All translations in this book, including the epigraph on the title page, are my own except where indicated in the text or notes. The notes that follow are grouped first by chapter and section, and then by page number for notes that apply to specific statements. Books are identified by author’s last name; a short title is supplied for authors of more than one cited work.
“Part of what you criticize”: Stafford (2003, 36).
As far as I know, there has been no other general study of reverence as a virtue. This is the first. Garrison, however, has published a fine study of pietas, the analogous Roman virtue, and its descendants in literature through the eighteenth century. The revival of interest in virtue ethics has produced a sizable bibliography, which I introduce in the note to chapter four.
p. 3. “The one great western philosopher who praises reverence is Nietzsche”: See below, p. 161–62.
p. 4. “If we find a common thread in Greek and Chinese ideals”: See chapters five and six; for a defense of my claim that reverence belongs everywhere, see chapter nine, “Relativism,” with references.
p. 5. “Cardinal virtue”: A virtue of such importance to satisfactory human life that it is honored in many cultures and is essential to a complete virtue ethics.
p. 5. Defining Reverence
My approach is based on my understanding of Aristotle on courage and other virtues, especially Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3, Chapter 7. A general discussion of ancient virtue ethics comes at the start of Annas (1993); important studies of Aristotle’s ethics relevant to this task are by Cooper, Sherman, and White.
p. 6. Awe and respect: See chapter seven for awe and chapters eleven and thirteen for respect.
p. 13. God Votes in a City Election
See pp. 151–55 and chapter thirteen, “The Silent Teacher.” The ancient Greeks observe a strict line between gods and humans—gods know things that humans do not. And yet they respected a class of prophets who did claim to speak for the gods. How is this possible? (1) They knew that human prophets could get the message wrong; (2) when the prophet got it right, they gave credit for that not to him but to the god; (3) they apparently believed that reverent prophecy was difficult to read—that prophecy may be true, but not in the way human beings tend to understand it. All these stand between the giving of prophecy and the sort of arrogance I have illustrated in this section.
p. 15. No One Votes at All
On social choice theory, see A. K. Sen’s classic work (1970), especially pp. 192–96 for the problem about voting, which has not been resolved since then from within the theory.
p. 17. Trees Are Merely Cash and Sawdust
Thanks to Paul Domjan for showing me how valuable virtue ethics (especially the ethics of reverence) are to environmental issues.
Steinbeck (1962) writes: “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that’s the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.”
In chapter seven I will ask what sort of thing can be an object of reverence. These are the conditions I suggest for consideration: An object of reverence (1) should not be in our power to change or to control; (2) should not be fully comprehended by human experts; (3) should not be a human product; and (4) should be transcendent. The trees satisfy the first three, but not the fourth. Those who insist on the fourth may wish to think of the trees as inspiring awe because they represent to us the power of God or of Nature, considered as transcendent. A tradition or way of life satisfies only the first two conditions at best; it can’t be changed very much and still be what it is, and it is pretty hard to understand; but it is made by human beings, and human beings can replace it. It is, therefore, much less worthy of reverence than the trees are. Trying to have reverence for tradition is dangerous; on this, see chapter nine.
p. 20. “Socrates’ famous belief”: Plato’s Crito 47 de.
p. 23. “the ambiguity of ritual”: Kertzer, especially p. 77. On political party conventions and Galbraith’s view of them, see Kertzer, pp. 182–84, citing Galbraith (1960).
p. 26. We Know the Enemy Loves to Die
“Studies have found that such armies are reluctant to shed their civilian ethics”: Grossman, especially Section 1.
p. 28. “(That is one of the lessons of post-traumatic stress)”: Shay, p. 32–35, Grossman, 281ff. The point was dramatized by Bertolt Brecht long before these studies in “A Man’s a Man.”
p. 29. There Is No Reverence
p. 30. For Aristotle on learning virtue, see his Nicomachean Ethics, book 2 chapter 4; for Mencius, see Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation, pp. 18–22.
p. 34. Plato’s objection: See p. 272–73. (note to p. 95).
p. 34. “We shall see, however, that justice does not suffice for a healthy society.” See p. 138 and the treatment of justice in my recent book, The Ajax Dilemma (2010).
p. 35–36. Analects of Confucius: I have modified Legge’s translation, printing “Li” for his “rules of propriety.” Legge’s otherwise excellent translation misses the point: it is not the rules of Li that take the bustle out of respectful courtesy, but a spirit or underlying attitude of reverence. See also Analects 2.7, 3.3, and 17.11. Different translators take the last clause differently: “If you are upright but lack ritual you will become inflexible” (Slingerland).
The string quartet and the funeral are not actual events but composites of events that I have shared in or witnessed. The overlapping terms “ceremony” and “ritual” in this discussion must be understood fairly loosely. Part of the reason we lose sight of reverence is that we reserve these words for grand events in our own culture and trivial ones in others. But shaking hands is ceremony, and dining out usually involves ritual.
p. 39. Philip Larkin’s “High Windows”: title poem in a book published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (New York: 1974) and Faber and Faber (London:)
p. 45. Reverence Across Cultures
This section summarizes material explored at greater length in chapters seven and eight.
p. 50. Protagoras was the first teacher in ancient Greece to call himself a sophist and the most famous teacher of his time (fifth century BCE). Only a few sentences have survived from his writings, but several other sources purport to give us the gist of his teachings. Plato is the chief source, but he is unreliable on the history of philosophy. Plato reports that the statement “a human being is measure of all things” was equivalent to the relativist position: “what you believe is true for you, while what I believe is true for me” (Plato’s Theaetetus 152a, with subsequent context). Other evidence shows, however, that Protagoras could not have been a consistent relativist (Woodruff, 1998). For a translation of the surviving work of Protagoras, see Gagarin and Woodruff (1995, pp. 173–89).
p. 51. “According to Plato, Protagoras held such a view”: Plato’s testimony on historical matters is not as reliable as we would wish, and there is no consensus among scholars as to whether the historical Protagoras held the view related in this chapter. Still, we have good reason to think that views of this kind were in the air among humanist intellectuals of the later fifth century BCE.
p. 52. Protagoras is not alone among humanists who support reverence: See my remarks on Thucydides, pp. 136–37.
