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Surges of Moral Certainty

- John H. Finley -

"In later life one sometimes has the feeling of going into a large church and seeing a shaft of light coming down. That shaft of light, perhaps, comes in the period of life between 65 and 70. A lot of people have walked through that shaft of light…But remember, it is the shaft that makes the person; it isn’t the person that makes the shaft." - John H. Finley (1904-1995)

"One starts in life by learning and experiencing," John H. Finley once mused. "Then middle life comes and sweeps you along in a torrent. Finally, as one gets along in years, one does find a little more chance to think..."

Finley has done a prodigious measure of thinking in his time. From 1929, when he became an instructor in the classics, until his retirement in 1976, he was a Harvard institution: Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, Honorary Associate, interpreter of the classics, and club man nonpareil.

Finley embodied the professorial archetype over his 47-plus years at Harvard: ardent, articulate, erudite, bemused. At home in the academic village, he earned renown as an authority on the poets, historians, and philosophers of the ancient world.

Yet Professor Finley earned his most heartfelt esteem as Master of Eliot House, where he was a surrogate Pater Familias to thousands of gifted young people over the course of 27 years, the longest tenure ever by a Harvard House Master. Finley was beloved for his gentle shepherding of the up-to-500 students a year who lived in Eliot House. He would memorize the name, photograph, and file of every incoming freshman, so that he could greet them personally and straightaway engage them in intimate conversation. Master Finley's fabled receptions, hosted with his wife Magdalena, were said to have raised the art of Sherry drinking to Olympian heights.

John H. Finley (photo courtesy of Harvard University News Office)

Meanwhile in the lecture hall Finley was known to coruscate — to be positively beatific at the rostrum, where he would regularly posture with hands neck high in excited motion. This pose would typically signal the onset of one of his legendary professorial musings, guaranteed to free minds for ethereal exploration. What is it all about? What does it all mean? Though he promised no ultimate answers, Finley, unlike most college professors, was unafraid, at least, to raise ultimate questions.

Spontaneous and vivid in the lecture hall, John H. Finley was one of the few professors who could handle a huge lecture course — 800 students at its peak, the most popular at the college. According to Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, Finley's bread-and-butter course, Humanities 103: The Great Age of Athens, was a "super gut" — a course where students could earn a 'gentleman's C' with minimal effort.

Yet, if some thought Hum 103 was a breeze, Finley was unaffected. It was up to the students, he believed, to apply their own rational powers, to make of themselves what they would. That was, after all, at the root of his philosophy. In fact, his courses were extravagantly popular for other reasons as well. While for some Finley was but a magnificent curiosity, for many he was a true sage.

"Well, I'm a rather simple fellow," he would demure. "I think in metaphors." A listener at a lecture could almost imagine Tarzan swinging through the philosophical jungle, hurtling from vine to vine, leaping past incidental epiphanies with no discernible acknowledgment, heading for the really profound stuff. That was the way Finley moved through the classics.

Off he would go on a recitation, voicing rich layers of metaphor. Listeners would follow, entranced, thinking they knew just where he was headed. The ideas would build, and he would guide them deftly through the whole vast history of Western thought and literature, right to the threshold of what seemed eternally, unalterably luminous. Then his perfect verbal paragraphs would fade. A torrent of moral certainty might well be replaced by a piercing moment of doubt or ambiguity. And there you would be. For some this was agonizing, infuriating; they wanted the mysteries spelled out in neon. For others, many thousands, the intellectual tours were brilliant, majestic. They were touched; they were illumined; they loved him for this.

Professor Finley would sometimes seem to swallow sentences whole, and listeners would strain forward to hear. At penultimate moments, when certainty seemed inevitable, he might very well confound everyone and spin his statement into a rhetorical question, as if to say "You come up with your own answers," punctuating the whole puzzle with a sharp glance, as if he'd like an answer from you, and he would like it right now.

Then with hands raised neck high again, and another rhetorical flourish or two, he would return to certitude: "Oh yes," he would nod, "that is what it's all about."

