Intro to the Odyssey with Dr. Patrick Deneen and Dr. Chad Pecknold (2024)

Summary

Ascend – The Great Books Podcast
Episode: Intro to the Odyssey with Dr. Patrick Deneen & Dr. Chad Pecknold
Date: April 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Ascend launches the podcast’s deep dive into Homer’s Odyssey, featuring a lively discussion with Dr. Patrick Deneen (Notre Dame) and Dr. Chad Pecknold (CUA), alongside hosts Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan. The roundtable explores why we read the Great Books—especially Homer—what these texts offer to first-time and seasoned readers, and how the Catholic tradition offers a unique framework for engaging them. The conversation moves from personal stories of discovering the classics to analyzing major themes of the Odyssey, the formation of the Western canon, teaching the Great Books, and the practical implications of approaching ancient literature today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Journeys into the Great Books (03:10–15:42)

• Dr. Deneen on his love of literature:

  • Began as a voracious reader with a fixation on Ayn Rand in high school, which was ultimately supplanted by a recognition of the superiority of Plato and Aristotle.
  • Saw the loss of traditional literary study due to the rise of deconstruction and postmodernism in academia. Shifted to political philosophy because it took great texts seriously and allowed space for genuine engagement.
  • Quote (06:30, Deneen): “I came away from those encounters thinking Plato and Aristotle are way better than Ayn Rand.”

• Shared formative experiences with Greek mythology, especially the D'Aulaires' illustrated books, and the enduring impact of early exposure to myth and the classics.

  • Guests share anecdotes about reading these stories to their own children and seeing them awaken a love for languages and classics.

• Dr. Pecknold’s introduction:

  • Educated in a secular, existentialist-dominated environment, he first encountered the ancients through Augustine, which became a gateway to Plato and Cicero.
  • Augustine revealed to him the idea that meaning comes from outside the self, not from subjective construction.
  • Quote (12:22, Pecknold): “In Augustine, every word just pulsates with that sense that our nature must be conformed to something greater than ourselves.”

• Dr. Milosh on narrative as teaching:

  • Came to the Great Books indirectly through philosophy (especially St. Thomas Aquinas) and the realization that narrative is a powerful way to address philosophical questions with students.

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2. How to Approach the Canon: Tradition, Continuity, and Critique (16:02–36:04)

• Critical discernment is necessary: Not all ‘great’ books are virtuous, per Augustine. What makes a book "great" is its orientation toward truth.

  • Quote (16:08, Pecknold): “Augustine thinks there's a lot of books that we might think are great, which he thinks are vicious.”
  • Requires a framework (“oriented towards truth”) for approaching texts.

• The organic, living nature of tradition:

  • The canon is formed and reformed as later works reshape our understanding of earlier ones.
  • Quote (30:37, Deneen): “Every writer creates his own precursors… it’s a very organic idea of tradition as opposed to a very static idea.”

• Deneen on how later Christian literature (Augustine, Aquinas) affects how we now read and understand Homer.

  • Similarly, Christian doctrine perfects and critiques the ancient tradition but also arises from it in important ways.

• The importance of teachers and communities for interpreting classics:

  • Reading the Great Books is best done in conversation—with guides and friends—rather than in isolation.
  • Quote (34:47, Milosh): “These texts are meant to be read and conversed and discussed within a context of friendship, teacher and student, or a group of colleagues.”

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3. Why Read Homer? The Foundational Role of the Odyssey (36:04–52:02)

• Homer as the “beginning of the Western tradition,” providing essential themes: the hero’s journey, the longing for home, the tension between beastliness, divinity, and humanity.

  • Quote (37:26, Deneen): “The Odyssey is the effort to find out what it is to be a human. And what we understand to be a human is that creature that is neither a beast nor a God.”

• Aristotle’s famous line (“that creature that is incapable of living in the city is either a beast or a god”) as a reflection on the Odyssey.

  • Reading Aristotle—and even Aquinas—requires some “Odyssey knowledge.”

• The Odyssey’s complex hero:

  • Odysseus as an imperfect, conflicted leader—admirable for his hard-won humanity (especially his refusal of false immortality) but also deeply flawed.
  • Quote (45:34, Deneen): “He becomes smaller and more, you know, sort of bent over until finally he’s indistinguishable from a grasshopper. So it’s really a great line: Dawn rose from the bedside of haughty Tithonus.”
  • The pathos of being human is to accept these limits, including the capacity for error and suffering, over the illusion of godhood or animal contentment.

• Pre-Christian texts as “preparatory” for Christian revelation:

  • The universality of questions about meaning, the good life, and human destiny.
  • Both the dangers and the opportunities of reading the classics with Christian eyes:
    • Deneen: Don’t retroject Christian ideals onto ancient texts; understand their world (fate, limited freedom, tragic heroism).
    • Pecknold: The Catholic framework gives unique resources for reading these narratives deeply and for purifying their truths.
    • Quote (49:04, Pecknold): “Our Catholic faith can… go deep into Homer, into Virgil, into Beowulf, and it can pull up, it has this hydraulic power and it carries up the truths and purifies and washes away the errors.”

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4. Teaching & Theological Connections (57:51–64:01)

• The Great Books for theological education:

  • There is a lacuna in seminary and theology curricula regarding systematic engagement with the Great Books, despite their value in helping students and teachers clarify theological, philosophical, and human questions in narrative form.
  • Programs like Ascend’s—leisurely, attentive, communal reading—are ideal.
  • Quote (57:51, Pecknold): “I think this is a lacunae in theological education… It would behoove us to actually have the time and the leisure to read through classics precisely with a Catholic worldview.”

• The Great Books as preparation for deeper reading—of theology and scripture ("De Doctrina Christiana" is offered as an example of reading ordered to God as the end).

• The role of Providence:

  • Multiple stories throughout the episode highlight how, contrary to planning, accidental or providential encounters with certain texts change lives and intellectual trajectories.
  • The long “great conversation” is shaped by such moments and by God’s work in history.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The tolle lege of reading Augustine led me to, well, I have to know Plato now. I have to know Cicero…” – Pecknold (10:11)
• “To take, you know, the critical thinking requires a framework oriented towards truth. And making those discernments between what's true and false, I think became for me, the Augustinian desiderata.” – Pecknold (16:08)
• “We don’t even know if there was a Homer. Whoever did this, though, was a master craftsman because there are so many little telling details in this book that... open up worlds.” – Deneen (64:01)
• “It’s preparatory… to being a good reader, and a good reader, perhaps finally, ultimately, with an end to being a good reader of scripture, a good reader of the world, and thereby come to knowledge, to know, to love and to serve the Lord.” – Deneen (65:03)
• [On Odysseus’s refusal of immortality:] “He makes, in some ways, the hardest decision, which is the decision to turn down at least a kind of false immortality that’s offered to him by Calypso… by being a human, you accept the limitations of what it is to be human.” – Deneen (46:23)
• [On the tradition:] “It doesn’t leave the existing unchanged, because each thing that’s added then has this kind of resonance to the things that preceded it.” – Deneen (30:37)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:10: Dr. Deneen’s intellectual biography: Literature to political philosophy
• 05:32: The impact of D'Aulaires’ Greek Mythology
• 09:19: Dr. Pecknold’s turn from existentialism to Augustine
• 16:02: How do we discern what’s truly “great” in the Great Books? Augustinian critique
• 17:56: Deneen’s Odyssey-focused PhD and the Leo Strauss connection
• 29:13: Augustine and Homer—restlessness and longing for home
• 30:37: The dynamic, living canon—each new work reshapes tradition
• 36:04: Why Homer, why the Odyssey? Human nature, limits, and freedom
• 42:32: The ambiguous legacy of Odysseus as a hero
• 49:04: Beowulf, universal human themes, and the power of Christian interpretation
• 51:10: Dangers and opportunities of Christianizing the ancients
• 57:51: The lacuna in theological education and the need for leisurely, communal reading
• 64:01: Deneen’s closing advice on how to read the Odyssey
• 65:27: Final remarks and resources

