Culture wars? The answer is Yes, it does: culture wars. And at a cost to no one.

This time let us begin with the image, an image from the Western tradition and concerned with culture. Civilization is attributed by the Greeks to Athena, protectress of Athens, whom Athenians represented in two characteristic ways: “tranquilly” seated on a throne, and “in a warlike pose,” helmeted and, with shield and raised spear, ready to strike (in a posture very like those Egyptian pharaohs smiting their enemies).

Classicist Robert Luyster reports that this dual treatment has perplexed modern scholars. How can Athena be both “goddess of Wisdom and all the arts of civilization” and goddess of war?

It has long been seen that a tension exists between the … civic and martial aspects of Athena … and her more pacific … connotations.

To resolve this tension scholars advanced theories on the ‘real’ Athena; “because no evident connection could be sensed between these two halves of her being,” there became two Athenas: one the original goddess of Athens and the other a “later and artificial development.”

Robert Luyster, “Symbolic Elements in the Cult of Athena,” History of Religions 5:1 (1965), 133

But it is this modern opposition that is artificial.

Athena as the guardian of Athens was called Athena Promachos, which literally means Athena pro (‘in front of’) Athens for the purpose of shielding or guarding, machos being ‘one who fights’: in short, ‘Athena defender’.

More generally a ‘promachos’ is

a deity who fights in front of, or champions, some person or state,

S.v. ‘promachos’, Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (1908)

but the Athens that Athena was poised to defend was not, to Athenians, simply their ‘state’. People today have picked up (from some source other than the tradition that gave us democracy) a peculiarly arid conception of the state. In his ‘Ladder of beauty’ speech in the Symposium Plato includes politics. There Socrates claims that a person attentive to beauty will awaken to the glory of

thoughts which may improve the young [and will come to] see the beauty of institutions and laws, and … understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle;….

Plato, Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 210

Athena’s spear was not raised to protect a form of government; it was raised against a threat to beauty, to truth, to goodness – to life and its very meaning as understood in Athens, for these were the things that Athenian culture rose to perpetuate.

Athena herself is beautiful for this reason.

Athens, a ‘garden’ in which beauty blossoms, is beautiful, and it was offered to Athena as a fitting gift to the goddess Homer called “bright-eyed”, whose penetrating eyes were filled with light.

Or, to put it in another way, Athena Promachos, behind her aegis or giant shield, is protecting herself. Athenian culture itself possesses – is imbued with, is an image or reflection of – her divine beauty. It cultivates life in that specific form that Athenians honoured: the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Were we to say that every culture has its own standard of beauty, we see the Athenian standard in the images of Athena. It is this beauty we see that she is preserving from destruction. The instant that this ideal is endangered the goddess rears up with a spear, “deathdealing and awful” (Luyster, 161), ready to terminate this threat to the life of the people – since it is by all that is true, all that is honourable, just, pure, lovely (to borrow language from the Epistles), that such people live. The assault upon culture is a threat to life itself.

Ancient cultures unapologetically protected their way of life as the way of life. Every member of such a culture speaks like Old Lodge Skins in the novel Little Big Man, who, turning to the great Spirit of the Cheyenne, says,

Thank you for making me a Human Being! … The white man … is in never-ending supply [but] there has always been only a limited number of Human Beings.

Thomas Berger, Little Big Man (1964; Penguin Books, 1968), 437, 176

You cannot live as a human being only biologically (via the water and shelter that keeps you alive). It is stupid to say ‘It’s the economy stupid’ (aiming to cut to the heart of politics) because it is stupid to talk as if you were plant life. The member of a culture is a particular sort of person who lives by (loves and therefore hates) particular things. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, Athenians

took it for granted that the way of life of their own city was unquestionably the best way of life for man … and it was equally taken for granted that what Greeks shared was clearly superior to any barbarian way of life.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed.
(Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), 133

And MacIntyre means vice versa: the Greek was a barbarian to the Persian, as the European was to Old Lodge Skins.

It is not that these societies recognized only their kin: there were always surrounding peoples and the ‘stranger’ in Athens deserved Athenian hospitality. The operative attitude is explained in Little Big Man:

In their spoken language Cheyenne don’t ever call themselves ‘Cheyenne’ but rather Tsistsistas, which means ‘the People’, or ‘the Human Beings’. What anybody else is doesn’t concern them. (60)

Scarcely anywhere in ancient art do you find even an image of foreign peoples and there are certainly no works elevating Greek ways above Persian. The outsider was of no concern, even as a threat. Should it happen that some external force menaced the Athenian way of life, the citizen of Athens (who is an Athenian in loving what Athens loves) will rise by his very formation to defend it: this is people being who they are, people infused with their god. External threats are never catastrophes; catastrophe befalls Athens when the Athenian (now indifferent to what Athens loves) is oblivious to any ‘threat’, talk of which he finds ridiculous. Unformed or deformed, he sees nothing to raise the shield against.

Not long ago American Pastor Nathaniel Jolly warned Christians not to lose their Christianity in the culture war.

If you view the left as an enemy to be defeated rather than a mission field to be won, you’ve given up a Biblical worldview for a pragmatic worldly one.

But he could not be more wrong in the fantasy entertained here about the meaning of ‘defeat’. Athenians did not want the Persians dead. The reigning understanding – which now and then was dangerously relaxed (this being how tiny Athens caught the attention of a foreign giant) – was that peoples co-exist, living their own lives in their own place. Athens had no objection to Persians being Persians, but when Persian armies landed in Attica they threatened not just Greek lives but the culture of Athens. (Indeed, when the Persians succeeded in entering the city they destroyed the temple of Athena so thoroughly that historians have wondered, I quote, “Why was it necessary?”) Greek and Persian conceptions of human life were – as was always perfectly plain to all – opposed, and when the ‘garden’ walls affording each way its protected place were removed, one way overran and eliminated the other. In 480 BC, then, Athens was facing the question should Athenian ways exist, and its answer might have been the one given by the Cheyenne in Little Big Man:

We must survive, because without us the world would not make sense.

Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man, 176

Human beings have, by definition, a way of life. To obliterate it, or just quietly dismantle its institutions and repurpose its laws, is not a minor irritation that ‘confident people will maturely shrug off’. It is quite significant that Alasdair MacIntyre placed armed Athena on the cover of After Virtue, leaning on her spear in grief.

At the assault upon Athens, Athenians did not shrug. After driving the Persians out they built the Parthenon, the temple of Athena Parthenos (‘Athena unmarried’) – in thanks for their victory, to be sure, but to honour divine beauty, to raise to greater glory what destroying ‘enemies’ had left in ruins.

‘Western’ people have a way of life: the civilization being shredded in today’s “anti-cultural vortex” – a force built up over decades in which Christians were given new loves and ‘pacified’ (Christians did not need to keep their schools, their sexual morality, etc.).

In one sense I agree with Pastor Jolly; as I noted above and also in the last essay, the enemy we have to fear is not “the left” but ourselves, neglecting the Order that we alone can maintain. But it is just one more form of submission to the vortex to teach that Christianity calls for no culture and has no fight in it.

The culture of a people is not just the smattering of customs that this and that person has chosen to deck out his life with (like keepsakes on the mantelpiece): that is the invading definition, reducing culture to trifles picked up in a life of consumption. Culture is not a trifle. It is the form, the only form, in which human beings can live, as human beings, honouring and transmitting to their children the very heart of what life bestows.