Do Great Books Make Us Better?

If they do not make use better just by reading them they definitely make self-improvement easier by showing us the proper path to virtue.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Glenn Arberry, PhD

If books could make us better on their own, then we could read our way to perfect virtue.

Do Great Books make us better? This question goes to the heart of what we do at Wyoming Catholic College. In an essay for The New Yorker early in December, the professor and writer Louis Menand reviews two books about the value of a Great Books education, and he ends on a sour note: “I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person.” If great books made us better people, Menand argues, English professors would be “the wisest and most humane people on earth.”

Rescuing Socrates, one of the books that Menand reviews, makes the argument that a liberal education centered on great books unquestionably makes us better. Not only has his education transformed the author, Roosevelt Montás, but he thinks that a liberal education makes more responsible citizens of all those who undergo it. An immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to this country at the age of 12, Montás maintains that democracies require the proper education for people who mean to preserve liberty.

There is something to be said for both sides here. If books could make us better on their own, then we could read our way to perfect virtue. Aristotle shows in the Ethics that virtue is not simply a matter of knowing what is good—for example, what it might look like to be moderate with pleasures and unafraid of difficulties (as Socrates is)—but of developing the capacity to be moderate or courageous through repeated action that becomes habitual and consciously chosen. At Wyoming Catholic College, what we call the “experiential” dimension of the education involves getting out and doing things, such as hiking in the mountains for 21 days or building and sleeping inside “quinzees” (small houses of packed snow) as our freshman did this week on their Winter Trip. Education must be taken deep into the habits of bodies to really take hold in all its dimensions. St. Paul finds the problem even more complicated: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:15-17). Ultimately, we hope for salvation from sin—still another dimension of this education, and one that reading alone cannot provide.

Nevertheless, reading turns on the lights. Seeing Odysseus outwit the Cyclops has deep pleasures that open onto deeper truths. Engaging with the most profound texts on our own and talking about them with others can reveal us to ourselves, which is the primary argument that Montás makes about his own life. Some would say that nothing fully exists until it can be articulated. By “poetic knowledge” here at Wyoming Catholic, we do not mean the experience alone, but the way that language reveals its full being. Anything describable in clichés has not really been experienced because it has not brought anything appropriately fresh into the quest for the right words, such as Hopkins describing “rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim” or “landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow, and plow.” As Robert Frost used to say, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Poetic knowledge is all about surprise in this sense: breaking open the exact quality of an experience, like breaking the crust of bread still hot from the oven. Knowing what to expect helps student to break open different kinds of texts as well—philosophical, theological, historical. The developing context of thought prepares them for the many contexts of the world as it is.

Montás admits that it is difficult to explain the good that a liberal education provides. “Communicating its value typically demands an artificial compression, a pointing to a bottom line that, like the plot summary of a great novel, can never convey the experience of reading the novel itself.” I can say something about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but it’s not the same thing as wandering the streets of St. Petersburg inside the mind of Raskolnikov. At Wyoming Catholic College, we say something about the 21-day trip that freshmen undertake and about the curriculum itself, but it is not the same thing as undergoing it. Montás is right: there is unlikely to be a completely convincing “elevator pitch” for a liberal education.

As for Louis Menand, what exactly is he saying to the seventeen-year-old facing the Iliad or the Phaedrus for the first time? That it won’t help him or her be a better person? There are certainly people unmoved by the death of Patroklos or the reconciliation of Cordelia and her erring father. On the other hand, perhaps my experience differs from Menand’s, but some of my professors—those truly interested in what they teach rather than merely in advancing their own careers and reputations—have been wise and humane far beyond the common measure, elevated by the greatness of what they read most deeply. As a former college president says in response to Menand’s essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Roosevelt Montas exhibits a kind of idealism, but it is “the sort of idealism that drew most teachers of the humanities to the disciplines in the first place.”

The featured image is “Læsende ung pige” (1885) by Michael Ancher, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.