In lesson 5, I want to address a final matter essential to this whole series of lessons, the education of the parents or adults. In the first place, I don’t think it’s wise for parents who are educating their children classically to neglect the tradition themselves.
Of course, it’s understandable that many parent who have begun educating their children classically, did not receive the same education themselves. But that’s not a reason to neglect it’s pursuit. You’ll do better by your own children by shoring up your own education. In the second place, I found most parents agree with me on this but struggle to remedy their situation.
This is something I hear constantly from intelligent, well-intentioned adults who are drawn to the classical tradition but haven’t found their way in. These are adults, often parents, who say to me something to the effect: As I listen in on my child’s class discussions, I realize I missed out on reading most of these books. Or, our dinner table conversations have been the highlight of my day ever since my child began pursuing a classical Christian education.
I only wish I had received this kind of education; but, it’s too late for me. For most parents, the obstacle to their own entry is not laziness or a lack of interest. It’s most often one of two things, sometimes both: time constraints and intimidation.
The Great Books sound impressive and feel inaccessible. Homer. Socrates. Plato. Augustine. Dante. Aquinas. Just their very names seem to carry so much weight, and sometimes if feel like too much weight. The moment you pick up the Confessions or the Republic and encounter the first page, something in you says: I am not equipped for this. This is for scholars. This is for people who were trained for this. This is not for me.
But let me tell you something. That’s just not true. The voice in your head telling you that is lying to you. These texts were not written for academics. They were written for human beings.
Plato wrote dialogues, conversations between people wrestling with real questions, because he wanted philosophy to be accessible to anyone capable of honest thought.
St. Augustine wrote the Confessions as a prayer, as an outpouring of his restless soul toward God, because he wanted every restless soul to recognize itself in his soul.
C. S. Lewis wrote for the common reader because he believed that the common reader was capable of uncommon thought if only given the right invitation.
The literature of the Western tradition is not meant to be some kind of fortress. It’s literally meant to be a door, a door into the human condition, and a door that swings inward into your own soul.
I’m going to riff off of something Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard University, said about his famous five-foot bookshelf. The five-foot book shelf was a kind of metaphor for what later became the collection of books known as the Harvard Classics. Eliot opined that a working man could acquire a liberal arts education by reading for just fifteen minutes a day from a five-foot bookshelf filled with the best of Western classic literature.
So drawing from this, let me share how you can wase yourself into the Classical Christian Tradition in just 15 minutes a day.
Start with a single text. Not a book list, not a commentary, not a curriculum guide, just one single text. The temptation when you discover the Great Books is to make an ambitious reading plan covering everything you’ve missed. My encouragement would be to resist this. Pick one book and begin. My recommendation for most adults who are new to this tradition is Augustine’s Confessions. It’s personal, emotionally honest, and theologically rich. It requires no prior knowledge of philosophy or Latin. Its only requirement is a willingness to be humble, a willingness to sit at the feet of St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and let him speak to you.
Next, read slowly, slower than you think you need to. Since grade school, we have been trained to skim and scan. Newspapers were formatted and printed with this in mind. And in recent decades, we’ve been further conditioned by screens to scan for information, to extract the key point, maybe summarize it, and then move on. That mode of reading will not serve you well for our purpose here. These texts reward close reading, restful, contemplative, lingering reading. Read a paragraph. Stop. Ask the author what he means, what he is claiming. Then ask why. Then ask about the implications of his meaning. Finally, ask yourself whether or not you agree. Then why or why not? Read it again. In fifteen minutes, reading this way, you will cover perhaps a page or two. That is just fine.
Keep a commonplace book (i.e., a florilegium, or something the Italians called the Zibaldone). While each of these tended toward a slightly different purpose historically, what I mean by a commonplace book is simply a notebook in which you copy out passages that strike you, passages that arrest your attention, quotes or statements that seem important, thoughts that you want to return to or perhaps memorize. The practice of writing out a passage by hand does something that highlighting cannot do: it slows you down, makes you engage the exact words, and imprints the idea more deeply on your mind. One additional benefit is after six months of commonplacing, you will have a personal anthology of the tradition’s most powerful moments, written in your own hand.
Fourth, find one other person to read with you. I’m not talking about a class or formal group, per se, just a friend, a spouse, or a colleague with whom you can meet for regular conversations. Agree to read the same thing and talk about it once a week. The conversation doesn’t need to be sophisticated; it just needs to be genuine and honest. What did you make of the passage? What nuggets did you find? What confused you? What surprised you? What made you push back? This is how the Great Conversation has always worked. While reading in isolation isn’t necessarily unprofitable, solitary brilliance unusual. Learning happens within the friction, inquisitive tensions, and illumination that occurs when two minds meet over a shared text.
Finally, be patient with the difficulty. Of course, there will be passages you do not understand. At times, there will be arguments you can’t seem to follow. There will be days when fifteen minutes will go by quickly and others where St. Augustine feels like an hours worth of wrestling. Don’t confuse this with failure. It’s actually a sign that you are reading something worthy of your attention. Texts that offer no resistance offer no transformation. The summer beach novel is light and effortless for a reason. The texts that require effort from you, texts that require you to reach above and beyond your current intellectual capacity, are the texts that give something back that effortless reading never could.
In closing consider how this works itself out for just a minute. Fifteen minutes a day is ninety minutes a week. In a year, it is more than seventy-five hours. In seventy-five hours, you can read the Confessions, the Apology, the Abolition of Man, and a dozen other texts that have shaped the Western imagination for centuries. And the great thing is, you’ll not be the same person at the end of that year. You will be wiser, more attentive, better equipped to ask the questions that matter in life, and better equipped to sit with the questions and answers long enough to learn from them.
The tradition has been waiting for you for a very long time. It is not going anywhere. Fifteen minutes. One book. you can begin this week.
