To get the first question out of the way, yes, I’ve been calling the last Cantos of Purgatory the Dante Apocalypse for several years now, and my term predates the recent fascination with various iterations of a “zombie apocalypse.”

With that out of the way, the final grand scene in Purgatory is a particular kind of purgation, one that seems to be for Dante only.  (There’s room for disagreement there–perhaps all the saved go through this last trial–but Statius, who is right there with the pilgrim as he undergoes the Beatrice-suffering, doesn’t seem to have his own analogous moment.)  In addition to facing his betrayal of Beatrice, Dante must behold and bring back to the living a vision of the end times, both events that lead up to the final fall of the Roman hierarchy and the fallout of the same.

The Parade of Divine Revelation

Beatrice does not simply show up at the end of Purgatory.  She makes an entrance.  Before the chariot (normally YHWH’s vehicle of choice) reveals her to Dante, a visual argument ensues that will make the following vision, without a doubt, the stuff of divine oracle.  The seven lamp-stands from Revelation lead the way, followed by the twenty-four elders form the same, then the four living creatures from Ezekiel.    Dante even pauses to note that the one place where the vision differs from Ezekiel, it agrees with Revelation, namely in the matter of how many wings the creatures have.

After them, Dante sees allegorical figures for the four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues, then figures corresponding to Paul and Luke and the other writers of the New Testament, with John of Patmos and seven other writers of the New Testament bringing up the rear.  So to summarize, whatever comes next is going to have behind it the force of philosophy, Scripture, apocalyptic disclosure, faith, hope, and love.  And with all that, in comes… Beatrice.

The Shame Unto Salvation

When Beatrice arrives, no paraphrase can really capture the language that the pilgrim musters to describe her glory.  Go read it.  But the purpose behind the big reveal is not merely that of aesthetic devotion (thought there’s some of that too): Dante must face his shame.  Having passed through the seven disordered loves that human beings have in common, Dante must face his own personal guilt (yes, Critical Theory people, I just used “guilt” and “shame” synonymously), that which has brought him so low.  She calls him out in front of the whole New Testament for betraying the vision of divine love that he received earlier, pursuing lechery and vain glory (and vainglory) rather than pursuing with diligence the higher ways that he could have had, even as a mortal.  For Beatrice this is not merely personal; it is a blasphemy against divine grace, and she will not let Dante cross the river Lethe until he has faced it one more time.  Again, the final trial seems particular to Dante, but I’d be glad to read comments to the contrary.

What’s even more odd about the scene is that, immediately after the public shame, Dante does undergo a Purgatorial baptism in the Lethe (another echo from Homer and Virgil), forgetting the evil that once distorted his life.  Beatrice even expresses amusement at his sudden change of demeanor, and when that deed is done, Beatrice’s venom is no more.  My hunch is that such a sequence of events might be Dante’s way of encouraging a plurality of readings, the sort that he mentions in his letter to Cangrande.  From that letter he describes four levels of interpretation that are necessary to understand the depths of the Commedia:

[Y] ou must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: `When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion’ (Douay-Rheims, Ps. 113.1-2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which is Latin means `other’ or `different’.

This moment rewards the same kind of polysemantic reading: in terms of the literal narrative, on its own terms, Dante experiences psychological disorientation as he remembers intensely, then forgets.  But morally, Dante might be pointing to the ethical experience that many seem to have upon conversion, a strong sense of personal guilt just before baptism (or whatever experience stands in for baptism in other kinds of conversion-rituals).  And allegorically, Beatrice seems to be standing in both for law and gospel, convicting Dante and proclaiming his release.  And anagocially (because why stop with three?), Dante might be living through the same tribulation-before-the-consummation that the Biblical apocalypse narrates so memorably.

Now if I had just made up those four interpretations, one could rightly accuse me of being an English major with too much time on my hands for interpretation, but given what Dante wrote about his own work, I don’t think I’m too far off here.

The Apocalypse

What Dante sees next convinces me that the human being Dante Allegheri likely thought that the world would end during his own lifetime or shortly after.  I don’t think that disqualifies him from being a great poet or philosopher, but it’s hard to deny that the expectation is there, especially when one reads the Purgatorio‘s apocalypse next to the passing mention of the Greyhound in the early Cantos of the Inferno.  What brings about the end of things is the corruption of the Church, and what replaces the hierarchy that’s also become a military force is one Empire with two swords, the Church with its Bishop of Rome and the Crown with its Emperor of Rome.

I used to be more critical of Dante’s imperialism, but as I’ve gotten older, I continue to disagree but don’t blame him nearly as much.  Trying to put myself in his position, I have to realize that the Papal corruption for Dante was no mere historical curiosity but a rift in the very fabric of salvation.  In Dante’s eyes, the world needs visible and clear moral authority, and when the Pope maintains a private army, acting like one more feuding prince (or, even worse, refuses to hold court in Rome, the seat of Peter), there’s an urgency to the situation that a Protestant like me can’t really imagine.  Moreover, as someone who’s living the last years of his life in exile because of feuds between Guelph-Ghibbeline and even more finely divided factional struggles, Dante certainly knows firsthand what happens when the effects of unstable political forces can be.

So in his vision, Dante imagines one Pope and one Emperor, spiritual and temporal power centralized but not combined, for the sake of peace in all the world.  In that respect Dante’s apocalypse is not the end of temporal power, as the book of Revelation seems to make it, so much as an establishment, by divine decree, of the truest justice possible on earth.  Thus is the vision that Dante brings back, and thus his expectations seem to stand.

Eunoe

When Dante has seen all of this, he enters into the Good-Mind river, and the memory of the goodness that accompanied him in life returns to him, intensified because not diluted by the bad memories.  Once again I marvel at the affirmation of human life: where some theologians would regard anything that human beings do as inherently worthless (or worse), Dante has earthly good follow the soul into Paradise.  When first I read Purgatory some ten years ago and more, if I remember right, I probably rejected this vision, but once again, as Dante has worked on me, reading after reading, I have to rejoice in his insistence that goodness is goodness, that our earthly minds, though clouded, still know what’s glorious when we see it.  It’s on that note that I wrap up this little journey through Dante, and the questions that I’d like to pose here at the end are these:

1. If you’re a CHP listener (and you should be if you’re not), you might know that David Grubbs claimed in a recent show that Martin Luther might end up agreeing with Dante more than I suspect.  Writing up this post, I still can’t reconcile someone who would regard the good deeds done without knowledge of God as inherently sinful with someone who would use the same deeds to lead the desires of the saved towards God.  Am I making too much of this?
2. Does Dante’s apocalypse strike you as a defect in an otherwise great poem, one more sign that it’s overrated, or something that adds to the grandeur?   Why?
3. Why, do you think, does Dante have a super-Purgatorial trial of memory?  Do the four levels of reading above make sense of or muddy further that episode?

