The Great Books of Western Civilization were published in the middle of the twentieth century as a series of beautifully bound volumes that even inspired new collegiate programs of study. They were needed because Americans began realizing how much we had lost our cultural memory and literacy. The Great Books stood the test of time as the classic works known to form the mind and shape culture throughout history. Without exposure to these works, education became shallow, and cultural amnesia set in as young people lost sight of the ideals that shaped our civilization.
The Church Fathers likewise preserved ancient works of literature, for they understood the power of language, how grammar was needed to receive and convey information, and that eloquence sweetened the delivery of speech. They found models in writers such as Virgil and Cicero, who opened up for them the power of language and thought. They sought these goods not as ends in themselves, but as a means to access the singularly great book, the one given to us from above: the Bible.
When we think of engaging the Great Books, we might imagine sitting down in a comfortable chair and reading in leisure. Until the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, however, very few could afford to purchase a book, which had to be copied by hand on parchment. The Bible shaped the Catholic mind and imagination in other ways, standing at the center of an entire worldview expressed in countless ways that were embedded within the life of the Church.
The Bible is a living book whose power extends beyond reading. Reading remains the foundation, of course, as the words of the Bible transmit the Word of God itself. But its enfleshment extends beyond the page into the life of Christ’s Body, the Church. Its greatness cannot be confined simply to the text but to the entire life built around it. Bruce Gordon noted in his book, The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024), that,
Without a doubt, one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation is that the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages. True, few in the medieval world ever touched a Bible, and even fewer read it. Yet the Bible was everywhere: heard and seen in worship; performed on secondary stages erected in village squares, recounted in song, shown in pictures on church walls. It was in medicine, colloquial speech, and roadside chapels and crosses. The medieval Bible was not limited to a seldom-seen book; it was the book of life. It was internalized in word and images through repeated experiences. (108, emphasis added)
The Bible has inspired unparalleled cultural achievements. Think of the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, or the great churches such as Chartres, places where the Bible’s message is proclaimed and enacted. The Church’s liturgy enters into the cosmic vision of the Bible that opens the door of Heaven, drawing us before the throne of God. Gordon relates how early Christians, especially in the East, understood that the realities of the Bible became present through the Divine Liturgy:
From the beginnings of Christian worship, liturgy gave shape to worshippers’ recollection and reenactment of the passion, burial and resurrection of the Son of God. In mind and body, they participated in the biblical story. … In the liturgy, the faithful were healed, their sins forgiven and their inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven assured. (70)
Catholic education would do well to return to the Great Books of Western Civilization. In a Catholic vision, however, the Bible opens up the great narrative of the human story, enabling us to situate all the Great Books within its vision. Pre-Christian works speak to the longing and despair of a world lost in the tragedy of sin, searching desperately for a savior. The works that follow the Incarnation reflect this ultimate turning point, either embracing its deeper vision or rejecting it, creating a new crisis of meaning. All the Great Books either point toward the Bible as their fulfillment or are framed by it, as it situates all things within the ultimate narrative of reality.
While it is true that the greatest Book’s influence extends beyond solitary reading, we have been blessed with an explosion of resources for studying and praying with the Bible. Its words can penetrate our hearts and enlighten our minds, which is why we should regularly read from the Bible with a prayerful disposition. Pope Benedict XVI even thought that this prayer reading, known as lectio divina, could reinvigorate the Church:
“I would like in particular to recall and recommend the ancient tradition of Lectio Divina: the diligent reading of Sacred Scripture accompanied by prayer brings about that intimate dialogue in which the person reading hears God who is speaking, and in praying, responds to him with trusting openness of heart. If it is effectively promoted, this practice will bring to the Church — I am convinced of it — a new spiritual springtime” (Address for the 40th Anniversary of Dei Verbum, September 16, 2005).
This is a Book that makes things happen. It changes our lives, makes God present, inspires charity, builds communion, and transforms culture. This is why the Bible stands alone as the singularly great book, one that must be read, prayed, imagined, and lived.
