I had the privilege of recording a few of Louise’s lectures on tragedy for the Association of Classical Christian Schools earlier this fall. A clip from those courses is linked above.
Tonight via Google Meet, Dr. Bainard Cowan and I begin teaching a class on Louise Cowan and Greek Tragedy. We will begin by looking at Louise’s essay in Tragic Abyss and Fergusson’s introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics. We will then go on over the course of four more sessions to hear from Louise on: Prometheus, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, Medea, Trojan Women, and the Bacchae. (We will be using The Greek Plays.) The reading will clip along at a swift pace—all the better for appropriating and grasping, as Louise encourages below.
“Tragedy is primarily an experience, not simply a knowledge—an experience of seeing beyond our daily lives into the impenetrable and unchanging laws that govern existence,” she says. “It is not about good and evil. In it one sees, as Nietzsche has written, beyond good and evil, for none of the laws that govern the universe are evil. But tragedy shows us the way in which these laws, which in and of themselves are good, may be in conflict, so that if this conflict is played out, and not somehow redirected, the human enterprise will be rent from top to bottom, and that destiny to which the human race is called will be harmed…
So one of the things we must school ourselves in when we approach Greek tragedy is the temptation to assign blame. We ought not take sides, ought not label a character as wicked, for the grand Greek discovery is of these conflicting goods, as we might call them. We need to school ourselves then to look at all the issues sympathetically” (lecture to DIHC 2003, Cowan Archives).
“The task you and I have in reading these tragedies—that come to us from another continent and another epoch, so far away in time and space as to be virtually inaccessible as history—the task is to appropriate them, to grasp them, (and that means to experience them, to approach them with the willing suspension of disbelief and hence not so much to absorb them as to be absorbed) to go on to a few mappings, without, however, thinking that we are getting at the final meaning. Nor, without a lifetime of study as a classical scholar, should we think we are approaching the original meaning (what the Greeks thought of them, or what their significance was in their own culture). As serious readers of literature, as disseminators of the literary tradition, we have no hope of apprehending these Greek dramas except in the light of their universal qualities. It is the miracle of the work of art that it speaks across the ages: that, in fact, we know in principle that we may see more in it than those of the culture out of which it came” (Lecture on the Bacchae, Cowan Archives).
Please subscribe to the Cowan Archives Substack for more of Louise’s essays delivered to your inbox.
Thanks for reading Mrs. Gerth Teaches! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Get full access to Mrs. Gerth Teaches at mrsgerthteaches.substack.com/subscribe
