An appeal for antiquity

Nadya Williams’ appealing and ambitious Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan Academic, 320 pp.) argues that faithful Christians ought to read, study, and enjoy the great literature of classical and early-Christian antiquity. And yet, a sea of troubles roils between us and the act of what St. Augustine memorably called “taking and reading.”

A first trouble: American society has become increasingly postliterate. Saturated in the spectacles of new media, fewer and fewer submit their minds to the quiet discipline of reading. A second trouble: Despite the Reformers’ encouraging a mastery of the classics as both humanizing and as a model for good Latin composition, modern Protestants have all but abandoned this recommendation of their forebears.

Williams counters these troubles in a series of short chapters, offering insightful and easy introductions to roughly 30 ancient authors. In each chapter, she shows how classic works can help us, here and now, to receive the gospel, just as the classical world prepared our ancestors to accept the revelation of Christ. She helps us draw nearer to those early Christians by deepening our understanding of the world that shaped them. And she shows how Homer and other great authors provide us with imaginative models for “character formation.” Williams brings a Christian’s understanding to these texts, appreciating their intrinsic qualities, while highlighting the ways they fall short of the gospel and also those ways the gospel itself fulfills what they merely shadow forth.

As Williams notes, hers is the latest in a spate of books by Christian authors that attempt to draw fellow Christians into deeper engagement with humane learning. Some of those books make broad appeal to the virtues of liberal education or the spiritual dimension of reading, and so does Williams’. But, on the whole, her argument is simpler and more at the service of giving us reasons to read the great authors of classical Greece and Rome.

In a series of short chapters, Christians Reading Classics introduces the great authors of antiquity and reflects on the significance of their literary work when cast under the light of Christianity. Williams considers, for example, the attempt of the early historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, and of Pindar the poet to immortalize the great deeds of men through their prose and verse. As Herodotus tells us, the aim of history is to preserve forever the glory that’s due consequential actions. Pindar’s odes sculpt in the marble of verse the achievements of ancient athletes. Williams reflects on the ubiquitous craving for glory among the ancient Greeks. Isn’t this natural, but futile, yearning for immortal (literary) glory a seed and sign of our universal and true yearning for eternal life in Christ? When she turns to the tragedies of Sophocles, she contrasts the essentially tragic vision of the ancient world, where all human life is doomed to be trodden under the foot of fate, with the Christian vision of man as the image of God and our hope in Christ for everlasting life. These observations are fundamental but perhaps a bit facile.

Williams’ learning is wide and she fluently provides a sense of the historical context in which these many great works first appeared, but she is at her strongest in the late chapters, where she considers Virgil, the greatest poet of Rome, and the Christian writers who wrote at the end of the classical age. She gives us a sense of Virgil as he anticipates the Christian world that would be born only a few years after his death. While her account does not quite capture what Theodor Haecker called Virgil’s anima naturaliter christiana, her own emphases are illuminating. So also, as she takes note of the way the saints and martyrs Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine drew on the forms of classical epic to understand their own Christian lives, she brings home with force why contemporary Christians ought to do the same. That said, she understates Augustine’s debt to Virgil: Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, provided Augustine the dramatic architecture for his own long journey from lost and wayward to saved and saintly.

This book is so delightful, earnest, and unpretentious that I hesitate to take issue with it in style or substance. And yet, the anecdotal, familiar voice, in which we learn that Thucydides had “no fun. Ever” and that Augustine was a “proud nerd-above-all-nerds,” felt pandering to my ear. Any reader sufficiently willing to open the cover of this book will, I hope, not require the style of contemporary preachers trying to appeal to the “young folks” as an inducement to proceed.

Despite her intention to show the salience of the classics for Christianity, she leaves the connection between them more obscure than she might have done. I have mentioned her discussion of glory, classical and Christian, but she does not adequately indicate the way Plato and Aristotle transformed “glory” from an external, martial, and reputational achievement to an interior condition of virtue, contemplation, and happiness that prepared the world for the Christian concept of “beatitude.”

Williams notes Plato’s account of eros in the Symposium, but does not define it (as Plato does) as the primordial movement of the soul toward its good, that is, happiness. Nor does she mention how Plato’s idea of eros and the Song of Songs directly led to St. Augustine’s memorable prayer to God, one which she herself quotes: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Plato helped Christians to understand that we are essentially ordered to the God who saves; without grace to elevate our fallen natures, we can never be happy.

So also, Williams discusses Plato’s overemphasis on intellectual formation and his failure to understand that a love of virtue is equally important for human goodness. She gives the impression that these latter were inventions of Christianity, leaving out the way in which some of Plato’s dialogues and, most certainly, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics provided Christians a framework to understand the role of desire (including bodily desire) and the virtues in the ordering of human life to the divine.

Connections of these types are made methodically in Louis Markos’ From Plato to Christ (IVP Academic 2021) and would have strengthened this one. That said, Williams’ book is not intended to be an excursus in the history of ideas. It is meant to invite us to fall in love with old, good things and to help us become better Christians through encountering some of the beautiful things our ancestors took for granted. This she has done well.