Lenten Reading
What is my Lenten reading? Glad you asked.
THE GREAT HERESIES by Hillaire Belloc: a book I’d recommend to anyone with any interest in history, in Europe, or in Christendom. Belloc takes in insiders view on the Arian Heresy, the great and enduring heresy of Mohammedanism, the Albigensian, the Protestant, and what he calls the Modern Attack (because he was unwilling, wisely, to call it by its right name).
He selects these five because each represents a specific type of attack: Arianism attacked doctrine from within, Mohammedanism attacks by force from without, Albigensianism attacked morals, Protestantism attacks the essential concept of Christian unity and organization, and Modernism attacks the essential concepts of faith and reason.
I myself got a lot more out of this book because I had previously read a more thorough and scholarly work on the topic: HISTORY OF HERESIES AND THEIR REFUTATION by St Alphonsus M Liguori.
I confess that St Alphonsus created in me a lingering admiration for the classical heretics of the first four centuries of the Christian Era, since they showed more wildness in their imaginings. Gnostics, Collyridians, and Docetism, especially that version where Christ substituted a wrongdoer on the Cross to die in His stead, while he stood nearby, mocking and laughing.
I also admire the Circumcellions (or Agonistici) who traveled the highways seeking martyrdom by asking any stray traveler to smite them, and menacing whoever refused. They condemned property and slavery, and advocated free love, canceling debt, and freeing slaves.
Both books are in the public domain.
12 RULES FOR LIFE by Jordan Peterson: aside from an unsightly admiration for Nietzsche, and deep misunderstanding of the role of the Catholic Church (which he calls “organized religion”) in intellectual freedom, it is a striking and insightful work.
ORTHODOXY by G.K. Chesterton: a work well worthy of rereading, which I have, perhaps reread too often, since I practically have the darned thing memorized. He is like the more ornate and rococo version of CS Lewis, and the mentor of Lewis. He also, like Lewis, showed nigh-prophetic insights into the modern world decades in advance.
IMITATION OF CHRIST by Thomas a Kempis: The book, like most medieval books I have had the pleasure of encountering, is logical, straightforward, clear, humble and direct.
I have no idea how anyone who reads the intellectual products of the medieval as opposed to the classical or the modern age can maintain the illusion that our modern intellectual chaos, or the primitive fits and starts of the classical authors, are somehow dizzyingly superior to the medievals, the men who invented the university system, and formalized the rules of logic. What have modern men done to universities, aside from quell academic freedom and turn our children into braindead, screaming zombies?
I suppose people are deceived by the term ‘Dark Ages’, as if there had been a light in the ancient world extinguished by the Church, but which escaped to flare up again under the breathe of Hobbes, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Marx, Stalin and other torch-bearers of the bright future.
Let me suggest instead that the classical world celebrated slavery, sodomy, polygamy, pederasty, and allowed for divorce, contraception, and exposing unwanted infants to the elements; that the Christian world celebrated monogamy and monotheism, and developed the sole coherent and universal worldview ever attempted, eventually abolishing slavery; that the moderns reintroduced divorce, then contraception, then infanticide of the unborn, and now we celebrate pederasty and sodomy once more. And the slave trade is back.
GALAXY’S EDGE: LEGIONNAIRE by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole: technically, this is not Lenten reading, but it is rollicking good Mil-SF, which is not a genre I normally visit. Footsloggers in Afghanistan, but in space. Think of STARSHIP TROOPERS but with no power armor, no civic lessons, no character arc, and no lectures. Just non-stop action, and a salute to band-of-brotherhood, unit cohesion, esprit de corps. It is what the liveaction GI Joe movies were lacking.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
