Recently I finished building a bookcase for Mrs. Monk in our bedroom. We moved all the cheesy paperbacks upstairs to that bookcase and brought down the last two boxes of books from the attic in order to display their contents more prominently in our downstairs bookshelves.

I discovered in those boxes my 54 Volume set of the Great Books of the Western World. These books have been within my reach since before I was born (ummm… you know what I mean…) and yet I have never read a one of them (well at least not from this particular collection)

Last night I decided I was going to crawl my way through them. In volume 1 there is a 10 year reading guide that works it’s way through the Great Ideas (from Angel to World) that characterizes the organization of these books.

In the first year one will read from Plato, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Plutarch, the New Testament, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Locke, Rousseau, Gibbon, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, The Federalist Papers, Smith:The Wealth of Nations and Mark-Engels:Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Even as I set out to undertake what for me appears to be a task of Herculean proportions I find the question floating around in my mind – why? The post-modern milieu of which I am constantly embittered for it’s influence upon me and my children and the culture at large still has an unwitting grip on some of my basic assumptions about that which is to be valued.

Something inside tells me that to read these books is of great value. However the cynic in me decries that voice as the pompous harangue of the intellectual bourgeoisie… a class of which I aspire to be… and yet loathe to be… another voice .. the voice of the pietist tells me that I should not concern myself with things other than those things that will advance my sanctification… stick to Calvin, Luther, Lloyd-Jones, Owen and Ryle…

So why read “the Great Books”? Why grow intellectually at all? I imagine the answer to this question must be found in relation to the WCF catechism question 1: What is man’s chief end? How and in what way does reading the Great Books contribute to Glorifying God and Enjoying Him forever?