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Key Takeaways

• The Great Books—and especially Homer—are foundational for understanding the major questions that shape Western civilization, especially when read in conversation and through the lens of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
• Engaging deeply with these texts both forms the intellect and offers a preparation for theology and Scripture.
• Tradition is not static; each new reader and writer contributes to the ongoing “great conversation.”
• Odysseus, as the quintessential human—neither beast nor god—offers a powerful entry into exploring what it means to be human, our limitations, and our longing for home.
• Teachers and communal conversations are essential; programs like Ascend, which guide first-time readers thoughtfully, are rare and valuable.
• To read the Odyssey—or any Great Book—is to prepare to be a better reader of the world and of divine revelation.

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Further Resources & Next Steps

• Free 115 Question & Answer Guide to the Iliad (from Deacon Garlick, coming soon to the website)
• Dr. Deneen’s book The Odyssey of Political Theory (link will be posted in episode notes)
• "Against Great Books" essay by Dr. Deneen (First Things)
• Show notes and additional readings at thegreatbookspodcast.com

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End of summary.

Transcript

[A]

Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we have an absolutely wonderful conversation with Dr. Patrick Deneen, professor, philosopher out of Notre Dame, the author of why Liberalism Failed, and also of the Odyssey of Political Theory, a wonderful little book. We're going to talk with him about the great Books and why he loves them and also why everyone should read Homer. We also have on the podcast today Dr. Chad Pecknold, an Augustinian scholar out of the Catholic University of America. And he's gonna join us today, too, as we talk about the theological implications of reading the Great Books. Overall, we're gonna talk about why should we read the Odyssey. Now, if you don't know anything about the Odyssey, I'm just gonna give you a fair warning that there are a few spoilers. If you just know absolutely nothing about the text. There are a few spoilers, but overall, this is a wonderful introduction to why we read Homer and why we read the Odyssey. So join us for a wonderful conversation. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books podcast. You can find us on social media and also the Great Books podcast dot com. We're continuing our Year of Homer, having worked through the Iliad and now working into the Odyssey today. We have some very special guests with us today. So we have. Dr. Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame. He is the author of many books and articles, including why Liberalism Failed and also Regime Change Toward a Post Liberal Future. His teaching and writing interests focus on history of political thought, American political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism. Welcome to the podcast.

[B]

Thank you. Glad to be here.

[A]

We also have Dr. Chad Pecknold, Associate professor of Systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. In political theology, Pecknold is principally concerned with close readings of Augustine's masterwork, the City of God as a fundamental and transcendent vision that inspires and has the power to critique and correct the dynamics of Western civilization. I thought that was a wonderful line out of your bio on the CUA page, so I stole that.

[C]

Terrific.

[A]

Yes. So welcome.

[C]

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[A]

And then we also have Dr. Richard Milosh, who's been on our podcast before, so president of the Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture, a ministry of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, and a colleague of mine here at the Chancery. So welcome.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

All right, gentlemen. So today we're discussing the Great Books, Homer, the Odyssey, All Things in between. So, Dr. Dean, one thing I think that's interesting, I was looking at your biography, is that you actually hold a BA In English. Right. So usually we think of you as, like, the political philosopher. When I think of you, it's very intimately always tied to why liberalism failed, because that was like my introduction to a lot of your thought. But who is Danin, the lover of literature? Like, what led you to go into a BA in English?

[B]

Well, I remain a lover of literature in spite of my calling now as a political philosopher. Now, at the time, I was going through both undergraduate and then graduate school. This was a time, we could say, the beginning of the collapse of the study of literature in the American academic institutions. As an undergraduate, I was at a school, Rutgers University, where Foucault, Derrida, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, was making massive and very quick into the study of literature. So that was really, at the time I was studying. So I saw it kind of happening, unfolding in real time. And I wanted to study literature. I wanted to study the great books, I wanted to study the masterworks of literature, and to think about the ways in which literature teaches us about the human condition, about the condition of human beings in relationship to the transcendent, the kind of space that's philosophic, while also drawing on the human reservoirs for imagination and storytelling, character, plot, tragedy, comedy, et cetera. And what I discovered, increasingly, especially wanting to go on to study literature in graduate school, was that I couldn't do that in a department of literature. I couldn't do that in a department of English, which had been my original plan. And during that time, I was beginning to take courses in political theory with one professor at Rutgers who would teach a lot of literature in his classes. And he taught it in exactly the way that I thought literature should be taught, which is that these great texts have something to teach us, and we ought to approach them with a kind of humility and a sense of openness to what it is they have to teach us, rather than with the kind of hubris of thinking we know more than Shakespeare, for example, which I think is the postmodern approach. And this was how I kind of gravitated into political philosophy in my first. Well, my dissertation. And then my first book was on the Odyssey. It was precisely doing what I'd hoped to do in a department of literature, but which I ended up doing in a department of political philosophy. So that's how I kind of went over to the dark side.

[A]

Yeah. No, very good. Now, did you have a love for, like, the great books coming into your undergraduate, or were you being exposed to it at the same time? It's being kind of deconstructed and Taken away from you, or did you bring a love already to the table?

[B]

Very much so. So I guess maybe this is the time to make a confession, since I'm in the chancery, which, as, I mean, as a high school student, I was voracious, unusually voracious, maybe as a reader. But the figure that I became quite fixated by or on in the latter part of my high school years was Ayn Rand.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah. Which is not, I think, atypical of high school students. You kind of read Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead, and you read about people who wanna do great things. They're ambitious, they hope to make it, you know, transform the world. And they also were kind of rebellious, you know, during those years of beginning to pull away from your parents in your home. But it's funny, because Ayn Rand would often talk critically about figures such as Plato and Aristotle in her writings. And so I thought in order to really understand Ayn Rand, I should really read some Plato and Aristotle. Which I did.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I thought I should. The sources. And I came away from those encounters thinking Plato and Aristotle are way better than Ayn Rand. So this cured me of my Randism before I ever entered school. But I do have to credit Ayn Rand with inadvertently making me much more of a Platonist and ultimately an Aristotelian.

[A]

No, that's wonderful. So I think if I, you know, if memory serves, you know, I'm constantly usually posting on Twitter about what I'm reading for our great books curriculums or what I'm reading to my children. Right. So my children are still relatively young, so I'm trying to habituate them to some kind of, you know, these kind of great books for kids, if you will. And I. If I remember correctly, I posted a picture of Dulair's Greek mythology and, like, Norse mythology collections. I mean, I think I remember you commenting on. Did you love those as a kid?

