St. Augustine’s Press

This edition of Marcel’s inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty pages of new materials available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity’s foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on ‘man on the way’ that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope.

Compiled here for the first time are some pithy and incisive sayings of philosopher/playwright Gabriel Marcel, which give rich insight into his spirituality. Written with particular attention to the nature of man’s mortality and his longing for life and sure knowledge of his death, this intimate self-portrait introduces a new Marcel to the reader of his intricate philosophy, perhaps best said by Anne Marcel...

The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel’s work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe. These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel’s thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man’s deep ontological need for being, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.

The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel’s discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary.

These new plays of Marcel’s, here translated into English for the first time, will appeal to all who are interested in the role of grace in everyday life, in the influence of culture on belief, the relationship between faith and reason, the choice of faith in a secular world, and the struggle between inauthentic and authentic existence. Marcel raises profound questions about these and related topics, but does not offer final answers. In his plays, he leaves that to us.

Maria Traub's translation of Gabriel Marcel's post-war plays is a window into the French philosopher's answer to his own signature questions regarding human existence. And as in the earlier collection of plays, The Invisible Threshold, the realism, passion and sincerity that frame conscience and moral duty in Marcel are most profoundly visible in the day-to-day of family life. Ideas never before presented theatrically emerge in Marcel's characters who struggle to understand their times and how best to live in them. Post-war life was as much a spiritual reckoning as it was a new society, and Marcel's treatment of introspection is a valuable key to his own work.

Marcel's dramas require characters to respond authentically and from their true selves. He thereby offers the vision of how individual compromises may build up to break the world and condemn, or, conversely, contribute to the discovery and meaning of relation and redemption. Traub's new translation will interest the player as much as the scholar, and Marcel's aptitude for theatrical writing is proven once again. His intellectual sensitivity creates characters that beckon performance, which is an added dimension to the presentation of the human condition.

The reader who approaches Descartes's first work “Cartesianly,” that is, epistemologically, is faced with an insurmountable difficulty: the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii is virtually incomprehensible in Cartesian terms. Indeed, Descartes himself appears to have disowned the work, after having put it aside, never to be completed. In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1975 to accompany an Index to the Regulae published in 1976 and a new French translation published in 1977, Jean-Luc Marion argues that the key to understanding the text – and the genesis of Cartesianism – is to read it as a dialogue with Aristotle. Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind becomes intelligible when the precise correspondence between its themes and various Aristotelian texts concerning science and being is established.

Can there be universal moral principles in a culturally and religiously diverse world? Are such principles provided by a theory of natural law? Jacques response to both questions is “yes.”

Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), best known as the wife of the famous French philosopher Jacques Maritain, was a remarkable person in her own right. A poet, philosopher, translator, and mystic, she was at the epicenter of French intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, We Have Been Friends Together, together with the second part, Adventures in Grace, were originally published in two volumes in 1941 and 1944. Both books are combined here and are now being re-issued for the first time.

“When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.” – Thomas More, patron saint of politicians

It’s not easy being Catholic and conservative in secular ‘Blue State’ New York, but that’s what George J. Marlin is, always has been, and always will be. Don’t ask him to change.

The story of New York's feisty Conservative Party is really the saga of America's tumultuous political maturity. Born in response to the rise of Nelson Rockefeller's liberal Republicanism, the New York's Conservative Party has grown to become the nation's most successful third party. It has also turned out to be its political conscience.

In his new book, author and political commentator George J. Marlin, chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA – an agency under the guidance of the Pope that supports the persecuted and suffering Church around the world – describes the sharp rise in Christian persecution in the Middle East. After brief narratives on the rise of Christianity, Islam, and terrorism in the Middle East, Marlin documents country by country, acts of twenty-first century Christian persecution that is nearing a bloody climax that could produce the unthinkable: a Middle East without Christians and the destruction of an ancient patrimony that has been a vital link to the very birth of Christianity.

From the earliest days in the New World through the disputed presidential election of 2000, the influence of Catholics on American politics has followed a peculiar arc. In Colonial America, Catholics were often denied participation in the process; but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic bloc was recognized as a swing vote that determined the outcome of numerous elections; and today Catholics are either so assimilated or disunited that as a group their impact is declining.

Among all the fifty-six men who have served as New York’s governor, none was more complicated, self-righteous, pugilistic, and exasperating than Mario Cuomo.

