“Abelard raised a very foolish question when he asked: ‘What has Horace to do with the Psalter, Virgil with the Gospel, Cicero with the Apostle?’ The answer is simply that Horace, Virgil, and Cicero clarify the human situation to which the salvation of God is addressed through Psalter, Gospel, and Apostle.”
—Roland M. Frye, Perspective on Man: Literature and the Christian Tradition (Westminster Press, 1961) p. 59.
“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) pp. 77–78.
From Gene Veith’s blog:
I mentioned in a post yesterday that I am teaching a course at Patrick Henry College called “Major Christian Authors.” Some of you asked about my reading list. Here it is:
(1) Dante’s Paradiso
(2) Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I “Holiness”
(3) George Herbert, The Temple
(4) John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
(5) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Complete Poems
(6) G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
(7) T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets and other poems
(8) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
(9) Charles Williams, The Descent into Hell
(10) Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
(11) Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
Our students, thanks to our classical liberal arts core curriculum, have already read Dante’s Inferno, and other Lewis books. Likewise, obvious major Christian authors and their works who are missing from this list–such as Augustine’s Confessions, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pascal’s Pensees, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment–are also in the core.
Speaking of prayer and Plato, note this excerpt from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion:
“Plato, on seeing men’s want of skill in making requests to God, which, if granted, would often have been disadvantageous to them, declares this, taken from an ancient poet, to be the best prayer: ‘King Jupiter, bestow the best things upon us whether we wish for them or not, but command that evil things be far from us even when we request them.’ And, indeed, the heathen man is wise in that he judges how dangerous it is to seek from the Lord what our greed dictates; at the same time he discloses our unhappiness, in that we cannot even open our mouths before God without danger unless the Spirit instructs us in the right pattern for prayer.” [McNeill/Battles; 3.20.34; 2:897-898]
Of course this does not mean Calvin is uncritical of Plato. He certainly is critical of Plato in other places. But it’s interesting to me that Calvin feels the freedom to incorporate pagan literature into his instruction upon the Lord’s Prayer.
I appreciate all the thoughts and comments you left on the previous post. The priority of ancient literature in the reading diet of the Christian is a topic of great interest to me. But the topic brings some baggage due to the wide pendulum of opinion. Is reading this literature idolatrous? Is it helpful? Helpful merely as philosophy? Is it ethically useful? Theologically? C.S. Lewis, Luther, and Calvin seem to answer these questions differently.
John Calvin, for example, encouraged others to study and to appreciate the “profane authors.” “If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth,” Calvin writes, “we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver” [see his Institutes 2.2.14—16].
Cornelius Plantinga has summarized Calvin’s approach in this way:
Calvin understood that God created human beings to hunt and gather truth, and that, as a matter of fact, the capacity for doing so amounts to one feature of the image of God in them (Col. 3:10). So Calvin fed on knowledge as gladly as a deer on sweet corn. He absorbed not only the teaching of Scripture and of its great interpreters, such as St. Augustine, but also whatever knowledge he could gather from such famous pagans as the Roman philosopher Seneca. And why not? The Holy Spirit authors all truth, as Calvin wrote, and we should therefore embrace it no matter where it shows up. But we will need solid instruction in Scripture and Christian wisdom in order to recognize truth and in order to disentangle it from error and fraud. Well-instructed Christians try not to offend the Holy Spirit by scorning truth in non-Christian authors over whom the Spirit has been brooding, but this does nor mean that Christians can afford to read these authors uncritically. After all, a person’s faith, even in idols, shapes most of what a person thinks and writes, and the Christian faith is in competition with other faiths for human hearts and minds. [Engaging God’s World (Eerdmans 2002) p. x.]
Martin Luther distinguished the philosophical value from the theological value of the ancients. Gerrish in his Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther makes this comment (thanks Tom!):
To Luther’s mind it was quite astonishing that anyone should fail to see the incompatibility of Aristotle and ‘Catholic Truth’. And yet one recalls that it was the special concern of his own teacher, Trutvetter, to demonstrate their harmony. The important thing to note, however, is that he does not deny some validity to the heathen master’s philosophy in its own sphere. Aristotle wrote with admirable learning on the problems of ethics. Both his books and Cicero’s are extremely useful for the conduct of this life. In other words, Aristotle’s moral philosophy is of value in the Earthly Kingdom. This, no doubt, explains the apparent contradiction between the abuse which Luther heaps on Aristotle’s Ethics in one place and the praise which he bestows upon it in another. When Luther looks at Aristotle’s natural philosophy and moral philosophy, weighing them strictly on their own intrinsic merits, he much prefers the latter; but he can conceive of nothing more mischievous than Aristotle’s ethics when they are mixed up with the theology of grace and salvation. In any case, he calls it mere philistinism (barbarum) to be ignorant of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, even though it may not be universally true. After all, the Greek philosopher’s views form an integral part of culture and rest upon sound arguments. Clearly, as long as the distinction between theology and philosophy is kept before the mind, there is nothing to prevent one from passing favourable judgements upon Aristotle or, at least, giving him a fair trial.