Agamemnon’s failure of reverence: Homer does not use the concept of justice at all. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see chapter eleven on reverence as the virtue of leaders.
p. 55. A Philosopher’s Questions
Modern work in virtue ethics has been much influenced by Maclntyre; I was myself deeply affected by my colleague Edmund Pincoffs. For recent work in the field, see the articles printed in Crisp and Slote; Crisp; Braybrooke in his chapter 12, “No rules without virtues, no virtues without rules”; Casey; and Hunt. McDowell has been especially helpful to me in showing how the knowledge that is virtue is internal to practices. An excellent introduction to virtue ethics is Annas (2011).
p. 55. Plato presents a scene: The opening of his dialogue, the Charmides.
p. 57. Do virtues replace rules? See Onora O’Neill for a systematic approach to ethics that complements rule-based ethics with a theory of social virtues very like the theory of virtue I am laying out here. See also her eloquent warning against the danger of pushing virtues that support social structures in the absence of rules protecting human rights.
“A sense that there is something larger than a human being”: “larger” here is a figure of speech; I explain the idea more fully in chapter seven, p. 113.
p. 58. What is the difference between reverence and ceremony? On ritual, see the discussion in Burkert. Many students of ritual would disagree with my claim that the meaningfulness of ritual depends on attitudes and ultimately on the presence of virtue. Ethology has found “biological” explanations for human rituals in comparable behaviors in primates and other mammals.
p. 58. “Faith is not a virtue”: See Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, however, where he does represent faith as a virtue.
p. 59. “Nietzsche says that European Christian culture shows its greatest nobility in respect for the Bible”: Beyond Good and Evil, section 262. See also p. 161–62.
p. 60. On respect, see Woodruff (2013).
p. 61. “Does reverence carry compassion? Yes.” This is especially clear as the ancient Greeks understood reverence and compassion. See the notes on the ancient Greek attitude toward suppliants (p. 227 with p. 194).
p. 62. Compassion understood in this way is compatible with justice. On compassion and its relation to justice, see my The Ajax Dilemma (2011), pp. 99, 102–07, and 140–58.
p. 62. “Even an atheist or a non-theist may be reverent”: for example, see Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature.
p. 68–69. “The prevailing trend in Confucian philosophy, developed by Mencius, was to suppose that every human being is endowed with the seeds of virtue”: For Mencius on learning virtue, see Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation, pp. 18–22.
p. 70. “Hardly anyone who takes virtue ethics seriously, whether ancient or modern, thinks it worthwhile to wait for external foundations to be secure”: Aristotle does not. For a modern defense of an internalist approach to grounding talk of virtue, see McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism.” For an argument that internalism does not have to lead to relativism, see Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues” (1998).
“Can a reverent person do evil?”: Confucius thought that he was not secure in virtue until he was seventy, because only then did his desires accord with the will of heaven (Analects 2.4). Is it a paradox that the diminution of some of our powers makes virtue easier for us? In both Greek and Chinese traditions, virtue is not a triumph over harmful desire; it is freedom from harmful desires.
All translations in this chapter are mine, except for the translations from Homer, which are by Stanley Lombardo. Both his and mine are used by permission of the Hackett Publishing Co. For the content of the epigraph, compare the poem “What are Years?” by Marianne Moore (Collected Poems [1951, originally 1941], p. 99.)
The ancient Greek concept I wish to explore is named by both hosiotēs and its near synonym eusebeia, which is frequently translated as “piety.” It overlaps substantially with aidôs, which is untranslatable but usually rendered as “respect” or “shame.”
For this subject we must depend more on literary sources than most historians of religion are willing to do. The Bacchae, for example, cannot be treated as a source for actual Dionysiac cult practices in Athens or anywhere else. Fortunately, we have non-literary evidence bearing on cult practices, but this will not help us understand the ideas that lie behind those practices. I have argued elsewhere that Euripides’ Bacchae represents through the chorus a religious spirit known to the Athenians from their experience in the Eleusinian Mysteries (in my Bacchae [1998], and at greater length in my manuscript Godless Wisdom).
Understanding a concept such as reverence is difficult because it is most apparent in religion, and religion has too much to do with inarticulate loyalties to yield much from a close study of concepts. In the experience and practice of religion, the fine distinctions that matter to philosophers will seem irrelevant to most worshippers. Religion in ancient Greece is a complex of different kinds of worship in different places and for different groups of people. Time travel to the fifth century BCE might acquaint us with a number of different concepts of reverence. Even the majority of the jury that condemned Socrates would probably not have agreed with each other about precisely what reverence requires.
This chapter discusses a prominent concept of reverence; I make no claim that the concept is typically or widely held in fifth-century BCE Greece. It is not the concept of reverence. In its rough outline, I think most Athenians of the period would have recognized it as theirs, but once it is closely defined, its proper home is only in the texts from which I have derived it. Here I am working from three kinds of texts: Homeric epics, Athenian tragic plays, and the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. In all of these, I believe, the same concept of reverence is at work. The writer who does most to challenge this traditional notion of reverence is Plato, whom I will treat briefly in a note at the end of chapter five.
I have found no good general studies of the ancient Greek concept of reverence. Yunis, A New Creed (1988), is helpful on the new emphasis in the latter fifth century on beliefs about the gods. Belief, however, is not my subject.
1. Treatment of the dead. Violations of the dead call for the greatest outrage from poets and historians alike. Creon’s crime in the Antigone, according to Tiresias, is to bury a living person—Antigone—while withholding from burial a person who is dead—her brother—and who belongs to the gods because he is dead (lines 1064–1071). Thucydides does not explicitly treat this as a matter of reverence. But see 2.52, 2.53, and the general importance of revering the graves of the dead from the Persian war to the debate at Plataea.
2. Laws of war. The rules for starting and waging war fall under reverence. “Reverence allows one to repel an aggressor” (Thucydides 3.52). War frequently involves oathbreaking (see #4) and the rejection of suppliants (see #3). Thucydides sums up his long catalogue of virtues lost in civil war under the rubric of reverence (3.82).
3. Suppliants. Prisoners of war are suppliants; reverence requires that they not be killed (Thucydides 3.58, cf. 3.81). As often with ethical matters, Thucydides lets us see that no one can honestly expect others to behave ethically: the Thebans extract oaths to protect their suppliants (MacLeod, 1977, p. 233). But respect for suppliants is plainly honored as an ideal. We have seen that the actions that mark Achilles’ inhumanity most clearly are his refusals to honor the requests of suppliants, and the sign of his recovery is his protection of the suppliant Priam.