General Introduction
- The end of the season
- On doctoral regalia
- Summer courses
- Slightly less minor internet celebrities
- Ongoing projects

Witches in the Bible
- Saul and the non-witch of Endor
- Necromancy
- Countercultural power
- Not suffering chanters
- Other Ancient Near Eastern prohibitions
- State-sponsored sorcery

Greco-Roman Witches
- Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft
- Outskirts of official society
- Medea the murderess
- Barely controllable feminine power
- Circe the sorceress
- The Golden Ass
- New Testament witches?

Macbeth’s Witches
- The ambiguity of their actions
- Satan or Delphi
- Shakespeare’s modifications of the classical world
- How sexualized are the hags?

Walpurginacht
- What is it?
- Its role in Faust, Pt. 1
- Farcical parade of ideas
- Black Sabbaths in pop culture

Witch Trials
- As seen by Arthur Miller
- Confessing to different things
- Feminine power without witchcraft
- Is the play any good?
- Other treatments of the witch trials

Fairy Tale Witches
- Filtered through Disney
- How we misremembered Snow White
- Sexuality and the Disney witches
- The Wizard of Oz
- Harry Potter’s non-impact

Wicca
- A reclaiming of the margin
- Nathan insults Wiccans
- Historicizing Wicca
- Other pop-cultural locations
- Blaming sociology

Witches in the Modern World
- Shall we burn Harry Potter?
- Technology as witchcraft
- The egomaniacal mad scientist
- Historicize, historicize, historicize
- Taking the shortcut

Rather than write a giant post about the last nine Cantos, I’m going to attempt two short ones, the last dealing mainly with Dante’s apocalypse.  If, as I plan, I can get these two posts knocked out this week, I’m going to plan on writing a brief series on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as I teach it for a summer course, then a brief series on Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue as I teach it.  But right now, Dante!

Where Babies Come From

I’ve said before that a great book, for my money, is a text that rewards multiple readings, and Dante once again proves to be just such a text.  In Canto 28, Dante asks Virgil why the shades among the Gluttonous look like they’re starving.  After all, Dante reasons, they aren’t really bodies, so their form should not suffer from deprivation of food.  Virgil’s response, the first few times I read the poem, struck me mainly as fodder for historicist inquiry: Dante lays out a basically Aristotelian theory of biological reproduction, adding a specifically Roman-Catholic understanding of the soul as something bestowed individually, by God, upon conception.  And even on that level, there’s enough of interest in Dante’s account to think on for some time: although there’s no sense of cell biology, nonetheless there’s a fairly sophisticated, integrated sense of how a human personality consists of animated body rather than some dualistic schema of ghost-possessing-machine.

This time around, though, I noticed something different, namely that Dante’s theology of desire is moving right along with the Thomist/Aristotelian theory of personhood.  The shades on the Terrace of the Gluttonous take their shape not because they need food (they’re not bodies, so they don’t) but because, when they died, their desire for food and drink overpowered their souls’ abilities to maintain a solid personhood.  In other words, the desires that we cultivate in the world of the living follow us to the afterlife, and for those on this terrace, those desires visibly distort the souls whose desires are thus disordered.  It’s a reminder, though a subtle one, that Purgatory, as Dante describes it, is always a gift, always something for the good of the saved sinner.  A person who went to Heaven with such out-of-whack loves would never be able to enjoy the eternal presence of God, and so divine grace gives them a chance to un-learn such things.

The same goes for those on the terrace of the lustful, of course: because people indulge their lust, in most cases, in secret places, those whose lusts are purged shout their own sins to the other groups of lustful souls.  So as they pass, one group shouts their hermaphroditic desire (Italian ermafrodito–the desire of man for woman or woman for man, a term borrowed no doubt from Plato’s Symposium) at those whose desire is homosexual, and vice versa.

Yes, there are gay people going to Heaven in the fourteenth century.

The public shame of shouting the exemplar-stories to other people makes up part of the discipline of this highest terrace; the other part is the consistent presence of searing heat.  No longer do these sinners worry that the fires within are going to have repercussions in a cool world–the world is hot enough for everyone involved.  With this final terrace of the disciplined sinners, Dante has taken in a full spectrum of disordered desire and seen the broad variety of ways that divine mercy would train the saved to desire properly.

Matelda, the Garden, and the Active Life

When Dante reaches the end of the seven terraces, he must pass through a wall of flame to move on.  As first-time reader several years ago I had no idea what was going on at this point, but when Dante emerges from the other side, neither his clothes nor his body damaged, he finds himself in the Garden of Eden.  The flames were the same ones that God had set at the boundary of the garden at the dawn of creation, and only because his sins had been purged and his desires rightly ordered could he enter in.

In the garden the pilgrim encounters a young woman, later identified as Matelda, who plays the allegorical foil to Beatrice.  Where Beatrice stands as the figure of contemplation, Matelda represents the active life.  This latter-day Mary-and-Martha pair reinforce, here at the end of Dante’s earthly journey, the goodness both of the work of cultivating the garden (and by extension all human work) and the goodness of intellectual meditation on divine things (and by extension all human intellectual life).  As Dante moves along inside the garden, he is fascinated by but never taken by lust for the young Matelda, another sign that his existence has entered into a different order from what he experienced among the living.  (One assumes that he went back to being prideful and such when he returned to his earthly exile, but I don’t see any discussion of that in the poem itself.)  Still, he wishes he could cross the river running through this earthly Paradise to join her in her work, a detail that rises in importance as Purgatorio ends.

