Apart from its brilliant exposition of Christian theology, Augustine grapples with the philosophy of the Greeks, illustrating the limitations of Platonism but also acknowledging the wisdom and truth of aspects of Platonic thought. This is the great Saint Augustine and his magnum opus, The City of God, which is the fifth of our textual pillars. We now move to a giant of civilization in whom the thought of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome meet and meld. The Virgilian Muse stands on Homeric shoulders. It is needless to say, however, that Virgil’s debt to Homer is so great that his own epic would have been literally unimaginable without the presence in his imagination of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Latin was the language of civilization and Virgil was the Latin poet par excellence. Although The Aeneid, as a work of literature, does not attain the literary heights of Homer’s epics, its influence outreached that of Homer during the early centuries of Christendom due to its being written in accessible Latin and not in the relatively inaccessible Greek.

We now move to Rome, the third of the foundational cities on which Western civilization is built, and to Virgil’s epic about the foundation of Rome itself. Its absence would remove the very heart from Western civilization. Moving from Athens to Jerusalem, the inclusion of the Holy Bible needs no justification and no explanation. Homer’s epic narratives deserve preeminence on their own literary merit but also for the influence that they’ve exerted in the three millennia since they were written. Lawrence, here are what I consider to be the seven pillars of wisdom on which Western civilization is built.īeginning in ancient Greece, the first two texts are those twin towers of antiquity, The Iliad and The Odyssey. With an appropriate deferential nod to T. Permitting myself a little poetic license or literary leeway, I’ve allowed myself seven texts, not six. Scurrying and scrambling to pull from the top of my head six titles that could plausibly fit the bill, I thought that such an exercise might provide inspiration for a thought-provoking essay. In the dinner prior to the talk, the president of the university asked me to name what I considered to be the six foundational texts of Western civilization. This past week I gave a lecture on “Why Shakespeare Matters” at Colorado Christian University. Here are the books I consider to be the seven pillars of wisdom on which Western civilization is built.

Book the seven pillars of wisdom