4. Keeping oaths. Reverent people keep oaths even when doing so does not appear to be to their advantage. This is often cited as a requirement of justice also, but it is a requirement over which the gods particularly watch, and it has a more intimate connection with reverence than with any other virtue. (Thucydides 3.82, cf. 2.71, 2.74. 3.53, 3.58; cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.18, Philodemus De Pietate, col. 51, 79.)
5. Ritual. “Those accused of irreverence sometimes defend themselves by saying that they have at least done what was required by way of religious ritual.” This is Xenophon’s defense of Socrates (Memorabilia 1.2) and Philodemus’ defense of Epicurus (De Pietate, col. 51). Creon, for example, will do the ritual minimum for Antigone by leaving a token of food for her in her living burial (lines 773–80), but he has contempt for the idea of reverence, because he holds the rationalist view that the gods are too good or too powerful to be affected by our actions. “I am certain no human being has the power to pollute the gods” (lines 1043–44).
6. Respect for sacred rituals, objects, secrets, or places. Athens tried several well-known citizens on charges of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries; the city recalled its best general, Alcibiades, from a campaign to face charges of defacing sacred statues; Thucydides was shocked by the profanation of temples in plague or civil war.
7. Harmony. A reverent society will not go to war with itself; when a society does fall into civil war, the moral casualties end in a loss of reverence (Thucydides 3.82). That is because reverence is an attunement of awe and respect and shame among people of all ranks. If you are shameless, or if you lack respect for others, or if you are incapable of standing in awe of the divine, then you are out of tune with society. And that is one of the symptoms of irreverence. Reverence makes you feel like subordinating your interests to a higher good of some kind; reverence keeps selfishness at bay. The effect of reverence on society, then, is to dampen the sort of mean-spirited desires and ambitions that would lead to factionalism and civil war if left unchecked.
Euripides. Much has been written about Euripides’ treatment of religion. The main influence on my thought on this author has been Seaford (1994 and 1996), which is controversial. See especially the critical comment in Segal (1997). My edition of the Bacchae, with notes on the matters and texts discussed in the present paper, is published by Hackett (1998).
Socrates. The best account of the issues behind Socrates’ trial is now Parker (1996), which otherwise offers little help on my subject. I await eagerly his projected thematic study of Athenian religion. McPherran (1996) presents an account of Socratic piety. His view that Socratic piety reforms traditional do ut des religion with the result that human duty to the god is subsumed under virtue is largely due to the teachings of Vlastos. On Socrates, see Smith and Woodruff (2000). For Plato’s wider theory, see Morgan (1990).
Thucydides. This historian’s rationalist attitude towards religion was scarcely noticed in antiquity (with the exception of Vita Marcellini 22); modern scholars have paid it more attention, but it is neglected in recent works on the sophists. The consensus is that Thucydides’ neglect for Greek religion is an important feature of his history, but scholars have been reluctant to commit themselves as to the nature of Thucydides’ personal beliefs. An important article by Hornblower (1992) indicates how much Thucydides declines to tell us about events that were related to religion.
Marinatos reviews and criticizes modern scholarship on the subject. She defends Thucydides on the charge of atheism, showing that Thucydides does show respect for the practice of religion (which she wrongly thinks is all that mattered to the ancients), and concludes that “his affirmation of the social and moral validity of the religion of Greece is certain” (1981, p. 65).
Line numbers refer to the Greek texts. When the translator counts lines differently, that count is given in brackets.
p. 79. Pindar’s famous line “Custom is king”: Fragment 169; the poem is quoted often in antiquity. See Plato’s Gorgias 484b and Gagarin and Woodruff, p. 40.
p. 82. “Achilles plays the beast”: Achilles is not the only fighter who is likened to a beast in the Iliad; Menelaus is frequently seen as a lion. Generally, the Trojans are more reverent than the Greeks and are pictured as more human and domestic. Hector, in particular, is more tamer of animals—horses—than he is animal. On domesticity, see chapter fourteen, “Home.”
p. 83. “The most violent sociopath may, in some sense, remember that he is human—indeed, he may remember that he is a sociopathic human at the very time he commits the most odious crime.” I owe the point to Edwin Delattre.
p. 85. “Most ancient Greek thinking about ethics starts with this inference from the ‘is’ of vulnerable human nature to the ‘ought’ of virtue.” Alasdair Maclntyre builds on a similar inference in his Dependent Rational Animals. G. E. Moore is responsible for the widespread view that it is the Naturalistic Fallacy to derive an “ought” from an “is.” Annas (1997) has criticized ethical naturalism on the grounds that it is often abused, in “Ethical Arguments.” I defend ancient Greek-style naturalism in my “Natural Justice.” On the subject, see McDowell’s “Two Kinds of Naturalism.”
p. 86. “Hubris grows from tyranny”: Some editors prefer to translate this as, “Tyranny grows from hubris,” which is supported by the manuscripts but does not fit the context. On the issue, see Meineck and Woodruff, Oedipus, Introduction p. xxvi and the note to the passage (the first antistrophe to the second stasimon).
“Oedipus’ irreverence belongs mainly to the way he rules his people”: For a longer discussion, see my Introduction to Oedipus (Meineck and Woodruff). Note also that he, and his father before him, thought they could thwart a prediction of the oracle.
p. 88. “Creon proceeds like a tyrant, confident in his judgment”: Plato’s Socrates is in line with the conventional notion when he says he found that “in reality it is the god who is wise … and human wisdom is worth little or nothing” (Apology 23a). Thinking yourself wise puts you in danger of thinking yourself equal to a god. Protagoras claimed to teach good judgment, probably by teaching students to argue on both sides of an issue—and thereby to see both sides of an issue. This is the skill Creon and other tragic figures notably lack. See my “Euboulia as the Skill Protagoras Taught” (2013).
p. 89. “Megaphones into hearing trumpets”: Stafford (2003), 36.
p. 95. Plato’s joyful reverence: Although Plato gives expression to joyful reverence in a number of texts, he breaks with tradition and with the poets on the importance of reverence as a virtue. Plato transforms reverence in two ways, making it subordinate to justice and detaching it from its role in promoting social harmony: according to the Republic, justice is the foundation of social harmony; it is the first principle of statecraft, and reverence follows after. In Plato’s work, generally, reverence is eclipsed by justice. Justice is what Socrates cares about above all. In the Euthyphro, he considers reverence to be a part of justice and asks how we can identify the part of justice that it is. Evidently, it is the part of justice that obtains between human beings and gods. But since Socrates thinks the gods need no service from human beings for their own sake, he concludes that we cannot owe them anything in the way in which we might have debts to each other. Nevertheless, if justice is anything like paying debts, what could it ask us to do for the gods? In the Euthyphro, Plato leaves us wondering what Socrates thinks reverence really is. Some scholars have supplied this answer from the context: reverence is serving the gods by promoting justice and the other virtues.
