GWWL4 – Jonathan Swift & Gulliver’s Travels – Great Works in Western Literature with Joseph Pearce – Discerning Hearts Podcasts

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Descerning Hearts.com presents Great Works in Western Literature with Joseph Pierce,

who is an internationally claimed author and literary scholar who's work explores

the great writers of Western Literature through a Catholic and Classical Lines.

He has written numerous best-selling books on figures such as Shakespeare, Tolkien,

C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Soltsson-Eatson, and L.R. Bogg.

A frequent lecture and longtime contributor to EWTN, he serves as visiting professor of literature

at Ave Maria University and is editor of St. Austin Review.

Great Works in Western Literature with Joseph Pierce. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is one of the greatest satirical works ever written.

Through the misadventures of Gulliver, his hopelessly modern protagonist,

Swift exposes many of the follies of the English Enlightenment from its worship of science

to its neglect of traditional philosophy and theology.

Jonathan Swift's satire on the threats posed by the Enlightenment and the embryonic spirit

of secular fundamentalism makes Gulliver's Travels priceless reading for today's defenders of

tradition. We now begin our discussion on Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels.

Welcome Joseph. It's good to be here. Jonathan Swift.

Yes, indeed. Great writer, writing at a time of transformation in England a bit earlier than

Dickens and Jane Austen because he's writing in the 18th century during the time this,

now called the Enlightenment. And of course, the Enlightenment is a superstitious name that

it gave to itself. The presumption is of course that prior to this wonderful century,

everybody else was in darkened and superstitious, which of course implicitly, if not explicitly,

basically says that Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Augustus, and Thomas Aquinas,

and Thomas Moore, these great giants of civilization in terms of philosophy and literature,

knew nothing. Because this is progressivism. So again, you know, we're not surprised at the one

thing that the Ignatius critic edition stars is to show us that previous ages were remarkably

similar to our own. So the 18th century is a time where the world believes it's progressed

beyond the superstition of the past and it's now enlightened. And Jonathan Swift is basically

lampooning that progressivism. He would be the last of the great Renaissance writers, do you think?

Well, yeah, of course, you know, with history, you can always argue about when one time began and

another time ended. But yes, the early Renaissance grew naturally out of the medieval. It wasn't

as if the Heimatledges were times of barbarism on the contrary, times of the heights of

scholastic philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, etc. And that transitioned naturally enough into the Renaissance.

But then, of course, the Renaissance transitions from the early Renaissance to the late Renaissance.

And by the late Renaissance, we have the rise of humanism in a sense that's becoming proto-relativist,

that if you want to understand humanity, you study the human being, not theology, not God,

sort of marginalizing of Christianity. And then the Enlightenment, so core,

sort of grows out of the late Renaissance. So it is an evolutionary process. And Jonathan

Swift, probably technically speaking, being an 18th century writer, is after even the late Renaissance,

the Enlightenment really is a product of the late Renaissance. So it's a continuum.

When we have Gulliver brought forth as quote unquote hero of this book,

when I think of heroes, I think of Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey, who is struggling

through every trial to get home, to his home, where he believes that it's the origin.

Gulliver, he can't wait to get away from the family.

Well, absolutely. In fact, you could see in some respects Gulliver's travels as an anti-Hodicy,

in the Odyssey. The whole point of it is to get back to his wife and his son and his people,

all of which is home. And of course, home is very symbolic and particularly symbolic Christians,

because ultimately, if Christians that their home is heaven, of course, Odysseus is not a Christian,

but many parallels between home as paganism and Christianity. And this is not the place to discuss

that. But certainly, the desire to return home and particularly to return home to wife,

family, and children, and people is a good thing. What Jonathan Swift seems to do is make his

Odyssey the complete opposite. It's an escape from home and escape from responsibilities and

escape from his family and his family commitments and his children to go on this adventure where he

can ultimately be reckless. And we need to remember one thing here that there's a very important

critical distance between Jonathan Swift as the author of the work and Gulliver as the protagonist.

We always tempted to assume particularly in the first person narrative that the voice of the

protagonist is the voice of the author. Now, that's often the case, but certainly not always the case.