[B]

I loved those books, really. I read. In fact, I could probably. I could tell you almost verbatim some of those stories. The way in which they present them, I can remember the illustrations are just burned in my mind. Stories. That was, for me, that was my introduction to Greek sort of thought or Greek philosophy, was through those myths. And I think that's why I actually went into the study of literature initially, was because of those. And why I ended up ultimately writing my first book, my dissertation on the Odyssey was because of those, you know, the kind of formative texts and stories from my own childhood.

[A]

It's just amazing to me how many people I know who have credited those books. So if you're unfamiliar, Dou layers, he has this introduction kind of the Greek mythology, which I think, like, all the illustrations are that, like colored pencil very. It's just a wonderful depiction. Right. And he also has the Norse mythology, which I actually really enjoy. Both to my children.

[B]

Both the books are great.

[A]

It is. And it's amazing how many people credit that to kind of awakening their imagination right. To those mythologies. I think, Richard, your wife, who I know is very into, like, great books for kids and does a lot of reading with them, I think she was the one that introduced me to those texts, and I just fell in love with them.

[D]

They're a staple in the household, too. My kids love them and read them all the time.

[C]

It's the Norse mythology one that my son William, who's now a classics major at uva, decided he was going to teach himself Old Norse.

[A]

Really?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And did he?

[C]

Sort of. He was like 10. So he taught himself.

[A]

He made a good faith.

[C]

I mean, and that's also what led him to learn Latin and Greek and prioritized learning Latin and Greek.

[A]

I really like these stories because it gives me a lot of hope that I'm reading these to my children and actually cultivating their imagination. Right. In the proper way. So, Dr. Pecknold, what about you? So we talked about Dr. Nin's kind of exposure to the great books. Where did you kind of in your intellectual history come into understanding the great texts?

[C]

Yeah, it's interesting. My early education, my high school education was taught by liberals in Seattle who thought the bee's knees was modern existentialism. And so I studied Jean Paul Sartre. I didn't read any Ancients. I mean, the closest I got to reading Ancients was thinking about the myth of Sisyphus, you know, So I think my first encounter with the ancients was by picking up this little volume at a used bookstore edited by the great Vernon Bourque, called the Essential Augustine. And I just read and reread this little book, the Essential Augustine. And it's a little bit different than going to Plato through Ayn Rand. But in a way, that's what happened

[B]

is in both cases, it's take and read.

[C]

That's right. That's right. The tolle lege of reading Augustine led me to, well, I have to know Plato now. I have to know Cicero, because, I mean, in the Essential Augustine were these nice long selections from the City of God, which appeared to be very much a conversation with Cicero. So I better go read Cicero

[D]

and

[C]

So I think that this is actually just the medievals have this phrase, manuduction being led by the hand. And that's how education works with a teacher. A teacher leads you by the hand, but there's also a kind of serendipity or providence that leads you by the hand through Felix Culpa of Ayn Rand. Or the kind of way in which I got introduced to people like Plato and Cicero through a great saint.

[A]

What was it? I mean, now looking back on that moment, because now you are, you know, a scholar of St. Augustine. That's where you spend your time, in your studio.

[C]

Yeah, I never, I really never left the Augustine.

[A]

Yeah, like what, what was it? Was there any moment, sentence, something that actually just, you know, became that splinter in the back your mind that just

[C]

never left you in terms of going back to the classics or just in terms of like, what got me into Augustine?

[A]

What got you into Augustine? I mean, you were sitting here reading these existentialists, you pick up Augustine. What about that actually stuck with you?

[C]

I think that's a really interesting question in terms of the existentialists, because I think one of the key problems that the existentialists want modern man to face is that there's no meaning, that your existence rather has no extrinsic meaning, that the meaning of your life is the meaning that you give to it. And I think in Augustine, I discovered for the first time and wanted to discover because I knew somehow it was true, but my teachers weren't teaching it to me. I wanted to know that meaning was something that was extrinsic to myself. That wasn't something I was making up. And Augustine, every word of Augustine just pulsates with that sense that our nature must be conformed to something greater than ourselves. We're not masters of nature, but we actually have to conform ourselves to reality. And the only way in which we can find meaning is by giving ourselves to that, giving ourselves to that. Those eternal truths that can, you know, in a sense, free us.

[A]

Yeah, it's interesting looking back as you guys reflect how providence will take things and use it to open you up to the truth. Because I grew up Protestant, went to a little Protestant school, Definitely not great books based. Right. Everything is very new. Sometimes we read C.S. lewis. That was our dive into the intellectual deep end with CS Lewis. And then I remember our headmaster at the time did some kind of seniors honors course, whatever. He wanted to introduce us to Christian philosophy. And I took it for I don't even know what reason providentially now. And I remember we read Kirkegaard, and I was just enthralled. Like, I just. The questions he was asking, like, you know, it made me really think about, like, wait, what do I actually believe? And that was like, the moment that I really started thinking. I think that's actually what awoken an intellectual life in me. Right? It's like, oh, what is this text right now? I have no idea. Right? You're talking about, like, reading Ayn Rand. You go back to Plato, right? I'm reading Kierkegaard. I have really no understanding of where he is in the greater conversation of texts or anything like that. But I think it's just interesting ways how you can look back and say, what did Providence use to actually, like, wake this up inside of me? Right. Richard, what about you? What about, like, the great books? Like, where were you kind of introduced to that?

[D]

I think for myself is complete opposite of you all. It's very much not bookish at all. So I spent my youth up in Canada, and very much a courier. Dubois. Right. Just running in the woods and really had a disdain for any kind of intellectual life completely. And it really wasn't until I was introduced in my undergrad formation to the thought of St. Thomas and kind of the Philosophic act and the possibility that the intellect can actually be converted to truth and can grasp truth and understand it. Some wonderful Thomistic teachers and, you know, that kind of helped me move beyond relativism, intellectual and cultural relativism. And for me, then the return to the Great Books, after coming at it through the philosophic act, was teaching and beginning to teach now, philosophy and theology. And realizing that the students had a very difficult task of moving through a logical argument. And so they didn't need to be schooled or formed or introduced to truth from a kind of a side angle, not directly through philosophy, but indirectly through narrative. And so going back and trying to become a better teacher and realizing for a lot of modern students, it's best to address these really deep philosophical questions. Who am I? Where am I ordered to? What is my final end? What constitutes the good life? Not through a direct philosophical argument, but rather through narrative. And these great books, and the good books in general, do a wonderful job of kind of opening the students up to these questions through a narrative.

[A]

No. Very good. Any other thoughts on just our preliminary introduction to how we were exposed to the Great Books?

[C]

I mean, one thing that I'll say is that I learned from Augustine, and this kind of connects with Patrick's now classic essay against the Great Books is that Augustine thinks there's a lot of books that we might think are great, which he thinks are vicious,

[B]

starting with Ayn Rand.

[C]

Well, he didn't know Ayn Rand yet,

[B]

but he would have recognized her.

[C]

He would have recognized her. But that, you know, Augustine's withering critiques of great classic works. And that awakened me, I think, intuitively to the idea that, you know, texts aren't just magical on their own, that you actually need a framework for approaching texts, for understanding what makes a text great. And what makes a text great is the truth. And if a text isn't speaking the truth, if it's somehow deceiving people, as he often thought about certain Platonists. Certain Platonists were tricksters, they were deceiving people. And they were very popular texts. Manny, a very popular thinker, was a kind of, you know, you know, great figure, but was vicious. And so to take, you know, the critical thinking requires a framework oriented towards truth. And making those discernments between what's true and false, I think became for me, the Augustinian desiderata. Like, that's how you determine whether a text is great or not. Is it orienting you to truth, or is it somehow deceiving you or putting grave idols before your mind?

