St. Augustine’s Press

Servant of God Mother Catherine Abrikosov created this meditation on the seven last words of Christ as Lenten instruction for the Sisters of her Community. As Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova, together with her husband, later to be Father, Vladimir Abrikosov, she was a convert to Catholicism, at the behest of Pope St. Pius X entering specifically the Eastern Rite. She died in 1936, of cancer, in the basement of a prison in Moscow. Her cause for beatification has been introduced by the Moscow Catholic diocese.

Catholicism continues to experience an exponential growth in Africa. Going by the figures and the intensity of religious practice, Africa can unarguably be described as the new center of the Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. With over 236 million Catholics, Africa considers itself as having come of age and capable of making its voice heard on matters pertaining to global Catholicism/Christianity. And if there is a contemporary theologian greatly loved and admired by African scholars, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ranks premium on that list. His convening a second synod on Africa on the theme of justice, peace and reconciliation, further endeared him to the African theologians. This book is a testimony to the affection that the Church in Africa has for Benedict XVI. In effect, as Africa finds its voice on the stage of global Catholicism, the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI provides a fruitful space for Africa's engagement with the wider Church. Benedict XVI described Africa as the spiritual lung of the world. This volume testifies to the vitality and healthiness of that lung, a must read for all interested in African Catholicism and its definite impact on global Christianity as a whole.

Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, a native of Cameroon, has written a fresh, exciting new study of the lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs.

Fr. Maurice helps us to see how these two very different personal temperaments and philosophical methods meet and see a similar light, not despite their divergence but in and because of it. I found this work surprising and enlightening, and I found Fr. Maurice to be a reliable, sympathetic, and trustable guide through both of these challenging thinkers.

To call a philosopher "challenging" is often a negative euphemism for "difficult to comprehend." But in this case it is not negative but positive. Like Jesus and Socrates, both Kierkegaard and Blondel "challenge" us to a duel--a duel not with them but with some of our easiest and laziest assumptions about the intrinsic dynamism and restlessness of our very selves. This book should come with gentle warning labels to those who dislike that kind of challenge.

— Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College

Dick Allen’s earlier collections have always included poems written in traditional form. But This Shadowy Place is his only book in which every poem is rhymed and metered. Allen’s “stand alone” new poems – narrative, meditative, lyric, sometimes excursions into Zen Buddhism – consistently merge traditional form with his hallmark cultural, political and religious themes. Even when seeming to write of himself, Allen is actually forever writing of the strange and unique transitions from the American Twentieth Century to the Twenty-first. Known as one of the best craftsmen and poetry performers in the country, Allen here gives us new poems that when read either silently or aloud constantly shift between the literal and the metaphorical. The paths in these new poems lead unexpectedly through both calming and foreboding shadows.

This volume is an extraordinarily timely reflection upon myriad aspects of the conscience of institutions. It contains the collected papers of a group of scholars gathered in 2011 at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, in order to address growing threats to religious institutions’ freedom to operate in accordance with their conscientious convictions.

Essays by John Wisdom, Theodore Redpath, George Pitcher, Morris Lazerowitz, and others attempt to elucidate and critically assess Wittgenstein’s reflections on a number of important linguistic problems.

Anscombe guides us through the Tractatus and, thereby, Wittgenstein's early philosophy as a whole. She shows in particular how his arguments developed out of the discussions of Russell and Frege. This reprint is of the fourth, corrected edition.

A continuation of the eminent series of Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas from Dumb Ox Books. 

During his second stint as regent master of theology at the University of Paris in 1269–1272, Thomas Aquinas fulfilled the threefold magisterial task: legere, disputare, praedicare – to lecture, to dispute, to preach. On Virtues in General and On the Cardinal Virtues are two series of disputed questions which date from this period. In them Thomas, at the height of his powers and under the pressure of the raging dispute over Aristotle, discusses the central feature of his moral doctrine, virtue. During the same period he was composing his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and completing the moral part of the Summa Theologiae.

The Commentary Thomas Aquinas completed on Aristotle’s De Anima is thought to be the first of some dozen such commentaries that he wrote toward the end of his short career. He may have produced this word in 1268 while teaching in the Dominican house of Santa Sabina in Rome. Shortly thereafter he returned to Paris, where he was swept into the Latin Averroist controversy, at the center of which was the proper interpretation of the De anima. 