If reverence consists of promoting justice and other virtues, then it is not a virtue with its own moral content. That would explain why Plato’s Socrates omits reverence altogether from his lists of virtues in the Republic and other dialogues likely to have been composed after the Euthyphro.
In the ideal states of both the Republic and the Laws, Plato retains traditional temple religion with all its rituals and ceremonies, but with a refined theology that will not countenance the old stories of wickedness on the part of the gods. The ritual that survives in Plato’s ideal states is independent of the belief that bad people can buy off the gods by giving sacrifices. The judgments of Plato’s gods are inexorably just. In both ideal states, religion serves to stabilize the state, and reverence supports this project.
Religious reverence in the Republic and the Laws is more a quality that rulers should foster in their subjects than a quality they should cultivate in themselves. As a result, these rulers look suspiciously like the rulers we read about in tragic poets—kings like Creon of Antigone, who think they know what is best for their people, and therefore do not think they need to listen to those below them. Plato thinks he must reject the tragic view of reverence insofar as it predicts disaster for rulers who take this attitude. The philosopher-kings do know what is best.
p. 98. The translation of the poem by Meng Zhao is my joint effort with Xiusheng Liu; we have brought out its structure by rendering it nearly word for word.
My account of Li as both ceremony and reverence is based on the Analects and the Book of Mencius only; it does not purport to represent Li in the Chinese tradition overall, or even as it is found in the other classics. I have followed Confucius and Mencius partly because they are central and partly because they emphasize the capacities of individuals for appropriate feelings—capacities that are virtues by the definition developed in this book.
I am well aware that these two classics give only a partial understanding of the ancient Chinese view of Li and that not all Confucians agreed with Mencius. As with the Greeks, I am simplifying. What I present here is a Confucian concept of Li, not the Confucian concept. Generally, other ancient texts bring the rules of Li into prominence, whereas these two classics, as I read them, insist that rule-following is of no value if not in accordance with virtue. Nevertheless, a full study of Li would survey also the Li Ching (classic about Li), which deals mainly with detailed instructions for Li.
As with the ancient Greeks, we are dealing here with a cluster of related concepts: ceremony with reverence (Li), filial piety (xiao), obedience to older brother (ti), respect (gong), deference (rang). I take it that Li refers by turns to proper ceremony and the virtue that lies behind it; xiao and ti are particular elements of Li; respect and deference are the feelings that one should have to carry out any expression of Li in a virtuous manner.
I depend especially on two secondary works that bring out the interiority of Li with useful clarity: Tu Wei-ming and Benjamin Schwartz (especially pp. 67–75). I have a debt also to A. C. Graham’s elegant survey, and Ivanhoe’s work on Confucian theories of virtue and virtue education.
On the Analects of Confucius and the Book of Mencius I am at the mercy of translations, but I have had a great deal of help from two friends and teachers: T. K. Seung and Liu Xiusheng. I have often used Simon Leys’ Analects because they are good idiomatic English. I have also consulted James Legge, D. C. Lau, and Chichung Huang. In preparing the second edition, I have consulted Slingerland, who provides not only a fine translation but useful quotations from the ancient Chinese commentaries. In numbering the Analects I follow the numbering scheme that now appears to be canonical in D. C. Lau and others.
These are often composites produced with the help of Xiusheng Liu, but I have used Huang for 2.7 and Leys for 6.27, 9.3, 12.5, and 14.22.
p. 100. Analects 2.7. Cf. Mencius 4A.12.
p. 102. Li and the absence of external restraint: The view I have expressed is that of Mencius; it may seem to be contradicted by 12.1 but here the restraint is internal; it precedes and makes possible the correct practice of ceremony (Schwartz 1985, 77):
“To restrain oneself and return to Li constitutes Humaneness” (ancient maxim quoted in Analects 12.1).
The metaphors “inside/outside” carry no metaphysical weight in Chinese philosophy; they make no assumptions about what it is to be a person or to have a conscious mind.
On the inner qualities on which true Li depends: Analects 1.3, 3.3, 3.12, 3.26, and 17.11. See Schwartz 1985, p. 72ff, esp. pp. 75 and 81. The feelings supported by Li include sympathy, shame (Analects 2.3, 5.7), reverence, and respect. For Li and right attitudes, see 3.3 (on Ren) and 3.26.
p. 103. “Different sorts of advice on same topic”: Analects 2.5–2.8, with Leys’ note, p. 115.
“Rules restraining powerful people from usurping the dignities of the Son of Heaven”: Analects 3.1, 3.2, 3.10; for a lower-level usurpation, 3.22.
p. 104. No competition for virtue: Plato (Republic 1.349), Confucius (3.7, 3.16, 6.30); no value in taking power by force of conquest (3.25, with Leys’ note, p. 129).
p. 105. Analects 8.2.1 and 8.2.2. The first is translated after Legge, on which see the note to 35–36. The second is Leys’ translation. Many scholars hold that the second is a separate selection.
“How, then, could they possibly have cultivated the same sort of reverence, when they had different beliefs?”: Belief, on the whole, was different in the two cultures. In ancient Greece, agnosticism was a flash in the pan, but something like agnosticism was at the center of Chinese secular philosophy. I will ask in chapter seven how reverence can flourish in the absence of specific beliefs about the divine.
p. 106. “When rising doubts cloud the certainty of religious claims, reverence is all the more important”: There may be a see-saw here. Indomitable faith seems to support some people who have no talent for reverence (extreme Protestants who eschew all ceremony), while deep reverence seems to ground some people who have no faith at all (atheist scientists who live in awe of the truths that are investigated by science). T. K. Seung has suggested to me in conversation that the rise of reverence in cultures that are losing faith is a sign that they are clinging desperately to the trappings of that faith as it erodes (my paraphrase). But I will argue in the next two chapters that reverence is not at all a trapping of faith.
p. 107. “The restraint that comes from ceremony is never absent, in any culture, from any system of power, whether conservative or revolutionary”: For a detailed and compelling study of the role of ritual in politics, see Kertzer (1988).
