This fall Alex Petkas penned an essay titled “Great Books’ Is for Losers” in The American Mind. In the spirit of the New Right and Bronze Age Pervert or “BAP,” Petkas argued that reading great books is not merely enough: one should live a great life, imitating the great men and women of the Western tradition. Petkas is not entirely wrong. There are many great men and women who read about earlier great men and women and imitated their deeds. And indeed, much of classical education is, ironically, far too bookish and narrow. The rebellion of “former” Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, and even Amish against their upbringing in classical education is often framed in terms of rebellion against boring (and badly taught) material forced on them by teachers whose lives little resemble such heroes as Odysseus, Aeneas, and Charlemagne.
At the same time, those who read and truly imitated classical works, such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and General Patton, were also exceptions in their own day. Moreover, there is some question as to how many BAPists themselves actually live lives of brilliant adventure and daring.
And I would argue that there is nothing wrong with being a mild-mannered great books professor who teaches classics to future accountants, engineers, and home makers anyway.
Petkas, who runs a classically-themed Twitter account, should not be dismissed too easily, however, as he represents a new vanguard in classical education: social media and podcast-driven intellectual discourse. Paul Krause is a defender of the Great Books who has also made a name in this new arena. In the interview below, he shares his thoughts on education and university life, as well as pop and high culture.
Krause is the Editor-in-Chief of VoegelinView. He is a teacher, writer, podcaster, and the author of Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature (Stone Tower Press, 2024), Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023), and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021). Educated at Baldwin Wallace University, Yale, and the University of Buckingham, he is a frequent writer on the arts, classics, literature, religion, and politics for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals. Follow him on Twitter here: Paul Krause.
Russell: Paul, thank you for doing this interview. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Krause: Hello Jesse, it is great to be with you. I was born and raised in Ohio, was a triple major as an undergraduate, attended Yale University’s Divinity School and obtained my master’s degree in religious studies (theology), then studied in the UK with Sir Roger Scruton for another master’s degree in philosophy. While I was peer-reviewed published as an undergraduate, and also as a student at Yale, it was when I was at Yale Divinity School that I really broke into the world of public writing for magazines, newspapers, and literary journals and became more a cultural critic and literary essayist than anything else. It has since stuck. I’m now mostly known for being a public literary critic and writer, often highlighting the philosophical, theology, and mythic elements in great literature. Presently, I teach at a preparatory academy in New Mexico: Freshmen, Junior, and Senior Literature, and Junior Philosophy. These courses include reading Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Orwell, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, and others. I often include poets from Sappho and Ovid to Byron, Yeats, and Arnold sprinkled in for an even more comprehensive education and exposure to great literature within the western literary tradition.
Russell: You are a graduate of Yale University, one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world. Ivy League schools have come under fire recently as having greatly deteriorated in quality even within the past twenty years. What was your experience like at Yale? Do you feel like you got an “Ivy League” education?
Krause: I found my time at Yale to be very worthwhile. As an alumnus, I have a more direct view into the curriculum. First, while it is true the culture of the Ivy Leagues definitely leans “left,” the Protest Culture often portrayed in the media is overblown. I only ran into one mass protest while a student there; most protests are rather limited and don’t impact daily life. Patrick Deneen was invited to give a seminar talk that I attended when a student there. The quality of education in most departments is still top-notch with excellent professors and many great students, and I owe a lot to my own broad education, reading habits, writing abilities, social networking, and post-graduation success to my time at Yale. I will end by saying that Yale provided strong foundations for my continuing education as a person, and for that I am grateful. I’m grateful for having been a student—we need more gratitude in the world today.
Russell: Within Muses of a Fire, you explore both “traditional” great books literature as well as film, including a number of popcorn flicks. The late Harold Bloom, a professor at your alma mater, was famous for his ruthless critique of pop culture studies. Should pop culture be an object of serious study and discourse?
Krause: Jesse, I think you hit on an important topic. While Bloom was a great defender of “the canon” against the school of resentment, he too, from the perspective of a certain irony, was also an implicit apostle of resentment – the example being his hatred of pop culture studies (as well as religion, specifically, Christianity which he tried to minimize in a lot of literary analysis). I have found that being thoughtful in assessing pop culture, films, and music in particular, can often be a gateway for younger students (confession: I’m a millennial so very much identify with the culture of younger students) to approach great books and the traditional canon. I’ve found over the years of teaching and lecturing that students who have watched recent films, anime and animation, can also come to love Dante and Milton.
My own students are a reflection of this. One even drew an illustration of Dante and Virgil from the Divine Comedy with a very kind note attached: “This is for you, Mr. Krause, the Virgil who led me to love Dante and Virgil, and with them, many others. May that ancient flame ever burn in your heart and gleam in your eyes.” A lot of pop culture should be given a critical assessment, but if done with some sympathy, we might just find some deep profundities in pop culture. Muses of a Fire does just that in its treatment of certain films, keeping films like Godzilla, Terminator, Avatar, and Interstellar in dialogue with Augustine, Dante, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky.