[A]

No, that's very good. That's very good. So, Dr. Dean, your PhD dissertation in political science uses Homer's Odyssey as a narrative to explore politics, which later became a book entitled the Odyssey of Political Theory. So we have it here for our people who can see it. We'll put it up like there. And I also noticed my drive is correct. It won the Leo Strauss Award for best dissertation Political theory.

[B]

Yes, it did. Now, that doesn't mean it was Straussian,

[A]

although I was saying, my first reaction to that is that I need to go back and reread what I read for all the missing esoteric messages that I missed when I read.

[B]

Now, it's interesting, the American Political Science association, which, one wonders, this is still the case, the award, the name of the prize it gives for the best dissertation in political philosophy, is named for Leo Strauss. Although I think it's probably been decades since they've awarded it to somebody who was influenced by Strauss.

[A]

Okay, so, I mean, just like, in general, like, what actually led you to use Homer's odyssey in your PhD thesis in political science? So you talked about you had this background. You already mentioned that your love of literature continued, your love of the great books continued as you went through that program. So when you come to actually write your PhD thesis, what actually led you to pick the Odyssey? Because I'm going to assume that this type of approach to a PhD thesis is unique.

[B]

Yeah. As I mentioned to you, political philosophy, the discipline of political philosophy has. Has had a lot of people who study literary texts. In fact, there's an organized section in the Political Science association on literature, on the study of literature. And I, you know, I traveled and I traveled in those circles and spoke to people in those circles. And also, if we just invoke the name of Strauss, again, even where the texts are often not literary texts, the way in which those texts are read often call on, indeed demand, the kind of literary interpretive skills of somebody who studies literature. And so there's actually an awful lot of overlap between how one reads texts in political philosophy, Rousseau or Plato or Machiavelli, particularly if one's influenced in that Straussian tradition, and how one would read a literary text looking for allusions, looking for symbols, looking for the teaching that might be below the surface, the way in which there's an artfulness and craft to writing. So it doesn't seem to me to be. It never seemed to me to be all that. So different studying a literary text versus a kind of more nonfiction or philosophic text. Certain kinds of texts, at least.

[A]

Yeah, no, I very much agree. My introduction to the Great Books actually was very much in a context of Leo Strauss, who I was also being introduced to at the same time. So it was interesting because my first introduction to Leo Strauss was actually as a very attentive reader of the great text. It was only later that I actually kind of realized, like, all this political philosophy and etc.

[B]

Philosophical apparatus. So I think one of the things that Strauss, to his great and eternal credit, was to introduce something that now seems obvious, I think, or should should be obvious, which is that it's impossible to read the dialogues of Plato without at some level reading them as literary texts. In other words, to read them as dramas and to see that they have characters and settings and they have particular dynamics that are taking place. And this might seem in some ways obvious to us now, or at least to some of us, but if you look at the kind of tradition of the way in which Plato was interpreted until Strauss, an awful lot of it was basically just trying to extract the philosophical meaning without any attention to the kind of the dramatic dynamics within the text itself.

[A]

Yeah, those seem very flat after reading Strauss.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Very flat. Did you have, like, a particular love for the Odyssey that you were seeing you're wanting to incorporate into your PhD thesis or did you have your thesis and you're looking to fit it into a great book? Like how did that actually develop?

[B]

Well, I think part of our conversation here today is how serendipitous these things can be. When I finished undergraduate school, actually studies I went to, I spent a year at the University of Chicago with the intention of studying with Alan Bloom, speaking of straps. And I was in the committee on Social Thought, which was kind of interdisciplinary. I thought I could be literary and do my literature studies and study philosophy and so forth. And one of the courses being offered, very typical University of Chicago fashion, was an entire year long course on the Odyssey, which was offered by the great classicist David Greene. You may have heard of Greene's name if you have the old University of Chicago collection of dramas translated by Green and Lattimore. Okay, that's that Green, David Green. What a classic kind of character out of another age. He was an Irish classicist who had a farm not too far outside of Chicago. He would come into his classes having worked the farm all day with boots covered in cow dung and then just start reading in Greek.

[A]

Wonderful.

[B]

And just. And we would just have this very slow read of the Odyssey in the original language for an entire year. And that leaves an impression on a person. That leaves an impression.

[A]

Oh, I'm sure it does.

[B]

And when I left Chicago to go then do to focus on political philosophy as the discipline I wanted to, for the reasons I already said I was reading what the typical canonical introduction to political philosophy in which you read the kind of canonical texts starting with Plato and Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas, Cicero and so forth. And after having gone through that year long course on the Odyssey, it's no surprise that I saw the Odyssey everywhere. I saw the Odyssey constantly appearing and reappearing these texts, starting obviously with Plato, which constitutes one of the chapters of this book. And I began to think, this is kind of interesting to track through the appearance and reappearance of the Odyssey or Odysseus in the works of political philosophy. And what does that mean? And I thought this might make it for an interesting project, not only just because it was seemed like a project, but because it interested me.

[A]

It's interesting that juxtaposition that you talk about with Green, about having kind of that deep intellectual life, but then also coupling it with whatever you want to call that, a rural life. It's funny because that's actually very. I don't know if I want to say it's popular, but I say like that's a template that is actually being replayed out here in Oklahoma, I think, even like the Alcuin Institute. So if I can, you know, pick on you, Richard, for a moment, right. As president of the Akwin Institute. But that's actually very similar to the way that you've structured your life, right? So you come in, you teach, you're talking about the great books, etc. Right. We. We make you take your boots off outside.

[B]

It's more impressive if you leave them on, right?

[A]

Just come in raw, right to the class. But then at the same time, like, you know, you're living on, what, five acres, you have your cows, you also raise baby doll sheep, you've got chickens, you've also got some kids running around, right? What is it that particularly in that juxtaposition, do you see, that is either beneficial or you actually find to be a very natural coupling between that kind of like, rule life and this also life of the mind?

[D]

Yeah, I think there is a natural link between the two. Principally, I think if you want to have a robust intellectual life, have a life of the mind in which you are cultivating these higher habits, these higher speculative habits of knowing and understanding and sapiental gaze of reality and so forth and so on, in order to do that, and obviously have a rightly ordered will, a life of virtue as well. The imagination, I think, is an essential component of that integrated life. And so you need to be able to form the imagination very intentionally. And of course, I think, as you mentioned, I think it's very popular today because in past generations, that imaginative formation was somewhat natural, Right. The individuals had immediate contact with the real quite naturally. But today's technological world, there is a gap. And as a consequence, I think people are intentionally trying to form the imaginations in order for them to be more intentional with the cultivation of the higher speculative and volitional habits that constitutes traditionally what it means to live a good life. So I think there is that natural coupling which is unique in today specifically because of the technological age that we're dwelling in.

[A]

No, I think that's very good. So also from someone who lives on five acres, I only have chickens, though. Well, I also have children, but I have some chickens. Right. So. But it is interesting, though, just actually being able to even like with my role. So I don't get to teach all day. I do our legal insurance, HR and Chinese protection all day. Right. But actually to go home and have that time working outside actually as a decompression. And actually it's amazing how many thoughts and how many Things will come just out there, engaging that. And then also the life I've tried to give my children too, of actually being out there and actually engaging. I think what you call the real Dr. Pecknold, the Odyssey. Do you have any particular love for it? Do you remember when you read it, is it a book that sticks out to you at all?

