Christians reading classics
Book Review (Nadya Williams)
We become what we read
~ Nadya Williams
I needed a break. My over-ambitious self had set my hand, or my ear if you will, to listening through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age on my daily drive to and from my daughter’s school. I can be a hardy audiobook listener, but there’s only so much dense philosophy one’s ears can take.
So when I realised that I had unspent credits on my libro.fm account, and that Williams very recent book was there, it was a no-brainer to take a break from Taylor and enjoy this pleasurable trip through the classics.
Williams book delivers exactly what its title offers: Christians reading Classics. It is an introduction to the Greco-Roman literary canon, from Homer to Boethius, explicitly shaped by Christianity and written for Christian readers.
For those perhaps not familiar with the literature of ancient Greeks and Romans, I think it does a fine job at that. It introduces texts and authors, explores their works, discusses their themes, and gives a Christian angle on them. In doing so, Williams provides a kind of argument for reading these classics. They are worth reading.
I spend part of my days reading all sorts of Latin and Greek literature, authors canonical and not, ancient and more modern.1 I am, however, far from a classics professor. However that fits in here, I enjoyed Williams’ tour of the classics, with some fresh insights, reminders of things I’ve forgotten, and new angles I hadn’t considered.
Perhaps most engaging, or perhaps simply most recent in my memory, is some of the discussion in the final sections of the book. Why read classics? What are classics anyway?
Williams answer is that the classics are books that are always worth re-reading. And that they are timeless. And that’s why the Greco-Roman classics are worth our attention. And I half-agree with this.
Something worth reading once, is worth reading twice.
That’s a paraphrase, of the argument of a book I read in university, Michael Riffaterre’s The Semiotics of Poetry. Part of Riffaterre’s argument is that you can’t understand a literary text as whole without reading the whole of it, which means you also can’t truly understand the parts of it, until you’ve read it once. This is why jokes don’t make great literature - once you’d hit the punch line, there’s little value in going back to the start. Think of a poem, or a book or film, in which you gain more the second time around. If it isn’t worth reading the second time, then it probably wasn’t worth it the first time.
Williams’ argument is not quite along these lines, but rather that these works have some quality that means they are worth re-reading, that they raise, discuss, and sometimes answer (even incompletely) the deep questions of life, the human condition.
And, I agree with this, but I also have to quibble. Why these classics? That’s the question of canon. What gets ‘in’ and what is left ‘out’? Are these books timeless?
I think this is possibly a form of bias. People who end up in classics tend to like classics, unsurprisingly. They get a lot out of it. They enjoy and are stimulated by classical literature. But are classical texts unique in this?
In the past few years, I have spent a good deal of time in reading Gaelic poetry, and to a lesser degree prose. There we have a culture and language and a body of ‘literature’ that also deals with the human condition, with the questions we all face, and some of it is astoundingly good quality literature. Are these classics? Not as widely held… but I don’t think it’s innate qualities that makes this the case.
Some of it are accidents of history and culture. Gaelic prose as a genre only really dates back a few hundred years. The Greco-Roman classics have a couple of advantages. The dominance of the Roman empire, the spread of Latin, the shape of European history, and so on, all contribute to Greek and Latin texts being foundational for the shape of Western history. That could have been otherwise.
At the same time, I think it’s a mistake to say that these are timeless works. As I read them, I am reminded that they are also very much ‘time-bound’. Ancient Romans and Greeks share so much with us because they are humans, as we are, and our human condition is more or less the same. That’s why good literature speaks across the ages. At the same time, the more I read ancient works, the more I am also reminded of how different they are. Their culture, ways of thought and being, are radically alien to my 21st century life, that we do disservice to them and us when we truncate, or ignore, that gap.
I would contend that any good literature, worthy of its name, is going to provoke us and converse with us, and bring us to contemplate the meaning of things and the human condition. Greek and Latin authors are indeed one way of doing so, and a pretty fun way. But they are not the only way.
And yet, to give the other side once again, the nature of historical contingency, and the history of Christianity and Christendom in the West, means that to understand our world, and our church, demands some amount of engagement in Latin and Greek. To access the early church fathers, for instance, requires not only language, but culture, and a certain amount of education into the world in which they were educated. This is unavoidable. There is a unique place for Greek and Latin classics, if you want to engage in the history of thought bound up in Western Christendom.
I will comment on something else that struck me as curious on the way through. Talking about Sappho with no mention of any non-heterosexual reading of the texts. I can buy that there are reading approaches to Sappho that are hetero-normative, but given that there is a huge standing debate around a range of sexuality issues and Sappho’s poetry, this seems frankly a pointed lacuna. Not that I’m asking Williams to take a particular position, I just find it strange that you would provide an overview and introduction to an author like this and not mention this.
I’m glad for the way the book ‘ends’ with Boethius though; Boethius is indeed a janus-type figure, standing facing back to the classical tradition, while also forwards to the medieval. As much as we might (rightly) complicate the way late antiquity overlaps, hinges, interlocks, even bleeds, into the early medieval, Boethius is just such a figure. And his writing yields a rich reward.
At the end of the day, I think Williams does exactly what she sets out to do, and does it well. A book written for a Christian audience, that makes a partial plea for engagement with the classical tradition, at the same time that it serves as a guide introducing that literature and inviting the reader in to the joys, and questions, it raises.
Indeed, one of my great pleasures is reading post-classical Latin and Greek, including works authored even into the 20th century.