In addition to the great theological works, such as the Summa Theologiae, for which he is justly acclaimed, St. Thomas Aquinas commented on much of the New Testament. He found in the Pauline Epistles a comprehensive exposition of the grace of Christ, from treating the Mystical Body itself to guidance for its principal members. As the summit of the Apostle’s doctrine, the Epistle to the Hebrews was a treatment on the Head of the Mystical Body, Christ inasmuch as He is the high priest of the New Testament.

The mid-1260s found St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome commenting on the epistles of the Apostle Paul. His overall schema of the Pauline corpus reveals a synoptic vision of the letters unified by the grace of Christ. This grace is present first and foremost in the Head of the Mystical Body, Christ Himself, and to this examination is Hebrews dedicated. It also informs the whole Mystical Body: in that Body itself, in its sacraments, and in its power of effecting ecclesial unity. This accounts for Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. Third, and most apposite here, this grace is found in the principal members of this Mystical Body, both ecclesiastics and lay. Regarding the first we have I and II Timothy and Titus; for the second we have Philemon.

The Posterior Analytics is the summit of Aristotle’s achievement in logic. It investigates the logical requirements for the most perfect of arguments, the demonstration, which proves a necessary conclusion from necessary premises. In his commentary on this treatise, Thomas Aquinas gives us perceptive interpretations of Aristotle’s very concise and difficult text, together with illuminating explanations of the structure of the work as a whole and of the order of its parts. This new translation, based on the Leonine Commission’s 1989 edition, seeks to render Aquinas’s text faithfully in contemporary English. It includes a careful translation of the Latin text of Aristotle on which the commentary was based, with footnotes on passages where it differs from the Greek.

The study of any masterpiece can change one’s life, but the Confessions of St. Augustine, like Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Commedia, has the almost uncanny power to enact in the reader what it describes. Plato’s book reconfigures the city of the soul by freeing it from enslavement to the tyrannical passions and making it answerable to reason in its pursuit of the good. For Augustine, who shares many of the same ends, the pursuit of the good is not the rectification of philosophical reason, but (as it was for Dante) an intensely personal and consuming love: the encounter with the living God. Oddly, it may seem, that encounter comes for Augustine through the act of reading. Unlike Plato, who depicts the process of reasoning toward the truth, Augustine finds the truth revealed in another, immeasurably greater book that cannot be read in its true sense without the help of its author.

The Physics is the fundamental text in Western philosophy, as Heidegger said. The text analyzes the most common features of the natural world, such as motion, place, and time, grounding its arguments in common experience and proceeding to a proof of the prime mover.

Aristotle's much-translated On Poetics is the earliest and arguably the best treatment that we possess of tragedy as a literary form. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis have translated it anew with a view to rendering Aristotle’s text into English as precisely as possible. A literal translation has long been needed, for in order to excavate the argument of On Poetics one has to attend not simply to what is said on the surface but also to the various puzzles, questions, and peculiarities that emerge only on the level of how Aristotle says what he says and thereby leads one to revise and deepen one’s initial understanding of the intent of the argument. As On Poetics is about how tragedy ought to be composed, it should not be surprising that it turns out to be a rather artful piece of literature in its own right.

The De Anima (On the Soul) is the first and most general of Aristotle’s biological works and as such is the most important work in the study of nature after the Physics of Aristotle. It is presupposed to Aristotle’s Sense and the Sensible, Memory and Reminiscence, and his many other biological works.

Originally published in Polish in 2019 by The Lethe Foundation, this book demonstrates the relevance and important of Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) and Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Their collective legacy is one of responsible and truly thoughtful living. Their treatment of Humanists and their diagnosis of modernity is an important theme in this work, and the indication of the political consequences of humanism.

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, on June 4–5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss’s intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen “the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times.

The wager fragment in Pascal’s Penseés opens with the phrase “infini rien” – “infinity nothing” – which is meant to describe the human condition. Pascal was reacting to the notion that we seem to be able to know much about the world but less about ourselves. His famous wager – betting in favor of God’s existence, since the rewards for being right are infinitely good, but the loss for being wrong are utterly trivial – is one of the most celebrated and disputed in the history of philosophy.