“Li does not stand against change, but regulates and orders it.” This is explicit in a text from another author in the Confucian tradition:
Through rites [Li] Heaven and earth join in harmony, the sun and moon shine, the four seasons proceed in order, the stars and constellations march, the rivers flow, and all things flourish; men’s likes and dislikes are regulated and their joys and hates made appropriate. Those below are obedient, those above are enlightened; all things change but do not become disordered; only he who turns his back upon rites will be destroyed. (Xunzi 19, third century BCE, also known in English as Hsun-tzu. This translation is from Watson, 1963, p. 94.)
p. 108. “The example of the Master.” On speaking truth to power, but with deference, see also 7.31 with Leys note (p. 155) and 4.18.
p. 110. Juvenal, Satire 14.47–49:
The greatest reverence is due to your son; if you
are fixing to do something disgraceful, even your baby boy
should block you from sin. Don’t think he’s too young …
Here reverentia is not simply respect, but an attitude in the presence of something holy that keeps one from sin. Juvenal is arguing that children are easily influenced by the moral example of their parents, especially of the same sex.
p. 113. “That there is at least one Something … that is not controlled by human means, was not created by human beings, is not fully known by human experts and is transcendent.” I have placed them in descending order of importance for the concept of reverence. Reverence towards something in your power is always wrong, but some human products—great buildings, paintings, or string quartets—strike us with awe and may be objects of reverence. They belong so much to the past that they cannot be changed without irreparable loss, and therefore they satisfy the first condition. One may feel reverence for natural human powers, or even for a flash of human genius, like Mozart’s. Such things are not in our control or due to our conscious efforts, nor do we understand them fully.
By “transcendent” I mean completely independent of the world as we experience it, otherworldly. We can be reverent without believing in transcendence, if we are reverent toward nature, for example. But readers who wish to reserve reverence for transcendent objects may respect non-transcendent objects for representing to us the majesty of otherworldly powers (as a great tree might be thought to represent the majesty of God).
p. 114. Tennyson’s reaction to science: In 1837 he read Lyell’s Principles of Geology (fourth edition, 1835) with a number of his friends. See Mattes in Ross, pp. 120–26, “The Challenge of Geology to Belief in Immortality and a God of Love.”
p. 115. “Still, he says, we trust”: See Mattes in Ross, p. 120ff.
p. 117. “Tennyson consciously rejected such doctrines as original sin”: Martin, p. 1.
“Tennyson’s son, Hallam, tells us also that the poet believes there is a Great Soul”: Ross, p. 61, n. 6; cf. pp. 131ff.
p. 118. “he was more religious in his doubt than in his faith”: T. S. Eliot in Ross, pp. 176–77.
p. 120ff. For the outline of beliefs related to reverence I am indebted to T. K. Seung.
p. 121. “if all you have to keep you in line is the fear of God, then you have denied yourself all of the virtues, including reverence”: Thanks for this point to Reuben McDaniel.
p. 123. “source of evil”: Reverence does not entail that you believe only good things about the gods. The late Epicurean philosopher Philodemus defends Epicurus against a charge of irreverence by quoting his remark that “A person is reverent if he preserves the immortality and consummate blessedness of the god” (Philodemus, On Piety, col. 40, Obbink), but this defense evidently has not succeeded. Why is it not irreverent to believe that the gods have done wicked things?
p. 124. “Athenians held at least three fundamental beliefs”: Yunis (1988). Pentheus would be irreverent if he thought his power was a match for a god’s, but he does not believe that Dionysus is a god.
p. 130. Epigraphs: “The Narrow Way” is an allusion to Matthew 7.13. The Song of Kabir is also called “Song of Kahir”; Kahir was a fifteenth-century Hindu religious reformer.
p. 131. Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open, p. 39.
p. 132. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 125.
p. 134. The Bacchae and Athenian audiences: Because Euripides wrote the play while abroad, he may not have intended it for Athenian audiences. My hypothesis for interpretation, however, is that this is a very Athenian play. The attitudes of the Chorus are strikingly Athenian.
p. 134–35. The Psalms: Quoted from the King James Version.
p. 135. “The wisdom of knowing our own limitations”: Plato’s Apology 23ab.
p. 136. On Thucydides: see p. 7, and my Justice, Power and Human Nature, for an abridged translation with introduction and advice on further reading.
p. 138. On Plato: My account here is controversial, and based mainly on my reading of Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic. Plato argues for the existence of a cosmic god in Laws 10, and prescribes serious penalties for impiety at Laws 10.909. See p. 272ff.
p. 139. Chinese Humanism: Some Analects seem to imply that Confucians thought of Heaven as something like an active and personal god (Analects 3.24, 7.22, 9.5); others, that Heaven is an impersonal force of nature (17.19). See Schwartz, p. 117ff, especially p. 122.
By contrast with Confucians, Mo Tzu plays down ceremony and plays up belief in intervention by gods and spirits on behalf of Humaneness: “To maintain that ghosts do not exist, yet learn the sacrificial ceremonies is like learning the ceremonies for guests though there are no guests, making a fishnet though there are no fish” (Graham, p. 48, using Y. P. Mei’s 1934 translation).
p. 144. Epigraphs: “A human being is the measure”: Protagoras, quoted in Plato’s Theaetetus, 152b.
“The god is a measure”: The Athenian in Plato’s Laws, 716C. Oddly, the Athenian does not use such a measure in developing his political theory.
p. 145. “When beliefs are stated they do matter”: Philosophers generally take the verb “believe” as synonymous with “believe to be true”; but some religious believers understand their beliefs as metaphorical rather than true. Whatever this means, it does not disarm the point about relativism because two metaphors may be incompatible. For example, if you believe the world is a sort of garden given by God to humankind, you cannot believe both that humans are charged metaphorically with tending it and that they are told to make it over for their own exclusive use. Metaphors can lead to moral difficulties as well as logical ones.
“Plato tells us that Protagoras tries to be a relativist, but then Plato shows in a famous argument that even Protagoras cannot keep it up”: Theaetetus 152ab and 169d–171c.
