Fr. James V. Schall

“On Leisure and Culture: Why Human Things Exist and Why They Are ‘Unimportant’”

Originally published in Modern Age Fall 2004, vol. 46, no. 4

Let me begin by citing two passages that graphically underscore the themes I wish to consider here — the things of leisure and culture, of what is and its surprising origins. The first lines are from Gregory of Nazianzen, the great Eastern theologian:

What benefactor has enabled you to look out upon the beauty of the sky, the sun in its course, the circle of the moon, the countless number of stars, with the harmony and order that are theirs, like the music of a harp? Who has blessed you with rain, with the art of husbandry, with different kinds of food, with the arts, with houses, with laws, with states, with a life of humanity and culture, with friendship and the easy familiarity of kinship?¹

The second is from the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga:

Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms…. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure.²

In each of these citations, we are admonished to do things that seem utterly useless, things not necessarily senseless, but still impractical.

Beholding the beauty of the sky or counting, as Gregory calls them, the “countless stars,” is really not good for much. No doubt, it can prod us to wonder why things are in this way, in this order, rather than in some other arrangement. It might even impel us to send up a few spaceships to have a look about. Yet, Gregory obviously thinks what we gain from this contemplation of the heavens is well worth our efforts. And what is this about civilization “always presupposing limitation and the mastery of self?” Surely Huizinga is being ironic?

Yet, the things of civilization are also mentioned — art, houses, harps, food, laws, and “the life of humanity and culture.” Gregory understands these latter things, except for the rain, have a human component. But we still should wonder why we are said to be “blessed” with such humanly-fashioned things, almost as if they were “intended” for us to bring forth. They obviously refer us to a source not ourselves. We realize, at least implicitly, we did not cause ourselves to be, to stand outside of nothingness. If cultural artifacts exist in some abundance, still they had to be brought forth by a being who had the capacity to create or develop them. But we did not give to ourselves this artistic or craft capacity to make or order things, any more than we created the beauty of the heavens or the countless stars.

In order that something higher might be achieved among us than just our essential being, we need to act. Rules and limitations, as Huizinga paradoxically tells us, therefore, need themselves to be discovered, formulated, and, more importantly, “freely accepted.” So our limitation and our freedom are not necessarily and always at loggerheads, as we are sometimes told. We need one for the other. Our freedom is directed to what is; we do not make or create either reality or our capacity of free will. To make a choice to have this thing is simultaneously to make a choice not to have that thing. We are only free to play the game if we agree to abide by its rules that limit us to play in the way the game is played. Otherwise, with no rules freely accepted, it is not a game and no one will play with us on any other terms. What the game is, its truth, limits our freedom to play it, that is, makes us free to play it because we accept the rules.

What is implied here is our human life in the universe reveals something of this same structure, of knowing what we are, of learning the measure or rules of our being, of freely accepting them in order that we might be what we are intended to be, human beings, not toads or gods. We seem, by being what we are, as Plato taught us, to be ordered to “play” or to participate in some transcendent game or design whose rules we do not ourselves fashion.³ Huizinga also observes civilization itself requires a sense of limit and self-mastery. We cannot play a game while changing its rules in the midst of the playing. We cannot create a human culture while changing the structure of what it is to be human. “Man does not make himself to be man,” as Aristotle told us. He is already man, not of his own making. This fact itself is cause, in our souls, of the most curious of self-reflection. What is the ground of our being if we are not? The very faculty by which we consider what we are is already present in us, almost as if to say we are meant to reflect on how we could ever come to exist since we did not cause the sorts of beings we are to come to be in the first place.

Why do things exist rather than not exist? If precisely “nothing,” in the most literal sense of the word, ever once, as it were, “existed,” no thing would still “exist.” Ex nihilo, nihil fit — a most basic of first principles of being. Why, among the vast diversity of things that do exist, are there also human things, clearly different from non-human things both above us and below us on the scale of being? Why does the existence of human things include the capacity to know the other things that are? Why can we only know ourselves by first knowing something that is not ourselves? And are these things that exist, human and non-human things, “important?” Important to whom? To what? For what?

We like to agree with Aristotle nothing is made “in vain,” especially ourselves. Yet, who or what might “need” us, or at least want us to be? Leisure and culture are the conditions and circumstances in which we try to respond to such questions. These are the things we do when all else is done. Our lives are not, and cannot be, exhausted in the necessary. Our being is not intended merely to keep us in existence as if just living were our highest good. We know the purpose of a doctor when we are sick, namely to restore us to health. But what if we are “healthy”? What are the activities of health that fill our days? Surely they do not consist merely in efforts to keep us alive. We would like to know the answers to questions about what is just because we would like to know, just because knowing itself is a delight.

