Review: Climbing Parnassus - Simmons

Can you read and write Latin and Greek? Me either, but according to Tracy Lee Simmons, we ought to, and I’m convinced that he’s right. In Climbing Parnassus, Simmons argues that the ancient languages of Greek and Latin are the two pillars of classical education, and subsequently, wardens of western culture. Simmons explains the title in his easy, elegant way:

Mount Parnassus, a limestone mass hovering over the ancient shrine of Delphi, has stood as a prime symbol of poetic inspiration and perfection since the dawn of the West. It fixed anxious eyes on the heavens. The Castalian spring, being a sacred source of life-sustaining water, trickled far below. . . . But over time it came to embody those things which man, at his best, wishes––and ought to wish––to achieve. It became a sign of his better, divinely inspired self. To “climb Parnassus” was to strive after the favor of Apollo and the nine muses. . . ensconced up there, forever unseen. While presenting the unattainable for most pilgrims, Parnassus also pointed to those treasures bestowed by the muses upon the faithful ones who wait and work. And among those gifts most sought was the civilizing, cultivating boon of eloquence, of right and beautiful expression. Throughout the centuries to come, this forbidding image got lifted from its geographical and mythological settings to be transposed, in the wake of Renaissance Humanism, as an emblem of linguistic flair. “Climbing Parnassus” eventually became a code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin.

Simmons begins by examining our current pool of cultural and educational mire, and contrasts the purposes and results of classical education to modern education. Classical education was meant to cultivate an individual, to produce an excellent and cultured human being. Modern education, on the other hand, has “traded in the ancient ideal of wisdom for a spurious ‘adjustment’ of mind, settling for fitting us with the most menial of skills needful for the world of the interchangeable part.” Simmons continues, saying that according to modern education, “We are masses to be housed and fed, not minds and souls seeking something beyond ourselves.” Everyone recognizes that modern (especially public) education is broken. Simmons quotes a study in the 1980s which concluded that

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . we have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

Classicist Richard Livingstone noted three functions of education: to teach us to earn a living, to teach us to be good citizens, and to help us understanding the meaning of the good life. Simmons writes that we understand the first function well (even though we often fail in it). The second function, however, is increasingly neglected; and the third we have altogether lost.

Simmons argues (persuasively, I think) that Latin is the foundation of all true learning. It is not so much Latin itself that makes one educated, as it is the mental rigor required to learn it. In the process of learning Latin, one learns how to learn, the mind is duly sharpened, and many of the great texts which created the Western world become accessible as never before. In fact, Simmons goes so far as to say that every lesson in Latin is a lesson in logic. He again quotes Richard Livingstone, who makes the remarkable statement that

Not to know Greek is to be ignorant of the most flexible and subtle instruments of expression which the human mind has devised, and not to know Latin is to have missed an admirable training in precise and logical thought.

There is also a kind of education which democrats like, Simmons writes, and then there is an education which will preserve democracy. The first indiscriminately cries for equality in all things, the second upholds instead the superiority of the good. Unfortunately, modern education is of the first sort, and classical education is of the second kind. A civilization which refuses to call anything bad is a civilization which will soon lose its right to seek anything good.

Climbing Parnassus is a thorough and compelling apologetic for the study of Latin and Greek, which is impressive since classical education is notoriously difficult to defend to modern people. This book ought to be a companion to any other book on classical education. Doug Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, for instance, gives only a cursory defense of Latin’s study; and even Dorothy Sayer’s famous essay by the same name almost assumes the benefit of classical languages, rather than arguing the point.