You Are Who You Are

Professor Finley combs his silver hair neatly to the left, with a part on the right. He has keen eyes and a quiet demeanor. Through his life he has been given to introspection, and he has a habit of steepling his hands as he enters deep into thought. Head down, then eyes up, brow furrowed.

One of his most famous recitations concerns the course of life, and he shared it often: in class, in lectures at the Harvard Club, with congregations of Phi Beta Kappa scholars, and in interviews.

"I've sometimes thought that life is shaped like an hourglass," he would begin, "when one is born one could be anything from a ditch digger to the President of the United States. But from then on, each step you take makes it less and less likely that you will become anything other than what you are.

"Certain influences from the family make you like this, rather than like that. You had an uncle who was in medicine so you took an interest in biology in high school, and so that leads you to concentrate on chemistry in college. You had a cousin who was a professor in Cincinnati, so you go to medical school there, and stay on. And then later you find yourself completely fixed in one place and one occupation. You're married to Louise, rather than Henrietta, or all the other charming women you might have married. And instead of four children you have two. Instead of a Ford or a Chevrolet you have a Volvo. Experience builds and possibilities depart.

"Now you're 45 years old, and you say, 'Why in heaven's name do I do what I do? I have a cousin who's a landscape architect, and a pretty good landscape painter. I have another cousin who is a lawyer. The one knows nature, the other knows society. All I do is brain surgery. What a dull life.' Then it suddenly occurs to your dull mind that they think the same way. You could have been any of those things. Yet, you are who you are, and all these things fix you. It occurs to you that anything you do has its difficulties, its limits, and that the important thing is to do something well.

"This takes you to the central part of the hourglass. Instead of bewailing your lot as a brain surgeon, or a lawyer, or a landscape architect, you realize that you are free -- free to think about other things, as if your career had not taken all of your life. Whatever you've done, your experience is not the final thing. It's a sample, so to speak, containing suggestions of what it all would have been had it been something else. That is the root of sympathy, I do believe.

"This brings one back to the original Sophoclean thesis: namely, that you are who you are. In one sense you are caught up in a certain set of circumstances, and yet at the same time you want to see some wider setting and have some wider bearing. The two are complimentary, and this is what, in some way, all the great works of art are about...Everybody does something different, does something special. I do this, and you do that. Yet I can imagine, limited though my life is, that it shares something, that it's a little like yours. Yours is limited, too, though we each have some imagination of the other.

"In later life, one sometimes has the feeling of going into a large church and seeing a shaft of light coming down. That shaft of light, perhaps, is the period of life between 65 and 70. A lot of people have walked through the shaft of light. Mr. Kitteridge, when I was young, was obviously illuminated by it. Or Mr. Haskins, or Mr. Grandegent, or any of those remarkable people. But remember, it's the shaft that makes the person; it isn't the person who makes the shaft. It is there, and it's a great thing to be the beneficiary. All you've got to do is try not to stand in the way, so to speak."

Mentor for The Young

Musings such as this proved captivating to graduates and undergraduates alike in the academic village of Harvard. The stories tended to lift the minds of young men and women from the grind of library hours and exams toward the realm of the eternal, the realm where Finley seemed most comfortable.

All through his long life John Finley admired ability and success. He was noted for enabling gifted people, helping them to understand that they could do things, and prodding them onward with an endearing sense of humor.

"I used to make a speech saying that the only purpose of college was to reduce the amount of time you thought about the other sex from eighty to sixty percent. It was unlikely you could go under sixty, but it was desirable to get to that level, and there were various ways -- catching forward passes, or playing poker. Whiskey was cheap at the price, or you could even read a book."

"When I was young the definition of success was only too clear. A few of my classmates married soon after college. The rest of us went into kind of a tunnel — a medical or a law degree, or a Ph.D., or getting started in a bank, or writing a novel. A girl waited at the end of the tunnel, and you struggled through. Now the difficulty was that the tunnels were not sufficiently numerous. There was no tunnel leading to ecology, or improvement of the inner city, and a number of my classmates lost their way. They drank too much, or had too many divorces, and things didn't work out. Perhaps they didn't have sufficient imagination. So the better thing now, it seems to me, is the wider definition of usefulness. The difficulty could be lack of clarity: going off to Europe or Vermont, intending to get back, but drifting off and never hitching up again. Letting go of reality. One sees that.

