Sunday, March 14, 2021

Trying to Read Great Books

John Ehrett at Between 2 Kingdoms.

"it still makes me sad that a good number of my friends from college—all of whom share my same background of coursework in the Great Books and their ilk—have largely stopped reading classic texts and engaging with the 'great tradition' altogether. The explanation is usually straightforward: profound burnout and a sense that the key books have, for all intents and purposes, already been conquered. To the extent that the goal of liberal arts education is to cultivate an appetite for high-quality material that can be be enjoyed over a lifetime, something’s unfortunately getting lost in translation.

"If I had to speculate about why this pattern is so persistent, it’s worth noting that it can be oppressively difficult to find an entry point into a prominent author’s body of texts, particularly where that author has been prolific or is well known for one work in particular. (For instance, the colossal Summa Theologica is probably the worst place to start reading Thomas Aquinas. The far shorter De Ente et Essentia is a much better entry point ... .)"
The latter work, translated by Robert T. Miller, is available in the Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University. (I still have my copy of George G. Leckie's translation from my college days at a different Jesuit university.)

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volumes 19-20, and Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volumes 17-18.

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