Changing the World, One Book at a Time (Part II)

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Banned Books Week offers us all a chance to reflect not only on the insidious attempts to censor the written but also on the very power of written words to change and challenge our society. Clearly, those who would remove books from library or bookstore shelves or burn them on community pyres are not really disturbed by the coarse language or the masturbating youth but by the power of words to weave a spell over the reader and to seduce him or her into a new and strange world full of new discoveries. Not only that; a reading of Catcher in the Rye or any of the Harry Potter books shatters the reader’s known world and enables him or her to ask new questions about the world around him or her. We celebrate Banned Books Week to remind ourselves of the sheer inanity of the censors, but, more important, we celebrate the week to keep the power of the written word burning in our societies.

Last week, in my own meager observation of Banned Books Week, I drew up a list of twenty-five books that changed the world. As I wrote then, the list could have been much longer and it was subjective, as lists always tend to be. If I were to sit down with every writer on Bibliobuffet, or if I were to ask my students to draw up such a list, we might agree on a few of the books that should be included on such a list, but we would have more differences than similarities.

Of course, we would want to know how to define “world-changing.” Did a book, or set of books, introduce a new theory of government to multiple cultures? Did it introduce laws or moral principles that overturned existing principles and then transcend time and place to provide principles for contemporary society? Did the books teach people a new way of being in the world that required a different set of rituals and practices to express this understanding of human existence? Did the book, or books, provide explanations of how humankind and the world were created, overturning older explanations of such activities? Did the book challenge the existence of supernatural beings and thus confront the notion that such beings controlled the cosmos? Did the book, or books, overturn prevailing ideas about human agency and freedom or the extent to which various human faculties (understanding, imagination, sensation, reason) characterized human nature? All of these questions, and many, many more, might help bring some focus to a list of books that have changed the world.

If a book, or books, is world changing, then it must also transcend time and place. Thus, the words of a book that shattered prevailing notions about social, political, religious, and economic life in the nineteenth century would continue to reverberate in our own century. I think this is part of the meaning of a “classic,” and it’s why it’s very difficult to read a Faulkner novel, say, or Toni Morrison’s books without some rudimentary knowledge of these world-changing books. Readers of Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, could easily recognize the way that he was overturning the traditional readings of Genesis 2-4 by introducing the fall of Lucifer (nowhere to be found in the Bible) and the war in heaven to the Western Christian tradition. His readers could also see the ways that he was using the biblical text as a veiled attack on the two warring sides of the civil war that dominated his own life and times.

The list I drew up contains books that did change the world by overturning a prevailing set of principles and transcending time and place. I had intended to simply list the books, but I then offered some comment on some and not on others. Bibliobuffet’s editor, Lauren Roberts, kindly posted last week’s column on Readerville.com and the responses to it there raised many helpful questions. I want to say a little more about some of these books and how they got on the list.

No such list such as this would be complete without the texts of the world’s religions. The Tanakh (which refers the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah, nevi’im [prophets], and kethubim [writings]), the New Testament, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the teachings of Buddha all challenge in their own ways the prevailing religious teachings of the time. Buddha’s teachings are responses to the Hindu Vedas and both emerge and depart from these Hindu teachings. Many of the writings in the New Testament challenge and clarify the writings of the Tanakh. Of course, any canon of religious texts contains writings that are authoritative for the faith and practice of that religion. In that way, these texts record not only the evolving practices within a particular religion (thus, the prophets challenge the priests over the correct performance of rituals) and capture the historical development of various sectarian movements within that religion, they also record that religious community’s attempt to elevate itself (this is particularly true of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) over other religions. Religious texts also contain myths of creation that purport to offer an explanation of how a particular culture came into being and how it became god’s favorite. Religious texts also provide principles for humankind to follow as a means of being in the world. All of the texts I’ve already mentioned contain myths of the creation of humanity. More than that, however, they interrogate the nature of human existence and human agency. Are humans who depend upon gods for their knowledge of the world (revelation) autonomous beings who can decide for themselves how they ought to act? Should humans act only according to external principles that are mediated by religious functionaries (or by sacred texts!), or can they shape their lives through internal reflection on their own existence? Humankind continues to ask these questions even today, and it’s not only religious people who are asking such questions (though non-religious people might never turn to a sacred text for the answers).