"So the people of my period worked hard, at least. The modern ones have a wider sympathy, a very strong grip on humanity. The problem is combining this with clarity. The university is given to clarity. That's what it's about, and Greek certainly fits with it. The Greek stress on clarity, arete — excellence, performance, doing something — I believe in that."

On February 11, 1904, John H. Finley was born into a tradition of excellence. One ancestor, Samuel Finley, was the third president of Princeton. He was the great-grandfather of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, who invented the telegraph.

Professor Finley's father, also named John, served as President of the City College of New York, New York State Commissioner of Education, and also as editor of The New York Times. "He was a wonderful man," the son recalls. "Just as you make a distinction between pure and applied mathematics, you could also make a distinction between pure and applied poetry, in which case my father was an applied poet."

In 1925 Professor Finley's father purchased an old farm atop Stevenson Hill in Tamworth, NH, to be close to his good friend, the former US President, Grover Cleveland. This became the Finley family's summer home. The young John Finley had the best of circumstances: summers in Tamworth, matriculation in Phillips Exeter Academy, then on to Harvard, graduating in 1925.

During the summer days his father noticed that young John would often slip away from the bustle of the farm and retreat to an old, abandoned, one-room schoolhouse to read. So when John Finley graduated from Harvard his father bought the schoolhouse from the town and presented it to his son as a gift. Later, when Finley purchased his own home atop what had by then become known as Cleveland Hill, he had the schoolhouse moved about a quarter of a mile to the edge of his meadow, away from the road. Ever since, when in Tamworth, this simple building served as his study. "Everything I've ever written that was worthwhile," he says, "I wrote in that schoolhouse."

The white, clapboard structure has always been sparsely furnished: a table, a straight back chair for work, a rocker for relaxation, a wood stove, a cot set beside one of the four windows. A well-worn deck of cards sits on the edge of his schoolroom table, just as one sat for years on the corner of his desk at Harvard's Widener Library. But it is difficult to imagine how the cards became worn.

Finley became an instructor in the classics in 1929. Eventually, after advancing his studies abroad, he succeeded to the Eliot Professorship of Greek Literature in 1945. He was Vice-Chairman of the faculty committee which wrote the famous Harvard Report, "General Education in a Free Society," in 1946. In 1974 he became, at age 70, the first Senior Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Over the years the catalog of his scholarly works mounted: Homer's Odyssey; Thalia, or a Country Day; Three Essays on Thucydides; Four Stages of Greek Thought, and many others. All of these were written in the little schoolhouse in Tamworth.

As a leading authority on the poets and historians of antiquity, he taught their ideas, in Greek, to advanced students. In the whole history of Harvard he was the only senior professor kept on two years beyond the mandatory retirement age of 70. He could have gone on longer. The students, and the school, would have loved it. But he was done.

Reflecting on the course of his own life, he once observed "happy is the person who finds a life of sufficient dimension to enlarge his scope, but not so large as to overwhelm him. I think I have been very fortunate in that."

Freshness of Impression

Finley is a lover of nature, especially of birds. "Listen," he would command as he walked swiftly through the woods near his summer retreat in Tamworth, stopping in mid-stride the better to hear a thrush. Puckering his lips, he returns the call, demonstrating its variations, distinguishing it by illustration from related calls. He has an enormous capacity for details, yet seems well aware that detail begins to fade at the far end of the hourglass.

"You know," he commented, "a great problem generally, certainly in one's later years, is to keep freshness of impression. The same tree seems to grow by the same rock. The same people live down the road. And if you don't look out, you take it all to much for granted, it seems to me. I try rather conscientiously, at night, to remember what fresh thing I've seen that day, some light in the woods or some bird who flew through it, or the smell of a burning brush fire, or something that somebody said to you."

O joy, that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive.
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction.

