Persuade universities and colleges of the wealth of the insights and creativity of the Great Minds of past centuries and how serious teaching and study can bring students into a new realm of reality amidst the confusion some students are undergoing.  Here is book review from The Weekly Standard of Dec. 28, 2015, which an example of how one man is doing this.  (Sincerely, John Novotney)

Classic Lessons

How Greek drama speaks to modern-day heroes.

By Blake Seitz

The launch party for this book featured a reading from the Greek tragedy Ajax by Sophocles. Emmy-winning actor Reg E. Cathey played the tragic hero, brought to despair by his feeling that the Athenian military leadership had betrayed him, and by his sense of revulsion for an atrocity he had committed while in a fit of rage. He stared down at his sword and contemplated killing himself.

But I shall miss / the light of day / and the sacred / fields of Salamis, / where I played as / a boy, and great / Athens, and all / my friends.

The regretful words strike a chord in listeners because, with few alterations, they could be spoken today by a person in distress. That is the point of The Theater of War, and the reason its author founded a theater company that performs Greek tragedies at military bases across the country. When they encounter tragedy, Bryan Doerries writes, "Audience members are, in a way, healed by the realization that they are not alone in their communities, not alone in the world, and not alone across time."

Doerries is a somewhat unusual candidate for the role he now plays in military communities. He is a New York-based theater director with no military background, no family ties to the armed forces—and an outlook on politics that is typical of such individuals. But Doerries is well educated in the classics and in human suffering, which has opened his eyes to the therapeutic potential of art. He describes his father's slow descent into madness from diabetes and how, at the end of his life, he thought he was being watched over by black crows—persecuting Furies who had come to carry out his fate, largely the result of his own life choices. Doerries likewise describes the slow death of his girlfriend from cystic fibrosis, which was preceded by a double lung transplant, bacterial infections, and the ultimate rejection of the donor organs by her body. He saw from these trials that there is a universal, timeless element to suffering, the psychological dimension of which can be alleviated through drama.

As it relates to war, this psychological dimension he calls "moral injury," a syndrome that occurs when a soldier perpetrates or witnesses "acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations" on the battlefield, as the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has written. These are the psychological injuries portrayed so vividly in dramas like Ajax. Doerries hypothesizes that such plays are not just expressions of a great culture but tools used by the Athenians to heal and commune during dark times.

His hypothesis is supported by the tragic history of Athens. At the height of its cultural output, Athens was not only in the midst of a long and brutal war with Sparta but also a devastating plague that killed thousands. Athenian tragedies were not originally staged for small audiences of cultural elites, as they tend to be today; rather, they were performed for over 10,000 Athenians at a time. Present were generals and citizen-soldier hoplites—young men coming of age and facing the prospect of military service. Doerries notes that Sophocles, in addition to being the commander of an Athenian fleet, was a member of the healing cult of Asclepius. He also notes the proximity of the Theater of Dionysus to a temple where invalids gathered to be healed as evidence that drama performed a major healing function in a society with rudimentary medical knowledge.

Judging from Doerries's anecdotes, The Theater of War seems to be having some success in binding moral injuries not responsive to medicine, a cathartic experience that has contributed to the resiliency of military families. Doerries devotes a chapter to recounting the experience of one such family whose veteran father had sunk into a suicidal depression. He sought treatment after he identified with the plight of Ajax during a performance of Sophocles' tragedy.

If there is a problem here, it is the author's tendency to write as though there is an Ajax inside all soldiers—as though service to the country is, somehow, a uniformly damaging experience. Doerries knows that this is not the case—he states, at one point, that "a majority" of soldiers who speak after performances have been "made stronger by their war-related experiences," an observation that comports with the traditional view of returning veterans as good citizens and leaders—but readers are left with the impression that soldiers are, as a class, wounded. This is due, in part, to Doerries's emphasis on tragedies.

But what might veterans gain from other forms of art valued by the Greeks—epics, for example? The Odyssey opens with this invocation: Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Such works may contain impolitic lessons, but their talk of heroism might also complement the tragic offerings of The Theater of War.

Blake Seitz is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.

Blake Seitz is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.

Anything which survived for a long time is a reliable source of knowledge. Knowledge is not always objective like in science or mathematics, it can be collection of experiences, pattern, occurrences, non-occurrences re-occurrences as received through literature. Reliability of such knowledge could be in terms of approval by institutions, organizations, established scholars and in practice by number and frequency as well.

To follow Vijay: it also can be a source of knowledge about those people who created it as well as those who it was created for.

Ancient, modern or contemporary classic literature, especially the novel or play, tells a human story very often universal in scope.  Poetry evokes the inner dimension and depth of life experienced and with imagination and truth makes its way into the existence of others' lived experience. Supremacy is not its objective in relation to science or technology, Rather, I believe, is the understanding of our beingness and relationship to the world we encounter.