At first sight at least, such sophisticated-sounding notions as leisure and culture seem relatively insignificant compared to making and acquiring the basic necessities of life — food, clothing, shelter, economics, the production of things, war, trade. We are incessantly being urged by our churches, by our voluntary agencies, by our media to concern ourselves with the needy and the poor of various sorts. We sometimes wonder if this latter concern is not in itself an escape from or avoidance of more fundamental questions. With so many things wrong or lacking in the world, in any case, why on earth, of all things, are we to be worried about “culture” and “leisure?”

Is not this leisure something we cannot “afford?” And “culture” comes from cultus, the notion the highest things arise from ritual worship of the gods. Could anything be more fanciful? This same accusation, of course, was that which used to be leveled at believers by Epicureans, Marxists, and sundry militant atheist positions. The concern for the highest things, it was charged with some urgency, deflected us from those things that must be done for the good of the world. Culture, religion, leisure, worship were luxuries we cannot afford. It is because of them, it was charged, that the more “basic” things were neglected.

Yet, there are those who suspect if we do not concern ourselves with things that are not “necessary,” not “important,” we will never really get to those things that are commonly thought to be necessary in a worldly sense. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” At first sight, such an admonition, even with its scriptural authority, seems absurd. It advocates the wrong priority. If we first produce “all these things” by ourselves, we then can worry about the highest things in good time. They might be nice, but we can get along fine without them. Surely we can only worry about the Kingdom of God after we have enough material things. Then we can waste time on such fanciful questions for which no one has any clear answers anyhow.

Nonetheless, Aristotle himself did tell us, in a famous passage, not to follow “those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but [we] must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything” (1177b31–78a2). Human things are political and economic things. While not to be neglected, they are not of highest importance. We must “strain” ourselves to seek the highest things. Aristotle clearly thinks we can miss knowing what is important by concentrating merely on what we are in this world and its mortal activities.

We cannot, however, forget that haunting passage in The Brothers Karamazov in which we are warned ultimately men would prefer bread to freedom. “For the mystery of man’s being,” we read in Dostoevsky, “is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.” Such are indeed somber, yet also hopeful, words in these days of rapid population decline in Europe and in America, the effects of the culture of death. But these words remain apt commentary on the notion man does not live by bread alone, a remark addressed to, of all people, the Devil himself by Christ in the desert. The man who lives “by bread alone” is the man who lacks both culture and leisure.

To entitle, as I have, a book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, leaves one open to certain obvious charges of denigrating the ordinary affairs of men, affairs most people take to be precisely “serious,” the ones on which they spend the most time. While both accepting the validity of the point being made, the first two reviews I saw of this book, both written fairly soon after September 11, 2001, mentioned in fact the paradox of a book suggesting human affairs were “unserious” over against the obvious dangers and perils of a new war and numerous signs of cultural decay. The book was written before September 11, though it was not actually brought out until December of 2001. In the meantime, I had written a number of hawkish analyses of the current war against “terrorism,” as it is called, the general outlines of which I approved. I likewise agree many signs exist of — again to use that pressing word — “serious” civil decay, signs from rapid loss of population in the West, to the disorders in the family, to the legal reversal of many former sins so that they become “rights.”

But, to put things in perspective, I had come across C. S. Lewis’s famous lecture “Learning in Wartime,” given at Oxford in October of 1939, in which he said

The war creates no absolutely new situation. It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.⁴

From an eternal point of view, there seems to be little evidence fewer love God in wartime than in peacetime. In fact, Scripture itself seems to suggest, in many ways, times of prosperity and riches are more morally dangerous than times of want and poverty. Nothing suggests the poor of this world reach eternal life proportionally less frequently than the rich. The old monastic literature seemed to be more concerned about the souls of monks in times of peace than in times of trial. Our sociological surveys likewise tell us breakdowns in families, in society, in morality are much deeper in times of civilization and peace than in times of war when we are more likely to call upon the Lord, or at least see the need of some duty and honor.

