Dead Whites Make Comeback

When you find that rarity in academia today—a genuine scholar who knows his subject—you pay attention because you want to, not just because you have to, particularly when the professor is resurrecting a man of letters who has been purged from most thoroughly modern college classrooms. You also get a pretty good idea of why the politically correct gatekeepers of the Ivory Tower have banished such sages from campus lecture halls in the first place.

“You have the three founders of standard English,” Professor Dennis Taylor pointed out at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference late last year. “[John] Dryden was a Catholic convert, [Alexander] Pope was a lifelong Catholic and [Jonathan] Swift was a Tory sympathetic to Catholicism.”

Dr. Taylor teaches at Boston College. Of the trio he enumerated, Pope is the most troubling for secular scholars who hold most of the tenured positions in academia today. “Pope’s Catholicism influenced his work,” Dr. Taylor said at the MLA’s Washington, D. C. conference, and “Mainstream literary tradition does not know what to do with it.”

“Pope, a founder of standard English, was a papist.” For most professors, this influence makes Pope’s work incomprehensible. Dr. Taylor views their discomfort with wry detachment.

“This sets up a paradox in Pope of his Catholicism compared to his education and role in crafting standard English,” Dr. Taylor told the audience at the Marriott, “at least, an apparent contradiction.”

“Actually, Alexander Pope’s Catholic father introduced him to the classics.” Pope’s Catholicism seeped into his work in ways large and small: In his Essay on Man, for example, he used “[rosary] beads and prayer books” as symbols of old age.

In stark contrast to Pope, Christopher Marlowe is regarded as a “pioneer atheist.” Yet the religion in the climactic scene of his most famous work, Dr. Faustus, is usually ignored by Marlowe buffs in institutions of higher learning, and has been for some time.

Dr. Dayton W. Haskin, also of BC, has made a life’s work of studying not only Marlowe but changes in the college canon over time. Of Marlowe’s classic work, Dr. Haskin says, “Dr. Faustus is sort of a 16th Century The Graduate: he is given every advantage but doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Of college course offerings, Dr. Haskin offers, “Religious writings of [John] Donne have rarely made it into English courses at Harvard.” Ironically, “Harvard was founded by Puritans in the 17th Century.”

At Harvard, over time, “Reducing the possibility of studying religion led to a secular canon.” And, as Harvard went…

Although this is the type of panel that the 121-year-old MLA in days gone by would have assembled, that particular discussion was exceptional last year at the group’s late December gathering. Of more than a dozen arguably representative seminars which I attended at the MLA’s annual convention, it was the only one of its kind.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.