The Liberal Education

Monks preserve fragments of civilization after a nuclear war. The great Catholic science-fiction novel.

A young Catholic Irishman's formation and rejection of his faith. Joyce's most accessible work, and a prerequisite for Ulysses.

Solzhenitsyn's 1978 commencement address at Harvard. Short, prophetic, controversial then and now.

Arguably Faulkner's greatest novel. The South, the Civil War, and the past that won't pass.

Newman's account of his religious development. The great Catholic conversion memoir.

JPII's reflection on Rerum Novarum at its centennial, written after the fall of communism.

The full autobiography and the meditations on time and memory in Books X and XI.

Written in prison awaiting execution. Lady Philosophy on fortune, providence, and the highest good.

Reread at this age if read earlier. The Epilogue lands differently as a young adult.

The greatest book on America by a foreigner. Read the famous chapters (associations, religion, soft despotism) and explore from there.

Steinbeck retells Cain and Abel across two generations in the Salinas Valley. The timshel chapter is the heart of the book.

Kierkegaard's meditation on Abraham and Isaac. The classic statement of the leap of faith.

JPII on faith and reason as the two wings on which the human spirit rises to contemplation of truth.

Ratzinger's commentary on the Apostles' Creed. The book that made him famous.

The Nobel-winning trilogy about a medieval Norwegian woman's life, marriage, and faith. The Tiina Nunnally translation is now standard.

A short, dense argument that culture rests on leisure, and leisure rests on contemplation.

King's letter to white moderate clergy, drawing on Aquinas, Augustine, and Niebuhr. Required American reading.

The introduction and Part I on man, plus the chapters on the state of nature and the social contract.

The great American western novel. A long cattle drive from Texas to Montana and the friendship at the center.

Frankl's account of Auschwitz and his theory of logotherapy. Short, essential.

The full text, having read selections earlier. Lewis's most influential book.

Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." She was right.

The full novel, including the cetology chapters. America's most ambitious book.

Books I, II, VIII, X at minimum. The book on virtue and friendship and the good life.

Chesterton's account of how he discovered the Catholic answer to his own questions, before he knew it was Catholic.

The fragments. Read the famous ones (the wager, the thinking reed, the two infinities) and then explore.

Book I on the household and Book III on the constitution. Read alongside the Ethics.

The founding text of modern conservatism. Read in selections if needed; the prose is dense but extraordinary.

The founding document of modern Catholic social teaching. On capital and labor.

The intellectual source of the American founding. Short and clear.

Read Self-Reliance, The American Scholar, Compensation. Disagree with him too; that's part of the formation.

A Portuguese Jesuit in seventeenth-century Japan confronts the price of faith. Read before watching the Scorsese film.

The full text. Reread at this age; it deepens.

The five ways (Ia q.2), the treatise on the virtues (IIa-IIae). A good annotated edition is essential.

The dialogue on love, with seven speeches culminating in Socrates and Diotima. Read alongside the Phaedrus.

Three short lectures on objective value and the consequences of denying it. Essential and brief.

The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone. The greatest of the great novels by many counts.

Chesterton's history of humanity from caveman to Christ. C.S. Lewis credited it with his conversion.

The abridged single-volume edition is the way in. The most important book of the twentieth century by some counts.

The discourses on knowledge, useful knowledge, and the gentleman. The classic Catholic defense of liberal education.

After scripture, the most widely-read Christian book in history. Read a little daily.

Seven debates across Illinois. The high-water mark of American political speech.

Meditations on the person of Christ. Patient, beautiful, deep.

Short. Read alongside the Discourses if possible to see the fuller Machiavelli.

The full dialogue, including the allegory of the cave and the myth of Er. Read with a good guide (Eric Voegelin or Allan Bloom's essay).

Brooks on resume virtues vs. eulogy virtues, illustrated by biographical chapters. A good 21st-century introduction to character formation.

Hayek's argument that central planning leads to tyranny. The Reader's Digest condensation is also a fine introduction.

Du Bois's essays on race in America. The chapter "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" is essential.

Faulkner at his most demanding. A guide is helpful for the Benjy and Quentin sections.

Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength. Read all three; That Hideous Strength is the most demanding and rewards rereading.

Hemingway's first novel and the defining lost-generation book. Paris, Pamplona, the bullfights.

Book I, chapters 1-3 on the division of labor; the invisible hand passage. Pair with The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Washington's rise from slavery to founding Tuskegee. Read alongside Du Bois for the great Black intellectual debate of the early twentieth century.

Thoreau's two years and two months at the pond. Pair with Civil Disobedience.

