Russ Reno, the Senior Editor at First Things, a clear Roman Catholic and catholic voice, opines regularly in the pages of the magazine and its online site. Someone had the good idea of gathering up a few of Reno’s pieces into a little book called Fighting the Noonday Devil – and Other Essays Personal and Theological. He’s an intellectual essayist, never hitting ground for too long at a time, which made his essay on his conversion into the Catholic Church, after he had announced in another book that he was staying put in spite of the liberalism of his Anglican Communion, a little difficult to read for this blogger’s routine reading of conversion stories (see Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy).

But his essay on the intellectual life was a treat, among which I found his contention that university professors are not so much against truth (while chasing progressivism and political correctness with utter certitude) quite on the mark. It led him to this scintillating observation:

The crisis of reason in the West has more to do with the fragmentation or diminishment of truth than its outright rejection. We do not so much deny truth as retreat from what Benedict [XVI] calls its ‘grandeur.’”…

Expertise with facts, we assume, is quite separate from competence in virtues. In this way, reason has not been denied: it has been demoralized. Our universities are less hotbeds of relativism and nihilism than places were moral and spiritual questions go unasked and unanswered.

He is an advocate for docilitas, the classical virtue of having the capacity to be led by the “competent teachers of our tradition.” In this, Reno is right, and his piece would be even more convincing had he dug deeper for he would have found the same in the great biblical tradition of wisdom, beginning with Proverbs 1:3-4 where receptivity to wisdom is tied both to God and to the wise who have gone before us. It undergirds all he has to say about the tradition.

Sitting next to my reading chair are a few books that never change, and one of them is Michel Montaigne’s famous The Complete Works (Everyman’s Library). He is, by most accounts, the one to whom many point to explain the nature of the personal essay, my favorite genre to read. Montaigne was, above all, self-reflective and honest in his self-reflective writings about himself. He is eminently quotable and a model of how to write essays, and for that reason I was thrilled to see the new study of Montaigne by Saul Frampton: When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life.

Montaigne was an upper class gentleman, but also managed a vineyard and was chosen for a political position. He suffered immensely with stones, traveled some, and spent much of his time in his tower (literal, physical, round) reading, writing, revising and reflecting on himself — not in a Descartes kind of way, and not in a Bacon kind of way, but in a kind of honest, somewhat skeptical, self-exploratory kind of way. I’ve never read Montaigne all at once or from beginning to end. Instead, I’ve dipped into various essays, usually an hour or so at a time — maybe reading him for a week or so, but never extensively.

Do you read essays? Who is your favorite essayist? (Mine is Joseph Epstein.) Have you read Montaigne?

But Frampton has the guy mastered, and he reveals that exploring life through the lens of experience yields a different kind of knowledge. Perhaps the most seminal idea developed here is proxemics: that is, Montaigne believed to know a person one had to be with that person, and that presence shapes us — so whoever is present is an influence. Thus: “… if you value a friend, you should meet with them; if you are fond of your children, eat with them; if there is someone you love, stand close to them, be near to them” (12). Montaigne’s every essay and every word helps us in understanding the Western tradition of friendship.

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I wish I could tell you that I have been a long-time reader of Thomas Howard. I can’t. Discovering his absolutely splendid The Night is Far Spent filled my Easter weekend and occasional moments with joy, insight, ruminations, and pleasure in his delightful prose. |inline

This essay was previously blogged under “What to read” but I have now, at the helm of Bob Robinson, posted it as a link and a pdf file.

Never Alone

“…the truth that reading and its necessary twin, writing,
constitute not merely an ability but a power.”
— Jacques Barzun

“Every old man complains,” so said Samuel Johnson, “of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.” Old Professors of small liberal arts colleges moan, like veteran Argive soldiers long back from Troy, about the privileges – hard earned ones – the young Professors have, like sabbaticals, computer support, and no longer needing to raise funds for the school. More often, though, they crab about the competence of young students to write clear sentences with good grammar and active verbs and concrete nouns. I agree with them. I am inclined, however, to think the Apocalyptic Darkness is not just round the bend for, as Robert Benchley once wrote, “the gay little legends on which we were brought up before the world grew dim and sordid” are just that: “gay little legends” (with an extra twist for a former use of “gay”).

If you want to read the rest of this essay, click here.