In my previous post I addressed the matter of what makes a story “good”. That is to say, good in the sense of morally praiseworthy. I’m sure at some point (in the not too distant future) I will also take up the topic of what makes a story good in the sense of well crafted. For now, though, I’d like to continue riffing on the idea of morally praiseworthy stories and how that concept fits in with classical Christian education’s commitment to reading “the great books.”
There is no perfect list of the canon of Great Books, but Mortimer J. Adler did the world a great favor in compiling his 60 volume collection called The Great Books of the Western World. From Homer to some early 20th century thinkers, this collection represents “the great conversation” about “the great ideas.” The so-called great ideas are a collection of topics which are of universal human interest, topics which human beings of all stripes just can’t stop talking about and which have been written on for as long as human writing has been a thing.
Classical Christian Education is committed to the idea that this ongoing conversation is important and meant to be passed on, successively, to each new generation so that they may inherit its riches, learn from its mistakes, and, in the end, add their own contributions to the human dialogue. As I mentioned when I wrote about why everyone should study the liberal arts, reading the great books grounds a society in a common set of assumptions, gives them a common vocabulary so that they may speak to one another with understanding, and it gives them the ability to make discerning judgments between competing ideas (because the Great Books have Great Ideas in common but do not alway agree in their conclusions about those ideas).
A friend of mine raised the point, after my previous article, that he thought many of the Great Books would not meet my criteria of “good stories.” That is to say there is much in them which is not morally praiseworthy. This point seems rather undeniable. Odysseus, for instance, is rather a scoundrel by Christian standards. He is deceitful in the extreme, he sleeps with multiple women who are not his wife, he puts his own safety above his men at times, and he is rash in his behavior unto utter devastation of his crew.
I started off this year reading The Epic of Gilgamesh with my seventh grade students. There is plenty in Gilgamesh that is morally reprehensible (in case you haven’t read it). In fact, I generally warn parents of incoming seventh graders that if they haven’t had some conversations with their kids about the proverbial birds and bees that it is about time. This is not, by the way, just because we read Gilgamesh. It is also because we read one of the most scandalous books on the Great Books list…the Bible. It’s hard to read the Old and New Testaments while avoiding questions concerning sexual immorality because those matters are present all throughout the biblical literature.
So, the question becomes, what do we do with books which seem to contradict “good story”? What indeed do we do with texts which don’t always offer morally praiseworthy examples or, in many cases, they actually offer examples of blameworthy behavior which even seems to encourage the reader in that direction? The answer is that we use such texts to cultivate discernment in young people (and even old people).
When children are very young, roughly from birth to 12 years old, they ought not to read (or have read to them) anything but morally praiseworthy stories.1 Children’s literature ought to be very black and white, full of honorable knights and virtuous princesses and evil witches and dragons. Young children are not ready to disentangle moral quandaries or to wrestle with the fact that even good people do bad things and bad people sometimes do good things. The more nuanced discussions of morality do need to happen, but not yet. It is important that clear lines of morality are established, that moral ideals and absolutes are clearly presented to them without ambiguity, and this should be done regularly and repeatedly until those ideas are fully formed in their hearts. It is only once those notions are firmly established that it then becomes appropriate to introduce students to more complicated examples where goodness and wickedness inhabit very close quarters (sometimes as close as being found in the same soul).
This approach to moral education shouldn’t be surprising. It is actually the same approach we take to teaching all other things if we aren’t completely mad. No one starts off teaching Algebra to kindergarten students, nor do we have students diagram sentences before they can read. The abstract and more complicated concepts always follow after the most basic principles have been established with clarity. We start with learning how to count, then we go on to simple math 2+2=4 and we make sure that is quite clear before moving on to things like 2x=4 or start discussing how the absolute value of -4 and 4 are the same, etc. One has to understand what twos and fours are before one can contemplate more abstract ideas about them. Obviously math just goes on and on to much more complicated ideas but it is obvious that there is a logical progression.
Moral education should be the same. Counting to ten before starting linear equations. “Murder is wrong” before, “Was this actually murder or justifiable homicide?” Learning the classifications of animal life before dissection. Brave knights risking all to save the virtuous princess long before we consider whether or not Arthur was ultimately a good king or a complete moral failure. It is not for nothing that the “black and white” 10 Commandments preceded the much more tricky case laws in the rest of Exodus and the following books of the Pentateuch. Inevitably, we must go on to higher things but let us not do so before the foundation has been set and the fundamental truths, principles, and ideas have been firmed up in the heart and mind.