Russell: You admit to being a Star Wars fan. Prior to the advent of the more recent Disney films, the running joke was that there are only three Star Wars films. However, you provide a trenchant and thorough discussion of the infamous prequels in Muses of Fire. Do you think the prequels have aged well—especially in the age of Disney Star Wars?
Krause: I do think the prequels have aged well, especially in light of the recent Disney films. While one can laugh and poke fun at A Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith seems to have always held a higher place of prominence as the best of the prequels, the prequel trilogy does have profundity to it as my essay/chapter tries to communicate. Both as a standalone trilogy and as part of the “original” saga, the prequels implicitly deal with complex questions of science, technology, human love, liberty, tyranny, and the meaning of life despite the sometimes clunky dialogue and popcorn explosions. I like to think, as you imply with your question, that readers of Muses of a Fire when going through the analysis of Star Wars might just find a whole new level of the meaning “In a galaxy far, far away…” I invite all readers to give Star Wars a chance for a serious treatment of intellectual matters rather than just assume it is, and remains, a “fun” sci-fi/fantasy adventure. You might just be surprised by joy, and the recovery of joy when reading is an imperative in the world we live in.
Russell: The names Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer are notorious in the world of film criticism. However, you discuss the 1998 Bay-Bruckheimer film Armageddon in your treatment of science fiction. Do you believe there is more to Bay and Bruckheimer than explosions and car chases?
Krause: Jesse, this is another great question that might surprise people with my answer: Yes, there is more to Bay and Bruckheimer than just explosions and car chases. Part of my overall framework in understanding sci-fi films begins with a treatment of theology, philosophy, and mythology. Science Fiction films are the mythos of the modern age—ever since the creation of the Atomic Bomb and the apparent “triumph of science.” Yet, as I point out in so many sci-fi films, including Armageddon, our filmography is wrestling with the tension between human love and passion against technology and science.
What makes Armageddon (and other films like Deep Impact) unique and important within the history of sci-fi filmography is how in the aftermath of the Cold War and the end of imminent nuclear armageddon, a more positive approach to science and technology emerges yet it is not science (as such) that really saves us but the sacrificial hero—a deeply religious and human archetype—that saves humanity. Harry Stamper, the character played by Bruce Willis, saves the earth through an act of loving sacrifice so his new “son” (Ben Affleck’s character, A.J.) and daughter (Liv Tyler’s character, Grace) can have a loving life back on earth with a family. His act of sacrifice literally gives humanity a second chance and new life by marrying a woman named Grace. Beneath the CGI, the explosions, and the entertaining fun which move blockbuster films are very deep philosophical, mythological, and religious currents even in the most popcorn of pop culture flicks. To extend the spirit of Northrop Fyre into pop culture films, archetypal story-telling doesn’t die even in films by Bay, Bruckheimer, and other “popcorn” directors.
Russell: You discuss Wagner in your work. Indeed, the effect of Wagnerian Romanticism is present in many of your essays. However, until very recently, Wagner (and Germanic mythology) was considered beyond the pale due to Wagner’s (mis-)appropriation by German National Socialism. Do you think there is a way to explore German culture without the taint of Nazism?
Krause: It is very perceptive of you, Jesse, to see the echoes and traces of Wagnerian Romanticism across my essays. Romanticism is definitely part of critical lens in which I approach culture. Here, I understand culture as a synthesis of two great influences over me—one I never met and the other I studied with—Matthew Arnold and Sir Roger Scruton. Arnold says that the study of culture ultimately leads to “sweetness and light” and that culture contains the “best which has been thought and said” by humans. Scruton understood culture as the repository of ethical and emotional wisdom found in cultural pursuits and creations: art, music, poetry, literature, and spiritual practices, etc.
Romanticism, being, in part, the emphasis of human passion and the human heart within human nature threatened by the ongoing rise of science and technology, naturally fits into this cultural vision for the products of culture as products of the heart. And when you study and immerse yourself in great culture, you find the expression of human love, human togetherness, and the yearning for love transcending space, time, and death. This was very much the desired hope of Wagnerian Romanticism, confused and incomplete as it was (and it was).
There should be a gentle study of German culture and the gifts of what some scholars call the “Romantic Imperative” without the philistine dismissal of chalking it up to proto-Nazism. Only closed minds are afraid of seeing the “sweetness and light” that is so often accompanied by the less savory realities of human existence and history. At the same time, we need to be forthright in not ignoring the misappropriations you speak of—that is part of the story too. I would end here by agreeing with the eminent Canadian philosopher and Catholic thinker Charles Taylor who passionately (and I think accurately) defends Romanticism as a spiritual movement and spiritual solution to the problem of modernity.
Russell: One of the key themes of the essays in Muses of a Fire is the triumph of love. In our own day, there is a brutal realism that dictates that one can only triumph of an enemy with brute force or with Machiavellian trickery. Can love defeat evil?