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Para. 5 – perpetrated
Good article! Can you really call yourself a Christian if you have never read the Bible? It’s God’s words, often straight from Him, and no Catechism/Saints book/sermon/religious opinion even comes close.
I recommend every person here (who hasn’t done so already) read the entire Bible – cover-to-cover. You will be surprised how much you learn about your Faith.
The Prots. will claim to believe the Bible and the Catholics will admit they barely touch it, but the reality is that most people of all/no religion(s) are mostly unfamiliar with it. Yes, the liturgy helps a lot, but it’s no substitute for reading/studying the Bible directly.
Let’s change that! Let’s make Catholics the Bible experts and the ones who read it the most thoroughly!
I love the line [the Bible] “makes things happen!” It really does. Your life really will be different after you finish reading it.
We read from the quoted Bruce Gordon: “Without a doubt, one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation is that the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages.”
One detailed summary, plus one summary detail:
DETAILED SUMMARY:
By the 2nd Century translations of scripture already had been made in the vernacular—from the Greek to Latin for those Western Christians who did not understand the original Greek. The most common was the Old Latin, or Itala. Of the complete translations, a Gothic version is dated in the 4th Century still near the same time that St. Jerome in the East translated the Vulgate from Greek to Latin. A sampling of either partial or complete and mostly early translations (hand written copies!) are in Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon, Italian (1500), Cyrilic (9th Century and which first required Sts. Cyril and Methodius to invent a Slavic written script), German (980) Armenian (4th and 13th Century), Icelandic (1297), French (807 under Charlemagne, others in the 15th and early 16th Centuries), Russian (New Testament, 10th Century), Flemish (1210), Polish and Bohemian (six editions beginning in 1478), Italian (1471), Spanish (1478 and 1515), and Slavonick (early 16th Century).
Between the invention of printing and Luther’s extolled German version, early complete German editions after 1462 were numerous, with 5 editions at Mentz, 15 at Augsburg, and others at Wittenberg, Nuremburg and Strasburg. The vast majority of other translations or copies no longer exist due either to religious wars, invasions and the pillaging of the Reformation. In the modern languages, and before the first Protestant version was issued from the press, some 626 complete or partial editions of the Bible were published by the Church, and of these 198 were in the language of the laity. (Lester Ambrose Buckingham, “The Bible in the Middle Ages,” London: Thomas Bentley Newby, 1853.)
In the 15th-century, Gutenberg’s system of a few dozen moveable type was the new act in town. Just as the Industrial Revolution and its mischief (slavish factory towns, robber barons, and revolutionary Marxism) called for Pope Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum” (1891). And, just as the likely mischief of today’s zillion-electron sea of AI has drawn the attention of Pope Leo XIV…
SUMMARY DETAIL:
How to defend human personhood; and proclaim the Bible’s sacramental Mystical Body of Christ—now seemingly awash in many dozens of circular town-hall/“synodal” roundtables? How to faithfully continue the Acts of the Apostles (apostello: to be “sent”)?
It’s great because the Holy Creator God gave it to us in order for us to know who He is and what He requires of mankind. If it is studied and lived by without man adding and subtracting from it, the Catholic church would not exist today and the Christian church would be flourishing more than it is now spreading the Gospel message throughout the world like Jesus commanded.
Troll Brian strikes (out!) again….we read “…the Catholic church would not exist today…”
The Eucharistic Catholic Church existed prior to the writing of Scripture and, indeed, is the author of Scripture. St. Paul’s letters are the first of the writings, and in them he admonishes thusly: “Stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word [!] or by our letter” (2 Thes 2:15). The four Gospels came later, as did Luke’s Acts of the Apostles and the various letters and John’s Apocalypse.
The sacramental Church began at Pentecost. And, flourished before such time as it was decided to write things down partly for future generations. Even for the benefit of myopic sola Scripturists who invert the actual history, pretending that Christianity is only a “religion of the book,” like Islam.
The Church existed before the Bible. It was the Church that gave us the Bible.
Protestants wouldn’t know what the Bible is if the Catholic Church hadn’t established its contents. And as for “adding and subtracting,” the so-called Reformers subtracted several books from the Old Testament canon; if Luther had had his way, several would have been subtracted from the New Testament as well. Rather than accuse the Catholic Church of adding and subtracting, (some) Protestants would do well to consider their own mathematics — dividing and multiplying. (One fold, one shepherd?)
