For this Great Books Monday, I glanced over my spreadsheet to get a quick idea of how much ground we’ve covered so far in the reading program. Of the 1,600+ pages in the can, we’ve completed eight short stories, two plays, an epic poem, about fifty essays, letters, and speeches of varying lengths in different fields, five political documents, and excerpts of several long historical and scientific works. It really is pretty impressive if you look at it all at once, and we’re not even halfway through the first year of this seven-year plan. So pat yourself on the back if you’ve been following along!
Here are the readings for the upcoming week:
- “What Men Live By” by Leo Tolstoy (GGB Vol. 3, pp. 707-727)
- “Romulus” by Plutarch (GBWW Vol. 13, pp. 15-30)
- “Romulus and Theseus Compared” by Plutarch (GBWW Vol. 13, pp. 30-31)
- Federalist #15-20 (GBWW Vol. 43, pp. 62-78)
- The Elements of Euclid, Book VII (GBWW Vol. 10, pp. 127-149)
- The Confessions of St. Augustine, Books VII-IX (GBWW, Vol. 16, pp. 54-90)
Plutarch wrote most of his biographies in pairs, intentionally selecting two lives he thought would bear fruitful comparison with one another. We’ll see our first effort of this kind this week.
Here are some observations on last week’s readings:
- “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller” by Gustave Flaubert: This is great storytelling, albeit in the terse modern style I don’t always appreciate fully. I’m sure many picked up on the echoes of Oedipus and Orestes here, although Julian blames no one but himself for his actions, and he struggles to do penance for them in an extreme way. I will say that the last scene is pretty gross (until the last sentence or two, of course).
- “Theseus” by Plutarch: I appreciate how scrupulous Plutarch is about giving us so many different versions of the stories concerning Theseus. I came away from thinking that Theseus may have been a real person. We certainly get a human portrait of him, warts and all. Poor Minos–the warning about not offending a literary people is well taken.
- “Of Anger” by Francis Bacon: There’s some good advice here about how to control one’s anger. I thought the lead about how Christian teaching in this area is superior to that of the Stoics was spot on.
- Federalist #11-14: For someone with a amateur’s enthusiasm for economics, reading Hamilton’s argument that the Constitution should be ratified so that the central government could jack up tariffs was painful, although I will say that tariffs are preferable to property or income taxes as revenue generators. And did anyone else catch Madison’s statement that the average distance between the Atlantic coast and Mississippi was 150 miles? No geographer, he.
- The Elements of Euclid, Book VI: My head was swimming by the end of this one. It would be so much simpler if Euclid used the same vocabulary as we did, but I’m constantly having to double check to make sure what he’s talking about. I was surprised a few times by what he was able to do with the proofs that had been built up to this point.
- The Confessions of Augustine, Books IV-VI: Augustine certainly isn’t the first person to reject Christianity on the basis of a misunderstanding of its doctrines. Reading this makes me wonder how the Manichees could ever have been so influential, but then I remember that the same sort of dualism repeatedly comes back throughout the history of the West and is prominent today (as evidenced in dozens of horror movies and LOST). This section reminded me that I need to read some Ambrose.
I hope you had a wonderful Easter Sunday yesterday and had a chance to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior of the world. Now get out there and read some classics!
[This post is part of my seven-year plan to read through the Gateway to the Great Books and Great Books of the Western World sets. The original post describing the plan is here.]
The Western Tradition 
Bacon’s “Of Anger” presents advice that could easily be found today in a cognitive-behavior therapy textbook. When angry (or under the influence of any strong emotion), let some time pass before taking any action to avoid extreme responses and regret. And how many times have I counseled couples to avoid discussing touchy subjects when one’s partner is tired, preoccupied, or otherwise not receptive? Often it is clear they are actually trying to stir the pot, as Bacon suggests.
Reading the Federalist Papers reminds one of the error in referring to our government as a democracy when it is actually a constitutional republic. From ThisNation.com: “A democracy is a form of government in which the people decide policy matters directly–through town hall meetings or by voting on ballot initiatives and referendums. A republic, on the other hand, is a system in which the people choose representatives who, in turn, make policy decisions on their behalf. The Framers of the Constitution were altogether fearful of pure democracy. Everything they read and studied taught them that pure democracies ‘have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths’ (Federalist No. 10).
In Plutarch’s “Thesesus,” the story of the minotaur, the labyrinth, Ariadne and ending Minos’s enslavement of the young Athenians is a standout. Sad parts of the story often overlooked are Thesesus’s abandonment of Ariadne after she saves his a** from the labyrinth, and his forgetting to replace the black sail with the white one and causing his father King Aegeus to cast himself into the sea thinking the mission had failed. And what is this about him kidnapping Helen? I didn’t know Paris was late to that party.