And in a very profound and pronounced way in the Gulliver's travels, it is emphatically

not the case that what Jonathan Swift is doing is holding up Gulliver as an example of the typical

modern man who has no idea about the important things and is ultimately defined by his stupidity.

So that's an important thing for us to realize when we look at Gulliver's travels.

Exactly. Another nuanced example of what you just spoke of is when we spoke of weathering heights

that Emily Bronti isn't necessarily Kathy. Exactly. In fact, Emily Bronti is emphatically not Kathy.

And as we discussed in that, if you want to try to find the authorial voice in one of the

characters of that novel, you have to look to Nelly Dean. Well, in Gulliver's travels, Jonathan

Swift's voice is notably absent. What he's doing is using Gulliver to take us through various

aspects and facets of modern life, modern ideas, particularly he's lampooning the progressive

ideology that's turned its back on traditional Christianity. We need to remember, by the way,

that Jonathan Swift is or dated minister of the Church of England. So he's a committed

practicing Christian on ordained Christian minister. And he's defending traditional Christian

philosophy and a traditional Christian way of looking at life and also a traditional Christian

way of looking at Western civilization and his inheritance. He's defending that against the

new progressives who really see that the future, the whole Baconian experiment,

Francis Bacon, that the future really lies in physical sciences and not in the metaphysical

sciences, not in philosophy and theology. And that science will liberate humanity from superstition,

that the humanities move forward into a golden age in the future. Well, this is really the

nonsense that Jonathan Swift is satirizing in Gulliver's travels. This particular type of satire

is one that, well, persons listening may not be familiar with Gulliver's travels. They probably

have heard the tale. They are familiar, for example, with a Wizard of Oz, which was a direct

political satire. It isn't just an adventure story of a young girl, but it's an adventure

story of us trying to traverse through the politics of the time. Right. And that's the whole

point. We do need to see that Gulliver's travels as a political work. It is profoundly a political

and a philosophical work. And it's addressing the politics of his time. Now, one of the

problems with satire is that satire is normally rooted in the topical. And the problem, of course,

of rooting something in the topical, it seeks to be topical. So a lot of the things that Jonathan

Swift is satirizing in Gulliver's travels are things that are very much alive in the 18th century,

that perhaps we know we need footnotes to understand now. And the Ignatius critical editions

has new footnotes that enlighten us about those individual things. But the general comments,

the general trends are nonetheless unchanged, that somehow the science can liberate us. So now

he lamppoons mad scientists who have no connection with reality because they're completely

not really fixated with their ideas, with their inventions. We have a society where the inventions

become so powerful that they sort of supersede human beings themselves. These scientists are so

out of touch of reality that it had to be slacked around the face effectively to bring them back

to reality. And against that we see how the two extremes of a platonic idealism on the one

hand with the whinims is sort of horse-like creatures. And the sort of the seeing humanity is merely

bestial, a sort of cynical view with the Yahoo's. And of course, both those views of extremes

not are not incarnational. The Christian view is that we're made in the image of God, but we're also

a concupersome because of original sin. But we're not only sinners, and we're not only made in

the image of God. So the platonic extreme of the whinims and the sort of beastial extreme of

the Yahoo's are two extremes again that Jonathan Swift is lampooning, satirizing in Galvestravels.

So you see what he's doing with the cutting edge, the cutting knife of orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy,

cutting through the cant and idiocy of the intellectual fashions of his own day,

many of which remain fashionable today, of course. Which he did over 200 years? Exactly.

Galvestravels by Jonathan Swift Part 4 Chapter 7

The reader may be disposed to wonder how I could prevail on myself to give so free

a representation of my own species, among a race of mortals who are already too apt to

convince the vialist opinion of humankind from the entire congruity betwixt me in their Yahoo's.

But I must freely confess that many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds placed in my

opposite view to human corruptions had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding

that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light,

and to think the honor of my own kind not worth managing, which, besides, it was impossible for me

to do before a person of so acute judgment as my master, who daily convinced me of a thousand

faults in myself, whereof I had not the least perception before, and which with us would never

be numbered even among the human infirmities. I had likewise learned from his example

an utter detestation of all falsehood or disguise, and truth appeared so amiable to me that I

determined upon sacrificing everything to it. Let me deal so candidly with the reader as to confess,

that there was yet a much stronger motive for the freedom I took in my representation of things.