[C]

No.

[A]

Did you take a year long class?

[C]

No, I did not. I did not. And myself, I wish my son was here because he's a great student of the Odyssey, but I only know it through the texts that I read. I've never sat down and read through the Odyssey. I've read the parts that get cited, but it's something I'm ashamed to say that I've never sat down and read through the Odyssey.

[A]

Is a lot of that coming through the. The Aeneid from like, doesn't Augustine pull heavily from Virgil?

[C]

I mean, I mean, I was gonna say Augustine's much more indebted to Virgil.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And though Homer does come up occasionally, Augustine famously comments that he hates the Greek language.

[A]

So you're just channeling that inner Augustine.

[C]

You know, it's funny because when you. Whenever you say Alcuin, I think Charlemagne.

[A]

Mm.

[C]

And Alcuin is tasked by Charlemagne to build this incredible educational system both both outside the court and in the court. And one of the things that I love in Einhard's Life of Charlemagne is this legend, and I think it's true, which is that Charlemagne had Alcuin read the City of God to him every night at dinner.

[A]

Really?

[C]

And that while some kings might have had the Odyssey read to them, it's a great sort of narrative, sort of oral tradition. Right. The Odyssey comes to us through oral tradition. That in a way, the City of God is kind of the Christian king's Odyssey. It takes you through history, it takes you through what matters and orients you to what is true. And of course, Odysseus is also yearning for home and he's yearning in some sense for the City of God.

[A]

Yeah, go ahead.

[B]

Oh, no, I was just going to say that it seems to me that in many ways the way in which I talk about this a bit in the book, in the introduction, the way in which subsequent books shape and reshape the tradition, it's hard for. I think it's impossible for someone who's grown up in a Christian or even somewhat post Christian society, not in some senses, to hear Augustine on the pages of the Odyssey.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because it is a book about restlessness and the longing for home and what it is to be at home for a human being. So obviously it's not a Christian text. No, but it's such a precursor, a kind of anticipatory.

[A]

That's. That's a good segue into this. Like, how do we look at the canon of the Great Books? Right. So a lot of times people think, oh, the great books, you might think of that. What is that? The 1952 series? Right. Great books of the Western world. And it's like, this is them. Right. They're on my mantle. Like, here you go. So can you say a little bit about that? Of you had a good line in the book. You say, every writer creates his own precursors. And you talk now about. Now, you can't really read the Odyssey without seeing Augustine if you've done that. Can you talk a little bit about the canon of great books? Where does that come from? And this dynamic that later writers can affect the canon itself.

[B]

Yeah. So that line actually is really just. It's a riff on a classic essay by T.S. eliot on the concept of tradition. And that tradition is itself a kind of sedimentation, the constant building of, in a sense, the addition of new works, the addition of new practices or new ideas. But that it always, in some ways, has to find its place of settlement among the existing. And it doesn't leave the existing unchanged because each thing that's added then has this kind of resonance to the things that preceded it. And so in exactly the way that the City of God, kind of, once you have that as part of the tradition, it reshapes the way in which we see its predecessors and things that may not have leapt out of the page, or in this case in the oral tradition, leapt out of one's mouth now suddenly have a kind of salience as a consequence of something that has taken place later. So. So it's a very organic idea of tradition as opposed to a very static idea of tradition. It always bothers me when you get these. This is what the canon is, and we're going to print it in these volumes. And this will. It's an effort to capture something that really is ultimately inescapable at some level.

[C]

But there's always a carrying up, Right, like the Virgil's carrying up Homer and Augustine's carrying up Homer and Virgil. The Catholic faith also does this in a way which is constantly perfecting and purifying the tradition.

[A]

Yeah, And I see that. I think it's a wonderful insight that you're offering here because one, it just seems like a natural observation of what's actually happening historically, you know, as these texts actually develop. Because typically, I think a lot of people have a knee jerk reaction when you talk about a change in a canon or a developing canon. That that's a negative, right? It's like, well, that means we're not going to read Homer anymore. We're going to read some terrible text that just came out two years ago. Right. And so what I like about this is it just seems very much to be pointing out that the canon is flexible, but there seems to be an inherent intelligence to that dynamic about how this actually happens.

[B]

I would add another element, which is that in some ways, to become a part of that tradition or to become, you know, to produce a work or write a symphony, whatever it is, that's going to become part of the canon, in some ways, it has to be deeply rooted in that tradition and in that canon. And for this reason, it can't be sort of astroturfed onto a tradition. It has to, again, sort of arise organically from development within that tradition. And this is where, again, I find the idea of, let's just throw in a bunch of. Today, in a kind of effort to have diversity and multiculturalism, we're going to add these authors to the canon in this particular class and so forth. Well, then you have people that are no longer speaking to each other and no longer building on the insights and thoughts of predecessors. And so you kind of disturb or you destroy that dynamic. That's, I think, one of the wonderful things about when students discover they're reading Augustine and they see, oh my gosh, here he's quoting or he's riffing on Plato, or you read Aquinas and you see these authors being invoked, that you undo what should become a sort of natural, sort of the wonder of discovery that now I am a part. I'm in a sense, participating in the creation of this tradition, in reading them and seeing and reconstructing these appearances and reappearances.

[D]

And another kind of element on this too, is the fact that often these great books, this entire canon, again, they're not static, but also they're kind of interpreted within a school, within a grouping, right? So even Patrick, what you brought up in regards to the professor who taught you the Odyssey, right? I mean, a lot of the way in which you read that text is dependent upon the way in which it's taught to you, right?

[C]

The.

[D]

The guide who is leading you through the text and the influence that that teacher has on the student of the text itself. So there's a fact that These texts are meant to be read and conversed and discussed within a context of friendship, teacher and student, or a group of colleagues reading it and learning from the text as a group. So that's an important kind of organic element of these great texts as well.

[C]

Teachers sometimes.

[D]

Exactly.

[C]

Alcuin and Charlemagne.

[A]

Yeah. It occurs to me too that maybe just a really simple example of this is, you know, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and post Aquinas, you know, how that changed the canon and the attention that Christendom then gives to Aristotle.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And so that's a natural dynamic that you actually see occurring in that, in that process. Why do you think Homer is such a lightning rod? Like when we talk about, like why, like where read the great book, should we read the great books? It just seems like there's so many debates that come down to Homer and why should we read him? Like, do we read him just because he's accidental to history and other people think he's important? Does he have any kind of inherent value in reading Homer? Like if people ask you, like, why? Why do we read Homer? Like, how would you answer that?

