Nadya Williams’ Christians Reading Classics: What the Ancients Can Teach Us

I love old books, but sometimes the gulf between the culture in which a book was written and my own is so great that I fail to get the original intent of the author. Nadya Williams’ new book, Christians Reading Classics, is an invaluable guide to some of the most time-tested classic works from the ancient world, and it can help bridge that cultural divide. It is divided into five parts, in rough chronological order.

Part I is Longing for Eternity, and it covers Homer’s The Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, Pindar’s Odes, and the Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Each chapter is relatively short but packed with profound insights. For example, in her analysis of The Iliad, Williams writes,

The externally governed nature of this heroic code – that one is only a great hero if this person is recognized by others and has accumulated great prizes of honor, including prizes that are real people! – is a warning to us as we consider how aspects of such a code appeal to our own desires even today. Each of us wants to be declared good – as God once spoke when he created Adam. In fact, we would like to be declared “the Best”, and we would like this coronation to come unconditionally from absolutely everyone around. But our worth and any declaration of goodness, excellence, and ultimately righteousness is to be found in God alone, not in other people’s view of us. The suffering of the heroes in The Iliad and in other ancient epics, where heroes do all they can to be declared “the Best”, is an important warning of what happens if we place our value in others’ opinion of us. It reminds us of the empty promises of this kind of glory – it cannot satisfy. (p. 9)

Part II: The Formation of Virtuous Citizens, covers Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle. These authors’ works are the high point of ancient Greek literature, and Williams makes the case that they wrestle with the issue of what qualities are necessary to be virtuous. Aristophanes used comedy and political satire to make his points, while Sophocles and Euripides used tragedy. At the end of each chapter, Williams includes some helpful questions. Here are the ones at the end of her chapter on Plato and Aristotle:

1. What do we learn about Socrates and the Socratic method from Plato and Aristotle?
2. What is the difference between eunomia and isonomia? Why does it matter?
3. Why did Aristotle consider poetry so important for the education of citizens? Do you agree? Why or why not?
   (page 113)

In Part III:  Words of Power and The Power of Words, we transition from Greek culture to Roman. It includes ancient Athenian forensic speechwriters, an entertaining overview of ancient “how-to manuals”, Cicero, Caesar, and Ovid. If there’s one obvious difference between Greek and Roman authors, it’s that the Romans are much more practical and pragmatic.

Part IV: Heroes and Role Models features Cato, Livy, Vergil, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch. These writers were alive from when the office of the Roman emperor was established through the turbulent and unstable second century AD. Williams makes an interesting point about how the new religion of Christianity made profound changes in Roman culture:

We can learn a lot about a culture’s values from seeing who its heroes are. In the ancient world before Christianity, these heroes were always famous politicians and generals – an overlapping category, for to be one was to always to be the other. Only after the rise of Christianity do we see different sorts of heroes arise: the meek, the lowly, and the ones willing to die for their faith. The rise of these new heroes correspondingly changes the genre of biography.
(page 218)

The final section, Part V: Virtues and Vices in the Age of Anxiety, brings us to the end of the Classical Age. We meet Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Perpetua, Cyprian, and Boethius. Williams makes a very compelling case that Athens (rationalism) needs Jerusalem (heart and soul), and Jerusalem needs Athens. You can have political leaders that are brilliant, but without virtue, they will turn into tyrants:

Socrates students were renowned as brilliant. They had received an excellent education. But lacking genuine character formation in the virtues, some of them turned that education against fellow citizens, overthrowing their democracy and ruthlessly killing anyone who opposed them. After all, selfishness and desire for power are the only impulses that do not have to learned – they are inbuilt.
(page 251)

Christians Reading Classics is an excellent introduction to some of the greatest thinkers and writers who ever existed. It is not a deep analysis of their works, but rather an appetizer that ideally encourages the reader to check out the actual plays, speeches, histories, and dialogs these men and women wrote centuries ago. Williams makes a strong case that they still can entertain and enlighten us. She includes recommended translations of every work she refers to at the end of each chapter. There’s a reason these are classics – they have stood the test of time, and generations of readers have benefitted from reading them.

Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Search for Enlightenment

I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) when I was in high school. I remember not liking it very much, because it moved so slowly. At the time I was into Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and science fiction – both genres a far cry from the gentle story of a young Indian man trying to find meaning in his life!

Siddhartha is the son of an upper caste Brahmin – bright, eager to learn, and attractive. His best friend is Govinda. He’s on the path to follow his father and be a respected man who discusses weighty philosophical and religious topics with other Brahmins. However, something is bothering Siddhartha, namely, what is the meaning of life? When a band of ascetics called Samanas show up in hi village, he immediately decides to join them. Govinda, the loyal companion, goes with him.

While learning the ways of self-denial from the Samanas, Siddhartha subjects himself to extreme deprivation: fasting, staying outside in the hot and the cold, sleeping in thornbushes, etc.

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heart, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 143-147). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, he realizes asceticism is a dead end. He and Govinda come across some monks who are followers of Gotama, the Buddha, who has allegedly found true enlightenment and broken the cycle of endless death and rebirth. They go to see the Buddha, and Govinda immediately joins his followers. Siddhartha, on the other hand, admires his teachings, but seeks his own enlightening experience. As he explains to Gotama himself:

“The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands.”

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 372-374). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

After the extreme asceticism of the Samanas, Siddhartha embraces hedonism, learning the art of love from the courtesan Kamala and how to be a successful merchant from Kamaswami. He indulges all of his physical desires, but he still is not satisfied. As Kamala says to him one day,

“You’ve learned my art well, Siddhartha. At some time, when I’ll be older, I’d want to bear your child. And yet, my dear, you’ve remained a Samana, and yet you do not love me, you love nobody. Isn’t it so?”

“It might very well be so,” Siddhartha said tiredly. “I am like you. You also do not love—how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps people of our kind can’t love. The childlike people can; that’s their secret.”

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 765-768). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

For a while, Siddhartha is able to keep things in perspective, laughing when he loses at a game or a business deal, and not giving in to greed, but eventually his burning desire to seek the true meaning of life is dulled.

Siddhartha lost his calmness when losses occurred, lost his patience when he was not paid on time, lost his kindness towards beggars, lost his disposition for giving away and loaning money to those who petitioned him.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 823-824). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, he wakes up, and leaves it all behind. He returns to a river where he met a ferryman many years ago, and apprentices himself to him. From the river and the ferryman, Siddhartha finally learns peace. When Kamala shows up with a boy who is the son of Siddhartha, he welcomes them. Kamala, however, is bit by a snake and dies. Siddhartha loves his young son unconditionally, but the boy hates living in a rundown shack with two old men and runs away.

So Siddhartha experiences the joy and pain that comes from loving another person. He eventually achieves enlightenment by listening to the river and learning to be content no matter his circumstances. When his old friend Govinda comes by, Siddhartha explains his hard-won philosophy:

The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 1502-1504). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Although Siddhartha was published in 1922, it became very popular in the 1960s as the so-called counterculture took hold. It is not a long book, and it is a relatively easy read. However, I had a hard time relating to Siddhartha – for most of the book he is self-centered and unable to give himself to any other person. Even the extreme asceticism he engages in with the Samanas has a selfish goal: to reach an enlightened state and no longer be trapped in his self.

Also, the goal of Buddhism, as far as I can tell from this tale, is annihilation – to get out of the endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. As a western Christian, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I can see how attractive it might be if I were raised in a different culture. By the end of the book, Siddhartha has found that simplicity is the key to a fulfilling life, and that true wisdom doesn’t come from books or teachings, but from being accepting of everything one experiences. I’m glad I gave Siddhartha a second chance, but it still didn’t speak that deeply to me.

David Berlinski’s A Tour Of The Calculus – From Points to Integrals!

