In his letter to artists in 1999, Saint John Paul II writes that “beauty is the visible form of the good.” The Greeks, says John Paul, combined the concepts of the good and the beautiful in the term kalokagathía, beauty-goodness. Likewise, in a July 2024 letter by Pope Francis on the role of literature in priestly formation, Francis turns our attention to the lessons learned from antiquity by the early Church. He draws from Basil of Caesarea extolling to his nieces and nephews “the richness of classical literature produced by…. the pagan authors.” St. Paul himself, Francis reminds us, drew upon the poets Epimenides and Aratus of Soli in his debate with the Greek at the Areopagus (see Acts 17).
Beauty, which is united with the good and true, leads us to God even if this is not the express intention of the artist. Beauty in this world is a foretaste of Heaven. Think of a key scene in Shawshank Redemption in which prisoner Andy Dufresne plays Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro over prison loudspeakers. The warden puts Andy in solitary confinement for this offense. Why? Because in this story of redemption, the prison is a stand-in for Hell. Mozart’s music is a ray of Heaven that gives those held in bondage a ray of hope, a bit of the promise of freedom that is redemption and salvation.
I think this is what Nadya Williams is teaching us in her new book Christians Reading Classics. Williams gives us an introduction to various classical authors, from Homer to Cicero, from Pindar to Vergil, from Herodotus to Ovid, and many more. Her goal, it seems to me, is to give readers who may be either loosely familiar with or even quite ignorant of the authors she treats a brief introduction to their importance and what beauty can be found in each of them. This serves to whet the appetite, hopefully encouraging her readers to seek further by picking up these great works of antiquity. I know I will be investigating Pindar, something I had never considered before reading this book! Williams helpfully provides translation suggestions at the end of each chapter to guide the neophyte. As an aside, while I can’t speak to the quality of the translations, I always find Penguin Classics useful because they tend to have excellent notes that help with allusions or historical references lost on contemporary readers.
What Williams is up to is instructing her Christian readers in those truths that Christians can find in ancient sources. Yet she also points to the limits of the ancient view. As she illustrates quite well in her previous book (about which I wrote on FPR), the ancient world could be quite brutal, especially to women, children, and slaves. We see that brutality in works such as Homer’s Iliad, a work overflowing with blood and violence. But that does not mean Christians should avoid it. Christians, for instance, can take heart in the heroic sacrifice of noble Hector. In the Odyssey, Odysseus takes pride in his role of the father. In Hesiod we see a man ignorant of the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, grasping in the dark for the truth about God.
The aforementioned Pindar is another example. Pindar gives us poetry about sport as a window into virtue. Modern readers can identify with the admiration for great athletes. One reason we link athletics and educational endeavors in high school and college is we recognize that athletic competition is itself a kind of school, an education in commitment, humility, graciousness, perseverance, and other important virtues. And yes, it can also be high-priced entertainment that distracts from the school’s mission. Still, I have seen on my own campus, where going professional in sports is nearly unheard of, certain coaches who have taken seriously the building of character as being at least as important as wins and losses. Indeed, athletics is sometimes the only division on the campus that takes character development seriously.
At the same time, the Christian revelation instructs us not to make an idol of athletic prowess. We should admire athletes who exit the field gracefully. I think of the examples of football star Jim Brown or golfer Annika Sorenstam, both of whom walked away from sports stardom to pursue goods they thought were more important. On the other hand, you have the examples of Muhammed Ali or today’s Aaron Rogers, once great athletes who hang on too long, seemingly because they don’t know what else to do with themselves. The case of Ali was particularly tragic as we saw a once great boxer turned into a punching bag with lasting harm to himself. Pindar’s poetry can help us reflect upon this phenomenon.
One thing I admire about William’s writing is her ability to take something that might seem abstract and distant, namely the lives and thoughts of those who lived over 2,000 years ago, and make them tangible. She introduces Cicero as a smart boy from a small town who wants to make it in the big city. Who hasn’t met this person? She compares the Roman emperor Galba to Richard Nixon. She draws a comparison between two women wronged by kingly men, namely Lucretia and Bathsheba, as a way of indicating that pagan sources might allow us to think more deeply about a familiar biblical story.
For the Greeks, she reminds us, storytelling was itself a civic education. The theater was a school for democracy: citizens gathered to watch dramas that forced them to confront moral and political questions together. These shared cultural experiences formed a moral vocabulary.
Do we have anything comparable today? Our fragmented educational system ensures that students seldom share any common texts. The days when college students all studied Western Civilization, American history, or great works of literature are gone. In my state, it is possible to graduate from a public university without taking a single class in literature, history, or philosophy.
Jospeh Bottum, in his book on the decline of the novel, notes that the last novel educated readers would be embarrassed to show up to a party not having read might be Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, a book published almost forty years ago. We seldom even have blockbuster movies. When Oppenheimer and Barbie both did well a few years ago, what was once commonplace, summertime blockbusters, had become a noteworthy event. And it’s been decades since there was “must-see TV.”
Stories help reveal our heroes, saying something about the character of a people. One can tell much about a society by those who are held up as ideals. In the ancient world, Williams notes, these were kings and warriors. In medieval times, with the advent of Christianity, stories of saints and martyrs abounded. Williams, for example, relates the tale of Saint Perpetua. Who are our heroes? Perhaps it is athletes, or musicians such as Taylor Swift, or maybe social media influencers. If you find these as models of human excellence uninspiring, consider what I fear may be the reality, namely that we actually have no heroes. Who would we play over prison loudspeakers to bring a ray of hope? As Herbert Storing notes, “[A] country without heroes is a country without principles or aspirations.”
Nadya Williams’s book is valuable precisely because it is thought provoking. She succinctly gives us the virtues and vices of various ancient thinkers. She does so in a way that makes us reflect on our own times and our own commitments. She then draws the ancients into a dialogue with the truths of the Christian revelation. To make the past come alive and make it speak to our own world is a rare gift. Nadya Williams has that gift in abundance.
Image Credit: Wreath Flowers via Flickr.
