The Prodding of Father Schall

The more I read of Father James Schall's essays, the more I realize there are books I still need to read or reread.

One issue for me is that I was a literature major and a philosophy minor back in the 1970's - and I finished my masters in literature in 1982. At the same time, I was also going through a period of rediscovering my faith. In the period from roughly 1972-82 I read incessantly, both for my classes, and for my own spiritual/religious growth.

So there are many books I read - but I did so some 40-50 years ago. I've begun to reread those works, but Father Schall's essays are spurring me to do so more diligently. Indeed, he cites C.S. Lewis - a writer whose works I need to reread! - on rereading:

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”  

There are some works I have read and reread because I taught them - To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, Romeo and juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Pride and Prejudice, and so on. But given that I was teaching them, they don't count. And to my credit since retiring i have gone back to reread some books (most recently, Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey). 

Among the titles that Schall brings up and that I read back in my decade-long binge are Dostoyevsky's  The Brothers Karamazov, St. Augustine's Confessions, several books by C.S. Lewis, and, as I noted in a previous post, various writings by Plato and Aristotle.I could add to those title More's Utopia.

Among the works he brought up that I have never read are St. Augustine's City of God, Boswell's Life of Johnson. sermons by St. John Henry Newman, and essays by Belloc.   

Related to Father Schall's suggestions are the works cited by Joseph Pearce in his Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know.  

Using those two mentors, among the works I need to read or reread are:

The Republic, and various Dialogues (Plato)

The Confession (St. Augustine)

City of God (St. Augustine)

The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius)

Utopia (More)

Life of Johnson (Boswell)

The Way of the Pilgrim

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)

Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)

Various works by Belloc

The Pilgrim's Regress (Lewis) 

The Great Divorce (Lewis)

The Weight of Glory (Lewis)

Mere Christianity (Lewis)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn)

Okay Father Schall (and others) - I'll get to them next year!

Pax et bonum