We walked home in silence, neither of us wanting to be the first to speak. We didn’t even really look at each other — two people who happened to be walking side by side. As we reached the center of town, we passed the public library, and out front was a sign: Book Sale.

Now, you have to know something about me. I love books, and I really love book sales, because you can often find good books cheap. It seemed like a way for both of us to get our minds off the fight — just browsing, hoping to find something new and exciting. I suggested we go in. She agreed.

At first there was nothing out of the ordinary. The tables were filled with the usual suspects — J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks. I yawned mentally. But I kept looking, working my way down to the boxes under the tables, where the books weren’t laid out so much as piled. I got down on my hands and knees and started digging, a little more aggressively than the task required — letting out some of the frustration from the fight.

My gaze fell on a box that at first looked like an encyclopedia set, the old classic Britannica covers. I love encyclopedias, so I pulled a volume out to look. I was wrong. This wasn’t an encyclopedia — it was called Great Books of the Western World. I ran my eyes down the bindings: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare. I felt something rise in me. I’d heard of this set before — a complete one could go for a couple hundred dollars on eBay — and I’d always wanted to own it and actually read it, though it had always seemed out of reach. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

I grabbed a volume and tried to sound casual as I got the librarian’s attention. “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m interested in these books. How much are they?” I handed her the one in my hand. “Oh, this is a very good set,” she said. “I’d only want it to go to someone who actually plans on reading them.” I assured her I did. She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. “How about twenty dollars?”

My heart sank. Fifty-four volumes at twenty dollars apiece — that was over a thousand dollars, in line with what I’d seen on eBay. She knew what she had. “Twenty dollars per volume?” I asked, sadly. She must have seen it on my face, because she looked at me with something like love. “No, sir,” she said. “Twenty dollars for the whole set.”

I was stunned. She might as well have given it away. “I’ll take it!” But I had no money on me — I hadn’t planned on buying anything, and my wallet was at home. I begged her to hold the set until I could run home and get my car and the cash. She laughed, probably at the idea that anyone else would want fifty-four volumes of the Western canon, but she agreed. I told Maria to wait at the library. She agreed happily, surprised — and a little intrigued — to see me this excited about something. I jogged home, got the car, hit an ATM, and drove back. A man from the sale helped me load the boxes into my trunk, and I drove off the proud, disbelieving owner of The Great Books of the Western World.

I’d learned about the ancient Greeks and Romans in my math and philosophy courses and always felt some pull toward their way of thinking, but I’d never gone deep into their writings. Now I had the chance. I started with volume one — Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey — books I was embarrassed never to have read, foundational as they were. I tore through them faster than I expected, enjoying them more than I expected. I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough. I was surprised to learn the Trojan horse isn’t even in the Iliad — I’d always assumed it was.

As I read, I felt a kind of pleasure that’s hard to describe — nothing like the passing pleasure of food or drink. There was a realness to it, as if I were brushing up against a truth I’d somehow always been meant to find. I couldn’t stop.

I moved straight into the next volume — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes. I missed plenty of the ancient references, but I felt the drama, and I started to understand why tragedy endures as a form: you watch people make bad choices, watch the consequences land, and by the end you’ve come to care about them enough that the disappointment feels real.

It seems strange, in hindsight, to want to read something that will make you sad — Augustine would later have something to say about that tendency in our fallen nature. And this was one of the striking features of the Great Books: later authors kept responding to earlier ones, as if they were all carrying on one long conversation across centuries. Read enough volumes in sequence and you start to feel like part of that conversation yourself — a conversation I’d never known existed growing up. I felt like I’d been dropped into this civilization with no idea how I’d gotten there.

I pushed on through Herodotus and Thucydides and arrived at Plato. Before this, I knew his name and nothing else — I hadn’t realized he wrote dialogues, philosophical conversations with Socrates at the center, usually debating some worldly opponent while keeping his own eyes on higher things. These spoke to me. Socrates went after powerful men for chasing flattery, indulging in cheap pleasures, growing morally soft — and it earned him enemies. He called himself a gadfly, a creature God had assigned to the state, sent to irritate politicians and poets and generals into examining their own beliefs. He saw the role as divinely appointed.

I came to love Socrates through these dialogues, and I couldn’t believe the Athenians actually killed him. But evil men hate having their deeds exposed. Put on trial for his life, he was offered a way out: stop speaking. He refused, in words that struck me as unsettlingly familiar: “Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner…”

I knew that line. In Acts 5, Peter and the other apostles are hauled before the high priest, who demands to know why they kept teaching after being told not to. Their answer: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” The account says the priests were cut to the heart and plotted to kill them — the same fate that met Socrates. He was found guilty and put to death.

This gave me pause. I was hostile to faith and the Bible at the time, while holding the Greek philosophers in real esteem — and yet here were the Greeks and the Christians agreeing on something as basic as the idea that it’s better to die than abandon your calling. It put a hairline crack in my atheism. That crack was about to grow.

Then I read something in Plato that shook me harder. In the Republic, Glaucon challenges Socrates to defend justice on its own terms. He argues that people are only good because they’re being watched, and that to prove a man’s goodness is real, you’d have to strip him of his reputation entirely — make the world believe him wicked while he stays righteous. He must be misunderstood, whipped, bound, tortured, and finally crucified, stripped of every reward and subjected to every cruelty, before you can know whether justice was ever worth choosing for its own sake.

The parallel to Isaiah’s suffering servant was impossible to miss: Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed… He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth… He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many… he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors.

Again I was seeing the same ideas of justice and suffering threaded through both traditions — as if the authors of Scripture were not, after all, the ignorant sheepherders I’d assumed.

I was starting to see Christ everywhere in these books, even before he entered the story. By the time I reached volume fourteen — Virgil — and read his Fourth Eclogue, I was stunned. It read, to my ear, like a prophecy: “Now dawns the last age… the Virgin reappears and Saturn reigns. From heaven descends a new-born race… under thy rule what trace may yet remain with us of guilt shall vanish from the earth… the whole world he will rule, now set at peace by his great father’s power… the flocks by lions shall be scared no more, nor serpents harm… all countries then all good things shall produce… Dear offspring of the gods—the time is come. Begin, O child, to greet her with thy smiles whose ten months’ burden caused her weary pain.”

A virgin giving birth to the son of the gods, ushering in an age where sheep no longer fear lions and war ceases — and calling for it to happen now. I thought immediately of Isaiah: a virgin conceiving a son called Immanuel; the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the kid, swords beaten into plowshares, nations that no longer learn war. The parallels were impossible to wave away — and it hit even harder when I learned Virgil wrote this eclogue roughly forty years before Christ was born. It wasn’t only Israel waiting for a messiah; it seemed like the whole ancient world was. Something was going on that I couldn’t explain by calling the biblical authors primitive.

Next came Plutarch’s Lives — short biographies of the great men of antiquity, full of virtue, humility, self-sacrifice, the corrupting pull of sin, and a moral order running through the world, all things I’d assumed belonged to Christianity alone. I started weighing what I was finding against the atheist worldview I’d absorbed — its dismissal for God, its moral relativism, its denial of objective meaning or purpose — and things weren’t looking good for the atheists. I hadn’t rejected that worldview yet. But it was getting harder to hold onto every day.

As I made these discoveries, I’d often go find Maria just to tell her what I’d learned. A lot of it went over her head, but she thought the connections between the Greek and Christian worldviews were genuinely cool. And I think she sensed something else too — that I was starting to move in a new direction, away from atheism and back toward faith. I kept reading, not knowing what would come next.

And then I picked up Saint Augustine’s Confessions.