"Finding the common potential for reverence is what enables us to
see each other as human."
Bill Moyers Interviews Paul
Woodruff
BILL MOYERS: Three weeks after
the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a small book appeared that I have now read
twice to help me sort out what I think about that massacre and the world
that both produced it and has now been shaped by it. This is the book: REVERENCE:
RENEWING A FORGOTTEN VIRTUE. Paul Woodruff wrote it. Paul Woodruff teaches
the humanities, philosophy at my alma mater, the University of Texas. He's
a veteran of Vietnam, the author of four other books, one of America's foremost
interpreters of Plato, Thucydides, and other Greek thinkers from the ancient
world.
Figuring out what they had
to say to our world is Paul Woodruff's passion. Welcome to NOW.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: How do you define
reverence?
PAUL WOODRUFF: I think reverence
is the capacity for awe in the face of the transcendent.
BILL MOYERS: The transcendent
being—
PAUL WOODRUFF: It's whatever
we human beings did not create: God, justice, the truth...
BILL MOYERS: Beauty.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Nature, beauty.
BILL MOYERS: Death?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Death is one
of the most awe-inspiring facts of our lives.
PAUL WOODRUFF: And I think
complementary to the awe in the transcendent is a felt sense of our own
mortality and our own limitations, our own tendency to make mistakes.
BILL MOYERS: How does this
create reverence?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Realizing the—
the distance between us and the ideals which we see as transcendent is the
essence of reverence. Recognizing that, you know, we are— we are born to
die and between the time we're born and the time we die, we'll— we'll probably
make a number of significant mistakes, and realizing that this is true of
other people as well as of ourselves, that we have a common— a common humanity
and are all in the same way vulnerable. It's the virtue in— actually, in
both the Greek and the Chinese system, I think, that protects the people
who are most helpless from the people who are most powerful. When a victorious
soldier kills a prisoner, that's a failure of reverence. When a ruler refuses
to hear a suppliant, that's a failure of reverence.
When you're utterly helpless,
if you're an old person in a hospital, if you're a lonely minority teenager
stopped on a road late at night by a policeman, you really have nothing
between you and— and a terrible fate but the— what I would call the reverence
of the powerful person in your life at that moment. The best clue to how
reverent we are is how we treat the weakest people around us.
BILL MOYERS: Why does reverence
do that? Why is it responsible for that kind of humane, civil behavior that—
that prevents a soldier from desecrating the body he has just created?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Well you put
it beautifully. Desecrating a body. The— the dead, of course, are the most
helpless people from the Greek point of view and from any point of view.
They are— a dead body is utterly helpless and vulnerable and to desecrate
that is— is to cross— is to violate the— the sacred. Part of reverence is
recognizing, you know, the lines that divide where we can step and what
we can touch and what we can do from what we shouldn't.
BILL MOYERS: You say, simply
put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act
like gods.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Perfect. (LAUGHTER)
BILL MOYERS: Well said.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. But it's
very ...
BILL MOYERS: You said that.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. When
people are powerful, they— they tend to fall into habits of acting as if
they were divine. The— the cliche, of course, is power corrupts. But what—
what the Greeks are noticing is that it corrupts in a very particular way.
You think that you can't go wrong. You think that you can't be mistaken.
You think that because you are not likely to be mistaken, you don't have
to listen to other people. And those are all signs of tyranny and they're
all signs of hubris. They all indicate a lack of— of - of respect for the
difference between human beings and— and gods, which is the essence of reverence.
BILL MOYERS: So reverence is something other
than the worship of God.
PAUL WOODRUFF: On my view, yes. And this came
to me as a surprise, actually, because I had always been taught that for
ancient peoples, reverence was sacrificing the appropriate number of goats
or sheep or cattle or chickens or whatever so that the plague will be averted
or we won't have an earthquake next year or whatever. What people have called
"do a deus," "I give to the god, the god will give back to me."
Then I— but as I— as I tried to translate
this term and understand what it meant and why it was so important
to the tragic poets like Sophocles, I realized that had nothing to do with
it. Oedipus and the other tyrants are not in trouble because they didn't
sacrifice enough chickens. It didn't have anything to do with that. It was
about their attitude towards themselves and their— their failure to realize
that they were not truly godlike.
BILL MOYERS: Do you see evidence
of reverence around you in your daily passages?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Yes. When—
when a family has dinner together or celebrates any other very humdrum sort
of ritual, they are, I think, celebrating the reverent idea of— of the unity
of a— of a family, which transcends each individual member of it.