[B]

I guess the question would then be why do we read anything? I don't know. We read Homer because in many ways. So in the first instance, he's at the beginning of the Western tradition. He inaugurates many of the themes that become central to the West's own self understanding. And I'm not saying that there isn't a kind of universality to any of these themes. I'm sure there is. But the particular valence or gloss that I think you find in Homer are ones that I think are at the foundations of the Western tradition. And I think here is in a sense the beginning of that process of the discovery of how the tradition itself is built upon the voices that precede others. A really good instance of this is, for example, in Aristotle name, we just were invoking Aristotle, who often cites and quotes and invokes Homer. There's a line in Aristotle and his Politics which runs along the following lines. That creature that is incapable of living in the city is either a beast or a God. And what does that mean? Like so much of Aristotle, it's a kind of great sentence that it's just dropped in there. And then he doesn't really elaborate on what it means here. I think this is more or less a kind of direct invocation of the lesson of the Odyssey.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah. I think this is one of the central dynamics of what makes why we continue to revisit the Odyssey. Which is the Odyssey is the effort to find out what it is to be a human. And what we understand to be a human is that creature that is neither a beast nor a God. And if you think about the dynamics of the Odyssey, it's Odysseus traveling to all these fantastical places that maybe no person has ever seen except on the New Jersey Turnpike, maybe.

[D]

I thought I saw the Cyclops once.

[B]

The Cyclops. I did see the Cyclops, but Cyclops is a really good example. What he encounters on the journey home is almost the complete absence of human beings. He encounters beasts and gods. And the constant question that's being placed before my dilemma is, is, will he find a home there? Is this the place where he can settle? Is it to be the human lot, to be among the beasts? And it's tempting, right? To be. To take the lotus is one good example, which is to kind of almost to become like a beast, to become like a. Whenever I come home from work, my dog is just so happy to see me. Or if I feed my dog dog food every night, the dog is super happy that I'm. What is it? Oh, my gosh, it's dry dog food again. So happy about the dog food. Imagine a blissful existence in which you don't have any worries and any cares, everything's always good. Wagging my tail, that's a really tempting pole. And then there's the pole of being a God, which is, you could say it's a couple of different things. First of all, it's not to have to worry about death, that constant gnawing anxiety that we have as human beings. Odysseus is offered immortality by Calypso. Sorry, spoiler alert. And the question of what he does is really an interesting question. He's offered the COVID of my book I'm looking at right now. He's offered the knowledge of all that happens above and below and on the earth by the Sirens, suggesting a kind of the knowledge of the gods. And he's tempted by it. Only because he's been forewarned to tie himself to the mass does he not throw himself overboard to pursue that knowledge. The Odyssey is kind of a book about what it is to be a human. And it is to kind of navigate, not just literally to go home, but to navigate between the temptations of being a beast and a God, at least as it was understood in that time. And that it turns out that to be a human being is to live in a city. It's to return to Ithaca as imperfect, as violent, as Filled with unsavory characters as that is. That's what it is to be a human. And so when you read that line by Aristotle, that creature that incapable of living in a city is either a beast or a God. If you don't have the Odyssey rattling around in your brain, you're not going to understand that line, and therefore, you're not going to understand the politics of Aristotle, which means then you're not going to understand, at some level, you're not going to understand Thomas Aquinas.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I would say let's start there with just one little sentence and we can move on.

[A]

No, no, I appreciate that. I think that kind of unpacks a little bit of what we're trying to do on this podcast is introduce people to the great books and kind of get them used to, you know, if you want to call it the great conversation or et cetera. But so many people, you know, just jump in somewhere in the timeline, Right. Which I think, you know, it sounds like a lot of us did as younger men. And then you just start realizing, like, oh, there's someone behind this, and there's someone behind this. Doesn't seem to be a whole lot behind Homer. Yeah, right. So if you're going to pick a starting place, this seems to be, you know, when this actually tradition starts. Do you think? You know, when you look at the Odyssey, you have this beautiful coming home story, right? Which obviously, I think is a main aspect that you've incorporated into the text that you wrote. You also have this dynamic of a father and son relationship, right? This fatherlessness. And also, then also on the other side, with a son, you have a coming of age story, I think, right. So you have these kind of, like, beautiful themes that I think you can pull out, but Odysseus himself. So maybe I'll play my cards and then everyone can tell me how wrong I am. So when I first read the Odyssey, it was actually a really frustrating experience for me. So I read it in a group and everyone was just saying, like, oh, he's amazing, right? Like, he's. He's enduring all these things, etc. And I saw him as an incredibly, I guess, conflicted character. That's probably a positive way to say what I saw, right. Without getting into, like, spoilers, but, like, you know, sometimes I feel like using his men as a sacrifice, right. To endure so he escapes. But it's at the. It's, you know, at the sake of his men. And he's a leader, right? He's not like one person amongst many. Like, how do you navigate that with all. It just seems like Homer has stacked all of these different themes. But even, you know, Odysseus himself just seems to be an incredibly conflicting character that like, anytime you bring up like, oh, is he a good man, is he a bad man? It seems like very blood on the floor conversation. So if you could solve that for us, I would appreciate that.

[B]

I don't know that I can solve it. So, I mean, I guess maybe the kindest I can be about Odysseus is that he is an imperfect character or like all of us, he has his definite weaknesses and his proclivities. And it comes out, I mean, he is someone who is foolhardy. He turns out to be at least a dubiously. Could one even say he's a successful leader? Well, he returns home with none of his men, so by that measure, not terribly successful. He makes a lot of bad decisions in the course of his journey home. And I also make some decisions which I think are also praiseworthy. I mentioned before the decision not to accept immortality from Calypso. And that again, a spoiler alert. But that decision, as far as I know, we were talking about Dolaire's Greek mythology. One of the things that that book seems to be a particular good example of is how often human beings, men in particular, are offered immortality by women and how often, to use the phrase of art, how often they're buggered as a result of it, that there's no human being that we know that gets offered immortality and accepts it and doesn't end up in a really just bad situation, usually just destroyed by Zeus or something cursed. Yeah. And in fact, for readers who are looking for this, the very beginning of book five, which is the first book where we actually encounter Odysseus, we've heard about him. Books one through four are called the Telemachia. They're about Telemachus son and the situation in Ithaca. Book 5 begins with Odysseus, who we've been hearing about. And. And it begins by breaking the normal, the kind of standard line with which almost every chapter begins. Dawn spread her rosy fingers is the typical way. You'll see this almost every. The beginning of every book. It's a new day. Dawn is spreading her rosy fingers. Beginning of book five begins. Dawn rose from the bedside of haughty Tithonus. And then now you'd have to know who Tithonus is. Now, if you've read Daulaire's book of Greek mythology, you will know who Tithonus is. Tithonus is offered immortality by dawn, by Eos, and he accepts. And Eos then goes to Zeus and says, I'd like to marry this mortal. And Zeus said, okay, I grant your wish. I will give him immortal life. He will never die. Now, you remember what happens? She forgets to ask for eternal youth. Oh. So he continues to age until he becomes a grasshopper.

[A]

Yes, I remember because the imagery, the illustration there is wonderful. That's what Kevin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

He becomes smaller and more, you know, sort of bent over until finally he's indistinguishable from a grasshopper. So it's really a great line. Dawn rose from the bedside of haughty Tithonus. He thinks he's got immortality in his pocket. And then we move to Odysseus on the side of the island, weeping to go home, because for seven years he's been wanting to go home. And we learn that Calypso is offering him immortality every day. Just stay with me and you will never die. And he turns this down in order to leave the island and return home. I can forgive Odysseus, in a sense, almost every other bad decision he makes, because he makes, in some ways the hardest decision, which is the decision to turn down at least a kind of false immortality that's offered to him by Calypso. So I think in many ways a lot of his bad decisions are a result of, in an interesting way, of the good decision that he makes, of the decision in which he's going to throw his lot fundamentally down with being a human being. And then to be a human being means you make a lot of dumb decisions, Right? You make a lot of stupid choices. And he could have avoided that fate, maybe, or at least he thinks he might have been able to avoid that fate. But I think by being a human, you accept the limitations of what it is to be human. So I'll give him that much.

