How to Read the Great Books Well
Podcast: Ascend - The Great Books PodcastPublished On: Sun Dec 31 2023
Description: Dr. Richard Meloche, Dr. Aaron Henderson, Dcn. Harrison Garlick, and Adam Minihan ask the question, "Why read the Great Books and how do you read them well?"In this episode, they discuss:What are the Great Books?Why should we read the Great Books?How reading the Great Books helps form the person.How reading the Great Books will help form the cultureHere is a copy of the text read at the beginning of the episode:Avoiding the Unreal: How to Read the Great Books WellBy Deacon Harrison GarlickOriginally published on The Alcuin Institute for Catholic CultureI. Reclaim your Education“We are concerned as anybody else at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civilization seems to be taking,” wrote Robert M. Hutchins, editor of the 1952 Great Books of the Western World.[1] In order to “recall the West to sanity,” Hutchins, and his associate editor Mortimer Adler, compiled the fifty-four volume Great Books of the Western World series representing the primary texts from the greatest intellects in Western history.[2] From Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare, they saw these authors in a dialogue, a “Great Conversation,” that gave the West a distinctive character.[3] These authors, especially the ancient and medieval ones, had contributed to the rise of the liberal arts and to the belief that the liberally educated man was one who had disciplined his passions in pursuit of the good. As Hutchins observed, “the aim of liberal education is human excellence.”[4]Yet, Hutchins saw the West as undergoing a practical book burning.[5] The great books were being removed from Western education and with them any semblance of a true liberal education. Today, the book burning continues. It is evident that modern education is more a training—it trains students for a societal function and delegates the holistic, human formation to a culture of relativism. A college graduate is no longer expected to be “acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition” nor the perennial questions into truth, beauty, or goodness.[6] We are deaf to the “Great Conversation.” We are cut off from the great treasury of our intellectual inheritance and only vaguely aware it even exists.The great books are an invitation to reclaim your education. They are a remedy to the privations of modern education and a salvageable substitute for our lack of a robust liberal arts formation. As Hutchins advocated, in reading the authors of the great books “we are still in the ordinary world, but it is an ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius.”<a...
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