I have this beautiful Oxford University Press hardback edition of The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis I ordered some time ago and have been wanting to re-read. My old copy is a falling-apart-at-the-seams paperback edition. But I have been wanting to re-read it anyway, as it's been many years since I read it. This is not your typical apologetic C.S. Lewis book. It's an academic study of the medieval mind and specific poets who illustrate the medieval view of courtly love. Lewis clears up such misunderstandings (or rarely thought about) concepts of how the medieval poets viewed/wrote about love and marriage. This is essential to understand any reading of a medieval love poem, and even from the general mindset before the 11th century. It was a revolution, Lewis notes, for the 11th century poets to begin to express the romantic sense of love as we know/think of it today, or certainly up to the 19th century. Our "new" ideas of love, courting, placing the women ahead and elevating them was not the norm before the 11th century. Marriage was made out of an obligation and contract, not out of love, which shaped the whole way of thinking, which subsequently was how the poets wrote about it. The way we read Aristotle and Plato can be read through our eyes in our tradition and yet it's not their understanding of love.
A recent discovery is The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges. This is a gem of a book. I am not very far into it yet, but every line is a nugget of wisdom for how to live the intellectual life. How to manage your day, thinking, processes to be aimed toward this goal. Can you give a couple hours each day to such study? This is where he breaks it down for the one who wants to pursue such a life - how to schedule one's day and time, stay organized, take notes, maintain memory, etc. I've already been underlining so much in this book. It would be ideal for any student or self-learner who wants to be more purposeful in their intellectual life.
Learning about one of the early desert fathers, The Life of Antony by Athanasius is a short book detailing the humble life Antony had out in the desert, living on bread and water and prayer. It's a study of a life, Antony, who heard the word of Scripture read in church he was inspired to leave everything and move to the desert. He was met by demons to challenge him over his long years, but he was never distracted by them and they fled. They continued to try, but he was not swayed. It's a story of endurance, trusting in the Lord, and resisting the temptations that Satan throws at us.
I've been in the midst of an Oscar Wilde study, reading his Complete Short Fiction as well as the short essay book The Decay of Lying. I am so interested in studying him. He was a brilliant writer, his short stories start with fairy tales and moral tales for children, and move into more morally ambivalent creative tales. I find myself disagreeing with almost everything he writes about in the two essays (written as Platonic dialogues), and yet, they seem to me to be satirical, criticizing the notion of lying, for example, for art. Is he actually serious in these outrageous philosophies? His early stories all had a moral of the story, his later fiction hones in on lying for personal gain and art for art's sake. He struggled all his life with joining the Catholic Church; he almost joined several times, but backed away, and I just wonder if these tales and essays (and his plays) were his way of critiquing and trying to reconcile the ideas of the aesthetic movement he was part of at the turn of the 19th century, with the Catholic faith he was so drawn to (even converting on his deathbed). I would like to explore more here.
As we move into a new season, I am moving into the liturgy, which has fascinated and drawn me for so many years. This book I stumbled across Light on Darkness by Cosima Clara-Gilhammer is a study of the liturgy from church history, the meaning of the words, hymns, chants, sacred traditions, and how many of these built modern things we know today (art, music, literature, architecture). It's like the liturgy is hidden in plain sight frequently, and those who don't see it, miss it. I love that idea, and am enjoying as I start to read more of this beautifully illustrated collection along the liturgical journey.