In a time when the relation of theology to science is in question, due in part to the unwitting fideism of religious fundamentalists and, conversely, as a result of the equally fundamentalist diatribes of the so-called “New Atheists,” How Science Enriches Theology provides a much-needed demonstration of the possibility and necessity for dialogue and integration between the two perspectives or fields of inquiry. 

The nineteenth century saw the rejection of earlier classifications of racial diversity – as grounded in environment, education, and divine origins – for that of scientific racialism. Used to account for political problems within Europe, it justified imperialism and the imposition of rule over so-called primitive peoples. And yet such racial theory, which is nowadays seen as a characteristic development of the nineteenth century, had its foundations in the age of Enlightenment. This volume reproduces documents written between 1760 and 1850, surveying developments in Germany, France, and England, which reveal the rise of racial theory in all its complex diversity from Buffon and Blumenbach onwards.

“Students of the Aristotelian tradition in medieval philosophy will welcome the excellent English translations of Averroes’ commentaries on these two works of Aristotle.” – Mohamed Alibhai, Religious Studies Review

This volume contains both the translation of the text and an introduction which the arguments of both Averroes and Aristotle are sketch out and their differences from Plato and other important thinkers explored, an outline analysis of the order of Averroes’s commentary, annotations to the text, a bibliography, and a glossary of important terms with their English translations..

Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (published in February 1936) is probably the most influential and controversial economics book of the twentieth century. Keynes claimed to have undermined the foundations of orthodox economics and to have developed a radically new way of thinking about unemployment.

”The name David Lindberg is certainly not new to the study of medieval science in general or of medieval optics in particular. . . . But without any doubt we have in hand now the man’s masterwork, a truly first-rate book, done with consummate skill, complete in every detail. . . .

There have been serious complaints since Vatican II that many Catholics do not know the basic teaching of the Church on the essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the twelve articles of the Creed. That was one of the main reasons for the production of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was mandated by Blessed John Paul II and published in the 1990s.

Jesus Christ is the most important person who ever set foot on planet earth because he was and is God Almighty in human flesh. He came from heaven into this world of suffering and death to save all mankind from sin and the sad consequences of sin – ignorance of God, suffering and death. He is the only one who could possibly reconcile man with God, since as God all his actions have infinite merit.

The purpose of this little book is to answer certain questions that many people have about the nature of death. Most people feel that there is something wrong about death. We all want to live a happy life and we do not want to die. Life is experienced as something very good and we want to preserve it. But the reality is that man is by nature mortal, which means that he is destined to die sooner or later. The fact is that we begin to die the moment we are conceived in our mother’s womb.

Here you’ll find a weekly devotional for Christian disciples of all stripes, but with a different twist—it is a series of brief spiritual ruminations accompanied by black-and-white photographs, so you can meditate on the verbal and the visual at the same time—synesthesia! The more senses entangled up in a memory, the more likely we will make it our own. Each week you’ll encounter a Scripture reading, a recommended hymn, a lead-in quotation, probing comments on the selected theme, and a closing prayer. These all work together to create an “ambience” which promotes spiritual growth.

To be a Christian is to be a convert. The word “convert” applies in a real sense both to cradle-born Catholics and to those, traditionally regarded as converts, who become Catholics as adults. The Catholic Church is the divinely established framework of the program of a conversion, which Christ presented as a thorough change of mind and heart (metanoia). While for a cradle-born Catholic the implementation of that program is usually a gradual process, for converts it contains a momentous act as they vote, so to speak, with their feet, on behalf of Truth, by joining the Church as the One True Fold, the Sole Ark of Salvation, to recall hallowed phrases dear to John Henry Newman, easily the greatest convert during the nineteenth century.

Beck discusses the works on religion of the six philosophers he considers most germane to contemporary issues: Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, and Santayana. “I have tried to choose men whose independence of mind was such that they often appeared to their contemporaries to be enemies of religion.” He first addresses the question, What is secular philosophy? And then explains the differences between the “families” of secular philosophers, before examining both their life and works.

A Second Look at First Things: A Case for Conservative Politics offers in one volume, an intelligent, winsome, and readable articulation of conservative ideas on a variety of issues and questions. They range from the abstract (“Why the Natural Law Suggests a Divine Source”) to the practical (“Lincoln and the Art of Political Leadership”), and to the provocative (“Being Personal These Days: Designer Babies and the Future of Liberal Democracy”).