William Wordsworth -- Ode: Intimations on Immortality

"There's a wonderful passage in Plato's Symposium," Finley points out, "in which he talks about lethe, forgetfulness, Plato observes that you can't know a thing unless you know it freshly. You always have the impression, as a teacher, that you know a thing, but it was last year that you put your mind on it very heavily. And now here's this fellow who's absolutely fresh with it. Though in some sense he may be wrong, yet his freshness has something you haven't got, and you learn from him.

"Ah well, I fear I'm rattling on excessively...."

What Is the Purpose of Knowledge?

Finley presented the Greeks as particular figures of history, but he also sought to restore them to the present as archetypes for all eternity.

"Technology has its dangers, as the Sierra Club is well aware. And so, this leads you to various thoughts of which the Greeks were well aware. What is the purpose of scientific knowledge, or any rational knowledge? Is it to do something about the world and to improve things as certainly our poor ancestors would have thought? That is, to create more comfortable forms of life and so on. Or is it something else, a matter of interior knowledge, as if our chief human attribute is intelligence. And, as birds have wings and deer can run fast, and other creatures are very powerful and live by that, we finally have our minds."

"Lacking technological instruments, the Greeks used their rationality, really, for contemplation, to see the order of things and to live, not to do something about it...

"Basically it comes down to, it seems to me, what we started with. Namely, what the human mind is. Is it merely an instrument to allow you and me to get along, or to get ahead in the world? Or is it something that allows you and me to develop a whole part of our consciousness: namely, awareness of how big the world is and how interesting? Insofar as one can do that, one comes to a whole side of education which is greater than the purely personal part.

"Education fulfills the person, which is to say we are basic — we are in part, at least, mental creatures who fulfill ourselves not merely by some accredited success, but by seeing. Aristotle is terrific on that score -- it's the seventh chapter of the Tenth Book of Ethics in which he says that the most godlike capacity of people, or the capacity nearest to the gods, is the ability to contemplate the greater order of things. It's terrific.

"There are a number of ways to do this, but the Greek side tends to put the weight on mental enlargement, in contrast to the New Testament, which tends to put the weight on charity and goodness. So the purpose of education, is it to let you and I get on in the world? Oh, yes, up to a point. And yet, finally, it may be so that we live — I don't know how to say it — more modestly, more reverently, to see how big the world is.

"Ultimately, that is what education is all about. Education isn't only or chiefly to help you get on in the world, though all of us are grateful for the opportunities that have opened. Who is to say that they are unimportant? And yet finally, the purpose of education is not to bring you a lot of money or position, but to suggest to you how wide and how interesting life is, and how many people have lived, and how fortunate the process is. So then the real purpose of education, education in the broadest sense, is simply the chance to observe or share, the process of self-enlargement.

"The doctrine of Horatio Alger, of getting ahead in life, continues to be important. Yet the purpose of mind is not chiefly for you to get some place in society. Our gift is mind; we can see things. That's what it's all about. It really is. In your brief span, to make sense of all the interesting people you've known, all the interesting books you've read. This panorama — the other end of the hourglass — is increasingly your reward in life.

"After all, the self is both the hero and the villain in life. It is the villain insofar as it reduces the great and beautiful world to the idiotic closet of one's identity. It is the hero insofar as it tries to go to the window, look out, and see how big the world is and how many people there are and how beautiful the sunlight is. It seems to me that waking is far more desirable than dreaming."

"It makes all the difference in the world whether you use something that you've known simply as a means of expertness, that is, for itself, or whether you use it as a source of suggestion, for other possibilities."

At the end of his recitation, Professor Finley's voice trails off. He swallows his sentence before it is quite complete. He pauses, and then goes on again, broadening the horizon, as he has gone on through his long life, without ever really having been discovered outside the villages of Harvard and Tamworth, NH.

What the Greek Epics Are Really About

As was true for Odysseus in his time, Finley spent a large part of his life trying to reconcile the lure of a secure niche in the world, with the further adventures of life that beckoned to him.

A fitting word to describe the effect he had on hundreds of students is metanoia, a classical Greek term meaning a fundamental change in the way one regards the world. He would tell his classes that, just as the Hellenic heroes had done, they would go out in life expecting one thing only to find something else. Through this, though, they would have the opportunity to learn who they were and thus meet the challenge inscribed on the Temple at Delphi: Gnothe Se (Know Thyself).