About the time a student has reached seventh grade, assuming they have had the aforementioned preparations, they are probably ready to start getting into the trenches with the Great Books. In Gilgamesh they will see disturbing sexual immorality right next to faithful friendship. Students must learn to deplore the first and honor the second even when the source text is the same. In Herodotus students will see the worship of pagan deities, awful human sacrifices, cannibalism, and merciless slaughter of the weak and defenseless. Students will also see men of courage and strength standing between their wives, children, and country (all of whom they love desperately) defying a seemingly unassailable force of destruction which means to enslave them. Students need to be able to hate the former examples and approve the latter. They should see the folly of idolatry and the wickedness of murder while also being emboldened to stand up for their own friends and families against despotic rulers.
The Great Books give us opportunity to exercise discernment once we have clearly obtained a right understanding of virtue and vice. They are opportunities to disentangle truth from folly, goodness from wickedness, that which is beautiful from that which is ugly. They also help us to understand that these are human works, written by imperfect people (like you and I) from imperfect times and cultures (like our own) and that every single one of us is a mix of good and evil. They help to have compassion towards even those whom we justly condemn. After all, but for the grace of God there go I.
As C. S. Lewis wrote in Prince Caspian,
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
The Great Books teach us both the honor and shame of being human.
So when it comes to “good stories” it is true that many of the Great Books fall short of being consistently morally praiseworthy. Most of the Great Books are a mix of good and bad. Histories, of course, have their virtue in simply telling us what really happened (good or ill). It is only in later literature, namely that which is more profoundly affected by Christian thought, that we tend to find the best examples of stories which deal properly and consistently with virtue and vice and attuning the affections of the reader.
I dare say Christians, as we write stories, have no business being morally ambiguous in our work. We ought to intentionally (although creatively and not necessarily in a preachy fashion) try to form our reader’s desires towards the love of virtue and hatred of vice. On this point I stand firmly behind my previous article. But Christians have all the business in the world, once they are mature and ready for the work, discerning and separating out the good from the bad. We ought to read histories which record all of the good, bad, and the ugly deeds of those who have gone before us and learn from them. We ought to read the stories that our forefathers read and which fueled their imaginations and we must learn to praise and censure their elements appropriately. We must learn to acquire the true virtues we find therein and we must learn to recognize that many of the vices we observe in history and story lurk in our own hearts as well. We are not better than those who went before, we are just justified by a perfect Savior who calls us upward to holiness.
Ultimately, some Great Books are to be read so that we may better understand what has moved and influenced people in the past, or which still influence people in the present, even if we should reject their conclusions completely. Such books as these are “great” only in that they have “greatly” influenced millions. But understanding, even the worst of ideas and the wicked men who held them helps us to more clearly see the truth. It also helps us more clearly communicate the truth to confused hearts and minds who have not learned to discern in this fashion. As in Plato’s analogy of the Cave, it is those who have seen the light whom are the best guides to those who still dwell in darkness.
I am being general here. Obviously children should hear the Bible read to them in church and at home and I do not object to parents and pastors not skipping over things just because the children are present. But, for the most part, the kind of books we should intentionally be reading with and to young children should reinforce moral virtue in a very clear way. Anything we read that doesn’t or is mixed, ought not to go without commentary from the guiding adult.
Jacob, this is an excellent complement to your earlier post, and especially important since a false reverence for the classics often tugs people in the other direction -- in the direction of seeing Achilles as a moral exemplar, for example. I am a little curious about whether you would draw a distinction between a moral ambiguity that tries to problematize action (the kind that prompts us to ask whether a particular act was murder or justifiable homicide, for example, or, in the most extreme cases, actually attempts to glorify vice), and one that cleaves to a kind of realism where virtue is not always rewarded, nor vice punished. I can see where the former is not going to go with the grain of young children and their black-and-white thinking, but surely even very young folks have an apprehension on an ordinary everyday basis that virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not always punished, and I wonder if the kind of realism that the Bible depicts is really all that much of a surprise even to youngsters, or might even help them to process things they know to be true about the world already.
Well, maybe -- but again, a great post.