I had not been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and veneration

for the inhabitants that I entered on a firm resolution never to return to humankind,

but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable winners,

in the contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could have no example or incitement

of vice. But it was decreed by fortune, my perpetual enemy, that so great a felicity should not fall

to my share. However, it is now some comfort to reflect that in what I set of my countrymen,

I extenuated their faults as much as I dirted before so strict an examiner, and upon every article

gave as favorable a turn as the master would bear. For, indeed, who is there alive that would not

be swayed by this bypass and partiality to the place of his birth? I have related the substance

of several conversations I had with my master during the greatest part of the time I had the honor

to be in his service, but have intended for brevity's sake omitted much more than here is set down.

When I had answered all his questions and his curiosity seemed to be fully satisfied,

he sent for me one morning early and commanding me to sit down at some distance, an honor which he

had never before conferred upon me. He said he had been very seriously considering my whole story,

as far as it related both to myself and my country. That, he looked upon us as sort of animals to

who share by what accident he could not conjecture some small pittance of reason had fallen,

whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions,

and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.

That, we disarmed ourselves of the futability she had bestowed, had been very successful in

multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavors to supply them

by our own inventions. That, as to myself, it was manifested I had neither the strength or

agility of a common yahoo. There's nothing new under the sun, and that's why a reading literature,

especially good literature, allows for the development of that critical mind, so that you can

critically analyze not only something that you've read in the pages of a book, but you can begin

to critically analyze what you're hearing in the voices of politicians, of scientists, of the world.

And to judge your present day through the eyes of every day, if you can see that the humanity

has been addressing these same issues for centuries and centuries and centuries, and come

into certain conclusions about them, the centuries and centuries and centuries, that you're not

hoodwinked by the latest politician who tells you a bunch of lies, which is not new at all,

because the same bunch of lies that was told 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or the same philosophy

that tells you that the man's human reason is enough to liberate him from his lower appetites,

or that science somehow will make everybody happy. I mean, all of these things have been addressed

throughout history, and the wealth of Western civilization allows us to draw upon that wisdom

of Christendom to address the issues of the day. So we can be discussing, we've discussed

great expectations by Dickens, we talked about how worldly riches do not bring happiness.

In Galvestravels, we're seeing how these worldly philosophies do not bring happiness.

Scientism, the worship of science does not bring happiness. Science in itself is a good thing.

Science in itself is merely understanding the physical cosmos. All things that teach us something

about the objective reality of God's creation are good. Science is good. Scientism is the

worship of science, the idolizing of science, as that which can bring us happiness in itself,

and it's that scientism that's being lampooned by Jonathan Swift, with his mad scientist,

with his floating islands, with his feminition of bombs being dropped even, which is 200 years

before it happened with the blitz. The wonders of science, the atom bomb, blitz creak, poison gas.

Of course, there were good things as well, but let's not forget that science is a two-edge sword.

It can bring great evils and great benefits, and it's only by insisting that science is itself

subject to sound ethics, to sound philosophy, to sound ultimately sound theology, that we ensure

that we get a science which is beneficial, another science which is self-destructive.

And these are issues that in the wake of the flourishing of the Enlightenment in the 18th century,

that Jonathan Swift is addressing in Galvestravels. Also, he brings out something that we struggle with

all the time in our pride issues when he deals with the first two lands that he goes to.

The land of the midgets, of course, the little potions. We're more familiar with that particular

story or the land of the giants than we are the other two parts of the story.

Yes, largely, of course, because they are quaint stories that can be turned into children's fairy

stories, a giant man who's imprisoned and tied down by, by tiny men and vice versa, he becomes

a midget in the land of giants. It's the stuff of good fairy stories, and there's nothing wrong with

that. But of course, that's not what Swift is doing. Swift's putting it in the context of

this greater work where he's showing us about how size in itself is also an accidental quality.