Another quote originates from the pen of Peter Leithart. While I disagree with him on a number of various theological points, I find him cautious and helpful on this particular topic. Here is one excerpt of what he has written:
Given the fact that the classics are idolatrous through and through, why should we want to preserve them? Why should we keep alive the memory of Greek gods? Should we be studying the exploits of heroes who served these gods? Should we not instead throw all of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Virgil into one flaming heap in the town square? Wouldn’t Moses?
A part of the answer to these questions is that Christians have no more moral duty to read and study Greek and Roman literature than ancient Israelites had a duty to study the myths of Baal and Asteroth. Nor should Christian schools or home schoolers think that they can have a good Christian education only if the “classics” are prominent in the curriculum. The goal of Christian education is to train a child to be faithful in serving God and His kingdom in a calling, and certainly this goal can be achieved by a student who never cracks the cover of a Homeric epic. Given the appalling ignorance of the Bible among evangelical Christians today, mastering Scripture must be an overwhelming priority in all Christian education. If one must choose between studying Leviticus or Livy, Habakkuk or Homer, Acts or Aeschylus, the decision is, to my mind, perfectly evident, and the point holds even if the non-biblical literature were Christian. The genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1-9 are vastly more important to study than Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, or Dickens.
But, of course, students and teachers are not always faced with a stark either/or choice. Assuming a student has a strong grounding in Scripture, there may be good reasons for taking up a study of other literature. And a few texts of Scripture demonstrate that it is not necessarily sinful for believers to study pagan literature. Daniel and his three friends learned the language and literature of the Chaldeans (Dan. 1:4), which undoubtedly focused on Chaldean mythology. In the New Testament, Paul occasionally reveals that he knew some of the literature and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans. [Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature (Canon Press, 1999), p. 18.]
So these are a few of the prominent quotes that are helping me think through the priority of ancient myth in the reading diet of a Christian (or not). Keep the comments coming. I appreciate your feedback! Your feedback—learning from you and learning together—is why I continue to blog. Thanks to each of you who have (and will) respond.
Tony
“What then shall we say if we would restore the medieval bridge from Homer, Plato and Virgil to Christ, the Bible and the church? Shall we say that Christianity is not the only truth? Certainly not! But let us also not say that Christianity is the only truth. Let us say instead that Christianity is the only complete truth. The distinction here is vital. By saying that Christianity is the only complete truth, we leave open the possibility that other philosophies, religions and cultures have hit on certain aspects of the truth. The Christian need not reject the poetry of Homer, the teachings of Plato, or the myths of the pagans as one hundred percent false, as an amalgamation of darkness and lies (as Luther strongly suggests), but may affirm those moments when Plato and Homer leap past their human limitations and catch a glimpse of the true glory of the triune God.
I reject the all-or-nothing, darkness-or-light dualism that Luther at times embraced. But I also reject the modern relativist position that truth is like a hill and there are many ways around it. Yes, truth is like a hill, but the truth that stands atop that hill is Christ and him crucified. To arrive at the truth of Christ, the people of the world have pursued many, many different routes. Some have only scaled the bottom rim of the hill; others have made it halfway. But many have reached the top and experienced the unspeakable joy that comes only when the truth they have sought all their lives is revealed to them. …
If we are to accept these verses [Romans 2:14-15] in a manner that is in any way literal, we must confess that unregenerate pagans have an inborn capacity for grasping light and truth that was not totally depraved by the Fall. Indeed, though the pagan poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome did not have all the answers (they couldn’t, as they lacked the special revelation found only in Jesus), they knew how to ask the right questions—questions that build within the readers of their works a desire to know the higher truths about themselves and their Creator.”
—Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP Academic 2007), pp. 13-14
Tony Reinke 