But what about this notion of the “unseriousness of human affairs?” As I remind my friends, this title has a classical reference any cultivated person should immediately recognize. It comes from a passage in the Seventh Book of Plato’s Laws. The context is essential for us to understand. Plato does not think political and economic affairs are worth nothing. He grants them “a certain importance.” He is aware much of our time and energy are spent on them. But he asks of their relative importance not in light of themselves but in light of something more fascinating and absorbing. If we realize Plato tells us what is in fact “serious,” we will better understand what he means when he tells us our human affairs are “unserious.” What is serious, of course, is God.

In Plato there is nothing of the idea of “obligation” or “duty,” as we often think of our relation to God. Everything is rather a spontaneous reaction to the beholding of what is beautiful. The commandments themselves of course tell us to keep holy the Sabbath Day. They identify the Lord, our God. But revelation does not replace Plato’s main point here, rather it reinforces it. If we are admonished to keep holy the Sabbath or not to take the name of the Lord in vain, we are not to think obeying such admonitions is the essence of what revelation is telling us. We human beings are easily distracted, both to ourselves, and to our own affairs.

The first three commandments of the Decalogue point not to ourselves, but to God. And our relation to God, as Plato intimated, is one rather closer to play than to work. It is one of those things that are “for its own sake” and not for anything we might receive. Josef Pieper put it well in his classic book Leisure: The Basis of Culture: “And as it is written in the Scripture, God saw, when ‘he rested from all the works that He had made,’ that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.”⁵ Not only does God delight in His creation, but His creation is to delight in what exists. Human sin, in this sense, might well be called the “disappointment of God” in the creatures not delighting both in God and in what He has made.

The point is we are to respond both to creation and to God not after the manner of need but of true delight. It is bound up with the very idea God is complete in Himself, that He need not create anything, that if anything besides God does exist, it does not change God. We exist then not out of a need God had for anything, as if He lacked something, but out of His superabundance. And if God alone is “serious,” it can only mean He does not lack anything including our praise or worship. Yet, this is why we exist. We are the creatures who exist to acknowledge in the universe the glory of God in itself, for its own sake. The completion of the universe in some sense includes this chance the free creature will recognize what is not himself, will recognize God and respond to Him simply because of what He is.

The difference between ourselves and Plato is largely due to the fact, with revelation, we have been given the proper way to express an appropriate worship of God. This is what the Mass is all about. It is that worship for its own sake because of the Incarnate God who offers this Sacrifice in our name, in our presence. Moreover, the word “serious” when applied to God does not imply a lack of delight and joy. It is in fact to be surrounded by music and song. But also it implies an accurate knowledge of God. Our worship has and must have an intellectual component. This is why the Church insists we recite the Creed each Sunday, the Creed which begins “Credo in unum Deum….” “I believe.”

The two words “leisure” and “culture” have curious meanings and origins. There is a famous discussion in Aristotle about health and the activities of health. He asks, in effect, what is the difference between what a doctor does and what a healthy man does? The point can be made indirectly. When a man is not healthy, he sees the doctor to help him become healthy. The doctor does not decide what it is to be healthy. But beginning from not being healthy, he decides how to restore us to health. Once we are restored to health, we have no desire or need to see the doctor, ever again. So the activity of the doctor has a natural limit or purpose, namely, what it is to be healthy, something the doctor does not constitute but only serves. If a doctor wonders about whether he should aid us in becoming healthy, he ceases to be ruled by the end of medicine and becomes a danger to all of us.

But once I am healthy, what do I do? What are the “activities” of health? We can only answer such a question by knowing what we are. The specialist in what to do once we are healthy is not the doctor. True, we can exercise, diet, brush our teeth daily in order to remain healthy, but these are not the activities of health. In short, all those activities or professions primarily geared to keeping us healthy or in being, worthy as they are, are not what we represent. I revert back to the word “strain” Aristotle used when he told us to use every faculty we had to know as much as we could about the highest things, about what is, even if it be little.

What is leisure about? Essentially, it is about knowing, and knowing the truth, “to know of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is not,” to cite Plato. In an old Peanuts, we see Charlie on the mound. He is earnestly looking at Lucy wearing what looks like an oversized baseball cap. She tells him, “Does this look all right? I’ve got the ball under my cap. I’m pulling the old hidden ball trick!” As Lucy walks away, we see Charlie on the mound yelling at Lucy who has a frown on her face, “How are we going to start the game if you have the ball under your cap?” In the final scene, Lucy turns around angrily to shout back at Charlie, “Do I have to think of everything?”⁶ I suppose the proper answer to this exasperated question of Lucy is, “No, but you can think of anything.” This is precisely the Aristotelian definition of intellect: the capacity to know all things, to know what is. But it is not necessary that we think of everything, but we can, we have the capacity to do so. What we lack is time and opportunity — which just may be why we are given eternal life. “Thinking of everything,” especially the highest things, is precisely what we are about, even in this world.

