Books About the The Great Books

Classical Christian Education and the Great Books

I’ve been working on a “Top 50 Books for Families and Teachers New to Classical Christian Education” series. The point of the series is to curate a list of books that are comprehensive and accessible enough to take someone who knows little to nothing about CCE and lead them incrementally toward possessing a full-orbed philosophy of education.

The project not only allows me to create some evergreen content toward which to point people whenever they ask me about CCE, but it also provides me with an opportunity to think through what I’ve read—and what I haven’t—as a means of distilling my own studies. So far, I have suggested 26 books in four posts:

My Top Five Books For Families And Teachers New To Classical Christian Education

Ten More Books For Families And Teachers New To Classical Christian Education

Top 10 Books About The Liberal Arts In Classical Christian Education

The Liberating Arts: A Book Of Poignant Reminders

The last post in the series is a short review of a single contemporary book of essays I meant to curate in the top ten books about the liberal arts.

Of course, one must realize my list is just that, “my list.” And, while I am still pairing the rest of my list down to just 24 books—there are three more posts coming next week¹—by all means, feel free to tell me in the comments which books you think should be on this list.

Expanded Thoughts on the Great Books

Speaking of books in the context of Classical Christian Education, I have a short essay coming out over at Classical Academic Press’ “The Disputed Question” series answering the question, "Which Books Are the Great Books and Why Are They Great?"

I’ve written before on my blog about The Great Books and offered Seven Reasons for reading them. But there are a few thoughts I’d like to expound (and some I’d like to expand) here since the word count was quite limited for the The Disputed Question series (which is understandable since they published 16 answers to the last question).

Misleading Language

First, I want to note that the idea of a Western literary canon is largely misleading. The Greek word kanón means rule or standard, and in terms of writing, it meant “official list.” Thus it is derived from the biblical canon whereby the books of Scripture that were approved or considered authoritative by the church made it into the canon. Books that did not meet certain criteria of acceptance were rejected.

Thomas Oden explains,

God the Spirit enabled the revelation that is faithfully remembered in the form of canonical scripture. The list or canon of scriptural texts was repeatedly received consensually as God the Spirit’s own address, who bestowed upon the writers the gift of rightly remembering the events through which God became revealed (Athanasius, Festal Letters XXXIX, NPNF 2 IV, pp. 551–52).⁠²

In reality, no canon of Western literature exists in the sense that the biblical canon exists, since there is no set number of authoritative texts. This idea was propagated by Matthew Arnold in the 19th century. Recognizing the severe decline in Christianity’s place in culture, Arnold sought to establish literature, especially poetry, as a moral substitute for Christianity by canonizing “the best that is known and thought in the world” through literary criticism.

A Method to its Mutability

Second, we have to acknowledge that what has been referred to as the Western literary canon is somewhat mutable—but not entirely. Robert Hutchins Explains,

In the course of history, from epoch to epoch, new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.³

Revision of the canon is ongoing and inevitable. Even in antiquity there was not an complete and objective consensus about which books were the right books or the best books. Consider that for Cicero, studia humanitatis was equivalent to artes liberals in the first century BC. Yet, even then, “no complete consensus existed about their constituent elements.”⁴

By the early medieval period, the literature of the trivium essentially became the canonical foundation. But by the high Middle Ages, the emphasis shifted to the Quadrivium, and logic became the canonical foundation. By the late Middle Ages, “the humanities were reborn and reshaped at the start of the Renaissance,” where “Ancient Greek and Roman authors alone” were the focus.⁵ Specifically, the Renaissance humanists revised the elements of the Ciceronian studia humanitatis, and grounded their studies in “works of great wisdom that could perfect students’ character and style,” and the focused on works of “grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.”⁶

Given that our great books come to us from our Western ancestors, who Chesterton calls “the democracy of the dead,” and given the revision of the canon is ongoing and inevitable, how it changes is the key to preserving our Western tradition. Recovering lost or obscure works that possess aesthetic value and show promise of enduring value is natural to the canon’s mutability (e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh, Aristotle, Beowulf), but politically motivated change is contrary to the spirit of the Western tradition (e.g., replacing one book for another on criteria of race or gender instead of the merits of the work).

Education’s Telos

Third, how one views education will largely shape they books they see as preeminent—as being the road to that education—within the now vast canon. Because all education has a telos, defining that telos will, by necessity, inform which books within the canon remain central and which books are peripheral.⁷

If education is aimed at cultivating classical virtues and sound wisdom in the academically gifted, aristocratic elite who will inevitably rule the demos, as exemplified throughout many periods of history, including the era of our country’s founding, and well articulated in Charles Murray’s book, Real Education, then the canon of Great Books likely will be understood as a specific scope of classical works mostly derived from the Greco-Roman period.

If education is thought to be something more in line with a life’s commitment to educational democracy, a much broader scope of Great Books will be included in what is considered to be the literary canon. We might take Mortimer J. Adler’s Great Books series as our example for this view of education.

If the telos of education possesses that progressive understanding as it did for Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, then the canon will necessarily look something like the five-foot shelf of the Harvard Classics which opens in the first volume with the life of that brilliant polymath—and one of America’s founding fathers—Benjamin Franklin.

If education is thought to possess no specific moral telos, but rather exists as an exercise in the life of the mind—“the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world”—then the canon will consist of works that possess the highest aesthetic value in every period of history. This idea of Great Books might look a lot more like John Erskine’s “Core Curriculum” or Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon.”

If education is meant to induce an ideology, then the canon will necessarily be understood as fluid and culturally pliant. In other words, the Western canon will include new books and dismiss old books in accordance with each culture’s highest set of values (e.g., proponents of equity, inclusion, and diversity will seek to displace white European male authors with authors who are female and people of color).

If education is Christian in its view of enculturation, many great books from the periods between St Augustine and Aquinas left out by Mortimer Adler’s Great Books canon will naturally be emphasized. And, something like Roman Roads Press’ Old Western Culture series will be the model for the Western literary canon of Great Books.

1. The current shape of my outline consists of three posts titled as follows: “Further Up and Further In: Expanding and Deepening Your Philosophy of Education;” “Educational Polemics: What’s Wrong with Education Today;” and “Praxis: Practical Steps for Educating Classically.”

2. Thomas C. Oden, Life in the Spirit: Systematic Theology, Vol. III (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 68.

3. Hutchins and Adler, The Great Tradition, xi.

4. Battle of the Classics, 38.

5. Battle of the Classics, 45.

6. Battle of the Classics, 49.

7. Battle of the Classics, 47.