Plan to read it over a summer. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is the modern standard.

Chambers's account of his life as a communist, his break, and his testimony against Alger Hiss. The "Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children" alone is worth reading.

Death Be Not Proud, Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God, At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners.

Milton's Protestant epic. Read at minimum Books I (Satan in hell), II (the council), and IX (the fall).

Musée des Beaux Arts, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, the late religious poems. A formative twentieth-century voice.

Prufrock, The Waste Land, Four Quartets. The Quartets are the late Catholic masterpiece.

Beyond the early favorites: Birches, After Apple-Picking, Mending Wall, Directive, Home Burial.

God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty, The Windhover, the terrible sonnets. The most Catholic of the great English poets.

The American master of formal verse. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, A Barred Owl, Year's End.

The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children, the late tower poems.

Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Anthony Esolen's translation is excellent. Plan a year.

See it on the biggest screen possible. It is closer to a tone poem than a narrative film.

Franz Jägerstätter, Austrian Catholic farmer, refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. Malick's most concentrated film since The Tree of Life.

Either version. The 1930 American film is the classic; the 2022 German is more visceral.

Tarkovsky's three-hour film about the medieval icon painter. Slow, demanding, transcendent.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness up the Mekong. The hallucinatory war film.

The standard answer to "the greatest film ever made." Watch and decide for yourself.

Bresson's adaptation of Bernanos. As demanding and rewarding as the novel.

The Pasternak novel as Lean epic. The snowy dacha sequence is among cinema's most beautiful.

The Coen brothers' McCarthy adaptation. About the persistence of evil and the limits of the law.

Leone's western opera. The opening fifteen minutes alone are a masterclass.

George C. Scott's portrait of George Patton. The opening speech is famous for a reason.

Scorsese's adaptation of Endō. Watch after reading the novel; it amplifies rather than replaces.

An East German Stasi agent watches a playwright and is changed by what he hears. About surveillance and conversion.

The silent film. Maria Falconetti's face in close-up is one of cinema's great performances.

Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil prospector at the dawn of the American century. Hard, great, deeply American.

Hitchcock's most personal film and recently displaced Citizen Kane in some critical polls.

Twenty-six hour-long episodes narrated by Laurence Olivier, with first-person interviews from people who fought, governed, survived, and perpetrated the Second World War. Almost all of them are now gone; this remains the document of record.

Ten episodes, eighteen hours. About the war, the protests, the disillusion, and what it permanently cost American institutional confidence.

Nearly three hours inside the Grande Chartreuse — the Carthusian monastery in the French Alps — with almost no dialogue and no score. The viewer learns, with the monks, to slow down.

Robert McNamara, near the end of his life, on the firebombing of Tokyo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. Eleven lessons from a man who knew how badly it can go wrong.

Steak frites, a glass of Bordeaux, tarte tatin with crème fraîche.

The full traditional seder if a Jewish friend or family member invites you. The deep liturgical roots of the Last Supper.

Loose-leaf tea, scones, finger sandwiches, pastries. The Ritz, Fortnum & Mason, or a serious tearoom.

Antipasto, primo, secondo, contorno, dolce, espresso, digestivo. Three or four hours at the table.

Several bars over the course of an evening. One dish and one glass at each.

Not American, not familiar. The full shopping list, the proper technique, the right serving order.

Planned menu, courses, wine, conversation. The young adult takes the host's end of the table.

Know Bordeaux from Burgundy, Brie from Comté, baguette from pain de campagne. The basic culinary geography of Catholic Europe.

Plan and cook the major family meal as the young adult, from menu to cleanup.

Sit at the counter, eat what the chef serves, in the order he serves it.

Know enough vocabulary, technique, and tradition to navigate the menu without asking embarrassing questions.

A Greek Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox liturgy. The other lung of the Church.

A Tridentine Mass in full, with chant and incense, at least once. The liturgical inheritance of fifteen centuries.

Even a week of the Camino reshapes a young person. The last hundred kilometers from Sarria is the traditional minimum.

Construction, landscaping, restaurant kitchen, farm work. A summer or more. Reshapes how a young adult thinks about everyone else.

Spanish, French, Italian, German, Latin. Conversational at minimum, ideally able to read literature.

Walk the four major basilicas: St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside the Walls.

One year is the standard pace. A Catholic study Bible with notes makes the difficult books navigable.

A summer minimum, ideally a semester. Not as a tourist but as a resident.

In person if possible (a summer at Wyoming Catholic, Thomas Aquinas, or a Hillsdale summer program); online via Hillsdale or others if not.

