The Great Books of the Western World
The Apocrypha

back to Bible/Constitution
created 2011 June 3 cbd
updated 2011 June 27 cbd

Having spent six years looking daily into the Bible and the U.S. Constitution, what would I do next?  Some would say those are the fundamentals of belief, one should just go over them repeatedly, or in a more focussed, less survey-like fashion, indefinitely, like Jews reading the Talmud.  Indeed, the exercise had been, in part, my response to the Talmudic cycle.

But, though it is what we preach and passionately declare, we fool ourselves to think that our ways of thinking come exclusively from the ancient Hebrews and the less ancient Founding Fathers.  The Founding Fathers did not invent our country from nothing, they were products of the Enlightment.  And, as I have observed elsewhere, much of our morality comes not from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, but from the personal preferences of Queen Victoria.  And, indeed, much of our sense of rightness and appropriateness comes from neither, but from the Ancient Greeks.

In the 1950s when I was small there was a belief that mankind needed to be educated.  A hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, a liberal, classical education consisted of learning languages and rhetoric and reading the classics from Homer to Hobbes, being conversant with the Great Ideas of Western Civilization.  Education was not meant for the masses, it was meant for the intellectuals, the philosophers.  The highest degree conferred remains the Doctor of Philosophy, PhD to this day.  As technology advanced and knowledge exploded, particularly during and following World War II, education became more widespread and it became more oriented to job training.  Today, people take classes, and degrees, in quantum mechanics, strength of materials, and hairdressing.  Using colleges and universities to train everyone for jobs, the curiculum changed.  In order to make room for courses in Remedial Math, Education, and Journalism, the classics, the very basis of the liberal education, were squeezed out.  Latin and Greek became specialities, not main stream.  Reading of the Classics was relegated to majors less relevant to employment.  Departments stagnated.  Rhetoric dissappeared.  On a music degree (such as the one I obtained first, Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance, 1978), so much emphasis was placed on perfecting one's art that even the already reduced core requirements were abbreviated further.  Rather than four semesters of English and History, I was required to take only three.  Rather than two of Religion, I had only one.  And so forth.

This trend was distressing to liberally educated people like Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins.  With University no longer being the guardian of the very essence of civilization, they undertook in 1952 to collect, edit, and publish the greatest literature of Western Civilization, beginning with Homer and ending with Freud:  The Great Books of the Western World.  When I was a toddler, my parents would answer the door to a salesman.  Sometimes he would be selling Fuller Brush, sometimes Kirby Vacuum Cleaners, sometimes the Book of Knowledge encyclopedias, and sometimes the Great Books of the Western World.  Though of modest means, my parents bought into the idea of greatness through knowledge and literature and bought goods from all four salesmen (and presumably others).  In the late 60s, they confided in me that the Book of Knowledge was dated, that they should not have bought such a set until I was old enough to use them.  They are long gone.  Today we use Google for all research, for better or worse (and sometimes it does in fact point to the Encyclopedia Britianicca site, when not Wikipedia).  But the Great Books of the Western World are timeless.  Their shipping boxes retained a place of honor in storage and were carefully used exactly as designed everytime we moved.  For fifteen years, the set has resided on the top shelf of the east wall of our living area.

The Great Books consist of 54 volumes plus the Bible.  The Bible is not included in the actual set since it is assumed that every owner will already have their own Bible, probably several.  In any case, Hutchins and Adler did not want to get into the debates about translations and versions.  Their philosophy was that the Great Books would stand on their own, that democratic peoples would digest them to the benefit of all civilization.  This is a slight departure from the old idea of being trained in the classics.  No one is learning Greek, Hebrew, or Latin here, all have been translated into English.  And we read for ourselves without much guidance, though there is an occasional footnote for some sort of clarification that the reasonably well educated reader would not just know.  But their heart was in the right place.  At least we have ready access to the wisdom of the ages, even if we are not forced by instructors, curriculum, term papers, and exams to use it.

In order to pursue my interests in science and engineering, I returned to college in my mid 20s as a Post Baccalaureate undergraduate student of engineering,   When I did, I encountered the Honors Program at University of Houston.  The Honors Program was another response to the crises of liberal education.  It is a rigorous and difficult curriculum in which you get English and History and Political Science and other credits for taking courses that are intensives on the classical education model.  We read Plato's Republic, Homer, Locket, Hobbes, Flaubert, the Federalist Papers and numerous other great authors and works and discussed in class and seminars how these thinkers formed their parts of our civilization.  Some of our major courses also had Honors sections and it was also possible to get Honors credit for a class by arranging for extra above-and-beyond work from one's instructors.  For all of this we were promised only this: the designation "with Honors" on our diplomas and a liberal education in the classical tradition to go along with all of our job training and prehaps bring some meaning to it all.