It's not an essential quality. One of the essays in the Ignatius critical edition talks about how

Swift's imagination was informed by some of the scientific discoveries of his days,

such as the microscope. Because the microscope allowed us all of a sudden to see small things like,

I don't know, mosquitoes, much, much bigger to look like, sort of almost monstrous things.

So this understanding of, okay, well, what happens if you know that people become microscopic

or become macroscopic? Now, how does that make things seem? Of course, as we got the accidentals,

where you become very powerful, if you're much bigger than everybody else, or you become very

weak, if you're much smaller than everybody else. But the key issues are still issues of philosophy

and ethics and right and wrong, and doing the right thing or the wrong thing. None of which is

changed by the actual physical magnitude or something. So again, Swift taking some physical

innovations are showing ultimately that metaphysics still trumps physics. It is fascinating,

because as you go into the political nature of it, you see the ramifications of it today. And

real experiences. I go back to the illustration of Frank Elbaum and what he did with it was

if anybody knows more than the movie, but read all of the books, that was political, what was

happening in America. And it doesn't necessarily transcend in today's modern world. And I think

that's one of the reasons why it's the political aspects that is lost and left with a fairy tale

of the girl taken by the tornado. However, with Jonathan Swift, because of the virtue that is being

brought forward through the political systems, that's why Gulliver's travel still works.

Yeah, absolutely. And the sort of political corruption he's satirizing is not based upon a

specific political system, which I think Frank Elbaum's work was critiquing a certain system.

That certain system will change with time. But are human beings prone to corruption? Or to quote

Lord Acton's famous Maxim absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely? Well, these are the sort of

things that Jonathan Swift is dealing with. These are timeless political varieties. What is good

kingship? What is good rulership? What's a good politician? Ultimately, a good politician is one

governed by virtue who wants to serve. Not one governed by pride he wants to rule. These are

issues which we cannot hear often enough because we have to address questions of politics and

questions of politicians all the time. And we happen to what is a good politician? If we think

a politician is just someone who's going to make us promises and break them as opposed to a politician

who in his very language is one who is informed by Christian virtue will not vote for things which

every Christian conscience is going to be outraged by merely to further his own political career.

In other words, to put virtue second to power rather than putting power second to virtue.

These are issues of course which are never go out of date that are true of every single generation.

This is what Jonathan Swift's addressing in Gulliver's Travels and is one of the many aspects of

that work which remains as relevant today as it was then. One of the big reasons why this is a work

that can be mined on several different levels not only just the political system and understanding

how to look at it critically and how we see it being played out in all the different

isms in which it is elevated but also in the decision and the attitude and the reflections of

Gulliver himself. As he encounters each of these his pride his derisate that all of the cardinal

sins come out at some point and are played out in the individual of Gulliver. Absolutely so much so

that at the end of the work we have this climactic reduction at absurdum the whole thing is reduced

to the absurd situation where Gulliver actually prefers the company of his horses in his stable

to that of his wife and children and family because his pride is such that he sees himself as

sort of a platonic philosopher who lives in some sort of every world of virtue above the real world

of incarnated human beings. He is literally not of the real world anymore not in a healthy

other worldly sense but in a snobbish prideful I am too good for my smelly wife and smelly children

and of course we met to laugh at that situation that Gulliver's travels have not led him to wisdom

the idea of a pilgrimage of course is that ultimately why is it at the end and you are at the

beginning so you get home whether it's a pagan pilgrimage such as the Odyssey or a Christian

pilgrimage such as Dante's Divine Comedy or the Chaucer's Canterbury Tales but in Gulliver's

travels the satire is that at the end of it he is even more stupid than he was at the beginning.