Matelda explains to Dante that the river he can’t pass is none other than the river Lethe, where sinners forget the evils of their mortal existence.  When a sinner’s desire is for God alone, the memories of the earthly pain and suffering and guilt still remain, but the Lethe removes those so that the soul can enjoy its ascent into heavenly Paradise.  However, Dante still cannot enter into those waters, for reasons that will become apparent in the final stretch of Purgatorio.

I realize that the previous post in this series never did pose questions, and perhaps at some point I’ll backtrack and rectify that, but for the moment, here’s what I’ve got:

• To what extent does the Aristotelian biology of the poem make the vision of desires-shaping-souls hard to take seriously, and to what extent can a modern reader responsibly allegorize that passage for the sake of better imagining human existence in a historical moment shaped by cell biology?
• Allegorically speaking, how satisfying or disappointing is it that the Garden of Eden is a way-point on the soul’s path to heavenly Paradise?
• Am I overplaying the goodness of the active life as Dante seems to be imagining it, or is Matelda indeed a genuine vision of goodness?
• Am I the only one who gets to this point in the poem and hopes that there is indeed a Purgatory, because it’s just what a messed-up soul like mine needs so that I can enjoy Heaven?

The final installment of this series should be up tomorrow or Friday.  Thanks, all, for reading along!

It’s fitting that my Dante posts stalled out right when it was time to write about sloth, no?

Good Desire and Bad Desire

In Canto 18 Virgil continues his explanation of desire and its connection to divine justice and love.  The nature of human beings is to desire, Virgil begins, but in many cases something about that desire is contrary to the proper nature of the desire.  The paradox of human will is that, on the good side, our desires, properly ordered, are of a higher order of good than the desires of fire to rise, of stones to sink, and of plants to grow.  On the bad side, because our desires are contingent on our wills and acts moreso than those of flames and stones and plants, we have the capacity to warp our own desires, turning them bad in the ways that Virgil described in Canto 17.

Thus Dante’s Virgil explains, in terms at once concise and compelling, just what it means to be a rational animal: because our desires, unlike those of other animals, take their shape not only from instinct but also from the disciplines and bad habits of the courses of our lives, human beings alone among the animals have the capacity truly to enjoy the presence of God, but we also have need (where other animals have no need) to have our desires disciplined, either by the influence of kings and teachers while we live; or by Purgatory afterwards.

As I’ve said before, whether one “believes in Purgatory” or not, Dante’s vision has an undeniable beauty to it.  Purgatory is necessary because of the particular brokenness of human nature, and the particular brokenness of human nature happens because of the unique goodness of humanity.  Placed next to dualistic philosophies, which relativize our bodily existence to the point where they have nothing to do with our souls; and materialistic philosophies, in which the soul is some epiphenomenon of brain chemistry, or even a lie that’s mapped onto the flat assertion of biological change, there’s a richness to a Christian-humanist philosophy like Dante’s that makes the moral existence of humanity not only intelligible but beautiful.

Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony

Purgatory continues to be a place where desires get disciplined and educated in the fourth, fifth, and sixth terraces, each terrace’s mode of storytelling and bodily punishment fitting the particular nature of each deadly vice:

• The slothful must tell their own stories (since they must cultivate a sufficiently intense desire for God, it makes some sense to jump start it by making them tell their own stories), and they spend their time in Purgatory running from here to there, not waiting around for something to impress them before they move.  The stories have to do with those who did not desire good things (the most amusing being the Hebrews after the Exodus, who took forty years to get to the promised land) and those who sought out good news with great vigor (most notably Mary, who went immediately to Elizabeth to share news of their miraculous pregnancies).
• The avaricious must share their stories with each other (since they lived as people who would not share), and their stories are about both generosity and voluntary poverty on the good side, and their vice-stories have to do both with hoarding and with reckless spending.
• The gluttonous hear their stories issuing forth from food they’re not allowed to eat, and their stories have to do with those who denied themselves and those who destroyed themselves with indulgence, both of food and of wine.

I won’t go into detail here, certainly to avoid becoming a study site for those who don’t actually read their assignments in college but even more because, as perhaps the chief architectural poem in the medieval tradition, the Commedia sets up structures that allow a careful reader simply to note the stories and disciplines present and move on.  Once Virgil has explained how everything fits together, there’s no need to repeat the connections between the media and the stories and the souls educated by both.  Instead, Virgil and Dante and other characters can devote the space remaining in the poem to other matters, like how long people spend in Purgatory.

Out of Purgatory

The first time I ever read the whole Commedia (I read Inferno a couple times before then), this is what surprised me most about Dante’s vision, and in the ensuing years, it’s become easily the most intellectually satisfying part of Purgatory.  George Bernard Shaw picked this up, and C.S. Lewis followed Shaw, and I can only tip my hat to those two twentieth-century masters for their good taste.

Before they exit the terrace of the Avaricious, Dante and Virgil encounter a mysterious figure, a shade who later identifies himself as Statius, the Silver-Age Roman poet.  As they converse, Dante and Virgil come to realize that Statius, after a long spell among the Prideful and then five hundred years among the Spendthrifts (a division of the Avaricious), Statius has risen and will be departing Purgatory for Paradise.  When Virgil asks about the Purgatory-shaking celebration that happened just before he started his new climb, Statius explains the logic that governs one’s stay on the Mount:

Up here the mountain trembles when some soul

feels itself pure enough to stand erect

or start at once to climb–then, comes the shout.

The will to rise, alone, proves purity:

once freed, it takes possession of the soul

and wills the soul to change its company.

I willed to climb before, but teh desire

High Justice set against it, inspired it

to wish to suffer–as once it wished to sin.

And I, who for five hundred years and more,

have lain here in my pain, felt only now

will free to raise me to a higher sill. (Purgatory 21.58-69)

Had I read that passage as a younger man, I would have balked: who, I would have asked, would really desire to be punished more than he desired to rise to Heaven?  As the years have passed the spiritual truth here has become more apparent: the lives that we lead here on earth, both the parts that we choose and the parts to which we’re victims, leaves us deeply wounded, and Dante’s vision of reality includes a God gracious enough to heal those wounds rather than pretending they don’t matter.  If Purgatory were mere “jail time,” enforced at the behest of the grand Magistrate in the sky, I would probably reject Dante’s vision out of hand (as, for instance, I reject most sixteenth-century preaching on Purgatory that I’ve read).  But since Dante’s vision is rooted not in punishment but in the sort of love that only the Almighty can exercise, it remains a genuinely compelling vision, and I’ll say here what I say when I teach this poem to evangelical undergraduates: if Purgatory is what Dante says it is, I don’t reckon I’d mind going.

