Why Reading Matters: Great Books and the Life in Christ

I've enjoyed this talk by John Granger on how great fantasy stories help us in our Life in Christ many times. If you are interested in C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, imaginative literature, etc. you'll enjoy this.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece

The three principle sayings of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece:

1. Know thyself.
2. Nothing to excess.
3. It is hard to be good.

From Constantine Cavarnos, The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece.

The Beauty of Classical Christian Education

An article I wrote for a classical Christian school where I work:

"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, thousands can think for one who can see." - John Ruskin

Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale The Snow Queen begins with the story of a demon that creates a looking-glass with the power to make everything good or beautiful “shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looking increased in size and [became] worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous…” The demon kept a school to show mankind what the world was really like and he carried the looking-glass everywhere so that the people in every land could look through the distorting mirror. Eventually in his pride the demon even tried to fly the mirror up into heaven to see the angels, but it slips from his hand and breaks into tiny fragments which rain down on mankind. These tiny fragments can lodge in people’s eyes and even their hearts so that they can see nothing either rightly or justly. The rest of the fairy tale concerns the fate of one boy who has a mirror fragment lodged in his eye and heart.

It is a commonplace in our world that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, meaning that what is beautiful is completely relative and up to the individual to decide. This is not the understanding of the best of the ancients or the great teachers of Christ’s Church. The classical and Christian tradition has understood beauty as an objective reality that comes from God himself who is indeed the source of all beauty. But sin has entered in and distorted our sight and in some cases completely inverted the true order of the world. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of his characters say that we have fallen so far that “what to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart of man.” If beauty is objective and our vision is distorted preventing us from seeing, then what is needed to purify our eyes and restore our vision? As philosopher Mark Anderson says, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, rather “beauty is in the eye of the beautiful.” Or as the Apostle Paul puts it “be not conformed to this world. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” Our souls must be rightly ordered and renewed; they must become beautiful in order for us to see what is beautiful. Now to be sure, this is the work of the grace of God, yet we also need practice, or dare I say, classical Christian education to assist us in seeing aright.

The task of education according to David Hicks is to cultivate virtuous human beings: “Virtue is the life that knows and reveres, speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and reproduces the Beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.”  That is why we read great children’s stories: to beautify our imaginations. That is why we study logic, mathematics, and science: to beautify our minds. That is why we read and discuss classic literature and history: to beautify our souls. That is why we study the scriptures and the theology of the Christian church: to beautify our hearts.  In the words of the great fourth century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus, we need to “polish our theological self to beauty like a statue” so that we can see what is truly beautiful.

What happened to the young boy with the distorted glass shards in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen? You’ll have to read it yourself to see the great lengths that had to be pursued, but ultimately it was removed by the love of another who would not rest, who would suffer any hardship, who would sacrifice all for the restoration of the young boy’s true heart and sight. And ultimately that is what we have in Christ and what we must do and be as parents and teachers to teach ourselves, our children, and our students to be able to see what is good and true and beautiful. This is why we pursue classical Christian education.

The desperate need for a king...

I'm working my way through the the Odyssey and note that everyone in the first two books is either blamed or has the blame cast upon them for the problem of the suitors:

• Telemachus blames the gods for what comes to pass.
• The gods are vexed that humans blame them for the bad things that happen and in turn blame man with "heaping wantonness upon themselves."
• Telemachus blames the suitors for his troubles.
• Antinous, one of the suitors, blames Penelope for having "rapt away the wits of the Achaean men."
• Penelope's parents get blamed for not bringing her back home and choosing a husband for her.
• Telemachus blames the rest of the people who have "sat by mutely, without word of denunciation or restraint: though you are very many, and the suitors are but few" allowing injustice to go unpunished.

Homer seems to be telling us that a son needs a father, a wife needs a husband, and a people need a king.

Nature and the Knowledge of God

"Human beings have never before lived lives so remote from nature, or been more insensible to the enigma it embodies. For late modern peoples, God has become ever more a myth, but so in a sense has the world; and there probably is no way of living in real communion with one but not the other." (From The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart)

G.K.C. the Prophet

“The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilization. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, speaking in Toronto in 1930.

A Book for the Wise: Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

In 1759, Samuel Johnson published "a little story book" in order to defray the expense of his aged mother's funeral. The brief novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought to answer the question of  the "choice of life" or what kind of occupation will lead to happiness in this life?

Rasselas, a young prince, is sequestered in the Happy Valley, where he is given all of his desires and kept from the vicissitudes of life. The prince, however, isn't satisfied, and with his sister and friend escape the Happy Valley and travel to Egypt in search of the answer to the choice of life.

While their fascinating search leads to a less than clear answer to the question, the book itself sets the reader on the path to wisdom. As Rasselas's sister says at the end of the book, "to me the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity." This is a wonderful book that will bear repeated reading over the course of a lifetime.