“But we were looking for a relativist, and we now see that this is not what he is”: Of course milder forms of relativism may be held; and there is a form of skepticism that resembles relativism but takes no position of any kind. On alternative relativisms, and on Protagoras’ non-relativism, see my “Rhetoric and Relativism” (1999). For Protagoras’ view on reverence, see chapters four and eight.
p. 146. “A complete relativist”: For simplicity’s sake, this chapter considers only the most extreme forms of relativism. There are more palatable forms; indeed, we must recognize that many things are what they are relative to others (as a theory is relative to the language in which it is expressed), and some skeptics adopt versions of relativism that do not assign truth in the full sense to competing positions.
If reverence is a virtue, there must be a core idea of reverence that is at least potentially universal. If certain emotions, such as fear, are recognized in most cultures, then we would expect that various capacities to feel those emotions would also be recognized across cultures. Then, if the conditions of human life are similar enough across cultures, we would expect that certain capacities, such as courage and reverence, would be widely recognized as virtues, while others, such as cowardice, would be widely recognized as vices. The anthropology or cultural psychology to support this hypothesis is beyond the scope of this book.
On the universality of certain emotions, see Paul Ekman and Richard Dawson, The Nature of Emotion (1994). Nussbaum has argued persuasively that an Aristotelian theory of virtue can reach across cultural boundaries, mainly because virtue concerns issues of character, rather than the precise ways in which moral character is expressed in one culture or another (1988).
p. 147. “horrible consequences for Protagoras”: Plato certainly thought Protagoras irreverent; some sources tell us that the Athenians prosecuted Protagoras for irreverence, but many scholars doubt the tale.
p. 150. “A good game-player is reverent through and through”: David Reeve points out to me that Charles may be considered a good game-player who sets up the rules of the game and then sees no reason to discuss them further. That would be fine if the game were a contest like chess, for which the goal is simply victory of one side over the other. But it is not fine when the purpose of the game is to advance human understanding.
For Vaka’s case I am indebted to Roshan Ouseph, who was and remains deeply worried by it. Such cases tempt Europeans and Americans to feel superior in their culture, but such temptations should be resisted. Oppression knows no boundaries. On the complexity of the issues related to this, see the essays from different points of view in Okin (1999), particularly Nussbaum’s “A Plea for Difficulty” (1999). For the broader issues relating to human development, see Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000), especially pp. 48–49 on relativism. On reverence for tradition, see above, p. 65.
p. 153. “But no one who has reverence for justice can allow that it is whatever we say it is”: See the discussion of objects of reverence above, p. 113 with the note to p. 17 on p. 263. One may, nevertheless, revere justice as an ideal that is internal to, and corrective of, widely shared practices. Justice need not be a Platonic form in order to be worthy of reverence.
“Justice is an ideal that is imperfectly realized in codes of law, and it is the ideal—not the imperfect realizations of it—that merits reverence.”: Levinson argues that the U.S. Constitution as it was framed, with clearly implied support of chattel slavery, is not worthy of reverence, and shows how writers who do express reverence for the Constitution are thinking more of the moral ideal than of the literal text (pp. 60–87, particularly in his conclusion, “Against Idolatry,” pp. 87–89). I think, however, that he blurs the distinction I want to make between reverence and respect. I would add that reverence is not due to anything that it is in our power to change; but that it is precisely because we have respect for the Constitution that we do want to change it, and not simply shrug it off, when it is wrong. See pp. 223–25 for the distinction between thick and thin respect.
p. 155. “But the position I have taken is not exclusive to modern Europeans”: The ancient Greeks knew that it was irreverent to insist on human traditions as if they were god-given. Two great tragic poems prove the point: in Euripides’ Bacchae, Pentheus is shown to be irreverent because he tries to enforce the tradition that kept women in the homes, excluding them even from religious festivals. When a new religion comes to town, old customs must bend, and it is not reverent to hold onto them rigidly. In Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigone goes overboard defending burial customs. Such customs were never as rigid as she says they were, and her claim that the gods are on her side is outrageous. She appeals to an unwritten, unvarying law of Zeus concerning burial customs, which Creon and the chorus rightly recognize as a serious threat to any existing political order. The concept of divine unwritten law is new in the mid-fifth century and arrives, not surprisingly, along with a set of revolutionary challenges to tradition. Sophocles’ Antigone illustrates how easy it is, once people start going off the rails of tradition, for their opponents to go just as badly astray in defense of what they claim to be the old ways. As far as we can tell, it was never part of the ancient Greek tradition that tradition could not bend. (And indeed we see that Antigone herself is willing to bend the law she cites, except in the case of this brother, for whom she has a perverse longing.)
It is somewhat the same in ancient China. Although Confucianism (like many religions) became a rock of stability, resisting many tides of change, neither the Analects of Confucius nor the writings of Mencius reflect such rigidity. Confucius insists on maintaining to the letter the rituals that curb the arrogance of minor kings, but otherwise his emphasis is on having the right attitudes in ritual and this clears room for a certain flexibility, which later Confucianism gave up under threats from other cultures (above, p. 103, p. 108–09 with note).
For my understanding of sacred things I am indebted to John Meyer and Reuben McDaniel, as well as to anonymous readers for the journal Ramus, who made useful criticisms of a draft of my article, “Theater as Sacrament” (Woodruff 2013). I have used the material I developed for that article in this chapter. Bill and Weslie Janeway steered me to Mary Douglas and gave me time and space to write the meat of my new chapters at Hancock Point. For that I am most grateful.
p. 159. The first two commandments: For a reverent understanding of these commandments, one which should entail an ethical response to diverse religious traditions, see Hedges (2005, pp. 9–52).
p. 160. “When magic and superstition clouded people’s minds”: See Douglas, Purity and Danger, on nineteenth-century views of taboos, under the influence of scholars such as Frazer and Robertson Smith (Douglas 2002, especially pp. 12–35).
p. 162. Nietzsche on respect for the Bible: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translated by Judith Norman in Horstmann and Norman 2002, 160, section 263. Other translations use “reverence” where this one (rightly in my view) uses “respect.” I am grateful to Christopher Raymond for help with this passage.
p. 165. “The words “cursed” and “sacred” are the same in some languages.” The prohibition implicit in the idea of the sacred is carried by the meanings of the Latin root for our word “sacred”: sacer. Along with “sacred” and “holy,” the word means “accursed” and “detestable.” So the word seems to carry two values, but just one prohibition: do not touch. For traditional anthropological views on this, see Douglas (2002), pp. 9–10.
p. 166. “We owe respect to people with whom we share reverence for shared ideals.” See above, p. 000.
p. 168. “What we recognize as transcendent is worthy of awe and reverence”: p. 168.
p. 169. “God is beyond the boundary of what we can pollute.” In the Heracles of Euripides, the hero—who has polluted himself with a great crime—hides his head from the sky so that he will not pollute the heavens. His best friend pulls the covering off his head: “You are only human,” he says, in effect. “You cannot pollute what is divine.” Euripides, Herackles, p. 1233.
