Furnishing the Mind: How Classical Education Prepares Students for the Great Books

One of the great strengths of classical education is that we do not treat each year of a child's education as an isolated unit. We are building something. What is learned in the Grammar years is not discarded when a student reaches Logic, nor is Logic merely a hurdle to be crossed before Rhetoric. Knowledge accumulates. Connections multiply. Ideas first encountered simply and concretely in childhood can later be examined, questioned and, eventually, discussed with maturity.

This is why I believe that a genuinely classical education begins very young. If we want students eventually to engage seriously with the great works of Western civilisation at the Rhetoric level, we must first give them the knowledge that makes such engagement possible.

The Iliad provides a wonderful example.

You Cannot Simply Begin with the Iliad

Homer does not begin at the beginning of the Trojan War. He drops us in medias res—into the midst of things—in the tenth year of the war. It is, incidentally, a wonderful narrative technique, and one that students can be introduced to much earlier in their own narrative writing.

Homer does not carefully stop to explain who Achilles is, why the Greeks are at Troy, who Helen is, why Paris matters, or why the gods keep interfering in the affairs of men. His original audience did not need him to. They already knew the stories.

It is essential that our students possess this same background knowledge and are immersed in these stories, so that they too can draw from this rich literary well. If we have not prepared them carefully and fostered their understanding over time, they will struggle to drink deeply from this fountain of knowledge. Nor will they be fully equipped to access the writings of the many great authors in our tradition who themselves knew Homer intimately, drew upon his stories and themes, and expected their own readers to recognise them.

A student can technically read every word of the Iliad and yet spend so much mental energy trying to work out who Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo and Zeus are—and why they have taken particular sides—that much of Homer's richness simply passes her by. The problem is not an inability to read Homer. It is a lack of the background knowledge necessary to enter Homer's world.

The importance of this becomes particularly apparent when students encounter Homer without this earlier foundation. Those who are already familiar with the Greek gods, their relationships and the principal myths can move through Homer's many references with relative ease. Students without this background can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number of unfamiliar names and relationships, spending so much effort simply trying to work out who is who that they struggle to engage with the deeper questions of the text.

Begin with the Stories

For younger students, I recommend beginning with D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. It is lively, engaging and beautifully suited to the age at which children delight in stories.

At this stage we are not asking a nine-year-old to analyse the Greek conception of fate or evaluate Achilles' understanding of honour. We are giving the child the people, places, stories and vocabulary that will make such discussions possible later.

Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo and Poseidon become familiar figures rather than a bewildering collection of names encountered for the first time in Homer. Students also begin naturally to recognise the connections between Greek and Roman mythology: Zeus and Jupiter, Hera and Juno, Aphrodite and Venus.

This is Grammar in the classical sense. We are furnishing the mind.

Before tackling the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves, I also find Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War an excellent bridge. Now the student encounters the broader narrative: the judgement of Paris, Helen and Menelaus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, the gathering of the Greeks, the siege of Troy and its eventual fall.

This preparatory reading does not "spoil" the Iliad. Quite the opposite.

We need to resist our very modern assumption that knowing the ending somehow diminishes a story. Homer's audience already knew Troy would fall. They knew Hector would die. They knew Achilles' fate. Homer was composing within a living tradition of stories about the heroic past. There were different traditions and variations in detail, certainly, but his audience was not waiting to discover how the story ended.

Once students already know what happens, they are much freer to ask the more important questions:

Why does Homer tell the story in this way? What does Achilles' anger reveal about him? What does Hector owe Troy, his family and the gods? What is honour? What is piety? What is glory? What does Homer show us about suffering, mortality and the human condition?

Here we begin to see the movement from Grammar towards Logic and, eventually, Rhetoric.

History and Geography Matter

Literature cannot be severed from history.

The Iliad belongs to a world that our students need to be able to imagine. Homer repeatedly describes bronze armour and bronze weapons. That detail becomes much more meaningful when a student immediately thinks: the Bronze Age.

Now an entire network of prior knowledge begins to operate.

Where is Troy? Where is Mycenae? What is the Aegean Sea? How far have these kings and warriors travelled? What other civilisations flourished during the Bronze Age? What was happening in Egypt? Who were the Mycenaeans? What happened to the great Bronze Age civilisations?

Geography likewise turns names into places. A student who has repeatedly encountered the Mediterranean world on a map does not hear "Troy", "Sparta", "Mycenae" or "Crete" as floating abstractions. They occupy a physical world.

This is one reason I am increasingly convinced that we impoverish literature when we teach it as though it exists in its own little subject box. History, geography, mythology, Scripture, art, language and literature should constantly illuminate one another.

Developing a Chronological Imagination

Children also need gradually to develop what we might call a chronological imagination.