[A]

Yeah. No, I think that's. That's beautiful. Dr. Bregnall, do you see any connection or what connection do you see here between all these offerings of immortality and you will be like a God? And these things that we see maybe in an obscure way in the Greek myths. And I just keep thinking of Adam and Eve, I keep thinking of Eve's conversation with the serpent.

[C]

I mean, what leaps to mind is this is going to be another lateral move. But Beowulf was written in a sense, with. With this idea in mind, that you can create a non Christian myth that has all this kind of Christian resonance. And it's very clear that this is the case with. With Homer, with Virgil. These are attempts to struggle with the reality of what it means to be human. And whenever we struggle with the reality of what it means to be human, we're going to come up with the same sorts of narratives that the Bible gives us revealed access to, access to our fallenness, an understanding of our brokenness, and evidence of our original sin. And I also think of how Augustine treats the history of Rome and the fact that he reads the fratricide out of which Rome is born, the fratricide between where Romulus kills Remus as a Cain and Abel story, and the way in which the. The Catholic mind is at a distinct advantage over every other kind of human being for reading these narratives correctly, reading the narrative history correctly, reading Homer correctly, reading Beowulf correctly. That the Catholic mind is able to, in a sense, read the human story at a great advantage because we have divine revelation, you know, thinking.

[A]

So since you brought up Beowulf, I was just. I don't know why. Oh, I have another series of beautiful children's books. I have an illustrated children's book on Beowulf. It's a children's book. And I think you. Is that the one who recommended as well? Yeah, I think you have the same one. I've been reading it to my kids, which is wonderful. Cause now my toddler is talking about doing things with his bare hands. Right. Like, it sounds like that's what he got from it. I'm like, I didn't tell my wife. And then she was like, our toddler keeps talking about his bare hands. I was like, yes. Because Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off with his bare hand. Like, it never dawned on him my hands could be a weapon. Right. So he's like, he's very much enjoying that. But I just dawned on me as I was contemplating the story, because I love that story. I think it's wonderful. Is one of the most touching kind of moments in that story because you talk about being a pagan story and kind of has this, like, Christian gloss on it. Yeah. Is the narrator takes a moment. I'm going my memory here, so forgive me. But the narrator takes a moment back and because, you know, Christendom now has only come to them in, like, what, the seven hundreds or something like that. Somewhere in there, we can tell you a rough number, like. And so he gives this moment where he's like, I hope there can be a harrowing of hell for our people. And it just like. So basically, what he's saying is like, Christianity has just now come to us. I'm thinking of all of my ancestors that we honor. And there's this beautiful moment in which he actually has this like, prayer in which he is very short, but I think very powerful, in which he basically says, I hope there can be some kind of harrowing of hell for our people, right? That Christ would go down and preach the gospel now, now that we know it, to all of our ancestors. I just think it's just a very powerful, rich part of that text because

[C]

God has come down in the very flesh into human history. Our Catholic faith can go deep into Homer, into Virgil, into Beowulf, and it can pull up, it has this hydraulic power and it carries up the truths and purifies and washes away the errors.

[D]

There's also kind of an inherent danger too, you know, as readers of these classic texts that are after the advent of Christ, right now, all of a sudden we're reading these characters and we're looking at them through a Christian lens and saying, odysseus is a failure, he's a vicious man, he's not living up to the Christian ideals, instead of understanding him as this pagan individual who's imperfect, who doesn't have the grace of Christ in his church. So there's that inherent danger of reading these texts through that principal Christian lens as well, not understanding them in their own historical context, both as individuals, but also as fictional characters developed by these great poets.

[C]

But our faith also has a good anthropology, right? So that we can actually look at Odysseus and say, well, he's got these virtues. That's right. He's got these vices.

[B]

So this is one of the ways we were talking earlier about when you approach the great books, you need a frame, you need a framework. And if we don't have a frame, then we're seeing all in some ways the particularity, maybe, you know, this is. That's what the Greeks had to say, that's what the Romans had to say. That's what the Christians had to say. That's what the post Christians had to say. That's what the Nucheans have to say. And then you're left with kind of basically a kind of relativism.

[C]

It's like a pluralistic general.

[B]

Everyone just has a different view. And either you have. You come away with it saying there's no truth, which means you're default a Nietzschean, or you say you just have to pick a truth. It's just, you just have to.

[C]

What's Your favorite truth.

[B]

Yeah. And that's. I'm afraid that's too often the approach of the. The great books. And with a Christian lens, you actually, I think you can see the ways in which. You can see how aspects, for example, of the Odyssey are anticipatory. We talked about the kind of restlessness, the desire for home, what it is to be that no home maybe, can provide the final satisfaction. And that's part of the interesting thing about the Odyssey, is that once Odysseus reaches the. The goal, which is to go home, it's not clear he's going to want to stay there because he has a restless heart. But I think we can also see the ways in which that world is, to echo Richard, is not a Christian world. And there are two ways in which this is the case. First, it's a world in which to be cruel is in some ways the sign of a kind of heroism. To be vicious in some ways, to be cruel, sometimes wantonly cruel. And maybe the scene that's most disturbing in the Odyssey is when Odysseus punishes the serving women who have betrayed his home by sleeping with the suitors who've been cruelly using up his property and abusing his family. And he gratuitously and cruelly strings them up and kills them in a way in which there's. It seems to be kind of. The poem seems to suggest this is normal and somehow vaguely admirable. There's another dimension. I actually just taught the Odyssey last semester. And this is something my students all, you know, even if they weren't most of them Catholic, all of them, at some level, of course, ultimately affected by a Christian world, which is the world of the Odyssey is a world in which it's very dubious whether one has in some way, some. Some sense, in the deepest sense, a kind of free choice. And I praised Odysseus for making a choice. But there's a way in which, in the Greek, certainly the sort of pagan Greek worldview, the choices you make are always constrained in some ways by this mysteriousness of your character. And the source of one's character is a mystery so that one makes a choice. But the choice seems to be constrained by the kind of character that you have. Now, Odysseus seems to have more choice than most because he's described in the opening lines, the first sentence of the book, as polytropos. Odysseus of many ways or many turnings. He's the most unusual of the Greeks because he seems to have the ability to make more choices. But almost everyone is constrained by a kind of lack of liberty, a lack of freedom. Because there is. It's a world in which everything is more or less faded. Everything is faded. And one inescapably makes the choice that fate sort of demands of one. And I think that's for a Christian, that's a world in which that's, I think, rightly unrecognizable to us.

[A]

You see that almost in a comical way at times when you're reading the Iliad, right? That just like the fickle gods and just incredibly capricious and who's winning. It's funny in that one. Like, to be a good soldier at times is to read these patterns of the divine, right? So we're sitting there clashing, and all of a sudden something happens. And you'll see one soldier stand up and be like, hey, Zeus's favor has swung. We now need to retreat, right? And just how much. I mean, I think that's one of the perennial questions that Homer raises is what is the relationship between the acts of men and the divine?

