasticity, on higher ideals and stylistic perfections, is a sign of Goethe’s adherence to classical tenets. His play Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787; Iphigenia on Tauris) is probably the best illustration in his writings of a work that seeks to capture the atmosphere of the Hellenic world for the modern reader. Schiller’s turn toward classical qualities is perhaps less evident in his plays, most of which were historical dramas set in one or another country in modern Europe. But in Die Braut von Messina (1803; The Bride of Messina) he makes his greatest concession to antiquity by including a chorus in his tragedy, and by justifying this unusual dramatic device with a lengthy explanatory essay. More important were Schiller’s aesthetic views on Greece in his theoretical writings. Here he consistently lauded Greek art and literature for its naiveté, by which he meant its unmediated and harmonious relationship to nature, while the modern world is characterized by a distance caused by our own reflective relationship to the world and the disharmony that characterizes modern man and the society he inhabits.

These eighteenth-century ideals of Greece became a commonplace in discussions of aesthetics that were written by non-classicists as well. Despite the sharp differences between classicists and romantics in Germany, the chief representative of the latter, Friedrich Schlegel, concurred with Goethe and Schiller on the unrivaled nature of Greek works of art. Greece provides for us, he writes, “nothing other than a higher, more pure humanity.” In the realm of art, Schlegel feels, like Schiller, that Greek art was free from “the coercion of needs and the hegemony of reason.” Indeed, Schlegel believes that moderns, because of our altered constitution, are incapable of a genuine appreciation of the ancients. Thus he contended that contemporaries are almost entirely unfamiliar with “the most perfect poetic forms in Greek poetry, with the period of their poetic ideals, and with the Golden Age of Greek taste.” The past and the present operate with mutually exclusive principles, which generate two different kinds of art and culture, and modern observers can marvel at Greek achievements, but never attain them and barely comprehend their brilliance.

Perhaps the most important statements with regard to the veneration of Greece come in the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the most famous philosopher of the early nineteenth century and one of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers of all times. For Hegel Greece represented a high point of aesthetic achievement that is unique in the annals of human history. Indeed, the recognition of a pinnacle of artistic production in Attic society, a point that can never be attained again, is what leads him to postulate his often cited, albeit just as frequently misunderstood, hypothesis of the end of art. This hypothesis should not be understood literally. Hegel was certainly not oblivious to the fact that art continued to be produced after the decline of Greece as the dominant power in the ancient world. And he could reasonably predict that art would continue to flourish in his own times and far into the future. But what changed for him — and for us – was the significance accorded to art. While in Greece Hegel believed that art was the concrete vehicle for the expression of the world spirit, after that time the world spirit finds expression in other forms of human activity, first in religion, and finally, in his own era, in philosophy. The artworks of the Greeks will therefore never be surpassed in significance; the art of the future may be interesting and have formal beauties, but it will never recapture the historical role it acquired in the hands of the Greeks.

It was this sort of idealization of Greece, which in Germany runs from the middle of the eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, that very likely moved students at William and Mary to select a Greek motto and Greek letters for their secret society. The notions of ideal beauty, exemplary democracy, and higher moral values in the Greek world were rarely challenged in the German world. The author on whom I focused in my study of Grecophilia, Heinrich Heine, contributed to a differentiation of the Greek ideal, but ultimately he did more to reinforce it than to call it into question. Heine believed that he was writing in an age of discord and disharmony, and he therefore criticized individuals who portrayed and propagated a false notion of wholeness and concord in the social, cultural, and political order. Although Heine disdains the untimely imitation of Greek standards in his own times, he still attributes to antiquity a perfection unmatched by contemporaries. In some of his writings he even adheres to an ideal associated with what he called the Hellenes, although he recognizes that the recrudescence of a Greek spirit is all but impossible in the world of the mid nineteenth century. Opposed to the Hellenes in his thought are the more narrow-minded and sectarian political and artistic groupings of his time, who are labeled Nazarene. Indeed, even when Heine falls deathly ill and is forced to spend the last eight years of his life bed-ridden, in pain and physical deterioration, he still adheres to many of the identical ideals he had championed in his quasi-Hellenic phase.

I don’t want to detain you too much longer with further examples of Grecophilic activity in the German world. But it is interesting to note that Grecophilia was not confined to the artistic realm. Most of the writers and authors who admired the Greeks also considered them to be citizens of a free society, one that promoted great art by allowing liberties unknown in the more oppressed states in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It is also interesting that perhaps the most celebrated radical political thinker of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, harbors similar views of Greece. Like his contemporaries, Marx considered Greek achievements in the arts to be unparalleled. He also remarks that Greece represents the normal childhood of humankind, and although he cannot imagine recreating Greek art for the present, he cannot fathom something that would be a higher human achievement in the creative realm. Marx expresses these views with a more sober understanding of the economic basis of Greek society, which included the holding of slaves and production based on sometimes extreme forms of exploitation. The Greek ideals, however, were so firmly ingrained in the social order of the times that even a radical thinker such as Marx hardly deviated from the idealized formulations that had characterized Greece for the past hundred years.

Was there ever a turning point for the portrayal of Greece? Were the views that informed the foundation of Phi Beta Kappa ever really challenged in the intellectual world? To a certain extent the answer is no. If we examine typical twentieth-century histories of art, and even many histories of political thought, we will find an adherence to and veneration of Greece that recalls eighteenth and nineteenth century formulations. There was one philosophical mind, however, who directly challenged these ideals: Friedrich Nietzsche. The irony is that Nietzsche was perhaps a more ardent admirer of Greece than any of his predecessors. Certainly, as a professor of classics he was more familiar with them than any of the writers who extolled Greek supremacy in the arts, in government, and in cultural achievement. But Nietzsche saw in Greece something completely different from the ideals of noble simplicity, democracy, and grandeur. Nietzsche’s Greece was characterized by agon, by struggle and contest, by the overcoming of obstacles and enemies, not by harmony and beauty. While Winckelmann and his followers could be said to follow Apollo, who represented ideal beauty and nobility, Nietzsche favored Dionysus, the god of revelry, drunkenness, debauchery, and sensual excess. As he writes in one of his last works, Twilight of the Idols: “From scenting out ‘beautiful souls,’ ‘golden means’ and other perfections in the Greeks, from admiring in them such things as their repose in grandeur, their ideal disposition, their sublime simplicity – from this ‘sublime simplicity,’ a niaiserie allemande (German foolishness) when all is said and done, I was preserved by the psychologist in me.”

Nietzsche thus represents something of a turning point in the German tradition of Grecophilia. His notions of Dionysian Greece with its drunkenness and revelry might have been more appropriate for other types of Greek letter organizations, perhaps even for the Deltas in the 1978 movie Animal House, but it could never have served those five individuals who gathered on the William and Mary campus almost exactly 230 years ago to found the organization into which you are tonight receiving membership. The notion of Greece that they imbibed and in turn propagated for the coming centuries was one of broad learning, academic achievement, and exemplary university behavior. In this fashion, they, like their German Grecophilic contemporaries, sought a recreation of Greece in the modern world. They did not want a toga party in ignorant imitation of ancient garb, but a rekindling of the Greek world they admired for its knowledge, its beauty, and its freedoms. May all of you here receive and further this noble tradition in your induction tonight into this hallowed honor society.

Presented: 6 Dec. 2006