I recently read a book that (embarrassingly) I bought for its cover.

A Greek mask of tragedy with what look like two googly eyes staring through the eyeholes dominates the cover of Glorious Exploits, a debut novel by Irish writer Ferdia Lennon.

Somehow I was captivated, and I haven’t regretted it.

The tragicomedy of Syracuse

Glorious Exploits tells the story of two Syracusan potters after the failed Athenian invasion of Syracuse in 412BCE. This is the Peloponnesian War.

The Syracusans are starving their Athenian prisoners of war in brutal conditions.

Somehow, our two Syracusan potters, both admirers of Greek poetry and drama, happen on the idea that they will use these Athenian prisoners to stage a production of Euripides’s Medea and The Trojan Women.

It is a strange premise, but Lennon’s book is a comic novel despite its grim setting.

The Syracusans sound more like characters in a Roddy Doyle novel about working class Dubliners than the heroes of the Greek tragedians. It is a bit jarring.

Yet, Glorious Exploits is a song to the life-giving power of art. Art gives us purpose for living, and in Lennon’s novel art literally keeps men alive.

Art beyond ideology

My academic mentor, David Walsh, is a Dubliner, himself.

Years ago, he wrote that, “No great art can be in the service of ideology.” Art cannot be for something else.

To affect us, art must be only for itself. Art is not an advertisement.

Yet, Walsh wrote, art “can be in the service of religion because religion is rooted in the same inexhaustible openness.”

Art and faith complement one another, they evoke the same response. Neither can be at the service of something else.

Both shake us out of the common and the everyday to recognize what is more permanent and more true.

Imagination versus common sense

A line from Glorious Exploits leaped off the page and has haunted me—“Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the [person] who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in heart.”

One of our Syracusan potters is justifying their farcical determination to stage a play. The key words are “imagination” and “heart.”

We live in a world of common sense today. It is difficult to justify anything apart from its use-value.

The playfulness of imagination and the needs of the heart seem like frivolous luxuries in a hard world.

Faith and the heart

I am thinking particularly about some of the responses to Pope Leo’s apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, on the love for the poor.

It was naïve, some say, and it had little to do with the real world.

Even Leo laments how “some dismiss or ridicule charitable works, as if they were an obsession on the part of a few.”

How could placing the poor at the center of our concern ever be practical?

And, then I am reminded of Lennon’s message. Our imaginations and our hearts must be bigger than that.

We must work to see more possibilities. Our faith points the way. In companionship with our faith, so does art.

• Steven Millies is the director of The Bernardin Center at CTU. A political theorist who trained at The Catholic University of America, he taught political science for 15 years at the University of South Carolina Aiken before coming to Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, IL) where he teaches courses in history and Catholic social ethics.
• In 2025, the Catholic Media Association recognised Millies book, A Consistent Ethic of Life in their Religion in the Public Square category.