That's what is wonderful about the novel if you have the critical edition and it helps you because

in today's world there is the tendency without thinking critically you're thinking somehow that

Jonathan Swift is elevating Gulliver to a hero status. Right Gulliver's travels is a perfect

example of why the nature's critical edition is necessary because it is the sort of work

that you can't read unaided over the distance of 200 years without some critical mechanism to

help you understand it. So of course the footnotes that bring out the contemporary relevance of

things he's talking about the introduction which contextualizes where it fits in who Jonathan

Swift was why Jonathan Swift is emphatically not Gulliver and then at selection of critical

essays coming at the work from various aspects and the science that's happening at the time

the philosophy is happening at the time Jonathan Swift is a Christian all of these together allow

us to understand that work in its fullness without those things together it's very difficult

perhaps impossible for modern reader coming at it unaided to understand that work and it's certainly

worth understanding so it's a perfect example of why critical edition is needed. It's an important

work to have at the college level if you're taking a literature course but I would think even more so

within the home within the individual's life because this goes to the whole what a liberal

education is not about what we've made it today where we think of liberals in the political

sense but a liberal education is what you attain when you enter into these works.

Right liberal in a sense of free and liberating that ultimately the truth sets us free the more that

we exercise our reason the closer we'll be to God then to the paradox of faith and reason go

so the great works are necessary for all to read at all times. God of us travels is one of those

great works. God of us travels is a work that everyone should read and no one probably can read

very easily without a critical edition as we've said everybody it's not just students at university

or high school everybody should be reading these works because as I say they are the pillars

of the Western civilization which are our Catholic churches given to us and without

Catholic Christian civilization we'd have barbarism and whether it's the barbarism of a faithless

pagan world or the sort of world that Islamic fundamentalists might want for us and the great

defense against that is to make sure that all of us are world-versed in what it means to be a

beneficiary of Christian civilization and these great works of literature are some of the pillars

of that great civilization all of us owe it to ourselves and to our children and to our families

and to our wider culture so that we're better able to evangelize that culture to become well

versed in these great works. How would you encourage then the reader to approach Jonathan Swift?

The most important thing is to see Jonathan Swift as an important writer who stands firmly on the

side of tradition specifically Christian tradition in the face of the encroachments of

scientism and again to reiterate scientism is the idolatry of science in the sense that believing

that science has all the answers that humanity needs that's not scientific it's scientism it's

a philosophy that worship science so he stands firmly against scientism on the side of Christian

tradition he stands firmly on the side of the inheritance of Western civilization the great books

of the west as opposed to new ideas he's very suspicious of newfangled fashions and and

progressiveism so in these things he stands as a very important author and we do need to read

Gulliver's Travels within the context of a critical edition because it's too difficult to

understand without that supporting network of essays and footnotes but on saying that it's not

so difficult that people can't understand it it just means you need to have that support so

by the Ignatio's critical condition is the best and probably the only way to fully appreciate

this great work. I think it makes it fun it allows you to enter into the adventure with an

understanding of the audience that Jonathan Swift was there but once you have that you are having

as much fun as the community that read it originally. Yeah and we need to remember that as well

that if the works understood properly then it's it is actually a great work of humor it's meant

to be funny it's a comedy it's a satire it's a lampoon of lots of the nonsense ideas many of

which are very similar to the nonsense ideas held by the inheritors of these ideas 200 years

on so it's a it's a timeless response to timeless errors basically so I agree great fun good comedy

great sense of humor and if we need a little bit of help to understand the humor once we've got

the humor we can laugh along and we've spoken of this before but I think it bears repeating often

people will say to me and I'm sure they say to you do you really read all those books do you

really sit down as though somehow reading is something that you start to finish and occupy

your entire day this is a great example and a great book where you would take it in sections

maybe once or twice a week and allow yourself to digest the chapter you just entered into and

I do a world we should all find an hour a day for prayer and an hour a day for reading good books

now you know people might sound too busy for that but I wonder how many people spend an hour

a day idling in front of a TV watching nonsense wasting their time doing other things this is never

a waste of time this is a very good and appropriate use of our leisure time so if we don't find time

to pray our spiritual life will suffer we don't find time to read our cultural and intellectual

life will suffer and we need to be physically intellectually and spiritually healthy and to neglect

any of those three areas of our health is actually neglecting our bodies as temples at a holy spirit

quite frankly it's exercising the brain exactly exercise the brain and in the process

teaching us about the reality of the world in which we live and how to live it out in Christian virtue

absolutely and how Christian virtue sheds its light upon all the various issues and plots that

these great works show to us you've been listening to great works in Western literature with Joseph

Pierce to hear and or to download this conversation along with hundreds of other spiritual

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