Krause: As a Christian, I naturally affirm that love can, and must, defeat evil. Evil only begets more evil (hey, that’s a line from another Bruce Willis sci-fi flick from the 1990s: The Fifth Element). In fact, the notion that love trumps hate, love overcomes all things, love reconciles all things to itself, is the Christian spirit still alive in the modern age. It is the culture of the West, still moving with those fumes, that is still drenched in the language of love despite everything else around it. Looking back at great poetry, even pagan poetry, that little light can be seen with Christian eyes. You see its traces in Homer, in Virgil, in Catullus, even Sappho. There is this deep desire, this hope, that love does transcend space, time, and death itself. Brutalism, in particular, is the end game for people and a culture that have lost faith in the salvific power of love—yet if you ask most people, regardless of how “religious” they claim to be, most will likely affirm the reality of love and the power of love rather than the machinations of mere reason and self-ambition.
Russell: Our own age is an age of extreme isolation as well as, paradoxically, a virulent neo-tribalism. It seems that true love has been forgotten. Nonetheless, throughout Muses of a Fire, you quote from St. Thomas Aquinas on the unitive power of love. Is true Romantic love possible? Is love among friends possible?
Krause: I do quote from Aquinas a lot, but really Aquinas stands in the shadow of Saint Augustine. It is really Augustine’s outlook that moves Muses of a Fire. Augustine, importantly, notes several revolutionary things in his exposition of Deity and the meaning of life in his works. In his commentaries on the First Epistle of John, he writes that “Love is God” (dilectio Deus est). This is a truly revolutionary moment in our cultural inheritance; Augustine overcomes his younger self who was hesitant to push 1 John 4:8 which says “God is love” to its corollary conclusion. Yet that’s exactly what Augustine eventually does. This helps to magnify his statement in De Trinitate that the love of creatures overcomes covetousness and becomes charity when that image of God is discovered in humans. Love itself becomes the divine manifestation in our life according to the mature Augustine’s thinking which then takes root throughout western culture. Aquinas takes the next leap by articulating how love must be the uniting force of the cosmos and of all existence. Romantic love, and love among friends, any “true love,” is only possible in and with God. That is what Dante gained from Augustine and Aquinas in his Divine Comedy, which is also treated in Muses.
Russell: You note in your work that you were not an English major, but you write a great deal on English literature. It seems that the small republic of belles lettres is even smaller in the twenty-first century. Do people still read books?
Krause: I hope people still read books. As a Literature teacher at a preparatory academy, I emphasize to all my students the joy found in reading, creative writing, and thinking. Discovering joy in reading is something we must recover in the twenty-first century. We recently held a poetry night at the school, and it was very touching—as a teacher—to hear some student testimonies about their experiences in Literature, especially a freshman student remark how she owned zero poetry books at the start of the year but now has six thanks to, according to her, my encouragement and support.
While I was always an avid reader (and a former English student of the year back in high school), among the ironies of my education is my time spent studying philosophy and theology reopened my love of literature and brought new eyes and ears to read and hear the majestic stories being told in English literature. Reading Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters from the light of scripture, theology, and Aquinas’s theology of unitive love and the Christian message of forgiveness bestowing new life really makes the novels of Austen and the Bronte sisters all the sweeter. If I am permitted to quote once more one of my favorite critics, Matthew Arnold, returning to English literature with graduate degrees in philosophy and theology revealed to me a “sweetness and light” that was absent the first time I had read those truly great works.
Russell: Why is War and Peace your favorite book?
Krause: Tolstoy’s War and Peace is my favorite book for a myriad of reasons, but the simplest reason is it is a great pilgrimage of the transformative and salvific power of love. Shocking, I know! War and Peace reveals the naked brutality and emptiness of politics as the path for human meaning and salvation. It is easy to point to the shortcomings of Napoleon in the book, but let’s look at two of the protagonists: Andrei and Pierre. At the beginning of the book, both are seeking the meaning of life through political means. Andrei dreams of being a Russian Napoleon. Pierre is fervently supportive of revolutionary Jacobinism. This nearly causes Andrei’s death at Austerlitz and Pierre to slip into isolation as he can’t relate to Russian society. Yet how do we find meaning in life come the end of their respective character arcs and the book itself? Forgiveness for Andrei, and by embracing the “simplicity” of filial love and family life for Pierre. That’s Tolstoy’s message—simple yet profound: the love of regular people over normal things really does move the world and not the fantastical ambitions of “Great Leaders.” Additionally, it is such a stimulating, intellectual, and philosophical read. As a former philosophy student, I love it for the intellectual substance it offers. Love, not political utopianism, revolutionism, or personal scheming, is what truly matters in life. I will end with an exhortation by the man whom I wrote my thesis on while at Yale and who is the lead chapter of my book: Tolle Lege!
Image Via: Rawpixel
