In 1987, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led 500 protesters through the campus of Stanford University chanting that demand. The following year, the university abolished its mandatory “Western Culture” course for students and replaced it with “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Since then, many universities have discarded such “Western Civ” classes, mandatory or not, and replaced them with diversity courses or with nothing at all.
Some institutions, like Hillsdale College, the University of Dallas, and Christendom College, have resisted this demolition of Western studies. They continue to offer a traditional syllabus in history, literature, and philosophy, often based on the Great Books approach to learning. A handful of these institutions, like Thomas Aquinas College, offer a full-blown Great Books curriculum in which students throughout their college years study the canon of classics, mostly Western, while guided by a teacher, discussing and debating ideas in class rather than attending lectures.
Of the schools teaching such a Great Books curriculum, St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, is perhaps the best known. Since 1937, students on this campus have read and studied the Great Books for four years, a rigorous program that aims at producing thoughtful men and women unafraid to search for and speak the truth.
A postcard of Humphrey Hall at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., circa 1906. New York Public Library. (Public Domain)
And here at this school we find Ms. Eva Brann, a legendary advocate and defender of the Great Books approach to learning.
A Life in Brief
Born in 1929 in Berlin into a Jewish family, Ms. Brann and her family escaped Nazi Germany in 1941 and fled to the United States. Here she earned a degree from Brooklyn College in 1950, then a master’s in classics from Yale, followed by a doctorate in archaeology in 1956. In 1957, she accepted employment as a tutor at St. John’s and has now taught there for well over 60 years, compiling an extraordinary record of service to her students and the school, and to the teaching, promotion, and defense of the Great Books.
Eva Brann (to the left of former president George W. Bush) poses for a picture after being presented with a National Humanities Medal on Nov. 10, 2005. (Paul J. Richards/Getty Images)
In addition to serving so long a tenure, Ms. Brann has won numerous awards and honors for her teaching and her writing. Among these were a 2005 National Humanities Medal and the 2014 Russell Kirk Paideia Prize. She is a prolific author, writing essays and books often based on the knowledge she has accumulated from her many decades of reading and teaching the Great Books. “The Logos of Heraclitus,” “Homage to Americans,” “The Music of the Republic,” and “Homeric Moments” are only some of these works.
As Ms. Brann tells us in this book, our modern word for tutor—the title given to those who teach at Saint John’s—derives directly from the Latin “tutor,” which can translate as “guardian.” In her long life, Ms. Brann has filled that role not only for her students but for the rest of us as well in her defense of the Great Books.
Don Quixote reading in his armchair, 1834, by Adolf Schrödter. Oil on canvas. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. (Public Domain)
In “Pursuits of Happiness,” her love for these classics runs like a thread throughout these 38 essays. She devotes some of these pieces to specific works, like Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” focusing on some particular point of the literature under discussion while at the same time spotlighting aspects of our human nature.
Philosophy also takes a bow on this stage in essays like “Three Platonic Pieces: Or Better, Spots,” “Is Philosophy a Subject? Love of Wisdom,” and “Parmenidean Identity: Thinking and Being.”
Ceiling fresco "Philosophy," between 1509 and 1511, by Raphael. The Room of the Segnatura (Raphael Room), Apostolic Palace, Rome. (Public Domain)
Combining her interests in anthropology and history in her longest essay, “The Empires of the Sun,” Ms. Brann explores Aztec Mexico and the coming of Cortés and the Conquistadores—an examination of this clash of civilizations that, incidentally, brings our guide to some rare conclusions regarding colonialism and non-Western civilizations.
"Conquest of Mexico by Cortés" by an unknown 17th-century painter. Oil on canvas. (Public Domain)
To all these essays, Ms. Brann brings the ingredients of wit, light humor, and an old-world sense of grace. Particularly striking in her expositions and arguments is her practice of defining the terms and concepts she investigates. Given our current rancorous debates about culture and politics, this tactic in “Pursuits of Happiness” is a sharp and timely reminder of the need to establish a common ground of definition with an opponent before launching ourselves into a duel of words.
The broad range of topics that Ms. Brann addresses, coupled with her erudition, may discourage some readers (including me) from reading “Pursuits of Happiness” from beginning to end. That’s fine. After all, a collection such as this one is best served cafeteria style, with readers free to choose the dishes they wish to sample.
In addition, some of us may need to tap the brakes at times as we read “Pursuits”—a good thing, I think—to slow down and absorb sentences like this one, not at all atypical, from her Preface: “I can’t think of a single essay in this collection that isn’t at bottom about this ‘vocational’ happiness (what elsewhere I call ‘ontological optimism’), to be maintained in the face of reality’s recalcitrance.”
Essential Points
Keeping those small caveats in mind, “Pursuits of Happiness” strikes me as a book relevant to our disordered age.
In her essay “Immediacy,” for instance, we find a paragraph that might easily serve as the thesis for the entire book. Writing of the students and tutors at St. John’s, Ms. Brann notes: “Our study, then, is that living past which reaches right into the present. It lives in what may be called the Tradition, the works, the Great Books, that are both inexhaustibly interesting in themselves and the explanatory ground of our present. Not to know the Tradition is to become the helpless victim of circumstance, while to have some familiarity with it is to gain awareness.”
Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books" series aimed to supply the best of Western civilization's writings in one accessible series. "Great Books" has become a term for the foundational works of Western thought and civilization. (Rdsmith4/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Ms. Brann expounds specifically on this thought in the essay that follows, “The Tradition: Its Timelessness.” Here she makes it even clearer that Tradition—that massive assemblage of art, literature, history, philosophy, science, and mathematics—is with us always, whether we know it or not. Like the air we breathe, Tradition’s influence may be invisible, but it is vital to our spiritual and mental health, and to our humanity.
In “The Greatness of Great Books,” Ms. Brann spends a few pages brushing aside objections to the teaching of a canon of literature, and then gives 10 reasons for a “delineation of the greatness of Great Books.” These reasons include “great books are inexhaustible,” they invite questions, and “a Great Book can be life-changing.” None of these reasons for studying these works seems especially remarkable, yet Ms. Brann’s list begs a question. If the Great Books can offer such remarkable gifts to students (and like Ms. Brann, I believe they do), then why are so few institutions of higher learning offering such courses of study?
A Vision of Hope
Great books are inexhaustible; we can return to them again and again. A portrait of a woman reading, 1881, by Ivan Kramskoi. Oil on canvas. Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia. (Public Domain)
That situation, as we saw earlier, may be changing as more schools at all levels of learning are returning to the Great Books and Tradition. When asked in a 2009 C-Span interview “What is the state of classics and reading now in our culture today? How would you describe it?” Ms. Brann remarked that we might see such a revival like the one that is happening today.
She responded to the interviewer’s question with these words: “On the face of it, it looks dismal. But here is a very encouraging way to look at it. In percentages, probably fewer people study great books, classical books, classical languages. Certainly fewer people study it. If you take it in absolute numbers, we must exceed the Renaissance by a factor of a hundred. So, actually there are more people now in the world studying those things than there ever were before.”
For more than 60 years, Eva Brann has helped several thousand young people join the ranks of those reading the Great Books, all of whom are now out and about in the world, bringing their knowledge with them.
In case you’re wondering, Eva Brann remains as a senior faculty member at St. John’s College.
Cover of the 2020 paperback "Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested" by Eva Brann.
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Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