It is very easy for students to place different civilisations into entirely separate boxes: there is "Bible history", "Greek history", "Roman history" and "Egyptian history". Later we add "Church history". But these were not separate worlds proceeding neatly one after another. They overlapped.

When we study Troy, therefore, we should be asking: What was happening elsewhere in the world at this time?

The traditional dating of the Trojan War places it around the end of the Bronze Age, commonly in the twelfth century before Christ. Solomon's building of the Temple comes later, in the tenth century BC.

These events should not float in separate sections of a history book. They should find their place upon the same timeline.

Then move forward again.

Homer himself is generally placed around the eighth century BC. By then the Trojan War belonged to the distant heroic past. Homer was singing of events that were already centuries old.

So again we ask: What was happening in biblical history when Homer was composing?

Now we are broadly in the world of the divided kingdoms and the Old Testament prophets. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah belong to this broad period. While the Greeks were hearing the great epic traditions associated with Homer, the history of Israel was continuing and the prophetic books of Sacred Scripture were emerging from their own particular historical circumstances.

Suddenly the timeline begins to come alive.

The student no longer has Homer in one mental cupboard and Isaiah in another. He begins to understand that these belong to the history of the same human race.

For the Catholic educator there is a further dimension. We are ultimately teaching history as the unfolding of God's Providence. Greece and Rome matter enormously, but they do not stand alone. They form part of the world into which Christ would eventually be born.

Laying the Foundations Early

None of this means that a seven- or eight-year-old needs a sophisticated lecture on the relationship between Homeric religion and Hebrew monotheism. Once again, we begin with Grammar.

This is where narrative histories such as The Story of the World or The Story of Civilization can be so useful. Children first need the stories. They need names, places, battles, kings, kingdoms and civilisations. They need maps and timelines. They need to hear about Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome often enough that these cease to be disconnected names.

We are laying down pegs upon which later knowledge can be hung.

As students grow older, however, the nature of their historical study should mature with them. A narrative history that was wonderfully suited to the Grammar stage should not remain the final word in the Rhetoric years.

This has been particularly important in our own history classes at Via Classica. With our older students studying the Foundations of Christendom, we use a strong secondary source to establish chronology and provide necessary context, but increasingly we turn to the primary sources themselves.

The students should not only be told what Constantine did; they should encounter the documents of his age. They should not merely be told what the Council of Nicaea decided; they should read the Creed and examine the canons. They should not simply receive a paragraph explaining Julian the Apostate; they can examine his coins, laws and writings. When we study the Fathers of the Church, we want, wherever possible, to hear their own voices.

The secondary source provides the scaffolding. It tells the student where he is, who the principal figures are and what has happened. The primary source then allows him to enter the period itself.

But again, the ability to do this depends upon a solid Grammar stage.

A student cannot fruitfully analyse a decree of Constantine if he has no idea where Constantinople is, what an emperor is, why the Roman Empire matters, or what Christians had endured during the preceding centuries. Nor can he intelligently examine the Arian controversy if words such as Trinity, Incarnation, heresy, bishop, council and creed are themselves unfamiliar.

We sometimes speak as though "critical thinking" can be taught independently of knowledge. Classical education understands that the two cannot be separated. The richer the storehouse of knowledge, the more material the student has with which to reason.

Then We Can Really Read Homer

This brings us back to the Iliad.

When students finally encounter Homer at the Rhetoric level, our principal concern is no longer simply, What happened? They know the story. They know the gods. They can locate Troy and Mycenae. They understand something of the Bronze Age world and have a chronological framework within which to place it.

Now we can begin asking the greater questions: What is Homer trying to teach his audience? What does he believe about man? What does he praise? What does he condemn? And what, almost three millennia later, can we learn from him?

What a gift it is that our students can wrestle with these questions.

The Iliad has survived because it speaks about things that are permanent. Its world is strange to us in many ways, but Achilles' anger is not strange. Neither is Hector's love for his wife and child, Priam's grief for his son, the temptation of pride, the desire for honour, the devastation of war or man's fear of death.

Our students inherit this extraordinary conversation.

But asking students to enter that conversation without preparation can result in precisely the opposite of what we intend. Instead of giving them a great book, we give them a bewildering one. Too much of their attention is consumed simply working out who everyone is and what is happening. Discussion then becomes necessarily superficial because the students do not possess enough knowledge to move beyond the surface of the text.

We should not confuse difficulty with depth.

The purpose of the Grammar years is not to make everything easy. It is to give students the intellectual furniture that enables them, when they are ready, to grapple with genuinely difficult things.

Wrestling with the Great Questions

Once those foundations are present, the Iliad opens up remarkably rich discussions for the Catholic classical classroom.

