ROMAN GUARDINI

Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, Introduction by Frederik D, Wilhelmsen, Foreword by Richard John Neuhaus (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books/ Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998) (From the 'Foreword': "The question is not whether the glass is half full or half empty, but what do you do when you know it's empty." Id. at x. "From the 'Introduction': "Mass man is a man without a personality." Id. at xx. From 'The End of the Modern World': A Search for Orientation: "Where is the place of man? The question seeks answer not merely as to the place man shares in nature with all corporeal things, but answer above all as to his existential place. Where is man's place in being?" 'The Middle Ages answered the question by insisting that man's place was the earth and the earth was the center of the universe. That answer upheld man, satisfied him in the wholeness of his responsibility, his dignity and his being. The new astronomy, however, threw the earth out of its old position; at first it lost its place as the center of the cosmos becoming only one of he planets which circled the sun. Then, to worsen the problem, the solar system itself was absorbed within an unlimited universe, from the cosmological point of view the earth had lost all significance, Where then can man be" Id. at 45-46. From 'Power and Responsibility: A Course of Action for the New Age': "[W]e do well to realize at last that there has never been greatness without asceticism, and what is needed today is something not only great, but ultimate: we must decide whether we are going to realize the requirements of rule in freedom or in slavery." "An ascetic is a man who has himself well in hand. To be capable of this, he must recognize the wrongs within himself and set about righting them. He must regulate his physical as well as his intellectual appetites, educate himself to hold his possessions in freedom, sacrificing the lesser for the greater. He must fight for inner health and freedom--against the machinations of advertising, the flood of loud sensationalism, against noise in all its forms. He must acquire a certain distance from things; must train himself to think independently, to resist what 'they' say. Street, traffic, newspaper, radio, screen, and television all present problems of self-discipline, indeed of the most elementary self-defense--problems we hardly suspect, to say nothing of tackling. Everywhere man is capitulating to the force of barbarism. Asceticism is the refusal to capitulate, the determination to fight them, there at the key bastion--namely, in ourselves. It means that through self-discipline and self-restraint he develops from the core outward, holding life high in honor so that it may be fruitful on the level of its deepest significance." Id. at 217-218.).

WAS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY REALLY MODERN IN TEMPER?

Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 2d. ed., foreword by Johnson Kent Wright (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2003).

TEACH THE UNLEARNED

Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, selected and translated from the German by Oliver Davies (New York: Penguin Books, 1994) ("A pagan master, Seneca, says: 'We should speak of things that are great and sublime with  minds that are great and sublime and with an exalted soul.' They will say that such teachings should not be spoken and written down for unlearned people. To this I say that if we do not teach the unlearned, then no one will be learned and no one will be able to speak or write. The unlearned are taught so that they may become learned. If there were nothing new, then there could be nothing that is old. " Id. at 94.).

BE ALWAYS READING AND BE CIVILIZED!

Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("To generations of students, astonished by his prodigious literary memory, he [that is, C. S. Lewis] would give this simple counsel: 'The great thing is to be always reading but never to get bored--treat it not like work, more as vice!'" Id. at 41. "'Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on,' wrote Tolkien to Christopher near the end of the war. The worldwide carnage embittered him, as did the jingoistic jubilation of British citizens as Allied troops pressed forward to victory: 'There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted.'" Id. at 343-344.).

THE PLOWMAN'S VISION

William Langland, The Vision of Piers the Plowman, Middle English Text with the Donaldson Translation, edited by Elizabeth Robertson & Stephen H. A. Shepherd, introduced by Bernard O'Donoghue, & illustrated by Harry Brockway (London: The Folio Society, 2014).

VALUES

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition), with a new introduction by the author (New York: William Morrow, 1974, 1999) ("Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts." Id. at 310. "The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. [W]hen a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen . . . would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. . . . What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer 'holy ground.' The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestations." Id. at 149. "The real University . . . has no specific location, it owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself." Id. at 150. "[Robert Maynard] Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a 'good' education. Science is 'value free.' The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values." Id. at 342-343. Note: Pirsig is not a fan of Hutchins & Adler's project, The Great Books of the Western World, or at least not Aristotle, as a good source for "Quality," or values. I am, however.).

Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York: Bantam Press, 1991).

RELIGION

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD DEFINED RELIGION AS 'WHAT A MAN DOES WITH HIS SOLITARINESS.'

Carl Bielefeldt, Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley & London: U. of California Press, 1988).

Alain de Bottom, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (New York & London; Pantheon Books, 2012) ("To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused art graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives." "We have implicitly charged our higher education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended." Id. at 105-106. "To answer our longing for calm, Western consumer society has over the last fifty years refined the concept of sunbathing; Buddhism has takeover a thousand years to perfect the art of meditation." Id. at 152. "From the bookjacket: "Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it--because the world's religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Bottom (a non-believer himself) proposes that we look to religion for insights into how to, among other concerns, build a sense of community, make our relationships last, overcome feeling of envy and inadequacy, inspire travel and reconnect with the natural world.").

Robert E. Buswell Jr., & Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014).

Jack Miles, Wendy Doniger, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., & James Robson, eds., The Norton Anthology of World Religions Volume 1: Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism (New York & London: Norton, 2015) (See William Dalrymple, "Among Believers," NYT Book Review, Sunday12/21/2014.).

Jack Miles, David Biale, Lawrence S. Cunningham, & Jane Dammen McAuliffe, eds., The Norton Anthology of World Religions Volume 2: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (New York & London: Norton, 2015) (See Karen Armstrong, "Articles of Faith," NYT Book Review, Sunday12/21/2014.).

Gerard Russell, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (See Mohamad Bazzi, "Last Adherents," NYT Book Review, Sunday12/21/2014.).

Shinran, Shinran's Kyogyoshinsho: The Collection of Passages Expounding the True Teachings, Living, Faith, and Realizing of the Pure Land, translated by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, edited by The Center for Shin Buddhist Studies, under the Supervision of Sengaku Mayeda (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012).