I have taught calculus for decades, but David Berlinski’s book, A Tour of the Calculus, made me look at the subject in entirely new and entertaining ways. He starts at the beginning: points and lines, and slowly builds up the mathematical foundation upon which calculus rests. Along the way, Berlinski shares his wonder and love of mathematics. Concepts I have taken for granted for years suddenly appeared to me in a new light.

Berlinski’s sometimes florid style could be off-putting to some readers, but I found it kind of charming:

If the calculus comes to vibrant life in celestial mechanics, as it surely does, then this is evidence that the stars in the sheltering sky have a secret mathematical identity, an aspect of themselves that like some tremulous night flower they reveal only when the mathematician whispers. It is in the world of things and places, times and troubles and dense turbid processes, that mathematics is not so much applied as illustrated.

So, I enjoyed his over-the-top delight in unfolding the miracle of the calculus to his audience. He also has a wicked sense of humor – throughout the book, his tongue is firmly in cheek:

Students who need not be persuaded that gender studies are good for something often ask innocently whether analytic geometry is good for anything.

He gives the most original explanation of what a function is that I’ve ever seen:

A function, those thousand bright and brittle textbooks say, is a rule that assigns to each element in a set A a unique element in a set B. On the left are the elements in A, on the right, the elements in B. The function acts to pick one in A and assign it uniquely to one in B. This definition is current in the mathematicians’ lounge, where the mathematicians gather after class, and where it is always four on a gray Friday afternoon, the rain just beginning to streak the sooty windows. The image of a function thus evoked suggests one of those ghastly preadolescent dances in which sullen boys are lined up along one side of the ineffaceably smelly gymnasium and preening girls along the other, an energetic social science teacher seizing one of the hideously embarrassed boys and, after dragging him by the lapels of his stiff sports jacket, depositing him in front of a pleased but stout and red-faced young girl: Gregory, you dance with Jessica here. The homely tableau succeeds in spite of itself. The sets A and B are represented by boys on the one hand, girls on the other, and the function itself by the Czar’s dancing mistress, mysteriously transposed to suburban Teaneck, New Jersey, and acting energetically to pick a boy and assign him to a girl.

High school textbooks aren’t spared his wit:

The examples offered by elementary algebra are often uninspiring if only because no one wishes really to know which numbers correspond to the unknowns, the unknowns in word problems referring always to a strangely meditative farmer standing forlornly on that illustrated textbook hill of his, wondering in a way that suggests nothing of the power of mathematics how many turnips he might grow if he had two tons of fertilizer.

Along the way, we sit in on some of his classes as he tries to get his bored and confused students to share his enthusiasm for the Intermediate Value Theorem, among other topics. Berlinski really shines when he provides beautiful little portraits of the mathematicians who discovered and developed the math behind the calculus: Newton, Leibnitz, Cauchy, Euler, Dedekind, Lagrange, Riemann. I gained a new appreciation for the difficulties the concept of a limit presented to rigorous mathematicians. I especially enjoyed Berlinski’s tribute to Reimann, who died tragically young:

He was in his temperament a geometer, in his affiliations a Platonist, in his soul a visionary; he saw through appearances to a world less voluptuous and less complex than the real world, but more ordered, harmonious, stable, and beautiful. … Alone among the mathematicians of the nineteenth century, he saw what he needed to see before ever he acquired the symbolic apparatus with which to express his vision; his certainty about each of his discoveries was richly merited, but exotic and spooky.

Even if you didn’t like math as a student, you will be entertained by Berlinski’s presentation of it here. He doesn’t assume the reader knows anything, and he carefully explains every new concept that he introduces. There are excellent illustrations throughout, clear and easy to understand. By the end of the book, you will have a firm grasp of both differentiation and integration, and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus that weds them.

I’ve read many books on math that are written for the layperson, and Berlinski is definitely one of the most approachable. He joins Ian Stewart and Steven Strogatz as writers who never talk down to their audience, but manage to kindle interest in a subject that too often strikes fear into people’s hearts. Take Berlinski’s Tour of The Calculus, and see why

The calculus is the story this world first told itself as it became the modern world.