But we are not just “thinking machines,” not just disembodied spirits. Every truth can have a reflection in our world, in this world within our own minds. We often forget there is a pleasure also in just knowing, for no other reason than that we want to know something, to know its truth. We are indeed the lowest of the spiritual beings; we have to know first by knowing through material things. But we do know this way. And our knowing of things not ourselves is part of the “redemption,” as it were, of those things that have no intelligence, and even more so of those that do. We want to know most of all other persons, other spiritual beings precisely in their inner souls. We have a suspicion we do not fully “exist” until we too are fully “known.”

Thus if our affairs are “unserious,” if God could do without us, how do we go about thinking of those dire threats against living improperly that seem to come from revelation itself? Indeed, they even come from Plato. God, if I might put it that way, seems to be in the situation of someone trying to enable or to encourage someone to enjoy the very best thing possible or even imaginable. But no matter what He does, the other person will not accept what is offered. And the only way the latter can have this gift is if he freely accepts it. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy,

…to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn’t. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man “damned”: but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.⁷

However we construe it, and adventure it is, if we refuse the gift offered freely to us, we must live with that refusal. And in this case, God could not give us His life unless we freely chose it. There is no datur tertium, no way to accept what it is unwillingly.

Even our taking ourselves seriously is suffused with laughter. I once came across the following item in a book called Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac. John XXIII is reported to have said “it often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.”⁸ We would be in a terrible fix, I suspect, if our popes did not have some sense of the unseriousness of even their serious lives.

The subtitle of these reflections is “Why Human Things Exist and Why They Are ‘Unimportant.’” Human things exist but not of their own making. The cultural things of human making presuppose beings that did not make themselves. Human beings exist out of a superabundance of God who need not have created them. They are thus “unimportant” in comparison to their cause. But they are precisely human beings. This means they are beings with hands, passions, brains, and free wills. God deals with them according to what they are.

If I give a gift to someone I love, I do not want that gift to command or to coerce the elation of the receiver. Rather, I want the receiver really to delight in the gift and in the fact I gave it. Joy is the delight in having what we love. Our unimportance in one sense means we take a chance in our givings. We do not know what someone will make of our beautiful gift, and a part of ourselves. It means nothing to us, but disappointment, if we receive back an artificial or strained thanks. We want the thanks to be really from the freedom and the understanding, from the being of our love.

If we say we want to know certain things not for our sakes but “for their own sakes,” it means we can actually behold the existence and beauty of something, respond to it because we really know what it is. Paradoxically, in the background of this consideration is Augustine’s reminder we are made for God from the beginning and we cannot cease until we discover the rest for which we were intended. Yet, this is said not to depreciate or to minimize the beauty of the things that are not God.

Cultus and skole, culture and leisure mean we accomplish the highest purpose in creation not in necessity or in obligation, but in delight and in freedom. What we really want is what is given to us. God, for His own part, does not want our praise because He commands it. He wants it because we see what God is, is indeed lovely, worth our awe. What we create in our human way, in our leisure and culture, ought primarily to arise out of this initial realization. The world is only complete when finite beauty is the free response to divine beauty. Only God is “serious,” Plato told us. All else is “unserious.” But the seriousness that is God can only mean He prefers we love Him for His own sake, for the sake of His beauty, because we “see” it, delight in it, after the manner in which it is given to us, as a grace we can chose not to accept. Without this possibility of refusal, there would be no adventure, human or divine.

Endnotes

Fr. James V. Schall

For quite some time, Fr. James V. Schall has been my favorite living author.  His On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs and The Life of the Mind are essential reading for everyone who wants to understand what life is truly about.  For this last journal, I knew I wanted to get some of his work in here (whether he knew it or not), but I had difficulty choosing which of his essays to include, so I grabbed two mainly at random.  I figure he wouldn’t mind.

