Now that you’ve had a chance to catch up on last weekend’s Hollywood religious classics like Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments or The Last Temptation of Christ, I have a post-Easter question for you.

Do these stories about divine intervention — be it the Children of Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea or Christ’s incarnation in a Bethlehem stable — have some meaning for you? Or are they mere entertainments, folk tales from a past steeped in religious significance that many modern people have abandoned or turned into holiday treats?

Does watching these movies, as hokey as they are, suggest some existential purpose that is multi-dimensional, mysterious, even transcendent? Or do you think, I am the lone ranger of my own life, an autonomous being who lives with a meaning I must make up for myself?

That’s the question being asked in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, a new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly that has received lots of praise, but also criticism.

Two American profs try to feed us a spoonful of hope in an era where spiritual nourishment — at least according to them — is almost nonexistent.

It’s a readable work of philosophy that argues that even if, for many readers, “God is dead,” they can still find “passionate engagement” in Western classics from Homer’s Iliad to Melville’s Moby Dick, which convey a spiritual experience and longing, even if such things are ignored or marginalized in our present secular culture.

The New York Times Book Review put an appreciative appraisal on its front cover. But in a cranky piece in the New York Review of Books, Gary Wills deemed it unbelievable, wrong-headed and superficial. Wills, an intellectual heavyweight and believing Catholic, found it full of inaccuracies and worse, saying it cheapened the “Big Thinkers” the authors were supposedly celebrating.

“Reader, put it down,” he writes, telling us in effect that only dummies need read it.

Now, the authors of All Things Shining are not callow lightweights. Dreyfus is a popular professor of philosophy in California with three Harvard degrees; Kelly, his protégé, is the youthful head of the philosophy department at Harvard. They come with shining credentials, which probably irritates their critics aplenty.

So what’s the spat about? Differences in the reading of theology and history, for sure, amounting to fine points of interpretation. But there’s something more. Dreyfus and Kelly, like so many writers, are trying to feed us a spoonful of hope in an era where spiritual nourishment — at least according to them — is almost nonexistent.

At the centre of this book is that familiar character of modernity: the empty, desiccated, abandoned shell of a human being, like the stumbling, forlorn vagabonds in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot — searching for God, maybe, but clueless and confused, ultimately walking on a road to nowhere.

Dreyfus and Kelly cast David Foster Wallace — the astonishing novelist and essayist who hanged himself in 2008 at the age of 46 — in the dubious role of our culture’s sacrificial victim. Acknowledging his profound, biological depression, they portray him as a modern exemplar of spiritual exhaustion, a person who believed that his prodigious creativity flowed from one source – his solitary ego. Kelly and Dreyfus call him “the greatest writer of his generation and perhaps the greatest mind altogether,” but they also suggest he couldn’t hack it. He could not be his own god, endlessly flowing with the beneficial blessings of his own “genius.” Instead, he felt drained and emptied, a modern hero defeated by his own ambition.

If Wallace, with all his talents and sheer brilliance, couldn’t be a god-like human, what hope is there for the rest of us? That’s the implicit question these philosophers ask. And you can guess the answer: even if we do possess supreme gifts, we’re all in a meaningless pickle.

Even if we do possess supreme gifts, we’re all in a meaningless pickle.

It may be unfair to hoist Wallace on the crucifix of modernity as an example of spiritual death — a victim of our age and a warning to the rest of us. But what’s the alternative? Well, this is where things get a little fuzzy, but remain interesting. Dreyfus and Kelly want to bring back the Greek gods — sort of. They admire the way Homeric figures like Helen and Achilles and the host of warriors and players opened themselves up to forces beyond themselves. These were heroes who knew they were not individualists. They were co-conspirators with a pantheon of gods, who filled their breasts with wisdom, courage and, at times, simple foolishness. Even Helen of Troy, who ran off with Paris to start the Trojan War, acted on impulses dictated from on high.

Now, you don’t have to be a Gary Wills to see this as balderdash. Dreyfus and Kelly ultimately believe that we live constrained lives and need to be receptive to powers beyond ourselves. We need to be open to mysterious and glorious forces in the world as they “swoosh” into us, like some exhilarating gasp from a stadium of sports fans watching a home run, game-winning goal or touchdown. In fact, our Harvard profs like this sports analogy. Swooshing occurs when fans rise to their feet to celebrate feats of transcendent athleticism.

Dreyfus and Kelly know the ancient Greeks believed in real gods, not just metaphors or vague longings. Does that mean we should set up pedestals to real gods? How about Mammon, the greedy god of money, or Aphrodite or Mercury, the goddess and god of sex or success, respectively? They’re already here — they’re called celebrities, and they swoosh into us from the media.

No, Dreyfus and Kelly are asking us to believe in forces beyond ourselves, even if we don’t quite believe in anything. Believe “as if” — then maybe something may stick.

It’s all pretty tricky. Maybe it does take three degrees to believe all this.

Ultimately, Dreyfus and his protégé are asking their students — and the rest of us rootless types — to find some spiritual grounding. It’s a worthwhile project, if a little doubtful, just reading the classics.