The latest issue of Crisis has an irresistible column about a subject I'm a sucker for....which three books "would explain in clear, profound, and incisive terms the whole structure of human life, its destiny, and how it stands before God and the world"?
That's all I ask. Fortunately, Rev. James Schall is up to the challenge. Here's an excerpt:
I am aware that the disorders in the world stem mainly from the will, not the mind, even though a mind component is found in any disorder or sin. Often in my thoughts I mull over what I would recommend to someone who really wants to know the truth of things. What would I tell him? Where would I tell him to go? Whom should he consult? I have multi-lists of ten books, 20 books, 25 books. “Acquire these,” I tell anyone who will listen.
I know about Scripture, Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and the rest. I have long given out lists of what I call “minor” classics, books that no one tells us about in the university or in the culture, but books that nevertheless explain the essence and right order of things. At the top of this list is probably, for me, Chesterton. Nothing is quite like him...
Read carefully and leisurely together, [the following three] books give a better and more coherent overall picture of the unity of intellectual things, the relation of reason and revelation, the order of knowledge, the meaning of modern thought, of virtue and vice, than anything else that one could read, except perhaps Chesterton.
These three books are the following: (1) Josef Pieper: An Anthology (the German book); (2) Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien; and (3) Ralph McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life. None of these books is very long. Each is relatively easy to read. All three are as profound as any book ever written. They all deal with what is.
These books cover every issue of any importance about how to live and what is true. Each of the authors knows classic and modern thought. None of these books intends to be apologetic; yet taken together, they constitute the finest apologetic imaginable. They are all lyrical. They deal with evil. They take us to the order of things in a way that nothing else will in quite the same way. “Read them!”
--Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., teaches political science at Georgetown University
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