Due to the abbreviated core curriculum on my music major, I was required to take a few courses at U of H, such as English IV, to complete all the requirements for this degree (BSEE, with Honors 1985) but, true to form, I elected not to do the minimum, but to do all I could to meet the intent of the education, not just the form of it.

In this way I too bought in to the idea of a broad, classical education and so, at age 25 (1981) when I attended college for a second time, I dove into the full Honors curriculum in addition to the engineering work.  (I also had to write a Thesis as an Honors graduation requirement.)

And, continuing in the family tradition, the kids argue over who will inherit the set of books.  Katy has dibs on them right now but we'll see.

Of course, my plan had always been to read and fully absorb each of the books, cover to cover.  I was particularly looking forward to Principia by Newton and similar works of Aristotle and other scientists and mathematicians, but the real goal was always to "know everything," including Shakespeare and Montisque, Darwin and Swift, and Thomas Acquinas.  And, I don't want to hear that there are several hundred other volumes not included in this set that are arguably as Great, or at least nearly so.  Life is certainly too short to get to all that material too.

I have dabbled in The Books off an on through the years.  I read War and Peace while in high school, notably on the band bus on the way to football games.  Sometime in the last fifteen years I read The Brothers Karamazov by Doestoevsky.  That is probably recently enough that there is a review of it on my Book Reviews site.  And I remember once reading and thoroughly marking up a Shakespeare play, the first one in Vol. 26 "Shakespeare I."  Having read that Einstein was a fan of Spinoza, I scanned through a few pages of Ethics recently and judged it impossibly dense.  Similarly, wondering what the Republicans were talking about in some recent election cycle, I read the first few pages into Adam Smith Wealth of Nations but without learning much.

So now I'm in my mid 50s and it is clear that I will not be the complete, exhaustive, consumate scholar that I had imagined.  I will only devote a fraction of an hour per day to an activity like this but I will do something.

This is the wisdom of De Alcorn.  De and his wife Pat retired and spent five years circling the globe in their sailboat.  This had been his dream and the focus of considerable preparation over many years.  Of course, he did not intimately visit every spot on the globe.  When asked about this, he said only, "You can't do everything, but you can do something."

And so I'm doing something.  I'm taking the advice of the editors of the Great Books.  Volume I is called The Great Convesation.  It is the smallest volume, only a little over 100 pages, and is printed in a larger font than the rest.  It is the justification for the collection, presented by the editors.  In the front cover, someone has also slipped an undated copy of a book review by Robert R. Kirsch describing what the Great Books are and what they're all about, somewhat as I've attempted to do here.  At the end of Volume I, pages 112 to 131, there is a "Ten Year Reading Plan."  It is only presented by year, a list of selections that a person would read in year one, year two, and so forth.  Having estimated from the year one material how much reading per day, five days a week, is needed, I have started into the plan.  The plan is not exhaustive, but it is something and as such, I think it is appropriate to the benefit that those around me could gain from my effort.  I have no idea where the plan came from, what are its aims, or what percentage of the total collection it represents, but it appears that, given the question, "What portions of this collection must the educated reader read?" this is one considered answer.  The plan contains selections from the Bible to be read from the version of my choice.  Of course, I will cover those in turn.  They are an important part of Western Civilization as well.

In addition, upon finishing the Bible, I had decided to at least read (but not study in depth) the Apocrypha.  The Apocrypha is (probably) not included in the Great Books, it is part of the Catholic Bible that Martin Luther and other reformers threw out before establishing the Protestant canon that we Protestants use as God's only truth today.  This does not mean that I should not know what is in there and what it's all about.  Surprisingly (or maybe not so much so) some of our tradition of thought and value, otherwise unexplained, have seeped over from this material into our Protestant thinking, despite its de-cannonization.

The Apocrypha I have used is the version contained in "The New Interpreter's Study Bible, New Revised Standard Version With The Apocrypha, NIB" ISBN 0-687-27832-5.  It contains introductory notes to each book explaining its history and which traditions include it in their Bibles.  These are not all Catholic, there are some books that are canonized by some of the divisions of the Orthodox churches or modern denominations of Jews, for example.  These are not all of Hebrew origin, or at least not extant in Hebrew.  There are curation problems with texts in what Protestants think of as the "intertestamental period."  Indeed, in the sacred literatures as anywhere else, there are virtually infinite paths to follow, should one be entrapped by a need for exhaustive coverage.

