If you’ve ever considered reading the classics, or as Mortimer Adler referred to them, the Great Books, I want to suggest seven reasons for starting, immediately. Let’s jump right in.
Reason #1
Mark Twain famously noted that a classic is a book everyone talks about, but no one has actually read. Because the publishing of books is so abundant, reading the classics, or Great Books, is a liberating, fulfilling, and delightful experience that nearly everyone in our modern world can take advantage of, but probably won’t. Like most things that are important and beneficial to human flourishing, we tend to procrastinate too long. Instead, as C. S. Lewis quipped, we spend our time trying to fulfill ourselves making mud pies instead of enjoying the available holiday at the beach. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that addresses this issue as well: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
Reason #2
Reading the Great Books will expand your imagination and assist you in developing a cogent worldview. Aristotle noted that all men desire to know and he was right. Unlike the beasts, we humans want to know why things work or why they happen. Just consider the success of Google’s search engine. To read the Great Books is to engage in the Great Conversation and discover how generations of people understood the answers to the perennial human questions. Further, it allows you to see how ideas have changed over the history of Western civilization. Because the great thinkers of the day were writing in response to others’ ideas, they were in dialogue with those previous generations. We often refer to this as the Great Conversation. By reading the Great Books we enter into that conversation and understand how ideas have consequences and which of those ideas have shaped the present.
Reason #3
Reading the Great Books is an education in the human condition. Related to the previous point, though the human condition has changed in some remarkable ways (e.g., technology), it has actually remained the same in the most fundamental ways. Mortimer Adler notes,
A tremendous change in the conditions of human life and in our knowledge and control of the natural world has taken place since ancient times. The ancients had no prevision of our present-day technical and social environment, and hence have no counsel to offer us about the particular problems we confront. But, although social and economic arrangements vary with time and place, man remains man. We and the ancients share a common human nature and hence certain common human experiences and problems.
The poets bear witness that ancient man, too, saw the sun rise and set, felt the wind on his cheek, was possessed by love and desire, experienced ecstasy and elation as well as frustration and disillusion, and knew good and evil. The ancient poets speak across the centuries to us, sometimes more directly and vividly than our contemporary writers. And the ancient prophets and philosophers, in dealing with the basic problems of men living together in society, still have some thing to say to us.
Reason #4
Reading the Great Books is a delightful experience. Simply put, while reading the Great Books can be challenging, it is also an extremely enjoyable and satisfying experience. The Great Books can and should be read for the shear pleasure of reading great literature. Consider the beauty of the opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The Great Books are inundated with such grand commonplace utterances.
Reason #5
Reading the Great Books will provide you with a foundation for a liberal arts education. A liberal arts education was considered the education of a free man, thus the “liberal” in liberal arts (From the Latin, libere). A liberal arts education consisted of studying the Trivium, meaning three ways, and the Quadrivium, meaning four ways. The Trivium was made up of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The Quadrivium was made up of Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. By reading the Great Books, you are engaging all these disciplines but ultimately laying the Grammatical foundation. In other words, the Grammar referred to here is the common literacy possessed by every educated person in ancient times.
Reason #6
Reading the Great Books is like sitting at the feet of the great thinkers and writers of previous generations and having them as your teacher. By reading the Great Books, you are reading the primary sources of history, philosophy, poetry, theology, and imaginative literature, not a text book. That means your teachers are actually men like Plato, Cicero, and Dante. Instead of reading about Plato, you actually read what he thought and wrote.
Reason #7
Finally, reading the Great Books typically requires a guide, a tutor, someone who has been there before. This often means a person serious about his Boethius will have to enroll in expensive college courses. With the democratization of education through new technologies, hiring a tutor is no longer expensive or cumbersome. By taking a live, online course, you can read the Great Books and ask questions and discuss your ideas with a tutor and others who are on a similar journey through these great works.
While there are definitely other good reasons to read the Great Books, these seven are worthy of consideration. In closing, keep in mind the best time to start reading the Great Books would have been twenty years ago. The second best time is to start immediately. Sign up here to join me and a few others in the first leg of the journey, the place where it all began, The Greek Epics.
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