Of course, religion played a central role in other ancient cultures that preceded the religious communities whose stories are recorded in the biblical texts. There are Egyptian texts that introduce monotheism to a previously polytheistic Egyptian culture. To be sure, monotheistic religion didn’t hold up very well in Egypt, but these texts revealed an impulse toward change that Israelite religion then picked up and developed in its own ways. Sumerian culture has left us with the greatest ancient epic before Home, Gilgamesh. The epic story of the great king who searches for the secret to immortality only to be disappointed provided the threads that other cultures wove into their own stories of origins and quest. Gilgamesh tells a story of a heroic quest, but it also records a creation story, a flood story, and the story of the deep love between heroes. The book of Genesis picks up and copies the creation and flood myths from Gilgamesh and uses them as the frame for its own creation myths. The story of David and Jonathan and their deep and abiding sexual love are modeled after the heroic love story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Without this Sumerian epic, as well as the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish, the Hebrew Bible would be quite impoverished. In the same way, the Greek epics of Homer, as well as the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus provided stories that the writers of the New Testament imitated and used as a frame for the stories of Jesus.

Some of the world’s richest literature comes from ancient Greece. Romance novels (the Alexandriad), birth stories (the infancy narratives of Herakles), rhetoric (Isocrates), memoir (Xenophon), poetry (Sappho, among others), tragedy (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides), comedy (Aristophanes, Menander), and philosophy (the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, among many others).

In fact, I could devote an entire column to the ways that Greek philosophy changed the world. Early Greek philosophical texts, which we have now only in fragments, changed the world significantly. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Heraclitus and Parmenides, along with others such as Anaximander and Anaxagoras, challenged the contemporary religious view of the world.  These philosophers did not form a specific school or movement that is, they didn’t get together and say, “Hey, let’s challenge the reigning world view” but their writings and teachings argued that the primary reality of this world was material not spiritual. Until these folks came on the scene, the view of reality was that the gods controlled everything. What have been popularly called the Greek myths but which were in fact the sacred texts of ancient Greek religions posited a group of gods who ruled the world from a distant place, intervening in human lives at the god’s will. Gods controlled the weather, climate, natural events, and humans had to appease the gods in various ways in order to assert some feeling of agency in the world. In fact, the back story of many tragedies, including the Oedipus and Orestia play cycles involves the violation of the divine human order by humans and the subsequent punishment of humans by the disaffected gods.

Heraclitus and Parmenides, as well as the rest of the Pre-Socratics, posited that there were four elements that composed this world—air, fire, water, and earth. These natural elements, not the gods, were the stuff of this world and were responsible for everything that happened around people. Heraclitus introduced the notion of constant change to the world. He’s the guy who said (and this is a rough paraphrase) that you cannot step into the same river twice. Parmenides, on the other hand, taught that the world did not consist of change but that all of nature was permanent. Interestingly enough, you can trace both Plato and Aristotle, two others whose ideas and writings changed the world, to these earlier philosophers. Plato would have followed Parmenides in thinking of a world (the world of Ideal Forms) that is never changing, that is reflected in this material world. Aristotle would have followed Heraclitus in thinking of a world of constant change manifested through various and effects. These first philosophers introduced a struggle between science for they were really the first scientists, observing the ways of the natural world and attributing the source of creation to the natural world and not the gods’ religion as well as a struggle between the empirical (sense experience) and the rational (reason) as ways of understanding the world.

So, here are new works to be added to this list: the writings of the Pre-Socratics, Plato’s The Republic and Aristotle’s De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics. Plato’s book changed the world by challenging the reigning political systems and by demonstrating the centrality of reason in human nature. Aristotle’s theory of biology reigned until Darwin’s The Origin of Species knocked it from its throne in the nineteenth century.

 In my next column, I will write more about Plato and Aristotle and focus on the Greek tragedians and the ways that their plays captured the tremendous changes going on in the world around them.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it