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Why Read the Great Books?
Why Read the Great Books?
This article is based on a lecture given by our Great Books and Rhetorical Skills teacher, Mr. Peter Slomski, during our Secondary Back to School Night in September. It presents the reason why, as a Christian school in the classical tradition, our students read from the Western canon of Great Books and the Christ-centered, Biblical worldview through which we engage them. Our students read from such works as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Confessions (Augustine), On the Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), Hamlet (Shakespeare), Paradise Lost (Milton), and Frankenstein (Shelley).
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Why Read the Great Books?
As an avid lover of hiking in the mountains, I am so thankful for those who have gone before us on those mountain paths, who have routed and laid down the paths. Without them, we would quickly become confused and lost. I sometimes wonder about those who came before us, laying down, sometimes at great cost to themselves, large rocks and boulders, sometimes many small rocks and stones. Reading the Great Books is a little like taking the well-laid and worn path through the mountains. They show you the wisdom that has guided and navigated many others before us. These books link us to the past showing us how man has always asked questions about life.
The authors of such great works were clearly people of great gifts, ability and intellect. Through imaginative, nuanced, beautiful, language, which I hope the students will come to appreciate, these authors captivate and draw the mind and heart in, to contemplate questions shared by all of us. I could not put it better than one of our students, who wrote, “Within these works, authors construct a world of ideas (often grounded in the real world), imbue it with meaning, and present profound questions and tensions. By reading great books, people experience these ideas, gain inspiration, and engage in deep reflection. Often, classical literature allows readers to experience (rather than merely intellectually understand) things not yet present in their own lives.”
Someone else put it like this: “When we [read the Great Books], we see a pattern relating people’s happiness in life to where they place their focus. Specifically, when people are self-absorbed, they tend to be unhappy. When people focus their energy on others, and step outside of themselves, they find true fulfillment. The great books of Western culture show us that the good life is achieved by actively striving to serve other people.”1
In these books, we find people wrestling with what happiness is, what life is, what will be their future, what is the best, the good life, to live – a life that is meant not for self but for others. Yet, our lives, the lives of our students, the lives of our children, if I can put this way, are meant more than for others. Before our life can be for others, it begins with life for God. We can never really live for others, until we know God.
For, not all these great books have the answers and they do not all agree with each other. None of them are the Bible, God’s Word. Great as the books are, they are still merely the works of flawed people. But, running through them are these great ideas and themes of pride and humility, of good versus evil, of justice, of sacrificial love, of true happiness, of sin, of repentance, of the divine, of Christ. What we find in these books are characters and themes that hint, suggest, point to, Jesus Christ – that tell us that we need Him. It is as though these books are stretching out towards Him. And, we need to know Jesus, above all, in order that we might live the life we were made to live – to love and fear God and man.
I like how J. R. R. Tolkien says that there is a kind of story that brings us unbelievable joy. There is always some incredibly hopeless situation, and victory is snatched out of the jaws of defeat. But how? Always through someone who comes in, and whose weakness turns out to be strength, someone whose defeat turns out to be a victory. He says it is those kinds of stories that just seem to bring us joy. Why? Because there is truth in them of the One we need to know in our lives. And truth takes hold of our hearts. Because, there is, “the Story”, in the stories, in many of the Great Books. Tolkien said there is a bass string to the human heart, and those stories can kind of make it throb a little bit but cannot pluck that string.2
It is the gospel story, “the” Greatest Book, the Bible, which tells of the Hero and Saviour, Jesus, that will pluck that string so the whole heart never stops throbbing and vibrating with joy. The book of Jesus … is the reality to which the other Great Books point. It is “the” path, the way, it tells of “the” man we are to know. He is the path and the way.
It is as Augustine said, in Book I of his autobiography, The Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Many of the Great Books are not Christian books like The Confessions. But, they are like hands stretching out, longing for, yearning, attempting at attaining that good life, that life that we were made to live, and, that can only be found in resting in God and in His Son, Jesus. As we read them, we will consider them in the light of that greatest of all books, “the” Great Book, the Bible and the need to know the Great Idea, the Great Man, Jesus Christ, in order that we might know who we are and know how to live.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is an epic poem, a Great Book, that tells of the battle between good and evil, and of pride and humility, and of our responsibility and God’s rule, and of what we were created to be, and, of Jesus Christ. It is a Christian book. As pastor Tyler Van Halteren said, “In Paradise Lost, Milton flipped classical mythology on its head and presented the gospel in radiant beauty. Where the heroes of Greek epics were characterised by selfishness and pride, Milton presented Christ as the true hero who was victorious through selfless and humility.”3 In many of the heroes of the Great Books, Greek or Roman, Romantic or Victorian, we see their failings and flaws, and the need for that true hero, Christ. Even in the best of them, whether it is Odysseus in The Odyssey or Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, they are at best faint shadows of that greatest of saviours that our children need, Jesus Christ.
My hope is, that as the students and I read, wrestle with, interpret, and enjoy, the Great Books, as we do so in the light of God’s Truth, we will be directed to our God and Savior, to trust and follow Him, to know and live out who we are meant to be – to be those that love and fear God and man.
Peter Slomski, 18 September 2025
1 https://www.clrconline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GB4studygreatbooksessay2.pdf
2 Taken from the sermon, “The Joy of Jesus” by Dr. Timothy Keller (Series: The Fruit of the Spirit—The Character of Christ—May 3, 1998 on John 16:19–24).
3 Tyler Van Halteren, “The Legacy of Paradise Lost.” Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, by John Milton (Lithos Kids Ltd, 2024), p. 19.
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