The other night I went to a public lecture by Rachel Fulton Brown, a mildly controversial associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, who specializes in the history of Christianity in Medieval Europe.
She spoke on the topic of “Great Books of the Middle Ages and How to Read Them”. She stepped off by looking at the composition of the famous collection of great books of the Western world assembled at the University of Chicago in the early 1950’s. This 54 volume collection purported to represent the essential core of the Western literary canon, starting off with Homer and Plato, traversing Virgil and Plutarch, visiting Copernicus and Aquinas, dropping in on Chaucer and Machiavelli, and ending up with Marx, Tolstoy and Freud – just to name a few.
The point of contact for me was that my mother bought a set of these great books published by Encyclopaedia Britannica from a door-to-door Salesman. She did so with the best of intentions and the highest of hopes. I don’t know what mechanism she thought would bring them to life, and sometimes in darker moments I have thought it was an exercise in intellectual snobbery on her part, which is ungenerous.
What was clear to me as a child was that it was an expensive undertaking and I would have much preferred it to have been invested in the more traditional set of encyclopaedias sold by Britannica. As it was the great books sat unopened and unread on their bookcase in the hall for many years. Periodically out of curiosity I would try to delve into some of the tomes as various of the names on the shelf turned up in my general reading, but to no avail. Most of the works were simply unreadable or undigestible. I often felt bad about that since it meant somehow that I had failed to honour the investment she had tried to make in our educational future – but at the same time I had never thought it was a good idea and basically would have much preferred that set of encyclopedias which many of my friends enjoyed.
Professor Brown also mounted a critique of the Great Books project, but not from the perspective with which many of us would be familiar, that is that they are overwhelmingly the product of dead white European guys. Which of course they are, but she instead argues that the ‘Great Books’ canon and courses based on it should include more works from the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the sixteenth century, since otherwise these effectively exclude the Middle Ages from the development of Western Civilisation. Her case is laid out well in an article clearly based on her lecture and published on the ABC website.
She then proceeded to reel off seemingly endless lists of works from that period which she would deem worthy of inclusion, such as Origen of Alexandria, Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil of Cappadocia, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzen, Theophilus of Alexandria. And on she went; Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Hildegard of Bingen, Anselm, Francis of Assisi etc, etc. To be frank most of these sound just as unreadable or undigestible as those books great or otherwise that sat gathering dust in my parents hallway. And so I slowly zoned out and let the apparently endless listing of worthy works wash over me.
But then she concluded with an observation and a question which have sat with me since that evening, and made the investment of an evening listening to her worthwhile after all.
She observed that for medieval schoolmasters like Hugh of St. Victor and Alexander Neckam reading the Bible was the whole purpose of education, including the training in the theoretical, practical, mechanical and logical arts. From their perspective why learn to read if you did not want to read and be transformed by the Word of God?
Her question was; if medieval students learnt to read to know the word of God, why do we in contemporary society learn to read?
Why do we read?
That struck me as an excellent question and one I was more than happy to sit with as a question, rather than to try to craft an answer immediately.
There are obvious answers but I think it’s interesting to let the question interrogate the depths of our world-view, to think about how reading interacts with our lives in the same fundamental way as knowledge of the Bible informed medieval literacy.
I still don’t think I have formed a fully satisfactory answer but my intuition has been that it lies in fewer words rather than more. So the conclusion I have reached after three or four weeks of intermittent pondering is that if medieval folk read to know God, we read to know.
We presume a knowable world in which we have considerable agency and that knowledge of this world will give us greater control of our destiny in it.
That’s my working answer: if you have a different one I would be more than happy to hear it either in the comments below or by private message.