I. We are familiar with the incident in the Gospel of the rich young man who asked Christ what good he must do to be saved. Christ responded to him he must keep the commandments. This the young man had done from his youth, a fact Christ recognized in him. Christ added, in words that still force us to distinguish between “obligation” or “duty” and something more and different from it, if he wanted to be perfect, what he should do was to sell what he had, give it to the poor, and come follow Him. The Gospel records the young man did not follow this proposal, rather he “went away sad,” for, as it says in striking explanation, the young man “had many riches” (Matthew 19:16-23). We might suggest this rich young man was, as far as we can tell, one of Christ’s conspicuous failures along with, say, Judas, one of the thieves, the scribes, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and several of His hometown relatives.

Notice that Christ did not tell the young man to become an entrepreneur so he could create wealth to help the poor, though there is nothing wrong with this avenue. Nor did Christ “impose” a more perfect way on him. It was up to what the young man himself “wanted” to do with his life. Yet, even on reading this famous passage, a passage John Paul II referred to again and again when talking to youth from all countries, we have the distinct impression the rich young man, and perhaps the world itself, missed out on something because of his refusal.

If “ideas have consequences,” so, possibly more so, do choices — even refusals, which are likewise choices. Choices always have objects. There is no such thing as choice for choice’s own sake. It’s sophistry to maintain it is. We can suspect the young man’s talents, without his riches, or perhaps even with them, were needed elsewhere, perhaps later with Paul or Silas. Indeed, Paul was subjected to pretty much the same process, but he decided the other way, for which we can still be thankful as we read his Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Thessalonians, to Titus and Timothy. After all, when knocked to the ground on the way to Damascus, he could, after his eyes cleared up, gotten back up and walked away.

This memorable account of the rich young man reminds us not only is the world less when we do evil, but even when we do less than we are invited to do. It makes us wonder whether the world is founded in justice at all, in only what we are to render, in what we ought to do. Such a world would be rather dull, I think. It would lack the adventure we now find in it. While not denying their acknowledged worth, the highest things may be grounded in something quite beyond justice. An utterly “just world” may in fact be a world in which no one would really want to live. Justice is, as I call it, a terrible virtue. The fact God is not defeated by evil or even by a lesser good helps us to realize, with some comfort, I confess, we do not find only justice at the heart of what is. The great book that teaches this principle, above all, is C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, a book not to be missed.

My remarks obviously play on these words, “What must I do to be saved?” To be provocative, I ask, “What must I read to be saved?” I do not suggest Christ had His priorities wrong. When I mentioned this question…to a witty friend of mine, she immediately wanted to know whether any of my own books were included in this category of books “necessary-to-get-to-heaven?” I laughed and assured her indeed the opera omnia of Schall were essential to salvation!

The irony is not to be missed. We cannot point to any single book, including the Bible, and say absolutely everyone must actually read it, line by line, before he can be “saved.” If this were to be the case, few would be called and even fewer chosen. Heaven would, alas, be very sparsely populated. But I do think between acting and reading, even in the highest things, there is, in the ordinary course of things, some profound relationship. Acting is not apart from knowing, and knowing usually depends on reading.

II. Concerning books and getting to Heaven, however, let me note in the beginning, statistically, a good number of the people in the history of mankind who have ever been in fact saved were mostly what we today call “illiterate,” or at least not well educated. They were good people who did not know how to read, let alone write books. While Christianity does not at all disdain intelligence — quite the opposite, it thrives on it — still it does not simply identify what it means by “salvation” or “the gaining of eternal life” with education or literacy, in whatever language or discipline. In the long dispute over Socrates’ aphorism virtue is knowledge, Christians have generally sided with Aristotle, that fault and sin are not simply ignorance. Multiple doctorates, honorary or earned, will not necessarily get us to Heaven, nor, with any luck, will they prevent us from attaining this same happy goal.

Just as there are saints and sinners among the intelligentsia, so there are saints and sinners among those who cannot read and write. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn remarked Thomas Aquinas was the first saint ever canonized for doing nothing else but thinking. Yet, within the Christian tradition more than a suspicion exists the more intelligent we are and the more we consider ourselves to be “intellectuals,” the more difficult it is to save our souls. The sin of pride, of willfully making ourselves the center of the universe and the definers of right and wrong, is, in all likelihood, less tempting to those who do not read or who do not have doctorates in philosophy or science than it is to those who read learnedly, if not wisely. The fallen Lucifer was one of the most intelligent of the angels. His first sin was made possible by the order of his thought. No academic, I think, should forget Lucifer’s existence and his sobering story. It is not unrelated to a modern academic scholar. The figure of Lucifer should, in some form, appear on every campus as a reminder.