Local, state, federal. Vote with attention. Discuss the choices with adults you respect on both sides.

Bach's last major work, a full Latin Mass setting by a Lutheran who knew he was leaving the summit of Western sacred music behind him. The Sanctus alone is two centuries ahead of its time. Try the Herreweghe or the Gardiner recordings.

An aria and thirty variations. Bach's most patient demonstration of what a single melodic frame can hold. Glenn Gould recorded it twice — fast in 1955, slow in 1981 — and both recordings are educations in themselves.

The last works Beethoven wrote — Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 — the music of a deaf man at the end of his powers. The Op. 131 in C-sharp minor, in seven continuous movements, is the deepest thing in the chamber-music tradition. Try the Takács, the Busch, or the Quartetto Italiano.

Beethoven's last piano sonata, in two movements only — a violent introduction and a long set of variations that walks itself out of the nineteenth century. Thomas Mann gives it twenty pages in Doctor Faustus. Try Schnabel, Solomon, or Pollini.

Twenty-four songs about a rejected lover walking through the winter landscape into death. Schubert wrote it the year before his own death at thirty-one. Fischer-Dieskau and Moore is the historic recording; Padmore and Lewis the contemporary one.

A Mass for the Dead written by the great Italian opera composer in memory of the novelist Manzoni. Hans von Bülow called it Verdi's best opera, which was meant as an insult and is in fact true. The Dies Irae is the loudest moment in any liturgical music. Try Reiner with Chicago, or Solti.

A symphony in six movements for two singers and orchestra, set to German translations of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems. The closing Der Abschied — 'The Farewell' — repeats the word ewig until the orchestra disappears. Try Klemperer with Wunderlich and Ludwig.

The libertine seducer dragged to hell by the marble statue of the man he killed. Mozart's most moral opera. The graveyard scene and the closing sextet should be in the ear of any educated listener. Try the 1979 Joseph Losey film, or Furtwängler's 1954 Salzburg.

Composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1940 and first performed there in January 1941, scored for the four instruments Messiaen could find among his fellow prisoners — violin, clarinet, cello, piano. The fifth movement, Praise to the Eternity of Jesus, may be the most beautiful single page of twentieth-century music.

A four-part suite recorded in a single session in December 1964. Coltrane intended it as a devotional offering and printed his prayer in the liner notes. Acknowledgement — Resolution — Pursuance — Psalm. Listen straight through.

Recorded in two sessions with no rehearsal — Davis with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb. The bestselling jazz album ever made, and an honest description of what its title says. Start with So What.

The largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built, completed under Hadrian around 126 AD, with a nine-meter oculus open to the sky. Consecrated as a Christian church in 609. Every domed building in the Western tradition — Hagia Sophia, St. Peter's, the Capitol — traces back to this one.

The Parthenon frieze in the British Museum, the Laocoön in the Vatican, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. The two centuries of sculpture in which Western art set its standard for the human body.

Sixth-century mosaics in San Vitale, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, and the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. The peak of Christian image-making before iconoclasm, and the visual world Justinian and Theodora moved through. A day in Ravenna is a graduate seminar.

Two eighth-century gospel books made by Irish and Northumbrian monks in a calligraphic tradition that has no successor. Kells lives in Trinity College Dublin; the Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Library. The Chi-Rho page of Kells is the most decorated single sheet in the Western tradition.

The first dome the West built after the Romans, raised over the existing octagonal drum of Santa Maria del Fiore without falsework. Brunelleschi devised a herringbone brick pattern that supported itself as it rose. Climb the inner staircase if you can; the structural logic is teachable from inside.

The three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre, painted as a meditation on the Trinitarian relations. The deepest Orthodox icon and the standard against which all later icons are judged. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow holds it, behind glass and policy.

Two confident young diplomats at the height of their powers, surrounded by the instruments of learning and trade, with a stretched skull lying anamorphically across the bottom of the canvas — visible only from the right angle, and reminding the powerful that they too will die. National Gallery, London.

Bernini's marble of the moment Teresa of Avila describes in her autobiography: an angel piercing her heart with a golden arrow. The Cornaro Chapel at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome is the Counter-Reformation in three dimensions.

Spanish civilians executed by Napoleon's firing squad outside Madrid, painted six years after the event. The unnamed man in the white shirt — arms raised, eyes wide — is the first modern image of war: not history but horror. Prado, Madrid.

Cézanne painted the mountain near his studio in Aix over and over for the last thirty years of his life, reducing the world to overlapping planes of color. The bridge between Impressionism and Cubism — Picasso called him 'the father of us all.'