Consider anger. The poem announces its great subject immediately: the wrath of Achilles. Students can trace what happens when a legitimate grievance becomes disordered anger. What does Achilles' wrath do to his judgement? What does it cost his companions? At what point does the desire for justice become vengeance? These questions can then be brought into conversation with the Christian understanding of anger, justice, mercy and self-mastery.

Consider honour and glory. Achilles faces the choice between a long, obscure life and a short life crowned with everlasting fame. To the heroic Greek imagination, kleos—glory or renown—matters enormously. Students should first understand that ideal on its own terms. Only then are they equipped to compare it with the Christian understanding of glory. What is worth sacrificing one's life for? Is being remembered the same as being great? Where should man ultimately seek glory?

Consider piety. Again and again the characters sacrifice, pray, appeal to the gods and fear divine displeasure. Hector can be examined according to the Greek conception of piety: does he fulfil what he understands to be his duties towards the gods, his city and his family? Our students can recognise genuine natural virtues here while also seeing the limitations of pagan religion. What does it mean to be pious when one's gods themselves behave unjustly?

Then there is fate and Providence. Homer presents a world in which fate looms over gods and men, yet human choices still matter. Older students can bring this into conversation with the Christian understanding of Providence. Is fate the same thing as Providence? Certainly not. Why not? What difference does it make to understand history as governed by a loving and rational God rather than by an impersonal fate?

There is suffering and mortality. The gods do not age and die as men do, yet Homer repeatedly draws our attention to the peculiar dignity and tragedy of mortal life. Achilles knows that he will die. Hector knows that Troy may fall. Priam must endure what no father wishes to endure. For a great warrior poem, the Iliad has a remarkable amount to say about the limits of human strength.

There is also family and duty. The meeting between Hector and Andromache gives us one of the most human moments in the poem. Hector is husband, father, son, prince and defender of Troy. His obligations pull him in different directions. What does he owe his family? What does he owe his city? Is courage simply the absence of fear? Can an action possess genuine nobility while still belonging to a culture whose understanding of the good is incomplete?

And finally there is mercy.

After all the rage, bloodshed, vengeance and grief, we arrive at that extraordinary meeting between Priam and Achilles. Priam enters the tent of the man who killed his son and begs for Hector's body. For a moment Achilles sees beyond enemy and king. He sees a grieving father and is reminded of his own father.

Now we can ask one of the great questions we should bring to literature: Has Achilles changed?

The Achilles at the end of the poem is not simply the Achilles whom we met at the beginning.

Reading the Pagan Classics as Catholics

This is also why a Catholic classical education does not need to be afraid of pagan literature.

We do not need to pretend that Homer was somehow Christian. Nor should we sanitise the Iliad until its paganism disappears. Students should encounter the work honestly.

But neither do we approach it without judgement.

St Paul exhorts us to "prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That provides a wonderful posture towards our classical inheritance. We can recognise courage, loyalty, friendship, sacrifice and natural piety where they appear. We can admire Homer's profound insight into grief, pride, anger and mortality.

At the same time, Revelation gives our students a vantage point from which they can recognise what is missing, incomplete or disordered. The pagan world could ask extraordinarily profound questions. Christ gives us the fullness by which those questions can finally be answered.

We Are Building Something

This brings us back to where we began.

A young child hearing the story of Achilles may appear to be doing something very simple. A student memorising the location of Greece and Troy may appear to be learning mere facts. Reading a narrative history of the ancient world may not look like preparation for sophisticated literary analysis.

But it is.

Each encounter deposits something into the child's intellectual treasury. The myths provide familiarity. Geography provides place. History provides time. Scripture places human history within salvation history. Grammar provides language. Logic teaches the student to distinguish, compare and reason. Great literature develops the imagination.

Then the student meets Homer. Now he has something with which to meet him. He can recognise. He can connect. He can question. He can compare. He can judge.

And finally, at the Rhetoric level, he can begin to articulate those judgements: to defend an interpretation with evidence from the text, to compare the pagan conception of virtue with the Christian one, to recognise what is noble without being blind to what is false, and to speak about the permanent things with increasing wisdom and eloquence.

That is why the sequence matters.

We cannot simply place a Great Book before a student and expect a Great Conversation to follow. If we want our young people to receive the intellectual inheritance of Western civilisation, we must first give them the knowledge that enables them to inherit it.

The foundations are laid quietly, sometimes years before we see their purpose.

But when an older student can sit with Achilles, Hector and Priam and seriously wrestle with anger and mercy, honour and pride, duty and love, fate and Providence, suffering and death—and then bring those questions into conversation with the truths of the Catholic faith—we begin to see what all those earlier years were building towards.

This is the cumulative nature of classical education.

We are not merely teaching a child to read the Iliad. We are forming a mind capable of reading it well.