III. When we examine the infinitive, “to read,” moreover, it becomes clear a difference is found between being able to read and actually reading things of a certain seriousness, of a certain depth. Not that there is anything wrong with “light” reading. Indeed, the subtitle of one of my books, Idylls and Rambles — though again, need I remind you, it is not a book necessary for salvation! — is precisely “Lighter Christian Essays.” The truth of Christianity is not inimical to joy and laughter, but, as I think, it is ultimately a defender and promoter of them, including their literary expressions. I have always considered Peanuts and P. G. Wodehouse to be major theologians. In truth, it is the essential mission of Christian revelation to define what joy means and how it is possible for us to obtain it, that it is indeed not an illusion. The first thing to realize is joy is not “due” or “owed” to us.

J. R. R. Tolkien, in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” even invented a special word to describe this essence of Christianity. We are not, as it sometimes may seem, necessarily involved in a tragedy or a “catastrophe” but precisely in a Eucatastrophe. The Greek prefix “eu” — as in Eucharist — means happy or good. In the end, contrary to every expectation, things do turn out all right, as God intended from the beginning.² This is why in part the proper worship of God is our first, not our last task, perhaps even in education. In Josef Pieper: An Anthology, a book not to be missed, Pieper remarks further that joy is a by-product; it is the result of doing what we ought, not an object of our primary intention; ultimately, it is a gift.

“Faith,” St. Paul told us, “comes from hearing,” not evidently from “reading,” though this same Paul himself did a fair amount of writing. We presume he intended for us to read it all. It seems odd to imagine he wrote those letters to Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Ephesians with no expectation of results. When Paul remarked faith came by “hearing,” he probably did not mean to say it could not come “by reading.” We do hear of people who, as they say, “read themselves into the Church.” Chesterton, I think, was one of these. In classic theology, it is to be remembered, however, that unless we receive grace — itself not of our own fabrication — we will not have faith either by hearing or by reading or, in modern times, by watching television or Internet, themselves perhaps the most difficult ways of all!

Many, no doubt, have heard but have not believed. Paul tells of those, including himself, who, at the stoning of Stephen, put their hands over their ears so they could not hear what he was saying. Alcibiades tells of doing the same thing so he would not hear the persuasive words of Socrates. Christ said to St. Thomas the Twin, “Blessed are those who have not seen but who have believed.” Every time we read this passage, we are conscious we are among those blessed multitudes who have believed but who have not seen. And even our hearing, say in preaching and in Sunday sermons, usually comes from someone who has previously read, and hopefully read well.

The Apostle John affirms at the end of his Gospel, a document itself full of the word, “Word,” — in the beginning was the “Word,” “Word” made flesh — he in fact wrote the words we read and his testimony is true. As Benedict XVI says, “Deus Logos Est.” John also intimates, reminiscent of Plato, that many things are not recorded in books, even in all the books in the world. Yet, as the Church teaches us, the things the Lord taught and did that have in fact been handed down to us are sufficient for us. Sometimes, it is sobering to reflect the entire corpus of the New Testament covers a mere 243 pages in the English Revised Standard Edition. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be literate do not have to be “speed readers” to finish the New Testament many times over during our lives, even in the course of a few days, if we wish.

Whether all the books ever written in this world are contained in today’s libraries, or on the on-line facilities, I doubt. But a tremendous number of them are. One of the main problems with these comments on reading has to do with the sheer amount of books available to read, and yes, to re-read. I am fond of citing C. S. Lewis’s famous quip if you have only read a great book once, you have not read it at all. This pithy remark, of course, brings up the problem of what is a great book and why great books are really “great.” Even more, it asks whether “great” books exist that are not officially called great? Ought we to spend all our time, after all, on so-called “great” books? Leo Strauss once remarked that, in the end, the famed great books contradict each other. This fact led many a philosopher and many a student into relativism under the aegis of philosophic greatness. There are, as I think, “great books” that are not considered “great.”

The Web site of the Library of Congress informs us in 1992, the Library accessioned its 100 millionth item. The Library contains books in about 450 languages. I have friends who can handle fifteen or twenty languages. But I do not know anyone who can handle 450 different languages. No doubt considerable numbers of books have been added since 1992, and I do not mention the books in the British Museum or the Vatican Library, or the great French, German, Spanish, American, and Italian libraries, as well as others throughout the world.