I’m not sure whether I’ll do one more post to finish out the series or whether I’ll split the last nine Cantos into two posts, but either way I should have the last posts on the poem up soon.

General Introduction
- Yet more weather talk
- Light and heavy episodes
- Books for aspiring seminarians
- Listener feedback

Historical Background
- The dedicatory epistle
- Flattering the pope
- Attacking the Holy See
- Early and late Luther
- Knowing your audience
- Is Luther being ironic?

Faith and Works
- The indulgence system
- External and internal
- Faith as the gift of acceptance
- The purpose of the Law
- Does he ever really explain faith?
- Nathan complicates the Law

Luther as Preacher
- Christ is not the moral exemplar
- Don’t abandon the Gospel
- Womanish absurdities
- Nietzsche’s Jesus
- Promoting faith
- Only love can change a heart
- The influence on Philip Cary

Works and Goodness
- Whence virtue ethics?
- Environment again
- Why he’s not an antinomian
- What’s done without faith is sin
- Can habits bring faith?

Subject to All and None
- Inner and outer man
- Fighting antinomianism
- Where virtue enters
- A false dichotomy?
- Luther’s glorious ethics

Other Things
- Luther and ritual
- The kingdom of God is at hand
- Free to do good

General Introduction
- More weather talk
- Feed problems

Not Etymology but History
- David turns to the OED
- The Enlightenment
- Byron’s parody
- Intellectual vs. physical
- Other terms and overlaps

Intellectual, Scholar, Academic, Man of Letters
- Defined against one another
- Ranges of interests
- Career tracks
- Levels of specialization
- Rhetorical performances
- What to do with scientists?

“The Twilight of the Intellectuals”
- None of us have read the book it’s reviewing
- Political ideologies
- Practical considerations
- Outside the system
- Intellectual and prophet
- Capitalism and ideology
- The intellectual’s pragmatic value
- The New Left and activism
- Whence conservative intellectuals?

Christian Intellectuals
- How to stand outside and affirm doctrines?
- Oppositional disciplines
- How many kinds of intellectuals?
- Strangers and aliens
- David goes Van Til
- Leaning or standing
- A troubled faith

We Advocate
- Augustine as outsider
- Driven nuts by David Brooks
- Spanning the Academy and the street
- Sorry, First Things

The Architecture of Purgatory

This section of Cantos begins to reveal connections between the terraces, both in terms of the media through which the tragic and exemplary stories come to the saved and in terms of the discipline of desire that happens along the way.

• To envy another human being means to look on that person’s fortune, good or bad, and fall victim to one’s own disordered desires.  So in Purgatory, the envious no longer face that temptation, instead hearing together those stories (and thus picturing by means of their own faculties of imagination) the stories that shape the soul, and their eyes are forced shut so that they must feel their neighbors’ presence rather than beholding them in abstraction.
• To fall victim to consuming wrath means to live inside the network of your own tightening muscles, boiling blood, and furrowed brow, and so Purgatory educates the wrathful with ecstatic visions, stories which necessarily take the soul out of its own narrowing world.  The thick smoke on the terrace means that the sinners do not have the capacity to make an intentional rush at the neighbor and must actually listen to what other people say.

In all three of the lowest terraces, since the vices involve bad will towards the neighbor, the discipline involves something that restrains the shade in the presence of the neighbor.  The reasons for that kind of discipline don’t get stated directly until Virgil speaks his discourse on the nature of sin (that’ll be the next post), but hints already appear in Canto 16, when Marco the Lombard teaches the Pilgrim about free will:

Men, therefore, needed the restraint of laws,

needed a ruler able to at least

discern the towers of the True city. True,

the laws are there, but who enforces them?

No one.  The shepherd who is leading you

can chew the cud but lacks the cloven hoof. (16.94-99)

Following Plato’s lead in the Republic, Dante names the role of the ruler as restrainer, an agent that allows the citizen “to discern” what is good and what is harmful by means of habituation and training should they lack the natural ability to do the same.  That focus also informs the grand discussion, in Canto 16, about why the Pope should forsake temporal power for the sake of the world.  If the Pope, who should be exercising the moral authority that can even call the powerful to account, is instead acting himself as a petty warlord, then the moral force of the Bishop of Rome diminishes to the point that the world can go badly and leave the blame rightly at the feet of its rulers.

These parts of the Purgatory do some good for me, especially since I’ve not written about Dante in a while: they remind me that his imperialism, like just about everything else in his system, is worked our philosophically before I ever get there.  His advocacy for a renewed Roman Empire, one which wields the sword to restrain rather than to plunder, flows from deliberation, not merely preference.  As one of his readers, I’m perfectly free to take issue with his arguments, but Dante’s challenge is always to articulate those arguments, not merely to render political difference a matter of consumer choice.

The Discourse on Sin

The best part of Canto 17, though, comes after the explanations of Envy’s workings, when Dante and Virgil wait for the sun to rise.  In those moments when they cannot rise, the great Roman poet explains to Dante the divisions between the terraces of Purgatory and by extension the reasons for each sinner’s particular fate there.  Love is at the root of all things in the divine economy, and Purgatory is no exception.  The divisions among the saved are based on the ways that they miss the mark of perfect love:

• Some love glory at the expense of the neighbor’s dignity (Pride)
• Some love relative goodness and rejoice at the neighbor’s relatively bad fortune (Envy)
• Some love their own honor and lash out at the neighbors who wrong them (Wrath)

Those are the vices of ill-will, the ones turned against a neighbor and thus the most severely disciplined.  Beyond their circle, Virgil notes, there will be some whose desire for God does not spur them to following Jesus:

• Some love inadequately and need spurred to greater desire (Sloth)

Virgil does not spell out the last three, but given what he does tell Dante, they’re not hard to deduce at this point:

• Some love wealth and material goods in ways that harm the soul (Avarice)
• Some love food and drink in ways that harm the soul (Gluttony)
• Some love sex in ways that harm the soul (Lust)

Because the expansion on these ideas happens in Canto 18, I’m going to cut this post short, especially given that our Facebook readers just got a mess of posts dumped at their feet, but I will note, for those reading along, that our next post will deal with Cantos 18-21.