Now available for the first time in a quality paperbound edition,Herodotean Inquiries should be regarded as our best and most complete document for pre-Socratic philosophy. Without being a work of philosophy, its plan and intention cannot be understood apart from philosophy. Here an attempt is made to uncover Herodotus’ plan and intention and to link them with their philosophic roots. This attempt requires that Herodotus’ way of telling a story be examined, for Herodotus primarily reveals himself in the stories themselves and not in the moral he sometimes draws from them. Once one sees the importance Herodotus himself places in his own Inquiries, his account of Egypt, which has long been a stumbling block on any interpretation, can be appreciated; and Egypt in turn supplies the basis for understanding Book II on Persia and IV on Scythia and Libya.

This detailed commentary on the action and argument of Sophocles’ Antigone is meant to be a reflection on and response to Hegel’s interpretation in the Phenomenology (VI.A.a-b). It thus moves within the principles Hegel discovers in the play but reinserts them into the play as they show themselves across the eccentricities of its plot. Wherever plot and principles do not match, there is a glimmer of the argument: Haemon speaks up for the city and Tiresias for the divine law but neither for Antigone. The guard who reports the burial and presents Antigone to Creon is as important as Antigone or Creon for understanding Antigone. The Chorus too in their inconsistent thoughtfulness have to be taken into account, and in particular how their understanding of the canniness of man reveals Antigone in their very failure to count her as a sign of man’s uncanniness: She who is below the horizon of their awareness is at the heart of their speech. Megareus, the older son of Creon, who sacrificed his life for the city, looms as large as Eurydice, whose suicide has nothing in common with Antigone’s. She is “all-mother”; Antigone is anti-generation.

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete’s thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, andtragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete’s life-long engagement with one thinker in particular – Plato.

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Seth Benardete's study of the Iliad, which initiated his scholarly career, bears the hallmarks of the unique turn of mind that characterized all his later work. In a brief Note written thirty years later, included in this volume, he looks back on what he sees as the limits of his original reading of the Iliad. Yet he seems to have been aware of the fundamental problems from early on that he wrestled with explicitly when he returned to Homer some forty years later: the question of the relations among gods, fate, and human choice, which lies at the core of his late "Platonic reading" of the Odyssey, is already guiding his understanding of the Iliad. And he saw, in working out that understanding, how those relations take on a very distinct form for the tragic hero in contrast with the comic hero – Achilles in contrast with Odysseus.

For five centuries, literary treasures had lain dormant in the archives of the Palazzo Tuttofare in Florence. Through a fortunate coincidence they have been recently discovered, and the present work is the result of this find. Contained herein, in fact, is the unedited correspondence – or presented as such – exchanged between Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Niccolò Machiavelli in 1517–1518. To these letters are added texts which serve, as it were, as annexes of the Prince and of the Utopia.

In this profound and prescient novel, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson gives us an imaginative foretelling of the end of the world. All stories, Aristotle said, have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but most ends are relative, the terminus of this chain of acts or that. But what of the end that terminates all human action as we know it, the end of time itself, the Second Coming? Since this novel appeared in 1906, many others have been devoted to nuclear disaster, destructive comets, and other hair-raising possibilities. What sets Benson’s story apart and makes it as readable today as when it was written is the Catholic and biblical context that provides the ultimate meaning.

Alain Besançon’s studies, over decades, on Russia, France, Islam, and art have convinced him that “that nothing is comprehensible if one neglects the religious choices that determine a historical destiny.” His aim is to comprehend the most powerful nation on the earth, and he was convinced that Protestantism was the key to America.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne, the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter, shunned organized religion, his stories were heavily weighted with sin and guilt. The fascinating history of generations of Hawthornes and their journey from Puritanism to Catholicism offers a penetrating glimpse into an extraordinary family. As one critic remarked, it is a story enveloped "with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness."

Dr. Richard Bishirjian’s Conservative Rebellion examines the American conservative movement in light of phases of American history in which the life of the American nation took shape from forces and conditions of the American soul.

In The Coming Death and Future Resurrection of American Higher Education, Dr. Richard Bishirjian describes how, beginning in 2000, he founded Yorktown University and immediately confronted barriers designed to block entrance of his University from operating as a low cost, regionally accredited, high tech, Internet university.