The usefulness of encountering ideas in the classics is not necessarily that these works tell us the truth, but rather that, by posing the great issues of life, the classics serve as a catalyst to our thinking about those ideas. Whether by agreement or disagreement with the ideas that we encounter in the classics, we sharpen our own understanding of the truth and are affirmed in it. It is not necessarily a matter of literature telling us the truth, but rather of our coming to understand and affirm the truth as we read the classics and interact with their ideas.
