Thursday, 4 June 2009
Auctores Utriusque Linguæ
One of my favourite moments in the movie The Blues Brothers occurs when the band finds itself preparing to go on stage at "Bob's Country Bunker". As our heroes slowly come to grips with the hints (hay, cowboy hats, a suggestion that they set up their steel guitars) that they are in the wrong kind of place, Elwood hesitantly asks, "ma'am, what kind of music do you usually play here?" Her chirpy reply, "oh, we've got both kinds—country and western!", underlines just how far out in the sticks they are.
Besides underlining just how country this country bar is—definitely not the kind of place for Chicago blues musicians, the joke also plays on the stereotype that country folk have very limited horizons, mistrusting anything that "don't come from 'round these parts," as it were.
It is because of those disparaging associations that I was so delighted to read the preface to Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, precisely because that work is, to me, just about the polar opposite in terms of accepted erudition. Quintilian is considered one of the most heavily educated, serious writers of the ancient world, and his work has exerted an influence on education and literary criticism that can be felt to the present day. With all this running through my head, then, I opened the noble tome and read the first sentence:
Post impetratam studiis meis quietem, quæ per viginti annos erudiendis juvenibus impenderam, quum a me quidam familiariter postularent ut aliquid de ratione dicendi componerem, diu sum equidem reluctatus, quòd auctores utriusque linguæ clarissimos non ignorabam multa quæ ad hoc opus pertinerent diligentissime scripta posteris reliquisse.
As openings go, I must say, this is as pompous and formal as my understanding of Quintilian's reputation would have led me to expect, calling attention in the very first sentence to his twenty years of scholarship and long experience as a teacher—one who only hesitates to bestow his great knowledge upon us, for the humble reason that he is so widely read! The expression that surprised me so much, though, was the casual way he refers to "auctores utriusque linguæ"—both languages: Greek and Latin! No need to even enumerate them: for Quintilian it is just as much a given that these languages have all that's worth reading as it is a certainty for Bob's wife that country and western cover all the music worth listening to.
What it means, though, is that education in itself is no defense against close-mindedness. Indeed, often education—or rather, the assumption that one has done one's due diligence—is a key cause of close-mindedness. After all, with both Quintilian and Bob's wife, I think, we are dealing with people who have 'done their homework' and now feel confident that they know what they like. Presumably, at an earlier stage, they were more open to new things, but now that they consider themselves informed, they no longer are. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" at work? Perhaps, but the remedy to the phenomenon that that proverb describes is usually assumed to be more knowledge—more complete knowledge. I think that Quintilian's case proves that assumption false: it can happen that the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to assume you know best.
The implication, for me, is that an open mind needs to be seen as something worth cultivating in and of itself, regardless of how much one may know about the world. However much one may adore or value something, the light that something brings into our life should not be the cause of a blindness to things outside of it.