"Well, I take it that this is in general what the Greek tragedies, or the Greek epics, are all about. You go off to Troy, or on some other life adventure, thinking that you are going to be victorious and famous and come back with a lot of loot and forth, only to find something else -- namely, an awareness of how big the world is and an idea of how the gods' minds work. And then comes a moment of fearful confrontation with that. This is what creates the hero in some ways. In the case of Oedipus, for instance, in one sense he has a terrible loss of his kingly position, or his self-confidence, and even, when he tears his eyes out, his vision. Yet, in the end, he learns who he is, and his fortitude in meeting that changes him. 'Know Thyself.' It applies. It really does.

"Consider Odysseus, making all his travels and seeing the world. That is, he thought he was the great victor of Troy, but no. He was cast adrift at sea for ten years and so came to see how wide the world is. You go out expecting one thing in life and find quite another. So, when one is born one could be anything, but from then on, every step you take, each millimeter further you go, it becomes less and less likely that you will become anything other than who and what you are. That's true for all of us. Eventually, inescapably, you are who you are."

"The Calvinists originally had, in their austere view, the idea of predetermination. You were saved and somebody else wasn't. Sometimes I think that the Calvinist predetermination has now become IQ. You have high intelligence, and as for me, I'm a rather simple fellow. Where do I fit in society as compared with you?

"Ideally one could conceive of a society in which there were interesting and demanding jobs fitted to every kind of intelligence, so everybody would have a chance to do his or her best. I do believe that. And I don't believe that to be a scientist, or a professor, or a lawyer is any better than being a carpenter or a steam fitter or...I'm sure that this very moment there's some decent woman doing a humble job in a hospital who lives as virtuously as any scientist or professor. So there ought to be room in society for every kind of gift."

It's All There in the Classics

Professor Finley believes resolutely that the issues of the modern world are represented in the Greek classics, albeit without the overtones and complications of current reality.

"In the Greek it's easier to see," he explains, "expectation and change, reality and hope — all of it. It's all there in the classics. One of the things about life is the choices people have to make. In the Iliad, Achilles has to make choices about going to war or not, a struggle between his own values and the pressures of society. Still today a person has to make choices about doing what society wants, or following his or her own values. That hasn't changed."

"How to describe the Greek mind, and the way it worked, is the thing that has been so interesting to me. The literature of other cultures, in later centuries, perpetually describes situations emerging from people. This is what novels are about — the person is the center. Whereas the opposite seems true in Greek. It's as if the situation describes you; you don't create the situation. The early Greeks seem to have set out all the possibilities and positions that life allows."

"Imagine Ithaca, the island whence Odysseus comes, a tiny, bare island. Imagine this little island as a point surrounded by two concentric circles. The first circle, to which Odysseus is drawn out by ambition, by youth, by a need to get somewhere in the world, is Troy, which is history.

"Odysseus goes off to Troy, thinks he's going to come back as soon as all the others did. But the siege goes on for ten years, and there he sees all the physical types on both sides. This youth, Odysseus from Ithaca, sees to his surprise all these different kinds of people, how they perform, and how history works out, and even some intimations from the gods. He is the chief figure in the famous Trojan Horse that takes the city finally, so one might have thought that he would return home successful. But no, he is cast into the sea — the trackless sea — to seek his relationship, no longer to history, but to that even wider circle, nature...Life is much bigger than we in our social world think it is. It's into that kind of world that Odysseus is cast."

Likewise, Professor Finley feels, it is that kind of world into which we are all cast.

"There are very ancient myths which go back to Sanskrit which say that the wise man, the man who will right society, is the one who has traveled with the dead and come back...The great heroes are the ones who see, who have sight, understanding. This is what is in Greek from the very first. You get this understanding by going out into the world and seeing how it works."

- end -

N.B. The original version of this profile appeared in the magazine Boston Today in the early 1990s. John H. Finley died June 11, 1995.