Classic Literature Made Simple: Fifty Great Books in a Nutshell
Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95 USD, 227 pages
Great Books for Great Men: Reflections on Literature and Manhood
Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95 USD, 153 pages
Joseph Pearce, author of numerous literary studies and editor of the St. Austin Review, has had published two similar but distinct books on great literature. In Classic Literature Made Simple: Fifty Great Books in a Nutshell, Pearce collects 50 short essays originally published in Crisis that summarized “their themes and ethical spirit in a thousand words or so.” In Great Books for Great Men: Reflections on Literature and Manhood, Pearce collects 48 reflections on manhood and literature that were presented to Exodus 90, a spiritual retreat for men.
Pearce begins Classic Literature Made Simple by defining a good book. The great books are both well-written and have a good sense of morality. Many good books are either well-written but have bad morals or have good morals but are poorly written. The 50 books Pearce selects qualify as great because they are of superior quality in term of writing and convey good morals, although sometimes by their absence. The books are Christian or present themes consistent with Christian morality, including the pagan books written in Greek antiquity. Pearce presents his 50 books in chronological order beginning with Homer’s Iliad and The Odessey, and continuing with the Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles, and so forth. The Iliad addresses Christian themes in that it illustrates “anger, that cankered fruit of pride, is destructive and that it has devastating consequences, not merely for Achilles, the prideful man, full of wrath, but for countless other people.” In other words, “bad actions have bad consequences.” This is a theme Pearce returns to often to illustrate that sin not only endangers the soul, but harms oneself and others in explicitly earthly terms, or as Homer puts it in The Odessey, men “by their own recklessness win sorrow.”
It is no easy task selecting just 50 great books and Pearce does nothing so foolish as limit an author to a single work. There are three by Sophocles (the Oedipus trilogy is rich in pathos and Antigone is one of the great heroines in literature), a pair by Homer, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Hillaire Belloc, G.K Chesteron, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and 11 by Shakespeare. Regarding Shakespeare, Pearce offers historical context to show the political messages in the Bard’s writing, often coded protest against injustices inflicted on Catholics in England, not something students usually taught in high school English classes. But taking Shakespeare’s faith seriously, allows readers to not only see political statements Shakespeare was making in the late 1590s and early 1600s, but to understand the spiritual elements also. Pearce notes MacBeth’s three witches are “an objective presence of the supernatural” although they are, of course, “malevolent forces.” MacBeth’s pride means the king is “increasingly trapped in the narrow and narrowing confines of his own head, the self-centered god of his own contracted and constricted cosmos.”
Great Books for Good Men covers some of the same ground as Classic Literature Made Simple when there is overlap in the books discussed (Homer, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet, Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and some Waugh, Chesterton, and Tolkien). But Pearce also includes new material on C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Naria, several poems, and a dozen reflections on Chesterton and another dozen on Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Because the synopses are similar, it might be advised not to read these books back-to-back, but the lessons on how to think about these pieces of literature are unique enough to warrant reading both. Great Books for Great Men limns life lessons for men (actually all people) to act honourably by being obedient to God.
For the most part, neither collection is overtly political but in essay Pearce highlights Chesterton’s talk “Culture and the Coming Peril,” calling it “one of the best talks he ever gave and one of the most prophetic.” In 1927, Chesteron quipped “the best way of destroying a utopia is to try it.” Chesterton condemned Bolshevism because communism condemned itself; Standardization is always by low standard, and becomes self-defeating.
Introducing Classic Literature Made Simple Pearce says that great literature is important because if it is true that we write as well as we read, “it can be also be said, equally correctly, that we think as well as we read.” To understand our world and its challenges, we need to think better, and reading the better literature available to us will assist in that endeavour. Both of these books are excellent guides to better literature and therefore better thinking.
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