What Are the Great Books?

If you agree with us that we need to start reforming our educational system in the West, you may very well not agree on the way to do it. Even prominent supporters of the Great Books have stark disagreements about which books to preserve in the canon.

 A famous edition of the Great Books came out mid-20th century and has been controversial since, Hard-core, traditional Catholics would remove a lot of the post-enlightenment philosophy and leave Aquinas as the sum of all things. Certainly they would punish Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with banishment for its excoriation of early Christians.

Those with a more lenient view of modern works would drop a lot of medieval books as forgotten and replace them with great authors of the 20th century who were not recognizable as great when the first edition came out.

In fact, a second edition of the Great Books was eventually published with just such changes. Thanks to the Internet, it is not really necessary to ever publish another expensive edition of the books. We are still left, though, with the question of inclusion. Which books are great?

Ancestral Memory

While we are somewhat educated and possess degrees, we are none of us in possession of doctorates which would give our opinions on the matter some weight. There do seem to be some characteristics of great books, however, that would appeal to most if not all proponents of instruction in these texts.

The original compilation of texts certainly meant to appeal to some sort of ancestral memory. In other words, the books should be those that we once told around the fire and still do in one respect or another.

At the time of original publication, these were all books that were still being studied in colleges. The idea of creating and publishing an official canon was to reduce the entirety of a liberal education to its core and provide that core to the general public. The editors never intended this to be a list of forgotten works which we must all rediscover.

This makes it difficult to make the Great Books relevant today. The modernists were clever and actually removed most of these texts from college education. Few educated adults and fewer children are even cognizant of the names of these books, let alone their contents.

Therefore, efforts to popularize these texts are faced with an uphill battle because these are not works which the elite study and the common people desire in order to elevate themselves - instead, they are forgotten works which must be dredged up from the deeps of time and be read in clunky translations so that people are bored with them immediately.

In the face of this challenge, we must remember to avoid tossing something from the canon just because it seems like a dead letter or that it has no bearing on our world. Perhaps it should have a bearing on our world. Perhaps, in a world that had not gone so far off the tracks like ours did several decades ago, the college boys would still be reading these works and the girls would still be planning on being mothers rather than killing their children in the womb.

An Example

I know that, if it were left up to me a couple years ago, even though I was already a big fan of the Great Books with experience in implementing their instruction in an elementary school, I would have tossed Rabelais into the bin and never looked back. It just seemed like asking too much, I have to rethink that now.

Furthermore, we must carefully consider which books from more recent ties to add to the collection. There were some atrocious additions made to the second addition, simply in an effort to be more inclusive and have more works from women authors. While my own biases would not go in that direction, I could certainly end up adding works that simply appealed to my personal tastes but which had no real bearing on whether it was a work which would be valuable to my descendants in 200 years.

So Which Books Are Great?

For the time being, until society has recovered from this spell of cultural amnesia, we believe that it is best to leave Mortimer Adler's original edition as sacrosanct and to consider judiciously some additions.

Obviously, being a fan of the great books does not mean that you read nothing else. Listing the great books to a small list is an attempt to define a core of Western civilization, something on which we can all agree.

The Great Books and the Knights of the Resurrection


None of us has read through the entire canon and, even if we did, we would not have incorporated it
all into any kind of coherent philosophy. We depend on our liturgy to provide that foundation. However, the canon of the Great Books is the Tree of Knowledge to which we turn to whet our intellectual appetites. We will provide guidance and even curriculum for those who wish to join us in our appreciation of the greatest works known to Western Civilization.

Violence in the Name of the Lord

Over the last several decades, the idea that non-violence is the only true Christian form of expression has become dominant in both Christian and secular, non-Christian schools of thought. All violence done in the name of the Lord is somehow seen as hypocritical in a most fundamental way.

David takes on Goliath in the name of the Lord

Modernism: Everything Right Is Wrong Again

This notion defies two thousand years of Christian history. From the outset, Christ told his apostles to buy swords if they did not have any. That seems an odd remark for the man-God to make if he did not want anyone to defend Christendom with violence.

Of course, if you look back on the history of the last century with open eyes, this reversal of Christian thought makes sense. The late 19th century and early 20th century popes wrote lengthy warnings about the dangers of something called modernism. While we are technically described as now living in a post-modern world, we are still dealing with the destruction that modernism did to treasured institutions such as Christianity.

It is the inclination of a modernist to feel, instinctively, that everything that people did thousands of years ago was wrong-headed. Furthermore, in their view, people from eons past were a little bit stupid. They were also racist and sexist, the two mortal sins of the modernist.

There were, of course, errors in the ways that our ancestors viewed the universe. Geocentrism is a
cosmology which begins with the Earth at the center of the Universe and the rest of the planets and stars in orbit around it. It is erroneous but it works.

It works. Modernists overlook this. Even Einstein, a sort of ur-saint for atheists, admitted that geocentrism works. Of course it worked. People would not have used it for thousands of years if it hadn't worked. The reason we moved on from geocentrism to heliocentrism and then Newton and Einstein and others was that it did not explain why the planets and stars were moving. Nevertheless, you can still use the geocentrism of Ptolemy to predict the locations of planets in the sky.

What is the point of my astronomical digression? That liberals, who are just the philosophical offspring of modernism, are unable to see that the ancients were actually very intelligent and understood a great deal about man's character as well. Men who had no writing or only very rudimentary systems of writing were able to plot star movements, build immense structures and navigate the oceans while most of us struggle to pass high school algebra. If geocentrism was wrong, it was still the best that could be done with the naked eye and a limited technology.

Yet, because the ancients were wrong about the physical relationship of the Earth to the Sun and stars, moderns think that they were also inept at everything else, such as in ordering society.

Their Method of Robbery

This is how the modernist movement robbed you of your birthright. They have so altered the landscape that, even if you get your head on straight in this world and start thinking logically, you are still unable to create a solid foundation for thought. The first principles have been denied you.

That is why so many young men take the red pill but inevitably just become slightly more aggressive and abrasive versions of their leftist counterparts. The finest things in life have been hidden away and you cohabitate with leftists in an increasingly savage world.

Indeed, they have even convinced you that violence is always wrong. That's one way to keep your hands in your pockets.

When Violence Saved Christianity

As Christianity grew, it was embraced by people across a wide spectrum of classes in Roman society. It included soldiers, who certainly did not lay down their swords and stop defending the frontier.

Christianity became the dominant religion in the Empire after it was embraced by Constantine, a pre-eminent soldier of the late 3rd and early 4th century AD. He seized the imperial throne in AD 311 after seeing Christ's cross in the sky.

Stained window depiction of Roland, hero of Roncevaux

Openly Christian soldiers defended the empire afterward against Persians and barbarians. Emperor Justinian used force to reclaim the Western Empire in the 6th century AD after it had been overrun by pagan barbarians. Charles the Hammer led Christian troops against Muslim invaders in the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. Christian crusaders retook the Holy Land from cruel Muslim Turks who oppressed pilgrims in the 11th and 12th centuries. The list goes on.

No Contradiction

There is no contradiction in being proudly Christian and preparing for battle. Do as Christ commanded: Ar yourself for battle because the time is coming when you will need it to preserve your way of life and your right to teach your children as you please.

Get Furious.

Get Armed.

The Battle of Lepanto