[B]

I do think, in some ways, though, it's also a helpful. This is something I was emphasizing with my students last semester was it's helpful to read Homer because he's also kind of corrective to a world in which we think everything is the result of choice. That our choice is completely unconstrained. And how much of what we think of as our free choice is itself constrained by our own characters and by the fates or by our situations that are in some ways not chosen by us. So somehow, between the world of no choice or extremely little choice in the Homeric world and a world of seeming endless open choice of the modern liberal regime maybe there's some deeper, like, sort of synthesis between these that I think is also a reflection of a kind of Christian worldview in which we are. We do have a kind of choice. But it's choice that's always. In some ways, it's in a world that's given, we don't make it. It's a world in which those choices, you know, to get back to farming. A world in which, you know, I can't decide tomorrow that my cow is going to be a pig.

[D]

Yeah. There are natural measures and standards in place now.

[B]

I know. I just offended all the transhumanists.

[A]

That's fine. You can do that here. That's perfectly fine. So kind of moving more towards a conclusion. I am curious, Dr. Picknold, about where you see the role of the great books for like theologians for like a theological study. Like why, why if I just want to go read Thomas Aquinas, like why should I take the time to also be conversant with this great book's tradition?

[C]

It's interesting because in theological education it's just, it is not any kind of scripted part of curriculum that, you know, seminarians might read, you know, great books as part of their pre theology in a course of philosophical training, but it's not something that is dictated by the Holy See that we go and read great books. But I think this is a lacunae in theological education is that basically what happens is you pick and choose. If you're reading a lot of Augustine, here's the classic text you go and read. And I think it would behoove us to actually think as Catholics about having the, the places in which we can have the time and the leisure to read through classics precisely with a Catholic worldview, precisely with the Catholic framework, and have those conversations as you do. It's, it's, I think, unfortunately in, in theological education, all too rare to have the kind of luxury, you know, of a year or two years of study of Homer or something like that. That just doesn't happen. Someone might choose to do that on their own. You know, they, they'll, they might in their pre theological studies study Plato or Aristotle, but it's, it's not systematic. And so programs like this where you can actually have the leisure to take the time, then when you look at the theological text, it becomes even brighter.

[A]

Yeah, no, I very much agree. And for me some of that seems very alien because, you know, I went to graduate work at Ave Maria University and I went there as a Protestant. And so my first semester there, I'm in. I very much confused Ave Maria on why I was coming because I just. There was only four of us and like one's a Dominican sister and the other two guys are hardcore Catholics. And then I'm coming from. Also I was coming from Oral Roberts University, which probably could not be any more different. So if you talk about Providence, I have a lot to look back on and be very thankful for. How I mean, I literally found Ave by Googling, because Catholics were very theoretical. I didn't really have like a lot of like, you know, actual Catholics in my life to help form that decision. So I remember sitting at a coffee shop with Father Matthew Lamb.

[C]

Oh, the great Matthew Lamb.

[A]

Yes. And I don't know who he is. And I'm sitting there trying to talk him into letting me into the program. It's like, I can do this. And I would love to have a conversation on tape because I have no idea what came out of my mouth and probably everything I said was wrong. But God be praised, he allowed me in the program. And as I was mentioning kind of before the podcast, that master's program at that time had your typical. It was a two year, 64 credit hour master's that had its systematic side, as you would expect, but then kind of tethered to it was this great book sequence. And so I came in, I remember like now all of a sudden reading all these texts, like, I very much needed Thomas Aquinas at that point. Coming from a charismatic background, I needed that faith and reason. That was what kind of drew me to Catholicism. But at the same time being like, okay, now we're gonna read Plato's Republic.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And like, so for me, the coming to the faith and seeing and reading Aquinas and reading all these things is also like, intricately tied to also reading Plato and Dante and Boethius in these contexts and then seeing the moderns, right. As this ongoing, like, rejection. And it's something that I'm very indebted to the Diocese of Tulsa through the Alcuin Institute, that we have done this with our diaconate program. Right. So our deacons, deacon candidates that are going through our program that we run here through the Alcuin Institute, yes, they're getting their systematic theology, but also then they start off with also a great book sequence. And so we're going to start off reading Homer, you know, and that's their first year is actually mainly just working through Homer. And it is amazing to me how much that I think enriches and flavors the overall conversation.

[C]

Can I add a historical writer to that? Which is Augustine's great De Doctrina Christiana on Christian teaching, which isn't quite the classics, but it's the beginnings of the medieval university, because in On Christian teaching, he basically unpacks the. The importance of the liberal arts for reading scripture. And that when you tie the liberal arts to the Holy Scriptures and then also to the preaching of the Word, that on Christian teaching requires this kind of education in order to communicate the gospel. It's really powerful when you start to think about that as the basic blueprint of the medieval university that we study these things ordered to an end. And that end is God, right?

[A]

Yeah, I think very much, you know, as I approach the Iliad, as we approach the Odyssey, I think as we've mentioned here, having being able to see all things through the lens of Jesus Christ being able to take the incarnation seriously. Right. This actually happened in the fullness of time. And God used, I think, the Greeks and the Hebrews clearly to then cultivate the soil for the coming of his Son. Then. Yes. I think that when you look at these questions on free will and Homer, I don't find them accidental. I find them to be watching Providence really start to cultivate the world to understand Jesus Christ and understand. So they might seem comical at first of like, you know, oh, look what Zeus did again. And Zeus himself is very comical. But at the same time it is raising these perennial questions of like, wait, what is the relationship between the actions of men and the divine? Like, what is that? And then by the time you get to Aquinas, this is an incredibly mature, incredibly in depth conversation. But it starts in a lot of ways, you know, in this battle for Troy. Right. So as we kind of close out, Dr. Deneen, thank you for all of your thoughts. Deeply appreciate your insights. Lots to think about. Any kind of like, final words advice for people approaching the Odyssey?

[B]

Well, I hope, as a few of my comments suggested, we don't know really anything about Homer. There's a lot of legends about Homer. We don't even know if there was a Homer. There's theories that this book was compiled by a whole bunch of different poets. Whoever did this, though, was a master craftsman because there are so many little telling details in this book that I think, as your comments just pointed to open up worlds, they open up just dimensions and it's easy to get sort of wrapped up in the stories. But be a careful and close reader of this text. When the poet departs from the formula and mentions, for example, haughty Tithonus, make sure you do your research. Who was Tithonus and what does this have to do with the story? So I think again to echo and I think agree with my friend Chad Pecknold. It's preparatory not only to understanding maybe this Greek world, but it's preparatory to being a good reader and a good reader, perhaps finally, ultimately with an end to being a good reader of scripture, a good reader of the world, and thereby come to knowledge, to know, to love and to serve the Lord.

[A]

No. Very wonderful, Richard. Dr. Packdol, any other closing thoughts?

[C]

Amen.

[A]

Hallelujah. We are good. All right, well, you can check out more on thegreatbookspodcast.com we'll post things there. We'll have our show notes. We'll post the link to Dr. Deneen's book. We also, actually, you mentioned it briefly, the Against Great Books article.

[C]

Yeah, terrific.

[A]

That's actually a wonderful counterintuitive title, but a wonderful little article in first things by Dr. Deneen that I think came out right after I got out of grad school. And so I very much received it right after going through a Great Books program. So we'll link that as well, and we'll continue through our year with Homer. So thank you, gentlemen.

[D]

Thank you.

[C]

Thank you for having us

[A]

sa.