What We’ve Been Reading—March

Virginia Aabram

I’m reading two books this Lent, the first of which is a reminder of what is real, and the second a reminder of what is not. The first is my spiritual reading of Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, who reminds us that all we hold important—no less than all of creation—could be contained in an object the size of a hazelnut in the hand of our Savior. I particularly find relieving her articulation of the spiritual life as alternating periods of seeking God and beholding God. Even though it can feel that periods of seeking are useless, especially if they are also what St. Ignatius of Loyola would call “desolations,” Julian says that “seeking is as good as beholding,” for God delights in our search of him and will reveal himself to us only at the appointed moment. Nothing is done in vain.

In contrast, a great many other things are “vanity,” as Ecclesiastes says. Few novels convey the vanity of human achievement better than Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, which speculates on the course of the world after nuclear war plunges it into a new dark age. The monks of St. Leibowitz Abbey preserve remnants of knowledge from the fallen world, only for this knowledge to again poison humanity. It’s a controversial and ambiguous book, and yet it issues a dire warning against making idols of knowledge, achievement, and power. 

Both Miller and Julian have nudged me away from the silly, daily worries and toward simplicity in Christ.

Francis X. Maier

I first read Guy Sajer’s autobiographical novel The Forgotten Soldier as a film school grad student in 1971, just a few years after its publication. It left such a powerful impression that, dead broke though I was, I tried to wangle a movie option on the text. It didn’t work. Life moved on. And I forgot the book—until I found it again at a U.S. Army War College seminar in 2003. It was at the top of the reading list.

Guy Sajer (a pseudonym) was born in French Alsace-Lorraine of a French father and German mother. When Germany defeated and occupied much of France in 1940, Sajer was re-designated as a German citizen and drafted into the Wehrmacht. After training he was assigned to the Großdeutschland Division, an elite Panzergrenadier unit often, but wrongly, confused with the Waffen SS. The Forgotten Soldier is Sajer’s extraordinary memoir of unrelieved combat on the Eastern Front, from the Battle of Kursk to the German collapse. In no sense does it sanitize German motives or behavior in the war with the Soviet Union. It’s simply one man’s story of survival and comradeship under unimaginable conditions.

Captured at the end of the war, Sajer was again re-designated as a French citizen. He was then drafted into the French army rather than sent to a prison camp. Eventually returning home, he was so physically transformed by his wartime service that his mother failed to recognize him. After the war he went on to become a successful writer and cartoonist in France under his real name, Guy Mouminoux—a fact that got him fired from at least one job when his link to the Sajer text and his wartime service was revealed. Bitter resentments lasted for decades in Europe after the fighting ended. Sajer/Mouminoux was one of the millions caught up in horrific circumstances beyond their control.

The Forgotten Soldier is superbly written and translated. I’ve read it four times. It’s that good. It’s that memorable.

Germán Saucedo

I’ve been slowly going through Adolphe Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology. The book is a doorstopper. It’s didactic, authoritative, and dull. Tanquerey’s thorough examination of moral theology reminds me of the many legal tomes I had to all but learn by heart in law school. I’m convinced it has borne fruit in my spiritual life, and I’m glad to be reading it, although I yearn to be done with it so I can move on to more engaging texts. This book proves that reading, much like fasting, can be a form of mortification.

While shopping for Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation at a local bookshop, I struck up a conversation with a man. I mentioned it was the selection of my book club. He said: “A book club that reads Schopenhauer? That’s hardcore. That book is intense.” Intense is right. It’s also very boring. After two months and more than 250 grueling pages of ontology and epistemology, we’ve finally gotten to the good part: his thoughts on ethics and aesthetics. Those interested in Schopenhauer should instead begin with Parerga and Paralipomena, which is a collection of his essays and reflections. Here, you will find the infamous “On Women” and “On Noise.” There are some books you “have to” read (if only to say that you have read them), and The World as Will and Representation is one of them.

Jacob Akey 

For Lent, I’ve been reading Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. It’s a profoundly personal book—reading it, I feel as if I’m in conversation with the author. And, reprinted to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Ignatius Press, with a foreword by Cardinal Sarah, the short book has been honored with higher praise by more learned men than I could ever hope to match. But it isn’t perfect. 

The house was on fire and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wished earnestly that the arsonists would stop. He deploys lucid, clam, and finely-crafted arguments, which could not break through the chaos of late-nineties liturgical abuses and confusion. He needed thumos, something The Spirit of the Liturgy lacks. His book is sufficient to convince already aesthetically sympathetic Catholics that celebration of the Liturgy of the Eucharistic ad orientem has better theological grounding than celebration versus populum; that “dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy”; and that much of the art in churches is no longer sacred art. But the book was unable to convince liturgical modernists to stop their vandalism. Nor did it convince the bishops to stop the vandals in their diocese. If liturgical modernism dies, it will be because liturgical modernists died, not because Ratzinger, lucidly and calmly, convinced them to set down their hammers and Breaking Bread hymnals.

There has been much for me to gain from reading The Spirit of the Liturgy, and the book will certainly reinforce orthodoxy for years to come. But I cannot but wish that, as an archbishop, prefect, cardinal, pope, and author, Benedict XVI would have more fiercely defended the liturgy he loved.