All that is said is so, and some things that continue to reveal themselves. Sacred Scripture has within a lode with multiple veins channeling to the surface of our understanding, singularly, and at times collectively. Some preposterous, irreconcilable, some powerful and convincing.
Like lonely the golddigger out in yonder foreboding hill country thought idiot by townsfolk the persevering, patient reader finds things that glitter. What is irreconcilable to great holy minds like John Paul II on the massacres by God’s chosen during the Sinai journey of the Amalekites by Joshua ordered by Moses at Rephidim, later the townsfolk, women and children, cattle, dogs, cats chickens by Joshua ordered by God himself at Jericho. Saul signed his doom by not destroying every last living thing in the Amalekite city of Amalek, sparing its king and cattle. Could God be so cruel while Saul showed mercy?
John Paul [an heretical exegete?] refused to fully accept the accounts as written presuming they were fictitious. Can we literally accept everything written down in the texts? Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale emerging to save Nineveh 3 days after? Let me risk being an exegete. We know there were different styles of writing in the old covenant, perhaps in the new. Truths were communicated not necessarily by historical facts rather by allegory.
Insofar as the heartless massacres it’s not unreasonable to presume God acted as the times were fit for his intervention. Those were bloody times, far less sensitive to the good than now. We [should] take into account that Our Lord cultivated a deeper sense of mercy and justice, that in the schema of things some drastic measures were required in the process that would be justly forbidden today.
What we can say with utter conviction is that the truth of Man, his reason for existence, and his end is finally revealed exclusively and fully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Yeah verily, as one who is fully onboard with biblical allegory and such, nevertheless some misshapen details rattle in the back of my mind in response to the comment: “Can we literally accept everything written down in the texts? Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale emerging to save Nineveh 3 days after?”
Two points:
FIRST, regarding Old Testament massacres, yours truly has run across some Protestant (!) scholars who propose the following….Siege warfare was protracted, and allowed for the entrapped to freely exit the besieged garrisons. At some point the losing party simply recognized that the gods of the besieging party were superior. End of story, almost.
Those who remained inside were perceived as potential fifth-columnists who later would inflict harm, and therefore had to be annihilated pre-emptively. And, once the men were dispatched, it was regarded as merciful to also kill the woman and children—who otherwise would eventually starve or end up in the bellies of wandering lions. Not a biblical scholar, here, but passing along what I read somewhere, at some time or another.
SECOND, now, about Jonah….At the risk of public embarrassment, yours truly recalls a TV documentary (the media!) in the 1960s. It seems that in the 1890s during a whale hunt, a man was lost overboard and thought lost at sea. The harpooned whale was brought alongside and as it was rolled and stripped of blubber, the missing sailor was found inside. His body was laid out in the captain’s cabin; the skin and hair were bleached white, but otherwise he was totally intact. Then, the cadaver started breathing, and revived, so it was said.
The London newspapers later recorded that Barclay (or Berkeley?) could be seen on the streets for another ten years to tell his tale. The throats of whales are elastic and geometrically capable of swallowing a man, and whales are mammals and air breathers, surfacing for air a couple times per hour. Is it possible that for at least one day an unconscious Barclay, in the belly of a whale, had sufficient ingested oxygen to stay alive and avoid permanent brain damage? He seemed to think so. Or, so goes the story which stuck to my Velcro memory.
Just sayin’ that Nineveh couldn’t have been all that big, unless the penitent and prayerful Jonah traveled three days on his knees; and still wondering, if Barclay was not simply an imaginative albino, might he be reported in some archived London newspapers of the 1890s?
A whale of a story. It deserves honorable mention among the storied history of ancient mariner’s yarns.
Beautifully said!
When there is Divine Feminine to balance Divine Masculine I will return. For now I prefer the Divine as shown thru a much larger view of the Divine. Patriarchy is not kind to females so as a complete Human Being who is Female, I decline to continue this false patriarchal story.