Is There a Future for the Great Books?
Anyone who has tried to convey the benefits of the Great Books to someone not already convinced by reading one of them knows the objections he must face. The first is economic. Highschool and college curricula are meant to prepare the young for productive work. The Great Books are a distraction. The second is moral. Justice demands of our society more equity, more diversity, more inclusion. Any “canon” is bound to be exclusionary; hence, the project itself oppresses.
After working for some years in the classical education movement, I’ve come to think that only two methods lie open to would-be defenders of Western Christian literature: one is by dialectical engagement, the other by an immersive experience. Paul Krause’s fine book, The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books, offers an exercise in the latter. What readers of this slim volume encounter is a sort of pilgrim’s guide to a literary landscape in which the curious will find delight and the convinced a deeper instruction.
His twenty-one essays, many originally published in the Imaginative Conservative magazine where he served as a senior contributor for several years, explore a selection of books written by first-rank poets, playwrights, and philosophers – from Homer and Virgil to Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, and Dickens – all viewed through the lens of “love.” In my own work as a professor in a newly launched Great Books program in Canada, I found several of his discussions helpful for the classroom and for my own formation. For example, he draws out with particular insight the central role of the family in Homer’s Odyssey; his essays on Dante made me appreciate how Virgil’s encomium to love, in the middle of the Purgatorio, serves to unify the poem as a whole; and he made me want to get to know Tennyson (“’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all”). After reading Krause, I feel I owe Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels a better read than the spotty effort I gave it as an undergraduate.
Readers who share Krause’s desire to help rebuild the Christian culture of the West will welcome his explicitly theological lens. His approach builds upon or at least echoes themes argued persuasively in recent times by the English historian Christopher Dawson. If, he proposes, Western culture was indeed shaped by the incarnation, it follows that the great works of literature from that culture would similarly gravitate around love as its axiomatic theme. The Odyssey of Love thus offers a proof of concept for that thesis.
Krause’s sample of forty or so texts is far from complete, or even obviously balanced: it draws more from the ancients than the medievals, more from the Anglo tradition than that of the North-American or continental, and it ends, one feels, somewhat abruptly, in the 19th century, with essays on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Yet the book’s purpose is not so much to catalogue as to move. What is notable in this case is not what is missing but what the author has attempted through the medium of his chosen sample: to instill confidence that love, not prejudice, marks the moral point of departure within the best of Western literature.
Does this reading project have a future? That depends, it seems to me, upon which version of the project one wishes to revive. It has been a long time since Jesse Jackson led his march on Stanford with “Hey Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” Since 1987, the drive to bury our cultural memory has grown ravenous. Today, outside of select Catholic and Evangelical colleges, it is difficult to find universities teaching western civilization and its Great Books. Inside Higher Ed reported on a study which found none of the top 50 US universities mandated a course on Western Civ for its students.
Still, those already smitten by the Great Books may reasonably wonder: “Why love”? Why this thread and not, say, truth, beauty, power, wonder, or God? Clearly, many books long set within the canon do not fit the proposed pattern. The Prince takes self-love as the theme of its meditation, as does Rousseau’s Emile. And the same West that produced Plato and Augustine also begot Hobbes and Heidegger. So, whose version of culture are we speaking about anyway when we enter the war over the Great Books? More to the point: can you keep a common education without common loves, a canon without a culture?
Not really, or at least not for long. Decades before Wokeism, the Canadian political philosopher George Grant argued in his English-Speaking Justice (1974) that Liberalism never offered a coherent center either for the state or the academy. Insofar as secular Europeans and North Americans retained the habits of our Christian ancestors, he observed, we could set aside basic questions about our principles of justice, of natural “rights”, and of how the common law came to construct the “reasonable man.” In a later essay titled “Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship,” Grant also foresaw the end of classical learning as we had known it. Nietzsche’s critique of so-called Western reason was total. Though a classicist himself, the Athens that Nietzsche sought to retrieve was an antiquity interpreted apart from the distorting lens, as he saw it, of Platonic Christianity.
Nietzsche’s interpretation of the classics has triumphed almost everywhere. That high entrance fee for studying the classics, namely, learning Latin and Greek, had long barred unserious minds from joining the company of classical departments. Over the past twenty-five years, classics departments have closed or merged with various types of “cultural studies.” Today the gates are left unguarded. The enclave of Stoic-inspired, neo-Kantian classical and historical scholarship that an older generation of professors in living memory supported (I think here of Martha Nussbaum) is now, morally speaking, a spent force. In mainstream academia it is the political left that now contests with the progressive, or Woke, left – rarely with political liberals and not at all with social conservatives. But that is not the whole story. Institutional academia does not encompass the circle of intelligent debate. Along with book burnings, the toppling of statues, and the cancerous growth of Equity and Diversity Officers has also risen – mostly outside of the universities – a more determined resistance and interest in recovering the first things of political order.
Which returns us to the question of the place of Great Books in our culture. Culture, as Josef Pieper once observed, is the product of cult, that is, of worship. It is a gift from above. The higher the gods, the deeper will be the roots of culture. And Western culture, for most of its two and a half millennia, has been nourished by the experience of and meditation upon the divine Word given through the Bible and Jesus Christ. That truth is as much a historical fact as a metaphysical assertion.
Do the Great Books have a future apart from a recovery of religion? I doubt it. Of course, even to disagree one would need to gain acquaintance with the Great Books, not merely with a set of political slogans about them. Making friends with the books highlighted in this collection has the added risk or perhaps reward of nudging us to delight, with Dante and Krause, in that Love “that moves the sun and the other stars.”
The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books
By Paul Krause
Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021; 220pp
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