Literature gives an account of the life of the times in which it was written. It is through literature, that we know in detail of how the life was lived in the past. Even in imaginative fiction, as we chaff through the work, we get insight of situations of how people lived their lives, their attitudes and thought process.

Besides, history has a way of repeating itself. Through the study of literature, we can get an insight on the impact various events had on the lives of common people and the mark it left on the psyche of common man.

A literary text is an example of the best practice of language usage. It cannot be overestimated as a source in linguistic and stylistic education and self-education.

Besides, the literary text represents emotional agumentation and argumentation which can be called argumentation through images, both of which are the dominant type of the argumentation used in modern media. So studing a literary text rhetorically helps develop critical thinking. That's it for the present.

Dear Kiran Grover, you are asking: "How we can revive its supremacy ?". I think, there is only one way to improve the situation-dedicate more research to this issue. In my papers I often use the literary sources and compare them to archaeological evidence.

Dear Kiran, I think yours is an excellent question. In the 19th centuy your insight was still alive, as Marx (or is it Engles) claimed that we can learn more about 19th century capitalism from the novels of DIckens and co. than from social theory - if I remember well the eopise (anyone, who recalls is better, is welcome!. But with the advance of natural science, the epistemological merit of art in general, and literature in particular, has lost its credibility. And all my instincts and convictions suggest me that this is absolutely wrong! And yet it is hard to envisage an epistemology of literature, which might make the breakthrough - so perhaps young professionals should consider to confront this field!

• The conflict in "faith" and "Knowledge" is eternal. There is no question one being superior than another. Both play important role in determining our life. Literature is reflection of society but science is future.Science does not ask a man to become materialistic. The choices and values have degenerated for which science is not responsible. I think authors and writers are not doing their job honestly. They are creating artificial literature and popularising it as a salesman.

Kiran -

Are you asking strictly about classical works from Greece and texts such as the Bible?

In that case you would have to permit yourself to set aside the literal interpretation of what you are reading, because many ancient texts are more likely to use symbol and metaphor. You are no longer expected to believe that the world was created October 23, 4004 BC (as Bishop James Ussher -1581-1656 - Archbishop of Ireland maintained in his day) or even in seven days (Bible) or any other concrete number as depicted in any ancient work. But you can understand the work much better if you accept that there is a great degree of symbolism in those works.

If we are more skeptical these days it is because we have much more knowledge. We might read about the many loves of Zeus but acknowledge that Zeus wasn't a god, all of his supposed actions did not occur etc. BUT his actions, reactions, words,etc. are symbolic of a certain type. And over time they have been seen as shorthand for a certain type.

Thus you might more profitably read and evaluate classical works as examples of psychology and human nature.

Try Isaac Asimov's short 1941  science fiction story "Nightfall" in which the members of the main (Saro) astronomical observatory of the planet Lagash are rivals of  the members of "The Cult," this planet's religious group.  The story unfolds to show how both kinds of knowledge are needed and each has a piece of the grand puzzle that the other does not, so they need each other.  Hope this helps!  Gloria

Full text here:

http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.htm

I think one of the reasons that led people to reject literature as a source of reliable knowledge could be found in the emergence of two modern myth-like conceptions. The first is that of scientific and technologic knowledge as a way to answer to human questions with no margin of error (conception linked to the rise of scientific method and to its pledge to disclose evrey kind of truth in a way endowed with an appearence of "infallibility"). The second is that of any form of artistic representation as a kind of discourse which is made irreparably false (be it realistic or not in its intentions) because of the very freedom of artists to pursue their aesthetic interests to such an extent that they eventually come to counterfeit actual reality.

Obvoiusly both of these are misleading generalizations (interesting studies on both sides have already proven their weakness, for example The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T. Kuhn and Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative ed. by M. Hyvärinen, A. Korhonen J. Mykkänen), but, as always happens, generalizations are more persuasive than accurate investigations. So, the best we can do to give back to literature its reliability as a form of knowledge (and therefore its role in society) is work hard to promote its knowledge, so to train people to see with their own eyes how these unverified "everyday myths" limit our notion of the world around us, and to encourage them to leave their whole mythologies behind.

Cio' che aggiunge la letteratura alla scienza e' l'invenzione unica e particolare in cui un autore, preso dall'assoluta esigenza di uno 'specchio' come l'invenzione letteraria' in cui non solo possa far riemergere il suo mondo nascosto per riviverlo, manipolarlo a piacimento, per condividere con l'assente ( il lettore) le sue piu' intime possibilita' di comunicazione trasformando frantumi di inconscio in qualcosa di esteticamente appagabile perche' unico e irripetibile.