General Introduction
- Should we talk about the weather?
- Listener feedback
- The Purgatory Experiment

Poe Myths
- Marrying his cousin
- Drug addiction
- Alcoholism
- Death
- A self-portrait

Magazine Culture
- Literary centers
- A broad audience
- Self-fashioning through scandal
- Poe as mercenary
- Poe as editor

Poe’s Narrators
- “I’m not crazy”
- The unreliable narrator
- How much third-person?
- Found footage

Poe’s Poetry
- In love with their own sound
- Nathan reads “The Bells”
- Scanning Poe
- Is Poe being sarcastic?
- Proto-Dada

Poe Movies
- Why the cultural fascination?
- The Vincent Price series
- Cusack-as-Poe
- The Following
- The other Raven

Bad Student Readings
- Moralism
- Autobiography
- Poe over Donne
- Does the emperor have clothes?
- Liking things for the wrong reason

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 21 April 2013 (4th Sunday of Easter, Year C)

Acts 9:36-43  •  Psalm 23  •  Revelation 7:9-17  •  John 10:22-30

I’ve taught Revelation, in its entirety, four times in the last six years.  Ten years ago, I would have said that anyone willing to do that is nuts.

So it goes.

This week’s reading, though, is one of those that reminds me why I so love the Apocalypse.  With a bit of historical engagement and an ear for Psalmic utterance, Revelation 7 presents a beautiful vision of the Kingdom of God.  What sets up verses 9-17, of course, is one of Revelation’s (oft-misread) “hearing and seeing” pairs: a voice numbers those sealed with the mark of the Lamb, and the numbers and boundaries are very clear and very small: a total number of people less than half the population of Rome, and drawn only from the original twelve tribes of Jacob (without even any consideration for the sub-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh), the sort of saved-remnant that one might expect in the documents of Qumran.

But when John looks for himself in 9:9, the vision of the Kingdom overwhelms his mind: before him is no minuscule remnant but a multitude that nobody can count, the vast plenitude of the saved that YHWH promised to Abraham in Genesis and that Isaiah prophesied in the opening chapters of his book.  The Kingdom, as the vision makes clear to John, exceeds the imagination of all who count numbers, not only the territorial anxieties of those who would put the goodness of God within set boundaries.  In the hands of the saved are palm branches, signs both of the folly of Palm Sunday (where the disciples of Jesus welcomed the Christ as a Roman conqueror) and the promise of the Torah brought to fullness (as in Leviticus 23, in which the celebration is not a general’s coming in but a city’s going out), and their white robes indicate that the stains of the world’s wickedness no longer trouble them.

The song they sing sounds religious to the modern ear but would no doubt have been a song of a kingdom when those first-century Christians heard it: salvation, which Caesar’s armies proclaimed, belongs not to Caesar but to God and to the Lamb.  The healing of the world happens not when the peoples all come to give honor and glory to a man in a city but to God in the Heavens.  And the agent of that Kingdom is no agent at all but one who passively became the victim of violence, one could almost say a Christ who undergoes a passion.  The strong network of reversals in this song of the slaughtered king sometimes falls on deaf ears, largely because we’ve lost the referents, but in its own moment, this song, revealed to the faithful through a read text, is the herald not merely of a new king but of a kingdom beyond the imagination of Empire.

That the LORD is a shepherd is still well-known to modern Christians; if anything, Psalm 23 has risen to a prominence that it simply did not enjoy a thousand years ago.  But the ancient image of king as shepherd, the one that would have given Psalm 23 its force, sometimes gets forgotten when our main images of shepherds come from children’s Christmas pageants (Charlie Brown’s and others’).  What the Apocalypse sets before the faithful is nothing less than a revolution: this is no mere regime change but a new way of thinking about kings, not simply a removal of oppression but a way of imagining the future in which oppression is no longer categorically possible.

May our prayers be for the true Kingdom to come, and may God’s will, as alien as that might be, come to pass on earth as it is in Heaven.

I’ve often told people who aspire to graduate school in Biblical studies or theology that an English major might just serve them better than a Bachelor’s degree in ministry.  Most undergrads roundly ignore me, but recently three of my own students, Peyton and Johnathan and Seth, two English majors and an English minor, have told me that they’re seminary-bound.  In our conversations about such things, Seth recently asked if I could recommend fifty books that he could read before he starts seminary (he plans to work for a year or two before he starts up graduate school).  Since I told him I would do so, and since there might be other humanities-types out there who have also considered the formal study of divinity, I decided to post that list here.

The philosophy that governs this list is that seminary ought to be a place that pushes against your strongest ideas, and without some strong ideas going in, that’s harder to do.  These texts should provide a seminarian with a vocabulary of stories and claims and visions of reality that will make the critical intellectual work of seminary far more valuable than a trip to seminary where one hears of Plato for the first time from a twentieth-century book criticizing “Platonism.”

I encourage readers to suggest books that I’ve omitted, accuse me of overrating this or that book, and otherwise to interact.  The way I figure it, posting the list here actually offers these two and future students even more fodder for thought.  Let’s set this rule down just for fun, though: for every book you would add to this list, you have to suggest one of my selections to take off.  The cumulative effect will be not only a longer list than fifty (because you won’t actually erase my list) but also a conversation about what’s more important and less important for those seeking to study theology.

I’ve blocked the titles into categories for the sake of my own thought process, and of course readers can suggest entire categories that I’ve neglected.  And because some of these books are titles that I teach in my own English and philosophy classes, some of them are already on the shelves of the students named above.  And as my students and Christian Humanist readers alike will no doubt predict, my selections tend towards the old rather than the new.

