Brad Fruhauff – Writers on the Classics #16

“Christ plays in ten thousand places.” Just keep saying that to yourself for the rest of the week and see what difference it makes. Think about this, too: the Victorian Hopkins was unpublished until 1918, when he was read as a modernist. Hopkins’s poetry reads like the Blue Man Group’s psaltery, full of funky percussive rhythms in praise of the beauty of creation.

As Alan Jacobs counsels, you should read at whim when possible. Fifteen years ago, I bought this book used for $0.88 because I was considering a philosophy major, and I can tell you I wouldn’t have chosen the major if I had tried to read Locke or Kant. Kierkegaard, writing as the pseudonymous character Johannes de Silentio, opens with a series of imaginative retellings of the Abraham and Isaac story, then tries to wrestle with how it could be possible that God could ask someone to do something morally wrong like murder his own son. Silentio arrives at a description of faith that he cannot, in the end, reach for himself. It’s like philosophy as Shakespearean drama. Sort of.

 
[easyazon-link asin=”0385092105″ locale=”us”]The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals[/easyazon-link]

Friedrich Nietzsche
 
I first read this in Intro to Philosophy at Calvin College, and I am thoroughly grateful to Dr. Kelly Clark for turning me on to philosophy by entrusting me with diverse, challenging views. Nietzsche, of course, saw it as a kind of life mission to repudiate the Christian worldview, and, while he failed to deal a killing blow, certainly undermined some of the foundations of imperialistic, modernistic Christianity and provided the grounds for what became postmodernism. The Genealogy, in particular, tries to locate morality in a primitive power struggle in which the weak socially dominate the strong by dint of superior numbers and good propaganda. It’s actually a compelling read that has helped me understand where a lot of today’s relativism comes from.