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It was completely useless for anything outside the limits of that class--in fact, it was useless in understanding much of the literature we had to read later. A decent sized chunk of 'world literature' was European literature, and that stuff was riddled with Bible allusions.
Most people didn't get them. The teacher didn't get many of them--except in Dante, since she was a Dante specialist.
My Pushkin teacher told us literature students near the end of our first year of grad school that the most useful stuff we could read over the summer was the Bible and some of the CPSU missives. The Bible, if we wanted to understand pre-Soviet literature; the CPSU stuff if we wanted to follow socialist realist stuff. Of course, he said the second most useful stuff would be history--not modern revisionist histories, but history as people living shortly after the events saw it.
Most of the students scoffed. Then, come fall, when we were in Dostoevky or had to read Tolstoy or other Russian "classics" they were lost. I put away my Russian-language Baptist translation, which I had used for language practice, and tracked down the traditional Russian translation, the "Slavonic" translation. Sometimes a single sufficiently Slavonic word was enough to inform the reading of a passage.
A professor at a top research school had the same problem. She was teaching a course that focused on a particular medieval Russian narrative. She had learned the text when she was in grad school, and her believer husband helped her out when her turn came to teach it. Yet a grad student in the class--a fundie, by most standards here--ran rings around her *in class*, spotting allusions and using those allusions to easily adduce likely meanings for difficult passages, and to inform readings of even rather prosaic passages, to make them resonate, if not as they would have to people at the time, then certainly more than they did to most 25-year-old Americans. It wasn't just knowledge of the Bible, however--it was specifically knowledge of Orthodox interpretations of the Bible that were needed. The 'fundie' had learned them, realizing she'd need them. The other students figured that there was no need to be concerned with the book that the monks, who wrote this narrative and for whom it was written, read out of daily and made the center of their lives. Eh, unimportant, they stupidly and quite arrogantly thought.
The Bible *should* be read a few times through, with the proper historical interpretations provided (regardless of the belief system of the teacher or students, and without pushing either towards accepting them or towards ridiculing them) because it's key to understanding a fair amount of classical literature. If you have no use for things written before, say, 1920, then there's no need to know Bible allusions. Even fairly secular stuff still had such allusions, because the secular writers, like the faithful, had all gone to church and been catechised in their youth, so it provided a readily available and fairly universal system of metaphors and allusions that they could all tap into, and which most of them did.
I believe the same about Roman and Greek mythology. I read a fair amount of it, but still my knowledge wasn't hardly sufficient for when it came time to read pre- and early Romantic literature. Doesn't mean that it should be taught to convert us to worshipping Zeus or Artemis, nor that it's necessary to mock it when it's taught. But it should be taught.
As for Buddhism, Taoism, Native American tales or African or Aborigine creation myths, they're of less importance. They illuminate little or nothing beyond themselves, and are simply of less importance in understanding Western culture.
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