So, before beginning into the Great Books of the Western World Ten Years of Reading, I went through these apocryphal books for familiarity.  What follows are my brief comments on each reading in each series.

=====

Apocryphal Writings

2011 Jan 8 - 9            Tobit - A morality story about a young man leaving home, getting married, and getting established, the way it ought to be.
2011 Jan 10 - 14        Judith - A widow saves Israel by seducing the enemy general and lopping off his head!
2011 Jan 16 - 22        Esther (Greek) - A more lengthy telling of the story of Esther than the one in the Old Testament.
2011 Jan 24 - Feb 1   Wisdom of Solomon - An anonymous book attributed to Pseudo-Solomon discussing the history of Israel and wisdom gained from it.
2011 Feb 3 - Mar 5    Sirach - A lengthy collection of teaching by Ben Sira addressing Jews in an era of Hellenization.
2011 Mar 6 - 13         Baruch - Baruch was Jeremiah's scribe and these are some things he wanted to say himself in the period of the imminent Babylonian exile.
2011 Mar 13              Letter of Jeremiah - An anti-idol worship treatise in the tradition of Lamentations.  (Not by Jeremiah and not a letter.)
2011 Mar 13             Prayer of Azariah - Part of the story of the three men in the fiery furnace not included in O.T. Daniel.
2011 Mar 14 - 15      Susanna, Bel and the Dragon - Other missing chapters from O.T. Daniel.
2011 Mar 15 - 26      I Maccabees - In the time when Israel faced Alexander the Great a heroic dynasty arose in the Macabees family.  This is their history.
2011 Mar 26 - Apr 6 II Maccabees - Not a continuation or sequal of I Macabees, but additional material about various incidents.
2011 Apr 7 - 13         Esdras - Additional history of Israel from the era of Nehemiah.
2011 Apr 15              Psalm 151 - Our Old Testament book of Psalms has 150 chapters.
2011 Apr 15 - 21       III Maccabees - Israel falls to king Philopater who attempts to enter and desecrate the Temple but is rebuffed by angels.
                                  He rounds up all the Jews to have them executed in an arena, but in classical bureaucratic mismanagement
                                  (and under pain of death for disobediance) can't manage to get it done.  Eventually they are saved through prayer and fasting.
2011 Apr 22-May 9  2 Esdras - An apocalyptic vision similar to those in Daniel.
2011 May 6 - 11       IV Maccabees - The very graphically depicted torture deaths of Eleazar, a 90 year-old priest, and a family of seven brothers and their mother
                                  at the hands of King Aniochus because they wouldn't eat pork (i.e., abandon their traditions and become Hellenized.)

Great Books of the Western World Ten Years of Reading

2011 May 12-13      Plato Apology - The defense that Socrates gives before the men of Athens when accused of corrupting the youth and being an athiest.
                                 The result wads a death sentence.
2011 May 14-15      Plato Crito - When jailer Crito offers to spring Socrates from jail before his execution, Socrates talks him out of it.
                                 Shall we benefit from our culture and not also submit to it?
2011 May 16-20      Aristophanes Clouds - A father has his son trained in Wrong Logic so as to shirk his debts but when the son is trained, things turn bad for dad.
2011 May 23-26      Aristophanes Lysistrata - Lysistrata leads a revolt of the women who take over the temple.  No sex until peace is declared!  Come home men!
2011 May 31-Jun 8  Plato Republic - What is Justice and is it stronger?  In our perfect State, what children's stories would we censor.  The gods can't be immoral!
                                  ... and God can be creator only of the good, not of everything.  The nature of the perfet guardian:  a wild dog that has compassion.
2011 Jun 9-10         Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics I - What is happiness, given that good and bad happens to all and to all theirs, in life and in death?  Politics, the ultimate end.
2011 Jun 13-15       Aristotle Politics - The state, the family, men and women and children, slaves and masters - natural and forced.  Money and wealth.  The most descipable use of money - earning interest.
2011 Jun 16-27       Lives of King Lycurgus of Sparta and Numa Pompilius of Athens and their comparison.
2011 Jun 28-           Life of Alexander

(c)  Courtney B. Duncan 2011