Briefly Noted

Encounters with Euclid: 
How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World
by benjamin wardhaugh
princeton university, 416 pages, $29.95

What makes a Great Book? When one considers the many Great Books curricula in the United States, one notices an abundance of poets and a smattering of philosophers. Sadly missing from the list at most classically inflected schools are the works of such great mathematical minds as Euclid, Archimedes, and al-Khwarizmi.

In his new book, Benjamin Wardhaugh goes to great lengths to chart the afterlife of Euclid’s masterpiece, the Elements. Euclid, as Wardhaugh himself notes, is “utterly obscure, historically speaking”; his life is shrouded in romantic legend, and it is difficult to sort out what is true from what is hearsay. But as Wardhaugh illustrates, Euclid’s historical obscurity has in no way limited the reach of the Elements. In the three hundred pages that follow, our author traverses two millennia and ranges about all six inhabited continents, demonstrating the ways in which Euclid’s thought echoed through the years. Readers will encounter, among other things, the stirring pedagogical speculation of Plato’s Meno; the Euclidean mystical theology of Proclus; the tersely geometrical reasoning that Spinoza employed in his vain attempt to ground a secular metaphysics; and the fundamental break with Euclidean geometry in the work of Nikolai Lobachevsky, whose pathbreaking Theory of Parallels opened the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Geometry is a font of beauty, just as much as the highest poetry, and in the Elements, one finds an interrogation of modern man’s too easy equation of identity with equality. All this in a work about triangles. Wardhaugh shows that Euclid’s Elements, like all Great Books, transcends its genre, offering insights into every realm of human experience. The ancients never conceived of mathematics in the deadened and purely instrumental way that we late moderns do.

Wardhaugh diligently notes at the start that the Elements was not a purely “original” work; Euclid most likely compiled a great deal of geometrical knowledge which pre-existed him. His notability lies not in his being some kind of Promethean genius, but rather in his pathbreaking codification and systemization of mathematics. The lasting work of greatness, as Euclid’s case makes clear, is not the sui generis forcing of one’s individuality onto the printed page, but rather the assimilation and transformation of what is good in the tradition that one inherits. Euclid, and the story of his reception that Wardhaugh recounts, may be the best illustration of what classical educators mean when we talk about the canon as a “Great Conversation.”

—Hunter V. McClure

Academia:
Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States
by william morgan
abbeville, 200 pages, $49.95

According to William Morgan, America’s first collegiate architecture was Georgian or neoclassical. But during the Gilded Age, as America began to stand astride the world and grow in wealth, the buildings of Oxford and Cambridge became the ideal for new edifices on the campuses of American universities and prep schools. Countless classrooms, dormitories, and dining halls were given towers modeled on those of Magdalen or Merton College, Oxford. The tower of St. John’s College, Cambridge, was recreated in Princeton’s Blair Hall, which William Morgan describes as “a barbican and a gateway, defensible militarily—burning arrows raining down on Viking invaders or drunken revelers from Penn or Yale, perhaps.”

This architectural style did not match the founding theology of most of American higher education. As Morgan notes, Presbyterian Princeton was made over in an Anglican style, and its Chancellor Green Library looks like a medieval Italian baptistry with a monstrance on top. The goal was to create buildings that borrowed Oxbridge’s pedigree and history, buildings which looked the part of ancient, esteemed centers of learning. Famously, this led to steps being sandblasted and walls doused in acid to age new constructions at Yale. For Harkness Tower, “the leaded-pane windows were broken and their cames re-leaded to make it look as though someone like Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had broken them in a carousing revelry, perhaps even throwing a pet bear out the window.”

Gothic architecture raises the mind to the contemplation of truth by its combination of light and soaring volume. But it also encourages its viewers and inhabitants to delight in towers and turrets, nooks and crannies, and grotesques of football players or animals at their studies. It embodies in stone the elevation and whimsy inherent in the intellectual life. And as we see on Notre Dame’s campus, its idiom remains the ideal for new constructions today.

—Nathaniel Peters

Lost in Translation:
Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite
by michael p. foley
angelico, 302 pages, $32

Michael Foley, though perhaps best known for Drinking with the Saints and its sequels, is an accomplished patristics scholar and an expert on liturgical Latin. His latest offering, Lost in Translation, is the book that lovers of the traditional Mass and Catholic tradition in general never knew they needed.

Foley focuses on the Orations—the Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion—those short, often overlooked prayers that are part of the Propers of the Mass for each Sunday and feast day. These prayers underline the theme of each Mass and are often linked specifically to the readings, the liturgical season, or the saint of the day. Many of the faithful know these prayers only in translations, which can often be inaccurate or incomplete (as is the nature of translation), obscuring or missing much of the wordplay, elegance, and “charm” (as Foley puts it) that not only make the prayers attractive and memorable but also help drive home their particular theological point.

