Belmont Abbey College

Great Books Program at Belmont Abbey College

Assumptions

• What great thinkers and writers have said in the past, though formed by their historical circumstances, transcends these circumstances and speaks to us even today.
• Their ideas, which are received, examined and used by others in the context of the prevailing circumstances, have consequences and help shape the direction of history.
• The history of ideas unfolds dialectically and is not a random occurrence.
• What qualifies a book to be considered “great” is the breadth and depth with which it contributes to this unfolding dialectic.
• To be liberally educated means not only recognizing the inherent value of these great texts, but also becoming aware of their place in the larger dialectical history.
• The best way to learn this history is to read and study some of the great books of the Western intellectual tradition.
• Education in this tradition is ultimately moral in that it examines various teachings regarding the purpose of human life.

• To have students read, analyze, discuss, and write about selected great books of the Western tradition.
• Through this primary focus, the Great Books Program intends:

• to create greater awareness of the unfolding dialectic in the Western intellectual tradition,
• to examine some of the dominant themes of this tradition, including those specific to Christianity and Benedictine monasticism,
• to develop a synoptic view of the themes addressed in the course so that students better understand the roots of modern life and make progress in assessing the dominant values of the present age,
• to improve skills in reading, writing, and the synthesis of ideas, and by doing this and all of the above, and
• to provide a “capstone” or culminating course for the core curriculum.

READING LIST

Instructors teaching the Great Books course select their readings from the following list. All periods (ancient, medieval, and modern) are represented in their selections.

• Job
• Aeschylus, Oresteia
• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
• Sophocles, Antigone in Three Theban Plays
• Plato, Apology of Socrates
• Plato, Symposium
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• The Gospel of Mark
• The Gospel of Matthew
• Augustine, Confessions
• Augustine, City of God (Book 19)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
• Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict
• Bonaventura, The Mind’s Road to God
• Aquinas, On Law, Morality, and Politics
• Dante, The Divine Comedy
• Julian of Norwich , Revelations of Divine Love
• Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Pardoner’s Tale)
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• More, Utopia
• Shakespeare, Macbeth
• Shakespeare, King Lear
• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Bacon, The Great Instauration
• Bacon, New Atlantis
• Hobbes, Leviathan (Chapter 13)
• Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality
• Wordsworth, “Lines. Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
• Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Shelley, Frankenstein
• Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
• Marx, The Communist Manifesto   
• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Eliot, The Waste Land
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
• Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
• de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
• Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• Camus, The Stranger