When a good teacher listens
to a— to a student, when a good teacher in a classroom an atmosphere of
reverence towards the truth which they're seeking to understand and learn,
reverence is in play. When a game, you know, even a football game is— is
well run, you know, and people respect the umpires and— and the players
respect each other and the— the game is plainly not simply about the egos
and the successes of the various players and coaches. When a group of musicians
comes together and plays and their egos sort of drop away and they— they
are simply serving the— the beauty of the music, that's— that's reverence.
BILL MOYERS: The surprising
thing in your book is when you say reverence has more to do with politics
than religion.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Reverence has
to do with politics because I think reverence has more to do with human
relations than it has to do with relations between human beings and God.
It has to do with human relations because it's expressed in— in families,
in hierarchies, in human structures of all kinds.
And when it's violated in
the ways that are most important, it's— it's violated between one human
being and another.
BILL MOYERS: You've actually
said that reverence is— is crucial to the health of a community, of a family,
of an army.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Right.
BILL MOYERS: Of a political
party, of a nation.
PAUL WOODRUFF: All of that.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Well, for the—
for the ancient Greeks, there were two complementary primary virtues, justice
and reverence. And justice by itself you might think is enough to have a
sound community. But the Greeks understood that it was not. Justice works
between equals and when justice has been done, usually there's a winner
and a loser.
Reverence is about sort of
gluing together a society where there are big differences in power or big
differences in wealth or big differences in strength and involve— and— and
creating avenues of respect and languages of— for the expression of respect
between people who might otherwise not be able to— to function in the same
community.
BILL MOYERS: You tell a story
in here of the woman Janis who never voted and tells you she never will.
She thinks Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, it makes no difference. What's that
got to do with reverence?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Voting is one
of the great ceremonies of democratic society. It's one of the ways that
we come together as a community. And I think tradition soc— more tradition
societies than ours that have a closer experience of ceremony and reverence
vote in larger numbers.
Seeing long lines of people
who voted in South Africa when it first became possible for everyone to
vote in South Africa was inspiring to me and I thought why— what are we
missing here? And I think what we're missing here is the sense of the importance
of that act to our being the community that we want to be.
BILL MOYERS: There's a very
moving passage here. I'd like to ask you just to— to read it right through
the poem.
PAUL WOODRUFF: As I write,
the United States is in the supreme moment of its power. Not far from where
England stood in 1897, when Kipling wrote "Recessional" as a reminder that
power leads to arrogance and arrogance to a fall. The tumult and the shouting
dies, the captains and the kings depart, still stands thine ancient sacrifice
and humble and a contrite heart. If drunk with sight of power, we loose
wild tongues that have not thee in awe, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet
lest we forget, lest we forget.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Kipling was
the poet of empire, but he was also a poet of— of reverence. Remembering,
not forgetting that we are mortal. Remembering, not forgetting that human
enterprises, great governments, great powers eventually stumble and fall,
as history teaches us. It's very dangerous to be powerful. Powerful people
forget that they can make mistakes. I said this before. And powerful nations
can forget that, too.
BILL MOYERS: The essence of
tragedy is overreaching, is it not?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Exactly. And
I— you can't, I think, understand tragedy without understanding why reverence
was so important to the Greeks because overreaching destroys community.
When— when people overreach, other people, of course, are angry and frightened.
It's not just the— the gods who might resent you for overreaching. Other—
other people do, too. And the— the possibility of your being accepted as
a— as a genuine leader, as a legitimate king is undercut by your overreaching.
BILL MOYERS: I saw that happen
to Lyndon Johnson when he overreached in that war which you were part— you
were in Vietnam in what, '69?
PAUL WOODRUFF: '69 to '70.
BILL MOYERS: How do you think
that experience influenced your thinking about all this?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Enormously.
I— I went to Vietnam as someone who was partially trained in classical scholarship
for whom it was a diversion. I came back from Vietnam thinking that I really
shouldn't do anything that didn't matter to people's lives. It was hard
for me to figure out how to pursue a scholarly life in the way that I'd
been taught and take on issues that really matter to people.
BILL MOYERS: Well, there are
some people who say that nothing matters less to us today than the lives
and thinking of 3000-year-old dead Greeks.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Well, I think
they're wrong. The— the Greeks were extraordinarily observant about the
human condition. And they— they were models to us, I think, in many ways.
