Classical Learning’s Unicorn: A Syntopicon
Do you believe that there is a single book out there that contains the keys to all of life’s most important concepts? Well, Dr. Adler did, and he ought to know because he claimed to be the author of such a book. So allow me introduce you to the man.
Mortimer J. Adler, Jack of all intellectual trades and master of some, was one of the driving minds behind the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Britannica “Great Books” collection. A staunch Thomist (devotee of Thomas Aquinas) and Aristotelian, he believed that “philosophy is everybody’s business.” This idea flowed partly from his agreement with Aristotle that an unexamined life was not worth living and partly from his belief that American democracy was only as strong as the minds of its citizenry. Throughout his life (1902–2001) most of his contributions to American education reflected the assumption that if the right assistance were given the mind of the everyman, said every man Jack could think deeply and fruitfully on life’s greatest issues. One of Adler’s most prized contributions toward this end was the “Syntopicon” (a gauche neologism meaning “collection of topics”) which was included as vols. 2 & 3 of the Britannica Great Books collection starting in 1952. He believed these two volumes to be just the “assistance” that the average man needed to dig into the books that formed Western Civilization. The two volumes comprised an exhaustive catalogue of each time one of the 102 “Great Ideas of Western Civilization” was mentioned in the 431 “Great Books” enshrined in Britannica’s collection.
My personal interest in Adler is due to the fact that he was one of the co-creators, along with Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, of the Great Books program that was adopted at my Alma Mater, St. John’s College in Annapolis. Barr and Buchanan overhauled the failing college in 1937, integrating the ideas they had hashed out at the University of Chicago with Adler. The school was (and is!) the flagship Liberal Arts college and has remained pretty uncompromising in the vision of its creators.
The two years that I spent in the Masters program at St. John’s were amazing. While I think that Adler and Barr and Buchanan were all misled in their faith that the Great Books could be a panacea for all educational and political ills in this country, I was thoroughly convinced of certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein. Another wonderfully-simple educational tool is baked into the reading of these books in succession — reinforcement. That is because each semester is a chronological reading of many great minds’ attempts to wrestle with a given topic (Math and Science, Politics and Society, Literature and Poetry, Philosophy and Theology, and History). Each semester begins invariably with the Greeks, and almost every successive author gives commentary on the minds that came before him before adding his own accretion. Every new work helps you better understand the previous one and produces the miracle of ACTUALLY MAKING YOU WANT TO GO BACK AND READ THEM AGAIN. And finally, the beauty of the curriculum selection is that even if you make up your mind that Plato or Freud or Nietzsche were blithering idiots, the undeniable fact of their influence on our culture makes them worth the read. For example, I despised almost everything I’ve read from Marx. It curled my toes. But the deeper I read, the more I realize how truly pervasive many of his ideas are in modern society. Which is why it’s no big surprise that everyone on the left is openly calling themselves a socialist now…
But to return to the SYNTOPICON!!! (I feel like it should always be shouted with lots of echoey reverb). The book’s popular reception is very telling, I think. The whole set of Great Books sold very slowly at first and the Britannica company brought in some seasoned door-to-door salesmen who played up the “status” that owning such a collection of books could afford anyone willing to shell out the dough. Sales picked up after that, but when Britannica conducted followup research on whether or not the books were actually being read, they found that buyers who really read the books were the exception. The two largest sub-categories among buyers who were more likely to have read the books were housewives and men trained in some sort of technical profession. The men were highly-educated but recognized the lack of diversity in their knowledge. The women, in many cases, did not get much of an education in the first place and were anxious to find out what there was to know. But overall readership was very low. The Syntopicon itself, which was essentially two volumes of footnotes and cross-references for the 431 books in the collection, failed to make the splash that Adler had hoped. He had said of his hopes for the volumes: “we predict that, as dictionaries are indispensable in the realm of words, and encyclopaedias in the realm of facts, so the Syntopicon will become indispensable in the realm of ideas” (Mortimer, Adler J. Letter to J. Loy Maloney. 11 Apr. 1950). This was most certainly not the case, as it has fallen into obscurity. I think part of this is due to the fact that their very existence belies the “read the greats yourself” mentality that he spent so much of his life touting.
Two books by Dr. Adler that have had significantly more influence over academia are his How to Read a Book and The Paideia Proposal. The second book has been co-opted by Christian homeschoolers and classical christian schools who use that term to refer to the kind of Paideia referenced in Ephesians 6:4 (usually translated, “nurture and admonition”) rather than the more “Greek” concept Adler is referencing. The focus on “Great Books” has been kept in the classical Christian schools, but the formulation that best describes what they do with them is: “study how the ancient world asked the questions that only Christ can answer.” And I think this is appropriate. It runs the risk of using the texts only as a means to an end and not studying them in any deep sense, but ultimately I agree that they don’t really have the answers.
Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness to the flesh. -Ecc. 12:12
While I clearly think that it is worthwhile to read influential writers for oneself and wrestle with their ideas, I also think that there is a certain sense in which the average person (correctly) intuits that they will ultimately be judged by their actions, not on what they know. This is the conclusion that Solomon closes with in verses 13 and 14 of Ecclesiastes 12: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” This knowledge can sometimes make the exhaustive and demanding compendiums of men like Adler seem like dead, weighty tomes devoid of real meaning.
Not to say that reading the “Great Books” is in any way exclusive of living a good, dutiful life. Far from it! It’s just that most people are quite busy with the daily business of feeding and caring for their families. The mere existence of a 2 volume work full of hundreds of pages of catalogued and contradictory “wisdom” on 102 topics scattered throughout 431 works by 71 authors feels… well, makes one feel inadequate. While there could certainly be some great mental rewards for weighing each argument in light of all the others, each and every person on this earth already knows what it is their duty to do and all the commentary in the world won’t change that fact. Our consciences may never be catalogable, but they contain more practical wisdom than many of the “Great Books” ever produced. The problem here is similar to the problem of readership with Britannica set. Every man, woman, and child on this earth has a God-given conscience, but precious few study it and follow its advice.
For more on Adler (all podcasts also available on iTunes):
- Interview with Tim Lacy “The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea” (this is a direct link- also available on itunes podcast service)
https://newbooksnetwork.com/tim-lacy-the-dream-of-a-democratic-culture-mortimer-j-adler-and-great-books-idea-palgrave-macmillan-2013-2/ - Homeschooler podcast interviews classical christian curriculum guru:
http://theclassicalhomeschool.com/16-teaching-great-books-interview-angelina-stanford/ - Christian podcast recapping some of the highs of Adler’s thought and career:
https://player.fm/series/apologia-podcast-by-reasons-to-believe/wednesdaywisdom-from-thinker-mortimer-adler - The wiki for the “Syntopicon” if you’re interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon:_An_Index_to_The_Great_Ideas
PS- My wife is in LA this week and found a copy of the first volume of the Syntopicon at a used book shop, so I may do another post at some point summarizing my thoughts on it.
