Great Books and Western Studies

What is a "great book"? It is surely a book that stands re-reading many times, and deserves to be so read. And an educated person is one who knows the great books, and re-reads them. C.S. Lewis is quoted in Walter Hooper's Foreword to C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid (a wonderful new parallel text from Yale that could be used to teach Latin translation as well as introduce the Aeneid), as follows:

There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday's newspaper. One may have some hopes for a man who has never read the Odyssy, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick; but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells us he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk.

I feel better, now, about having read The Lord of the Rings so many times. Reading great books, however (even more than one), does not suffice to make a person educated. They need to be placed in a context, they need to be loved, and they need to open the door to other interests and other

Diagram of the cosmos

The Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey was underfoot when the Pope met the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2010, and when William married Kate in 2011. It is the traditional site of royal coronations -- 38 kings and queens have been crowned on this spot since 1268 (the symbolism of the ceremony is analysed by Aidan Nichols OP in his book The Realm). The Pavement is a kind of Western "mandala", a representation of the entire cosmos based on squares and circles and sacred numbers. I have posted about it before, but there are things to add. For one thing a much more detailed image of the entire Pavement is available here, on the Getty web-site.

The central disk of onyx represents the world, and the two sets of four roundels around it the four elements and four qualities unified by love, a symbol of the Great Chain of Being that bound the monarch to the lowliest subject and the highest angel under God, as in this fifteenth-century text:

"In this order, hot things are in harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, great with little, high with low. In this order, angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird and fish over fish, on the earth, in the air and in the sea: so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in the most harmonious concord. Hell alone, inhabited by none but sinners, asserts its claim to escape the embraces of this order." (Sir John Fortescue, trans. On Nature, 1492.)

There was a Latin inscription to accompany the Pavement which described the age of the world from beginning to end as 19,683 years - the lifespan of the macrocosm conceived as a living creature. However inaccurate this is in terms of modern cosmology, it was an attempt to make the Pavement an image of the whole of space-time. We lost our "Theory of Everything", and modern science has been trying to get it back ever since.

Post-secularism

C. John Sommerville's book is a brilliant indictment of the modern university. He writes about it in an article published in Reconsiderations, available online. As he says there, "Secularism is an impoverishment of thought. Religion can be a way of opening our minds, and quite relevant to intellectual questions," adding:

To be clear, accommodating Christian and other religious voices would not make universities Christian. They would remain secular in the sense of being neutral. Religion wouldn’t rule. But it need not be ruled out. Universities wouldn’t be officially Christian unless they somehow privileged Christian viewpoints. That would not be good even for those Christian viewpoints. We need to keep them honest, and you do that by leaving them open to discussion.

This seems to be a good example of the right kind of "post-secularism" -- what many Catholic thinkers these days are calling "a new secularity" genuinely open to truth, unlike the "liberalism" wrongly so called, which closes the mind in advance by operating with a narrow conception of both reason and freedom.

Communio - an introduction

One of the great resources of modern Catholic thought is the international review Communio, edited in the English language by David L. Schindler. Founded in the wake of the Second Vatican Council by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Josef Ratzinger with Henri de Lubac SJ and Louis Bouyer, with the support of Karol Wojtyla in Poland (later John Paul II), it has never sold in huge numbers but has had and is having a huge if indirect impact on the Catholic Church through the fact that many of its contributors and editors have been appointed bishops and cardinals, often placed in key positions (Francis George, Marc Ouellet, Christoph Schonborn, Angelo Scola, and of course Ratzinger himself are the most obvious). Communio theology is an expression of the Catholic ressourcement or "back to the sources" movement that partly influenced the liturgical movement and the Second Vatican Council, and is certainly now influencing their interpretation and consolidation under Pope Benedict.

All around the United States there are Communio circles that meet to discuss articles from recent issues, but in the UK there seem to be too few subscribers in any one place to make this viable. Even in the States, many readers find Communio hard going. (Second Spring was founded, in part, to offer a more accessible way into this tradition of Catholic thought.) But if you are seriously interested in creatively orthodox Catholic thought, Communio is indispensable. The journal has a News page which is a good place to start, and this has links to a number of articles.

I have selected several important Communio articles for our own site, which you can find under author in our Articles section linked from the menu at Second Spring. Look for example under Bouyer, Crawford, Granados, Hanby, Henrici, Kaveny, Lopez, Melina, Nault, Olsen, Ouellet,  Schindler (D.L.), Schindler (D.C.), Schonborn, Scola, Sicari - as well as, of course, Popes Benedict and John Paul II. There are also several recent ones on Catholic social teaching to be found in the articles section of our "Economy" site - Abela, Berry, Cloutier, Healy, Schindler (both), and Walker. And for an introduction to Balthasar go here. I hope to write more about Communio and education in the future.

Tolkien - some thoughts

Here are some thoughts on the possible use of The Lord of the Rings by homeschoolers.

The first thing is not to impose the book as a lesson, but introduce it naturally at an early stage. Reading to a child every day, for example as part of a bed-time ritual that can start as soon as the child is capable of gazing at a picture, is the foundation of everything. (You know this already.) In the case of Tolkien, there are books that can be used much earlier than LoR – his Father Christmas Letters, Smith of Wootton Major, and of course The Hobbit – as well as dozens of books by other authors that can be read in conjunction with these, books by the other Inklings, traditional folklore from all over the world, and of course many wonderful passages from the Bible. It doesn’t matter that one is reading a book where the vocabulary is difficult – the meaning of a word can often be gleaned from context, although you should encourage questions and have a dictionary to hand.

When it comes to LoR, reading aloud continues to be important long after the child can read for himself. The sound of the words is important. Spend a bit of time getting the pronunciation of the Elvish words right (the Appendices contain some guidance) – something I never did. The magic is in the language, as Tolkien would be the first to tell you.

Once the story itself has come alive in the child’s imagination, and perhaps after it has been read more than once, it becomes possible to explore a range of topics suggested by the book. Let’s consider Language, Philosophy, Religion, Nature, Geography, History, Mythology, and Art.

The Lord of the Rings for homeschoolers

 At a recent Tolkien-related event in Italy I was speaking about the theme of "friendship" in The Lord of the Rings. In a way it is could be called a central theme, since the story is all about a Fellowship. Of course the novel is about many other things as well. Tolkien himself said it was about Death and Immortality, and on another occasion that it was about "the ennoblement of the humble" (e.g. Sam Gamgee and the Hobbits). But it is also about Marriage, Myth and reality, Heroism and Virtue, Temptation and Freedom, Power (true and false), Beauty, Technology, Nature, Creativity, Social Order, the Fall, and Language.... The novel could also be used quite naturally by home-schoolers to get children interested in and thinking about Geography, History, Ethics, Politics, Language, Poetry, Natural History, Mythology, and Philosophy. Is anyone interested in hearing more about this idea?