Designed to be accessible to the Latin-less but also appeal to the Latin-learned, Lost in Translation contains a detailed analysis of the language, style, structure, theology, and Scriptural resonance of at least one Oration—usually the Collect, the prayer immediately before the Epistle that sums up the principal intention for that particular Mass—for every Sunday of the liturgical year and a selection of feast days, according to the 1962 Missal.

By examining the original Latin text of these ancient prayers in detail, Foley not only recovers their original meaning, but also demonstrates convincingly that these prayers form an essential part of the liturgy and effectively convey the lessons the Church wishes to teach the faithful in each Mass.

—David J. White

Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist:
The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O'Connor's Narrative Art
by damian ference
word on fire, 280 pages, $24.95

In Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, Fr. Damian Ference tackles the sometimes inscrutable stories of Flannery O’Connor and the various philosophies that influenced her. Beginning with a biographical account of Mary Flannery O’Connor’s life, Ference then gathers details from O’Connor’s personal library, analyses of her writing, her college and MFA coursework, her myriad letters, his own interpretations of her work, and accessible explanations of Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy to illustrate that understanding a writer’s influences enables readers to draw new conclusions about reality itself.

While O’Connor herself had only a narrow understanding of Thomism—Ference notes her abridged collection of Aquinas’s work and lack of in-depth philosophical education—she reflected thoughtfully and constantly on it. The fruits of this labor are evident. Despite her limited reading of Aquinas, O’Connor’s work reflects Thomistic ideals and suggests that art can communicate truth to the skeptic better than other media. Ference argues that Thomism inspired not only the themes of O’Connor’s own writing, but also her outlook toward art and writing in general: If a writer wishes to communicate truth, she must begin with articulating what the senses perceive and then dig deeper until she has found transcendent truth. This method of writing, Ference argues, might be particularly helpful in articulating responses to Nietzsche and postmodern skepticism. Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist is a helpful addition to the shelf of any Flannery O’Connorfan, or of anyone who believes art can be a messenger of truth.

—Sharla Moody

Pity for Evil:
Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America
by monica klem and madeleine mcdowell
encounter, 328 pages, $34.99

Abortion was understood by the first women’s rights advocates to be a blight upon humankind and the result of a godless society. It was seen as an act of feminine desperation and a crime committed by man as an offense against woman.

Twenty-first-century abortion advocates, however, seek legal, normalized, and celebrated access to this procedure that brutally murders a preborn human by means of starvation, poisoning, or dismemberment. It is most often masqueraded under euphemisms such as “women’s choice,” “protection of bodily autonomy,” or “reproductive rights.” Too few are aware of abortion’s history and development in the sphere of public thought, but Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell clear the cobwebs in their new book, Pity for Evil.

Klem and McDowell lay out the history of suffrage, abortion, and women’s empowerment in Reconstruction America with granular detail. Readers are invited to dip their toes into the mid-nineteenth century, where suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are found to be actively admonishing abortionists, initiating efforts to support women, and calling men to a higher sexual standard. The general consensus of the time appeared to be that when a woman aborts her child, she, too, is a victim, whether of abuse, coercion, or unenlightenment.

The authors excellently portray the nineteenth-century understanding of women’s role in society as nurturers, responsible for elevating societal tone, and men as protectors, providers, and thus criminals when responsible for an abortion.

Abortion was appalling to early suffragists because it targeted the nature of women in the fullest, most destructive manner possible. It served as a tool for abusive men who sought to flee responsibility—a chilling reflection of our own contemporary state of affairs.

Pity for Evil introduces the reader to a culture with a moral conscience, a culture that would be suffocated by the following century’s ghoulish march of abortion advocacy and its war upon human dignity.

—Mary Elise Cosgray

Science, Reason, and Faith:
Discovering the Bible
by fr. robert spitzer, s.j.
our sunday visitor, 360 pages, $34.95

In this ambitious book, Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., deploys his impressive range of knowledge to defend the Bible against a wide variety of objections and challenges. He gives answers to forty-two questions, such as “How can the scientific account of Creation be reconciled with the Bible’s seven days of Creation?,” “Are the Exodus, desert wandering and Sinai covenant historical?,” “Are the Old Testament miracles historical?,” “What is the extra-testamental evidence for the historical Jesus?,” and “What is the scientific evidence for Jesus’s resurrection?”

The book begins with philosophical and scientific arguments for belief in a Creator and in a “transphysical” human soul, then proceeds to more directly scriptural questions. On the whole, Spitzer takes reasonable positions and defends them clearly and cogently. That said, the book is not without flaws. A few of its conclusions are too strong; a few of its arguments are dubious (for example, on whether “near-death experiences” constitute evidence of a transphysical soul); and a few of its scientific analyses are problematic (for example, with regard to “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosomal Adam”). Even so, it is a book of great merits. Like a richly stocked emporium, not all that it contains is of equal quality or will appeal to everyone, but nearly everyone will enjoy it and come away with many “finds,” including some of great value. 

—Stephen M. Barr