The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

To understand these Greeks would in itself be a sufficient education, and indeed, a great American educator is making the experiment of giving two years of the college course, for one hundred fortunate students, to a study of Greek civilization in all its varied wealth. The Romans do not give us so much, for though they admirably laid the foundations of social order and political continuity for the nations of modern Europe, they lost themselves too much in laws and wars, in building roads and sewers and warding off encompassing barbarians, to snatch from their hard lives the quiet thought that flowers in literature, philosophy, and art.Yet even here there are gods: the greatest statesmen that ever lived, perhaps, made companionable by Plutarch’s artistry; the somber Lucretius expounding in masculine verse the inescapable Nature of Things; the delicate felicity of Virgil weaving his country’s legendary past into a cloth of gold; and, last of the Romans, Marcus Aurelius, meditating on the vanity of lust and power from the vantage point of an unequaled throne.

It is a tremendous and tragic story, how this great colossus bestrode all the earth with its majesty, and then through corruption and slavery slowly rotted away, until barbarian armies from without, and Oriental cults from within, brought it down to ruin. Here it is that the greatest historian of all, Edward Gibbon, begins his stately recital of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and plays with his mighty organ-prose a marche funèbre of desolation. Let us read those purple pages leisurely; life is not so important that we may not spare for this philosopher writing history the unhurried calm that we must have in order to drink in the wisdom of his comments and the music of his periods.

Gibbon is so generous that he tells the story not of dying Rome alone, but of that infancy of northern Europe which we know as the Middle Ages. Here is the rise of the Papacy to the realization of the greatest dream of Western statesmanship—the unification of Europe; here is the conversion of Constantine and the coronation of Charlemagne; here is the bloody tale of how Mohammed and his generals, leading armies hungry for booty and infuriated with theology, swept over Africa and Spain, built the civilization of Bagdad and Cordova, and sank back into the desert when the Turks, still more barbarous than themselves, poured down through the Caucasus upon the disordered West. How the Jews and the Persians prospered under Moslem sway let Maimonides and Omar attest. We shall find in Williams the noble record of Moslem achievements in mathematics and medicine, in astronomy and philosophy, and Faure will show us their unique and delicate architecture in the Alhambra at Granada, and in India’s Taj Mahal.

But there were a few Christians, too, in those days. Robinson takes up The Human Adventure, and describes their civilization so well that we cannot spare him from our list. Dante and Chaucer sum up the age: the Canterbury Pilgrims, though on a pious mission, frolic with stories as earthy as Rabelais’s; and Dante, though at war with his Church, lifts its theology to such splendor and dignity that for a moment we forget the barbarism that created Hell. Abelard doubted that theology, but very suddenly lost the manhood to stand his ground; nothing could be more pitiful and human than his weak abandonment of Heloise and doubt. If you would know how perfect, even in our styleless days, English prose can be, read George Moore’s quiet narrative of this immortal love. Henry Adams tells that story too in Mont St. Michel and Chartres, and expounds the encyclopedic orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as incidents in his personally conducted tour of the great French cathedrals; here Gothic is made to talk English, and reveal itself even to Americans. And here also we come upon that unappreciated glory, Taine’s History of English Literature: a book as scholarly in preparation and as brilliant in exposition as can be found this side of Gibbon; it took a Frenchman to explain their literature to the English.

Finally we listen to the masculine-melancholy music of the Middle Ages, and the Gregorian chant surrounds and deepens us with its flowing majesty. Cecil Gray is no perfect guide here, he is only brief, and those who love music as the highest philosophy will deviate from our list at this point and read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music. Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.