When I was about eighteen in the army at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, I went into the post library, with time on my hands. I looked at all the stacks of books, but I realized I did not know what to read or where to begin to find out. It was a kind of revelation to me of that famous Socratic dictum of “knowing what I did not know.” Yet I knew, that, however logical, one did not go to the first book under the letter “A” to begin to read systematically all the books until one reached “Z.” First of all, it could not be done in one lifetime, even in a fairly small library, and secondly it would have promoted a mental hodge-podge.

At the beginning of the Summa, St. Thomas tells the young student an order of learning and knowledge exists that makes it possible to distinguish the important and the unimportant things. No library, I might add, is constructed on the order of St. Thomas’s Summa, which, I suspect, might tell us something about the limits of libraries, however good they might be. Again, we are not well advised to take some encyclopedia and begin with articles under “A” and read to those under “Z.” The order of knowing is crucial to us.

A famous quip claims “any man who says that he has read all the writings of St. Augustine is a liar.” Likewise, if we take St. Thomas, remembering he had no computer and he had at most twenty-six or twenty-seven years of life during which he could write anything before he died in 1274, we still find it almost impossible to believe he actually wrote all he did write. What he wrote was clearly dependent on what he also had read.

I recommend students to go over to the library and look up on the shelves the folio opera omnia of St. Augustine and St. Thomas. Students need to consider what sort of life one would have to lead in order to write, let alone understand, such a vast amount of work. Too, the students should reflect on what different kinds of life from each other these two great intellectual saints lived. Moreover, we shudder to think where we should be as a culture had, like the rich young man, Augustine or Aquinas chosen some other form of life, which they no doubt could have.

The story of how the works of Aristotle or Augustine were saved for posterity is itself another of the scary accounts of how, even though they wrote what they did, we almost lost what they wrote after it was written. Indeed, we did lose much of what Aristotle wrote, not to mention Cicero and other important thinkers. The very dialogue of Cicero that changed the life of the young Augustine, as he tells us in The Confessions, is now lost. We do not have it in the Library of Congress.

I was once on a division of the National Endowment for the Humanities that considered grants to libraries for the physical preservation of books and newspapers. It is astonishing over time how fragile our output of books and papers is, even with great preservation efforts. Of course, all our current “on-line” facilities, in which most of today’s writing and publishing first appears and, indeed, in which it is preserved, depend on a continuous supply of electricity, not to mention computers. It also depends on whether the barbarians get through the gate to destroy it. These latter technologies seem to defy both time and space in enabling us to send our latest thoughts around the world or across the street in an instant. But the question always remains whether we have anything to say and whether what we say is true or not.

IV. Each of my students is required to read what is said to be the most “immoral” expository book in the history of political philosophy. It is also a most famous and enticing book. Students are much attracted to it and by it. Many students, indeed, I have noticed, are charmed by it. I am charmed by it myself. We are naive if we think the difference between good and evil is always easily recognizable, let alone easy to choose between, even when we do recognize it.

This book, of course, is Machiavelli’s Prince. The book originally was given as a gift to the ruler of Florence, almost as if he did not himself know how to rule. It sketched how a prince would sometimes, perhaps often, have to do bad things in order to keep in power. So long as we think it is a good thing to stay in power no matter what, then Machiavelli’s advice becomes a lesson in how to do it, especially on the “no-matter-what” part of his advice. Evidently, in such a view, what makes good men to be bad princes is the restriction on their actions imposed on them by the classical distinctions of good and evil. The prince, liberated from restriction, would presumably be a more “successful” ruler, if not a better man.

In the course of his book, Machiavelli tells us, with some paradox, that all armed prophets succeed and all unarmed prophets fail. At first sight, this teaching will seem quite logical until we remember Machiavelli himself was neither a prophet nor a prince. If this is the case, that he was a minor diplomat and not a prince, it seems paradoxical he thought his own unarmed life was worthwhile. Machiavelli hints his real foes are men who did not write books, namely, Socrates and Christ. Both Socrates and Christ were, moreover, unarmed prophets, as was Machiavelli himself. But Machiavelli did write a book. Neither Socrates nor Christ wrote one.

