Tertullian famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Aware of the intellectual riches available in the Greco-Roman tradition, early Christians faced a choice: Should they appropriate the best that had been thought and said among the pagans or forge ahead with the gospel alone?
Tertullian advocated for the latter path; Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine all took the other road, treating pagan writings as, with all proper caveats, beneficial for pursuing wisdom and godliness. The church fathers spoke of “plundering the Egyptians.” Just as the departing Israelites took with them the gold of their Egyptian neighbors (Ex. 12:36), Christians can appropriate the “gold” of the classical tradition.
In Christians Reading Classics: An Introduction to Greco-Roman Classics from Homer to Boethius, Nadya Williams, books editor for Mere Orthodoxy, embarks on a search for that gold. Half enchiridion and half apologia, Williams’s book offers both a guide to the classics and an argument for their value to Christians today. She examines what the great books of the classical age offer in their own right and weighs them against scriptural truth. The result is a lively and thoughtful tour through some of humanity’s greatest literature.
Presence of the Absence of God
Williams begins with the Homeric poems, which are stark and brutal in their depiction of the human condition. Simone Weil describes The Iliad as a “poem of force,” in which great warriors are swept up by powers beyond their control to kill and to be killed with little meaning and no permanence for their lives. What could such a poem mean to a Christian who believes in God’s providence and who clings to faith, hope, and love?
In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton connects the tragic beauty and profound sadness of ancient epic to what he calls “the presence of the absence of God.” Chesterton points us to a great yearning in the pagan classics. Ecclesiastes says God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (3:11), and, lacking a better path, Homer’s warriors seek eternity through undying glory in warfare.
Williams argues, “The epics were about an instinctive desire that people in all time periods of history have felt: the desire for undying glory that would give the greatest warriors an immortality of sorts” (5). This “God-shaped-void” makes characters like Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus both noble and tragic (5). They’re noble because their desire for eternity illustrates humankind’s highest aspirations. They’re tragic because they achieve only a second-best eternity even as they live on in legend. The Homeric epics remain beautiful and valuable because they mirror our own deepest longing: the longing for God.
The Homeric epics remain beautiful and valuable because they mirror our own deepest longing: the longing for God.
Williams sees this longing in other classical pagan poets, such as Hesiod and Pindar, as well as in the desire, as seen in Herodotus and Thucydides, to record history. Turning to classics of the Christian age, Williams makes occasionally illuminating—and even moving—connections.
“Given every opportunity to choose possibly a long life without Christ,” Williams writes about Perpetua’s martyrdom, “she instead chooses a death that will lead her to glory with her Savior . . . How Homeric!” (238). Achilles chooses to fight and die young and glorious rather than return home to die old and forgotten, a choice Williams connects to Perpetua’s willingness to die for Christ. For Perpetua, God fulfills the longing left ultimately unsatisfied in Homer and Herodotus.
How Shall We Then Live?
Williams goes beyond these sorts of literary connections into the practical value of reading classics as she commends the vision many classical authors offer for citizenship and virtue.
She follows Virgil and Plutarch, for example, in suggesting we read for the sake of exempla, characters on which to model ourselves. Such a purpose was once commonplace before romantic aestheticism and modernism disconnected reading from everyday life and moral formation.
The habit of reading for exempla survives among children—I knew one young girl whose behavior was much improved by the desire to be more like Lucy Pevensie. But most discussions of education and of adult reading fail to consider the way reading shapes our moral fiber. Restoring reading for exempla could only improve both our literacy rates and our national character. We could do far worse than imitate Cato or Aeneas.
In pointing us toward the imitation of Cicero’s civic-mindedness and Aeneas’s dutifulness, Williams subtly invokes the doctrine of common grace. She observes that “these writers in the dawning age of Christianity share with us a wonder that we might too easily take for granted as we read the pagan classics—that God could love sinful humanity so very much” (273). God shows this love primarily through the offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, but we see God’s love also in the goodness of virtue wherever it appears. Everything good points us to God, and thus Philippians 4:8 directs us to think about whatever is true, good, and beautiful.
Classics as a Good Guide
As an introduction, Williams’s book is occasionally idiosyncratic. Her discussion of Plato omits The Republic and makes no mention of Platonic forms. She devotes considerably more time to the comic playwright Aristophanes than to the great tragedian Aeschylus. Seneca goes unmentioned.
God shows his love primarily through the offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, but we see God’s love also in the goodness of virtue wherever it appears.
She’s correct, however, when she notes that “someone else could have approached this project with a different set of authors” (274). Her aim, and her contribution, isn’t to guide us through the classics—a lifetime project—but rather to guide us into the classics.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, as they travel through Purgatory together, the Roman poet Statius tells Virgil, “You were as one who leads through a dark track / holding the light behind.” Statius means that, although Virgil didn’t know Christ, the poet’s works pointed others toward Jesus. Williams shows just how this lantern works, how Homer, Sophocles, and even Suetonius can point us toward the greatest good. Christians Reading Classics is an engaging and thoughtful companion for the journey into the afterlife of the Greco-Roman classics.
The Gospel Coalition