For recent thinking on ethical leadership, see Ciulla, especially her introduction, “Mapping.” The volume includes a helpful foreword by James Mac-Gregor Burns, who is the parent of recent discussion of ethical leadership. See also the chapter on leadership in The Ajax Dilemma (Woodruff, 2011, pp. 185–201).
Thanks to Paul Burka who, as a commentator on politics, helped me to understand Thucydides’ Melian dialogue as a failure to recognize the possibility of leadership.
p. 176. “if they tend to think that the Constitution, unlike any particular law, stands for ideals of justice, or the spirit of justice, transcending anything that human individuals could legislate”: See the note to p. 153 on p. 281.
p. 183. “the Athenian theory is false”: See my Power, Justice, pp. xxx–xxxii.
p. 187. Paul Goodwin and Oliver North: for the episode, see Timberg, pp. 142–43. It is not surprising that Goodwin did not articulate the moral case for discipline. Reverence is hard to talk about.
p. 187–88. “that the violence they use is not in their own service, but in the service of something larger than themselves—even, in the end, larger than nations”: Hence, I believe, the consensus that aggressive war (which may serve the interests of a nation) is wrong and demeans the soldiers asked to take part in it. In real life, in the military and elsewhere, acts of respect are usually done from habit, to smooth social interaction, to avoid censure, or in the hope that they will be returned. But I am writing about the ideal these acts are supposed to serve.
p. 189. The “good opinion” theory of respect: For a review of current theories of respect, see my recent article, “Respect,” in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (2013).
p. 194. “I’ve come, out of compassion”: This and subsequent quotations were translated by Peter Meineck, from Meineck and Woodruff (2003).
p. 197. “I went and stood by them”: a family legend told by the poet’s son, Kim Stafford (Stafford, 2003, 7; see also his poem, “Serving with Gideon,” 95).
p. 199. “Pity is often a bad thing, but it is not the same as compassion.” I have argued that compassion is compatible with justice (although not with fairness). Pity, which is often mistaken for compassion, may be a serious threat to justice. See The Ajax Dilemma (2011), pp. 99, 102–07, and 140–58.
p. 199. Cognitive empathy: See my The Necessity of Theater, pp. 181–85.
p. 200. “Consider Ajax”: I have written an account of this story and the issues it raises in The Ajax Dilemma (2011).
p. 201. “The ancient Athenians provided education for compassion.” True, as shown in this play, but not perfectly effective. As Thucydides shows, the Athenians could be ruthless. But, as Sophocles shows, they understood the value of compassion, which is a theme of almost every one of his plays. On failure in moral education, see later in this chapter.
“Sophocles’ surviving plays, with one notable exception, all celebrate compassion”: The exception is his Electra, which is shocking for the absence of compassion; although the Chorus expresses some compassion for Electra, they do not celebrate it or urge her to compassion. In Antigone, Creon suffers for his lack of compassion; in Ajax, compassion wins the day. In Philoctetes, compassion vies with ambition and almost wins the soul of a young hero (but ominously fails in the long run). In Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus wins our sympathy in the first scene with his monumental display of compassion, even though it is laden with hubris. We have seen what happens in Oedipus at Colonus. Women of Trachis ends with a plea for compassion from the surviving main character: “grant me/For doing this, great compassion/And also see the ruthlessness/Of the gods in these actions” (1264–67).
p. 203. “The bright stars do not linger”: my translation in Meineck and Woodruff (2007).
p. 205. Imagination: Violent responses generally show a failure to imagine what will come of violence, as well as a failure to imagine the stories of the other people involved. “Going to war shows a lack of imagination” (Stafford, 2003, p. 153).
p. 206. The idolatry of virtue: “It was a time I dreamed of being good.” Chris Hedges (2005, p. 36).
p. 207. “Education matters. But so do situations”: On the responsibilities involved in what they call “choice architecture,” see Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge (2009).
Character vulnerable to situation: See Doris (2005) and Zimbardo (2007). Doris, Harman, and some others have argued that vulnerability to situation renders virtue ethics untenable. Classical virtue ethicists such as Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius have always understood this vulnerability and reckoned it into their thought, developing political and social theories that aim at environments that are relatively safe for virtue. For accounts of virtue ethics that are compatible with the data on situations, see Annas (2011) and Kamtekar (2004).
p. 209. “American civilization can be ruthless.” See the example in chapter fifteen, “the company commander.” Not one student I have taught—and not one student taught by the commander in the story (who later became a teacher of military ethics)—has ever shown compassion for the detainees in the case. When asked why not, they cite lessons learned from parents or grandparents. They might also mention Spielberg’s movie, Saving Private Ryan, in which sparing the life of a prisoner leads to the hero’s death.
On the range of opinion on such ethical issues, see Olson (2006).
On the history of treatment by U.S. forces of prisoners and detainees, see Doyle (2010). His chapter on Abu Ghraib is very telling (pp. 310–33). I regret, however, that he says almost nothing about the horrors attending the detention of civilians in Vietnam during the war of 1965–73, aside from a brief mention (pp. 285–86).
American civilization has not always been ruthless with prisoners. George Washington generally required relatively decent treatment for British and German prisoners of war (Doyle, 2010, 30, cf. 332). I know from family legend about the other side of the story: Two of my ancestors, New Jersey militiamen, barely survived British prison hulks. They were the lucky ones. Many died. For the conditions in Civil War POW camps, see Doyle: “A Very Uncivil War,” pp. 8–112.
p. 209. “The abuses at the prison at Abu Ghraib”: the best introduction is still Hersh (2004).
“The aberrant behavior on the night shift”: Schlesinger (2004): Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations, August 24, 2004, p.13.