What, then, can Machiavelli mean when he says Christ and Socrates were “unsuccessful?” Socrates needed Plato to write about him. Christ needed the Evangelists and Paul. Evidently, Machiavelli thought he had to undermine, not the armed prophets, but the unarmed prophets. Who was Machiavelli’s audience, then? Was it Lorenzo, the prince? It hardly seems likely. By writing a charming book, Machiavelli sought to entice generations of students and students-become-rulers to his principles. These readers encounter something that, if they follow its suggestions, will not save them. Machiavelli wrote to turn the souls of potential philosophers away from Socrates and Christ. Unless he could manage this “conversion,” the world could not be built on his “modern” political principles. To follow Machiavelli’s tract, we must cease to be interested, as was Socrates, in immortality, or like Christ in first seeking the Kingdom of God.

Do I think The Prince to be one of the books we must “read” to be saved? I do indeed. The knowledge of what one ought not to do is not a bad thing. It can be, but as such, it is not. It is good to know the dimensions of what is persuasively wrong. We ought to encounter disorder in thought before we encounter it, and especially before we duplicate it, in reality. It was Aristotle, I believe, who remarked virtue can know vice, but vice does not know virtue.

V. What must I read to be saved? When classes were over one spring, I received an e-mail from one of my students who had arrived back at his family home. He wrote:

I have found something interesting while talking to my friends here at home…. Many of my peers have fallen into the trap of moral relativism. They have accepted education as a means to an end. It is very disheartening. I was wondering if you had … any … suggested readings for this subject of the relativism of my generation? Many of my friends feel that religion or spirituality is a private thing, and one ought not question another’s belief system. Everything is personal and therefore out of the realm of criticism. I think someone wrote something about how an affirmation of morality, religion, and ethics as a “private” enterprise, is in itself a moral statement.

No doubt, readers will recognize the sentiment expressed here. It reminds me of the famous passage in Allan Bloom’s 1986 book The Closing of the American Mind: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”³ We wonder: “Does this relativism have a history?”

In a two-frame Peanuts comic strip, Sally is shown sitting upright in a formal chair staring at the television in front of her. From the television she hears the following announcement: “And now it’s time for…” In the second scene Sally, with determination, points the remote control, which looks like a gun, at the machine and firmly announces: “No it isn’t!” The last thing we see is a printed click.⁴ Sally shoots point blank to kill the monster before her. I cite this colorful little snippet in the context of “what must I read to be saved” because it makes the graphic point we each must simply shut things off in order to come into some possibility of knowing what all that is is about.

So I am going to propose, with some rashness perhaps, a brief list of ten books that, when read, will perhaps save us or at least bring us more directly to what it is that does save us, faith and grace and good sense. The writers of the books I select will all, I think, accept the proposition saving our souls and saving our minds are interrelated. We do not live in a chaos, though we can choose one of our own making.

Basically, I think if there is something wrong with the way one lives, it is because of the way one thinks. However, I am most sensitive to Aristotle’s observation often how we live and want to live prevent us from clearly looking at what is true. Our minds see the direction truth leads and often we do not want to go there. In short, there is no way around anyone’s will, but the shortest way is go follow Sally’s example, click off the screens that keep us in mere spectatorship and take up the much more active occupation of reading for understanding what it is all about. 

These, then, are the ten books:

One might object, “Only Dostoyevsky is a classic and it is long. What about John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope? Or Benedict’s Encyclical on Love?” Read them! What about the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle? Read them! And Augustine’s Confessions? Never to be missed. What about Schall’s opera omnia? For Heaven’s sake, read them!

I do not want to “defend” my list against other lists. I can make up a dozen other lists myself. The only really long book in my list is Dostoyevsky, which takes some time to read. Gilson’s book requires attention but it is manageable by most people. Most are short, easy to read. All should be read many times. The point about this list, however, as I see it, is if someone reads each of the books, probably in whatever order, but still all of them, he will acquire a sense that, in spite of it all, there is an intelligibility in things that does undergird not only our lives in this world but our destiny or salvation.

Again, a relation exists between what we think and what we do. We can think rightly and still lose our souls, to be sure. But it is more difficult. The main point is the intelligibility of revelation is also addressed to our own intelligence. We need to be assured what we believe makes sense on any rational criteria. Lest I err, a reading of each of these books will point us in the right direction — one that indicates at the same time how much we have yet to know, including the completion of God’s plan for us itself, but also how much we can know midst what often appears as a chaos of conflicting opinion. But to obtain the impact of these readings I intend, one does have to click off the screens and the noises that prevent us from encountering writers, often delightful writers, who so clearly wrestle with the reality of the things that are, including the ultimate things.

Endnotes