Several months ago I was contacted by a writer working on a piece about Catholic Great Books schools. My answers didn’t make the cut for the piece—possibly because I sent them too late. Not having anywhere else to send them, I post them here:
Why study the Great Books? Don’t more modern books have more to say to contemporary readers?
I like the answer Prof. Alan Jacobs gives in his recent book, Breaking Bread with the Dead. Studying great works of art is “our chief means of breaking bread with the dead”. That’s a quote from the poet W. H. Auden. The full quote, from a lecture Auden gave in 1967, goes: “Let us remember that though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.” Studying great books is valuable because it makes us companions to the dead. It introduces us to their company. And sharing company with the dead enlarges us as human beings. It enables us to live a more complete, more generous, more humane kind of life. It also makes us more resistant to the blooming and buzzing confusion of present ephemera. We find a secure standpoint. We can take a broader view. We can stop, and think.
What is it about Christendom College’s Great Books program that speaks to this?
I can see why you might call our college a great books program—we certainly have a lot in common with such programs—but I like to say that we’re a Catholic—Liberal Arts—College—and that each of those three elements is important.
First, being Catholic means enjoying a special kind of membership—in the sense of being a member of a body. Being a Catholic, or simply a Christian, is to be a member of the Mystical Body of Christ—a communion that transcends the bounds of time and space and so already realizes the kind of communion with the dead that makes a fully human life possible.
But we are a special kind of Christian community. We’re different in important ways from a parish church or religious community. St. Paul writes to the Philippians: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Think about these things. Thinking about what is true, honorable, just, etc. is the special vocation of a Christian liberal arts college. But to carry out that vocation, we need help—not just from teachers and colleagues, but from the dead who lived this same kind of life before us. The life of liberal learning is deeply traditional. But we should remember that tradition means “to hand on”. We first receive ways of thinking about what it means to be a human being—these are the different liberal arts—and by pursuing those ways of thought with others, we hand on what we have received. And so, St. Paul continues to the Philippians: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”
Finally, we are a college. Our entire focus is upon the education of young men and women seeking a bachelor’s degree in a particular liberal art, while completing a core curriculum that introduces them to the diversity and unity of the various forms of liberal learning—the various ways of breaking bread with the dead. Every member of our body is engaged in this common pursuit. We are a company of fellow learners engaged in a distinctive kind of communion with the dead—and moved by the good hope that someday others will likewise seek our company.
Etymologies 