The Stanford Prison Experiment. See Zimbardo’s account of this in his book, The Lucifer Effect. Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2008).
p. 210. “Coming from New York”: From Zimbardo (online interview), “You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel: A Talk with Philip Zimbardo.” http://edge.org/3rd_culture/zimbardo05/zimbardo05_index.html
“Another prison guard”: SPC Joe Darby, saw the photos on a fellow guard’s computer, found them disgusting, and turned them over for investigation. Schlesinger, p. 39. For Darby’s subsequent history, see the June 10, 2013, article in the New York Times, http://world.time.com/2013/06/10/10-notorious-leakers-and-how-they-fared/slide/abu-ghraib-photo-leak/
“The abuse was absent”: “The vast majority of the detainees … were treated appropriately.” (Schlesinger, p. 18). I suspect that this overstates the case, but at least some of the cucumbers in the barrel at Abu Ghraib did not go sour.
“Some of the young guards behaved well”: Even the good guards, however, felt bad about their failure to stop the brutality (Zimbardo, 2007, pp. 188–89, cf. 457–59).
On reverence in the classroom, see now Rud and Garrison, Teaching with Reverence (2012).
p.213. The passage from Shankara was translated and given me by Patrick Olivelle. The poem is an excerpt from “The Idol of Vimalakīrti, a Clay Sculpture by Yang Huizhi of the Tang Dynasty, in Tianzhu Temple,” Translated by Chiu-Mi Lai for this edition. Tianzhu (lit. Celestial Pillars) Temple is located northeast of Fengxiang (in modern-day Shaanxi). Su Shi shi ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 1.110–111.
p. 221. Dr. Johnson, after refuting previous scholars, admits that he will be refuted in turn: “The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress. … How canst thou beg for life, says Homer’s hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou are to suffer only what must another day be suffered by Achilles?” (Johnson, 1765, p. 99; Homer’s Iliad 21.106–14). On the passage in Homer, see p. 84.
p. 222. “The Paradox of Respect”: I owe this puzzle to E. De Lattre.
p. 225. “Equality is a fine ideal, but it is fatal to a rich conception of respect, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt has shown.” See Frankfurt’s elegant defense of respect in his 1997 essay, “Equality and Respect,” especially pp. 150, 153.
p. 227. “Team spirit, patriotism, at the highest level a passion for justice and peace—these are the feelings that allow respect to grow strong”: Not all respect is due to virtue. The respect that flows from reverence would have to be related to an ideal higher than the victory of this particular team. If the team’s ability to give respect stops at their own boundaries, then their respect is not admirable. They need to respect players on other teams and, above all, umpires.
Thanks to T. K. Seung for pointing out to me the importance of the Odyssey as expressing a myth of reverence.
p. 232. “but this is not what it is to expand a home.” Oliver Wendell Holmes makes plain in the last lines of the poem that he is writing about the growth of the soul away from the body and towards heaven—a Platonic idea that I will not pursue in these pages.
p. 236. Dionysus: With nice symbolism, he replaced Hestia, goddess of the hearth, in the Athenian list of principal gods, about a generation before Euripides wrote the play.
p. 237. Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
On interpreting “Ulysses,” see Ricks, pp. 113–19, and Kincaid, p. 42 n.14. I am grateful to William Gibson for setting me straight about Telemachus. Tennyson’s Ulysses is a man who does not need to have a home; as such he is unconceivable to the ancient Greeks, for whom Aristotle spoke when he said: “He who is without a homeland (polis) by reason of his nature and not by some accident, is either a poor sort of being or else a being higher than human” (Aristotle, Politics 1.2). Only beasts or gods would be without a home—unless beset by accidents of the kind that keep Ulysses away from Ithaca. On the ancient model, the adventures of Ulysses are obstacles or trials on a journey that is never in doubt. Homer’s audience would never agree that the journey was worth more than the destination.
The idea that Ulysses prefers adventure to knowledge—following “knowledge like a sinking star”—is at least as old as Dante (Inferno, Canto 26). Tennyson acknowledged that he followed Dante, but we should note two important differences: Dante’s Ulysses knows that he is leading his men to their deaths; and Dante’s Ulysses is speaking from Hell, where he is being punished for his lies—and possibly also for his irreverence in chasing knowledge beyond the limits set for men by the Gates of Hercules, and in neglecting his duties to his home:
Not fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind.
To his men, before sailing into forbidden waters beyond the Gates of Hercules, he says:
“Oh brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,” I said, “have come into the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil
Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes
But for the pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.
—trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
p. 239. “War cures old soldiers”: So I believed in 2001. Now, in 2013, reflecting on post-traumatic stress, I realize that old soldiers often miss the excitement, and most of all the close fellowship, of war.
p. 240. “Among poets writing in English, Tennyson is our greatest witness to depression”: T. S. Eliot said of him that he was “the saddest of English poets,” (in Ross, p. 178).
p. 241. “Hector, who was ashamed to take cover behind the walls of Troy”: Iliad 22.99ff.
p. 242. Thucydides: 3.82.8; see also 2.65.7 and 8.89.3.
p. 246. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day.” From House of Light by Mary Oliver, Published by Beacon Press Boston. Copyright 1990, Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.
p. 248. Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams, Preface, p. xx, xxix.
p. 249. Mindfulness: I am grateful to Ursula Goodenough and Reuben McDaniel for conversations on the subject. Goodenough (1998) shows the wonders of nature at the microscopic level. Goodenough and Woodruff (2001) explores mindfulness in relation to reverence. Langer’s account (1989) is basic reading; and Weick and Putnam bring out the differences between western and eastern approaches to mindfulness (2006).
p. 251. “We fall so easily into idolatry of ourselves and the things we do”: See Hedges on the first two commandments (2005, pp. 9–52).
p. 254. “People follow you willingly.” I argued in chapter eleven that having willing followers is neither necessary nor sufficient for good leadership. A leader may need to find a way to move unwilling followers. At the same time, followers may be willing to follow for reasons that have nothing to do with qualities of leadership.
p. 255. “A friend commands a company.” Story told me by William Gibson, used here by his permission. He reminds me (as I knew myself) that many high-ranking officers held their troops to high moral standards. But some did not. Gibson has taught ethics and used the story in ethics classes; like me, he receives mostly lethal solutions from his bloodthirsty students.
p. 257. “Hymns to reverence in the plays”: see p. 126, pp. 201–04.