For example, this is one of the— the most important things to me about the
ancient Greeks. Homer starts off the Greek tradition, after all, with THE
ILIAD. And in THE ILIAD, the most human, the most sympathetic characters
are the Trojans. They're not Greeks. They're going to be defeated. They're
losing the war. And the least sympathetic figures are the Greeks.
Agamemnon, who is really a
tyrannical general, quite without reverence, Achilles, who flies into a
rage and— and describes himself as a beast and acts like a beast through
much of THE ILIAD. But the Trojans are human and the ability to see the
enemy, the defeated, the about to be defeated enemy as human is— is something
remarkable about the Greeks.
With Hector, there's a wonderful
scene just before they fight. Hector says, "Achilles, let's make a deal.
Whichever one of us kills the other, we'll spare the body of the other and
turn it over to his parents for proper burial." Achilles says, "Does the
wolf make bargains with the lamb? I will kill you and I will leave your
body to the dogs and the vultures." And they fight and indeed that's what
Achilles sets out to do. When he returns the body of Hector to Hector's
father, he does so because he remembers his own father. And in remembering
his own father he remembers his humanity and sees what there is in common
between him and Hector, which up to now he's been denying on the grounds
that they're enemies.
BILL MOYERS: And in your world,
the wolf does make bargains with the lamb out of reverence for the weak.
PAUL WOODRUFF: In my world,
we're not wolves or lambs. We are human beings in this together and finding
the common bond, finding the— finding the common experiences and the common
emotions. Finding the common potential for reverence is what enables
us to see each other as human.
BILL MOYERS: You write, "If
a religious group thinks and acts and speaks as God commands in all things,
this is a failure of reverence." That's what you mean.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Right.
BILL MOYERS: It is some people's
notion of the sacred that— that frightens some of us. I mean, the men who
hijacked the planes and drove them into the World Trade Center, into the
Pentagon, they did it in the name of— of Allah, of God. It's there in their
manuals and their instruction books.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Right.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, it's—
it's when they think they're on a sacred mission that I think some of us
have to worry.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Absolutely.
And I— I think that one of the most devastating ways to be irreverent is
to think that you know the literal mind of God and that you are carrying
out God's will, that you are God's instrument in what you do. We don't—
we don't know the divine that well. And partly because they were unable
to see, recognize the— the humanity they share with the— the many innocent
people they killed.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me the story
of Iphigenia.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. This
is famous. Agamemnon was leading the Greek army against Troy. They needed
a favorable wind in order to cross the Aegean Sea to get from Greece to
Troy and the winds kept coming the wrong way. So he consulted the prophet.
The prophet said if you sacrifice your daughter Iphigenia or Iphigenia—
you can say it any way you want— if you sacrifice your daughter, you will
have fair winds. So he sent a message to his wife saying, "I found a bridegroom
for Iphigenia. Bring her in her wedding dress and we'll have an altar and
everything will be ready." Well, she went to the altar and there was no
bridegroom. There was her father there with a knife. The Roman poet Lucretius,
describes this scene and then ends with a ringing line, "So much evil religion
can bring about," and it certainly can.
BILL MOYERS: Because?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Because religion
is not always reverent. Religious wars represent a failure, I think, to
recognize the common human experience of reverence in different religions.
The— the great Israeli poet of peace, Yehuda Amichai, who died a few years
ago, wrote in his last long poem a canto that has the theme, "Gods come
and go, but prayer is forever."
And the English poet of war,
Rudyard Kipling, said something like that in— in one of the poems he wrote
for his novel, KIM, and he's speaking of a— of a man who's worshipping a
burnished idol. And he says, "His god is as his fates assign/His prayer
is all the world's, and thine."
Both poets in very— in different
ways, I think, were trying to get at the same idea that if we can get beyond
differences in articulate belief and focus on the— the reverence that is
possible in the different religious traditions and the— the human vulnerability,
the human needs which are represented in our common prayers, gods come and
go, but prayer is forever. It's a very powerful line.
BILL MOYERS: Paul Woodruff,
thank you for joining us. REVERENCE: RENEWING A FORGOTTEN VIRTUE is a wonderful
book.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Thank you.
© Public Affairs
Television. All rights reserved.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_woodruff.html
Remember
this, when you Lay waste to the land of Troy:
Be reverent to the gods. Nothing matters more, as Zeus the father knows.
Reverence
is not subject to the deaths of men; They live, they die, but reverence
shall not perish.