But to elude further delay, here they are: fifty books I’d recommend to an aspiring seminarian.  The hyperlinks lead to good critical editions of each text:

Long Narratives

1. Homer, The Iliad  
   It’s hard to imagine a liberal-arts education that doesn’t begin with Homer.  This Greek text taught ancient Athens how to do rhetoric, tragedy, and ethics.  Its clashes of gods and mortals still stand unmatched. And everyone from Boethius to the Coen Brothers pull on its episodes (and the Odyssey‘s, to be fair) to tell modern stories.
2. Vergil, The Aeneid
   What does storytelling look like after four centuries of philosophical speculation on gods, morals, and the nature of humanity?  Vergil and Ovid provide two answers.  They don’t enjoy Homer’s esteem among literary critics, but these two Roman storytellers stand to be gold for seminarians because they’re practicing the kind of post-critical imagination that twenty-first-century intellectual life, especially in the Church, must partake in.  Vergil’s Aeneas exhibits an awareness of his place in cosmic schemes that’s unimaginable for Achilles or Hector or even Odysseus, yet he retains the strong sense of heroic courage that made those Achaeans so memorable.
3. Ovid, Metamorphoses
   Where Vergil presents a legendary mortal exhibiting philosophically-sophisticated virtues, Ovid goes the other direction, taking Plato’s criticisms of the old gods and making badly-behaved gods the center of this subversive epic.  Jupiter’s libido and Juno’s petulant wrath aren’t the only shows in town, though: Ovid knows how to take an old myth and find the philosophical gold in it, and he does so over and over.
4. Beowulf
   Beowulf pushes the imagination in a different direction from the Romans: this tale has moments where the narrator and even the characters are aware of the Christian Bible, yet most of the time the characters (and sometimes the narrator) operate in a world more geared towards a polytheistic warrior-culture.  The result is a main character who’s at the same time a deliverer and a force of chaos; kings who are good so long as they’re strong but occasionally realize there’s something beyond; and monsters who are mythical, Biblical, and on occasion fire-breathing.
5. Dante, The Comedy (all three parts–Inferno, Purgagorio, Paradiso)
   The thing about Dante is that, in my experience anyway, he’s such a great poet that he reads differently before seminary and after, and each time I revisit the Comedy, I find something new on which to focus.  This complex poem has so much going for it that it’s become one of my perennial intellectual challenges–I never go through it without something new to contemplate.
6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
   A common thread in these narratives is the complex character of story-telling.  Very rare is the story in which one can detect only one stream of cultural influence, and Sir Gawain is no exception.  Mixing faerie-traditions and a strong sense of confession as the core of Christian piety, this poem follows Gawain, a proud but rash knight of Arthur’s court, as he faces his own inability to maintain honor (in all of its chivalric complexity) in the face of impending death.  The volume to which I link here also has some of the works that appear below.
7. Milton, Paradise Lost
   This was one of the books that served as a cornerstone of my dissertation, and an aspiring seminarian should have some awareness of its construction of God and Satan in narrative terms; its influence on English-speaking people’s conceptions of Heaven and Hell; and just because it’s a wonderfully constructed epic poem.
8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
   Read this one after you read Milton–the dynamics between Father, Satan, and Adam on one hand and Victor and the Creature on the other are all sorts of fun for meditating on the ways that we tell stories of creation and of responsibility.
9. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
   Second to Friedrich Nietzsche, the most convincing atheist I’ve read is a fictional character, Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.  Beyond that, this story sets forth moral quandries that baffle the ethical faculties, explodes the notion of childhood innocence, and makes most readers wonder whether one the main characters is really human.  I’ll let each reader decide which main character.
10. Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies
    Updike’s tale of the Wilmots, an American family on a journey with God and with the movies, is one of the best American novels I can think of for a seminarian.  The sins of the father and of the mother and of the grandfather are always with all of the characters here, and the shape of those sins is good for meditation.

Collections of Short Poems, Short Stories, and Essays

1. Plato, The Trial of Socrates
   These are the dialogues that establish Socrates as a legendary figure in philosophy and Plato as a master of accessible but challenging philosophical text.  A familiarity with these four texts will inocculate all but the dullest against simple-minded claims about “Greek thought” as a monolith.
2. Garbaty, ed. Medieval English Literature
   This volume, linked above, contains not only Sir Gawain but also Pearl, one of the great English theological poems; but also Lanval and Sir Orfeo, two great medieval adventure tales; and some Middle English dramatic texts.  Beyond the merit of those texts, staying familiar with Middle English helps one to “see” the oddities and the structure of one’s own modern English better.
3. Luther, Basic Theological Writings
   Agree with him or disagree with him (and I do some of both), Luther is a powerhouse in the history of Christian theology, and this collection will give you a good sample of those works which established that fact.  Especially important in this volume are Luther’s commentary on Galatians and his “On Christian Liberty,” his manifesto for a new kind of Christian ethics.
4. Herbert, Collected English Works
   George Herbert has been a constant companion for me, someone whose poems shape the language of my prayers and sharpened my tendencies to view critically and still to love the best worship music that comes down the pike.  Dipping into The Temple has been a devotional practice of mine for years, and not once has the well gone dry.
5. O’Connor, Collected Stories
   Flannery O’Connor is probably on the reading list of every Christian English teacher in North America, and she deserves to be.  She writes with an unwavering moral vision that suspects those like herself more than those alien; with a sense of human frailty and (even worse) human confidence that makes her characters impossible to forget; and with a sense of plot that makes just about every story a winner.
   

Dramatic Texts

1. Aristophanes, Lysistrata
   Part anti-war satire, part comedy of genders, and entirely made of dirty jokes, this mother of all comedy is one that will, if nothing else, cure you of any tendency to regard the past as the “good old days” of morality, as opposed to our generation’s depravity.  More than that, though, Aristophanes provides an occasion to think about what comedy might do for a community that takes itself entirely too seriously.
2. Euripides, Hippolytus
   Eurpides, I think, laid the egg that Plato hatched.  Or something like that.  The Hyppolytus presents a picture of the gods that had to influence the ways that Plato and Aristotle re-imagined divinity.  They’re arbitrary, amoral, and so powerful that human beings have no choice but to be squashed like bugs.
3. Seneca, Troades
   This play, along with Seneca’s Thyestes (in the same volume) are, for my money, the great revenge-ghost stories, the ones that got English-Renaissance tragedy going and gave modern cinema its vocabulary for action-revenge flicks.  A really compelling revenge story can’t end with violence against an unnamed and faceless enemy; the really good ones put before the avenger the genuinely tragic moral choice between honoring the desire for revenge in behalf of the dead and the desire for peace on the part of the living.
   
4. Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
   Not as well-known as Doctor Faustus or even as Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta is the work of an ethical renegade who came dangerously early on the world stage.  This play’s cynical take on Christians, Muslims, and Jews leaves the reader gasping for air, just the sort of thing that one should start rehearsing before one shows up for seminary classes.
5. Shakespeare, King Lear
   It’s nearly impossible to pick just one Shakespeare play (that’s why the link leads to a volume containing all of ‘em), but this one exhibits a wonderful tension between “the gods” who play with people’s lives (like wanton boys, yes) and a sense of divine love that’s far more monotheistic.  After you’ve read Lear, read some more as well, of course.
6. Miller, All My Sons
   Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are better known (all three are in the linked volume), but this play, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the great tragic meditations on life in the industrial age.  If Hippolytus gets torn between celibacy and marriage,  Joe Keller gets crushed between duties to his family, duty to his neighbors, and duty to his country.  Arthur Miller is without a doubt a modern Euripides, tracing the contours of the “gods” that squash us moderns.
7. Kushner, Angels in America
   I recommend this play because of its boldness of vision, even as I question its craftsmanship in parts and roll my eyes at the more preachy passages.  Set in the early days of the AIDS crisis of the eighties, Angels follows a cast of characters, conservative and liberal, gay and straight and pretending-to-be-straight, into the moral chaos surrounding HIV and links their stories with a crisis in Heaven as the angels lose sight of how to deal with the chaotic historical moment.

Long-Form Philosophy Texts

1. Plato, Symposium
   In my view, this is one of those texts that gets the Western tradition’s long conversation about ethics rolling. Set in an aristocratic Athenian drinking party (and crashed by one of the participants’ old boyfriends), this long conversation on the nature of eros raises questions of whether sexual attraction inhibits or enhances friendship; what it means to desire another human being; and how desire and education relate to each other.  Its questions remain with us.
2. Plato, Republic
   This is the right cross of Plato’s ethical one-two punch.  Those who have read ABOUT Republic will likely tell tales of censorship, fascism, and an allegorical cave.  Those who have read (and by read I mean “read carefully”) know Republic as a masterful book-length allegory about education and what it should do for the human soul.  Again, this is a book that has started many philosophical wheels turning.
   
3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
   What does one have disciples for, if not to take the master’s work and turn it on its head?  A conservative to Plato’s radicalism, Aristotle lays out a vision of the good life that reaches for the same unity of soul that Plato proposes but goes about it not by dismantling everything and starting over but by learning from the ways that we already talk about goodness and synthesizing a more articulate ethics from that.
   
4. Aristotle, Rhetoric
   Aristotle’s response to Plato’s Gorgias (also in the linked volume) explores the potential and the limitations of rhetoric as an art that points towards goodness as well as being effective in public settings.  Starting with the assertion that rhetoric is a dance-partner for philosophy, a power of seeing what is true about the subject matter at hand, Aristotle goes on to explore the implications of audience awareness, attention to the structure of a speech, and other matters as he sets forth the contours of rhetorical study for millennia to come.
5. Augustine, Confessions
   I place this with philosophy rather than theology because theology as a separate discipline wasn’t really on the horizon yet.  Augustine’s explorations of memory, time, sin, and other theological realities take place in the context of an extended prayer, pairing form and content in a way that most theology books do not manage.
   
6. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
   Part of the fun of this book is having conversations with other people who have read it–we never seem to have read the same book.  And that might just be the point.  Boethius begins with a treatise on the ethics of living as a philosopher in a tumultuous world and finishes up on topics related to that ethics, namely the nature of good and evil and the relationships between prayer, free will, and divine foreknowledge. 
   
7. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature
   David Hume is the modern philosopher par excellence.  Treatise on Human Nature lays out an account of moral life that requires no reference to historical tradition, divine revelation, or anything other than reasoned deliberation.  Whether or not the Enlightenment project was a success or a great disaster for humanity remains debatable; that Hume was at the center of that movement is not.
   
8. Hegel, Philosophy of History
   If you were going to grad school in philosophy, I might recommend Phenomenology of Spirit instead, but for someone who’s going to be engaging critical theory and its relationships with Christian theology, this book is just as handy.  Departing from much Enlightenment thought, which de-values history and attempts to construct airtight logical systems, Hegel in some sense returns to the medieval project of exploring the contradictions of reality, going so far as to say that contradiction itself drives history to be not a mere succession of uniform moments but a dynamic process of development.  Hegel will show you what it means to be “progressive.”
   
9. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
   Nietzsche said of himself, in his last book, that he is no man, but dynamite.  Whether or not he overstated, his aspirations to explosion come through loud and clear in this book, probably the most powerful of his arguments for an entirely anti-Christian ethical system.  Again, whether or not he succeeded in opposing Christianity (or whether, as some argue, his bullet ended up hitting Western liberalism rather than Christianity more broadly) is up for debate, but the influence of this book on subsequent philosophy and literary criticism is undeniable.
10. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution
    Perhaps I should have selected an actual Marx text, but for an introduction to Continental post-Hegelian thought, Marcuse is a good place to start.  His genius is actually showing what contradiction, dialectic, and other such philosophical terms would mean in actual social and political contexts.
    

Biblical Studies

1. Augustine, On Christian TeachingAlthough one could reasonably assign this treatise to a course on rhetoric or on Christian thinking more generally, the reason it’s in this list is because its extended case for allegorical reading of the Bible is like nothing else you’re going to encounter in most 21st-century seminaries, and as will become a theme here, I’d much rather read the texts that people demonize rather than take the word of those who made careers demonizing them.
2. Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel
   This is a book that every intro-to-Bible class in seminary is going to mention but very few will assign as required reading.  Rather than take the hero-worship or the demonization on somebody else’s word, why not read it for yourself?  What nobody will deny is that Wellhausen is an absolute giant in terms of how strongly he continues to influence the ways we study the Bible.
   
3. Barth, Commentary on Romans
   As with Wellhausen, many talk about this book but few assign it.  Where Wellhausen is the godfather of modern historical-critical Biblical scholarship, Barth’s commentary on the Romans signaled a strong theological turn in Biblical studies and a return to Biblical interpretation as central to academic theology.
   
4. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
   This one might actually get assigned, but two readings of this book are worth the time.  Imagination, for Brueggemann, is at the core of the Bible’s role among the faithful: where the world and its empires would situate us in certain kinds of stories and speak certain kinds of words to us, the prophets (up to and including Jesus) speak another world into our imaginations, saying “liberation” when the empires speak “order” and “justice” when the nations say “power.” 
   
5. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus
   N.T. Wright, who is sometimes a bishop and other times not, combines a genuine love for the Church with a lively mind for the questions of our historical moment and a world-class historian’s mind to produce some of the genuinely memorable Christian books of the last couple decades.  This one is a short, accessible entry into his work that explores the implications of taking Jesus seriously as a first-century Palestinian Jew whose career led to the formation of early Christianity.  With those aims in place, he writes things about Jesus such that one walks away wondering how anyone could have thought otherwise.

Theology Texts

1. Aquinas, The Shorter Summa
   Thomas started this book late in his life and never finished, but even the part he did write stands as a great introduction to theology as a genuine academic inquiry.  As with reading Plato, I always recommend reading Thomas not because he’s uniformly right but because the way he poses wrong answers is so interesting and demands such hard thought to oppose him.
   
2. Erasmus and Luther, On the Freedom of the Will and On the Bondage of the Will
   This pair of books was at the theological core of my dissertation, so they hold a special place in my heart, but beyond my own research, these books lay out, with polemical ferocity, the contours of the core battle that would distinguish the Magesterial Reformation from all comers.  Erasmus’s philosophical case for genuinely contingent existence and Luther’s for genuinely comprehensive divine sovereignty are the two sides of Boethius’s paradox, spelled out in a grand battle that will shake a reader as hard as Boethius shakes.
3. Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
   I’m not sure whether this belongs in the theology category, strictly speaking, but here it is.  Many have heard various versions of this book’s central poem (Lorena McKennett’s is my favorite), but the real treasure here is the medieval-style commentary on the poem, in which Juan describes the long desert wanderings that follow the great sweetness of one’s early Christian existence.  Read this, and know that much of your seminary career you’re going to spend in the desert.  It’s supposed to be that way, and going dry means you’re doing something right, not wrong.  And be sure to read to the end–there’s promised land on the other side of the wilderness.
4. Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel
   Returning to the theme of the Biblical-studies list, this is one of those books that everyone comments on and almost nobody reads.  Rauschenbusch, to put things simply, proposes what life in a republic might look like if Jesus actually meant what he said about the poor.  And as with most such books, it’s a perfectly reasonable book taken on its own terms.  The trick, of course, is dealing with so many books with so many radically different sets of terms.
5. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
   Largely a response to Walter Rauschenbusch and to other 19th-century liberal theologians, Machen’s book contends that Enlightenment-style liberal theology actually represents an entirely different religion from Christianity and that the modern choice is precisely between Christianity and liberalism.
6. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom
   This book is a brief, clear introduction to post-liberal Christian theology, a response to the influence of Niebuhr and other 20th-century liberal theology.  In its place Hauerwas proposes an ethics that gives priority to Church, Scripture, and confession and invites the world to join the adventure rather than assuming that the world is where the action already is.
   
7. Bosch, Transforming Mission
   David Bosch, a South African missiologist, lays out possibly the most ambitious theory of Christian missions I’ve ever read in this book.  Combining Church history with Biblical exegesis and speculative theology, it approaches the question of mission from inside of three major seminary disciplines and comes to a core conviction that any theology that does not see the sending of God as central might not really be Christian theology.
8. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy
   My hope is that, as you progress through seminary, you read some of the primary texts of Radical Orthodoxy, but in order to understand Milbank’s and Pickstock’s and Ward’s and Hart’s heavyweight tomes, you really need more background than an undergrad has.  That said, James K.A. Smith lays out a map to their thought in this (much more accessible) volume, and reading it will let you see one of the real intellectual alternatives available to a 21st-century theologian.
9. Hart, Atheist Delusions
   David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite is a book to take on after you’ve finished seminary; I needed Paul Oxley’s help to understand much of it.  But this little book is Hart for the people, and it’s terribly fun.  Starting with the propositions that history is an inherently rhetorical enterprise and that people who pretend otherwise deserve a sound mocking, Hart lays out a vision of Western Christian history that skewers conventional atheist tropes and leaves one ready to research an entirely new set of primary texts.
10. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity
    This book is on the list not because it gets so many things right (it doesn’t) but because it’s as good an artifact as any of some streams of 21st-century Christianity.  My 2010 posts on McLaren’s book (search on this site to find them) spell out my reservations about the book, but an aspiring seminarian should read it mainly to get a feel for some of the popular-level post-evangelical moves that one will no doubt encounter as one studies theology in the early 21st century.

Others that Don’t Fit the Above Categories

1. Herodotus, Histories
   I didn’t want to create a separate category for history books, so here’s where this one goes.  Herodotus is worth reading not only to see a strong alternate view of the ancient world from what the Bible gives (the number of characters and people-groups that overlap is wonderful) but also because Herodotus offers a reader a very different mode of Greek reasoning from Plato’s and Aristotle’s, which if nothing else gives the lie to the oft-repeated assumption that there is a singular “Hellenic worldview” that a theologian can accept or reject.
   
2. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
   Heilbroner set out to write an economics textbook for humanities students, and the resulting book is an engaging and accessible introduction for those whose undergrad education didn’t leave room for this fascinating philosophical discipline.  He digs into the big names up to his own day, including but not limited to Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes, and his style is such that no prior expertise in economics is necessary to make sense of it.
3. Fleming, Arts and Ideas
   DO NOT BUY THE MOST RECENT EDITION OF THIS ONE.  It’s prohibitively and immorally expensive.  Instead, look around for a used copy of a previous edition.  (I’ve linked to the 1994 edition, which was my textbook as an undergrad.)  Fleming’s art history sets the architecture and painting and sculpture of Europe and America, according to standard historical-period divisions, alongside discussions of the philosophy and theology and music and literature and other cultural phenomena that make the history of visual arts more interesting.  This book has been immensely valuable for me, largely to remind me that the seemingly abstract arguments of any period’s theologians always happen within the life of culture more broadly.