As governor, Mario Cuomo is remembered most for his advocacy of the “personally-opposed-but” position on abortion that led to confrontations with Catholic Church hierarchy, and for dithering about his presidential ambitions, that led the media to dub him the “Hamlet on the Hudson.” His political style reminded many of Machiavelli; Cuomo styled himself a successor to St. Thomas More.

In this political profile, George J. Marlin sets the record straight on Mario Cuomo.

Influenced by the logical positivism of Moritz , and by Russell and Ramsey, Maslow’s interpretation is that Wittgenstein’s basic philosophy is a kind of Kantian phenomenology. In this, the first critical study of the Tractatus by an American philosopher, Maslow examines Wittgenstein’s solipsism and mysticism, neglected areas of his philosophy. “One of the earliest, most neglected, and most thorough works covering several important aspects of the Tractatus.” – Plochmann and Lawson,Terms in their Propositional Contexts in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

The brevity of this work limits the amount of citations and textual references given, and Maspero instead urges the reader to study the book alongside Scripture. His manner of writing respects the impossibility of speaking of God in his immanence, but he nonetheless carves out a place for the Trinity in the human intellect, a place where the Jewish and Christian God might be encountered.

 The global pandemic has levied a heavy toll on humanity, but in its wake appears a great opportunity. Amidst what he calls a crisis of modernity, Giulio Maspero points to a phenomenon that can be seen in plain sight. "The absence of personal relationships highlighted by the health crisis exposes the consequences of the modern matrix, which, having lost its Christian element, now risks transforming itself into a digital matrix, substantially configuring itself as a technognosis."  

Subjects from public philosophy and natural law to spiritual healing and alienation, and building a culture of life, from contributors Deal Hudson, Robert P. George, Rev. Stephen F. Brett, SSJ, Gerald L. Campbell, Patrick Fagan, John Haas, Bernard Dobranski, and others.

A Selection of outstanding articles from the Fellowship’s first thirteen years of Proceedings.

Contributors include Germain Grisez, Msgr. George A. Kelly, Paul C. Vitz, Joseph M. Boyle, Rev. Ronald Lawler, OFM CAP., John M. Finnis, James Hitchcock, Maura A. Daly, R. V. Young, John M. Haas, Robert P. George, Joyce A. Little, Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., Alice Ramos, Rev. Marvin R. O’Connell, Janet E. Smith, Gerard V. Bradley, and Rev. Robert Sokolowski.

Catholic teaching regarding human cloning is closely linked to the sanctity of life, the status of the embryo, and the meaning of sex and marriage. It addresses the tensions between the relief of suffering-which can be sought in good or bad ways-and respect for every human being. Anthony McCarthy sets out the scientific background to cloning, explains the Church's teaching, and examines secular arguments for and against human cloning.

Anthony Kenny attempts to reconcile Wittgenstein’s apparently contradictory images of the nature of philosophy; McGuinness explores the similarities of method between philosophy as Wittgenstein practices it and psychoanalysis; J. C. Nyíri examines the influence on Wittgenstein of Spengler and the conservative fascination with mythology, symbolism, gesture, and ritual in Frazer’s Golden Bough, G. H. von Wright sums up Wittgenstein’s relation to his times and stresses his alienation from contemporary attitudes.

Being Ethical is fundamentally intended to serve as a sequel to D. Q. McInerny’s Being Logical (Random House, 2004), which has remained in print and has been translated into six languages. Its style lends itself to being used as a textbook in liberal studies. More generally, it is a refreshing presentation of this topic and timely and timeless exhortation to readers of the necessity of a love of virtue for ethical thought. For friends and students of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Ralph McInerny, this book bears a style and manner that is both familiar and much loved.

At last, a user-friendly introduction to Church Latin using church and scriptural documents themselves, allowing the student to build up knowledge with meaningful texts. All paradigms, grammar, and vocabulary are included, and the texts are explained line by line. A 60-minute audio CD is included to aid in pronunciation. Let’s Read Latin is for students of all ages, and a boon to home-schoolers too.

Poems written in what, in the debased coin of chronology, can be called the golden years are not like those written in youth. In earlier volumes, Ralph McInerny has proved that Belloc has no equal in light verse (An Abecedary) and that the Bard cannot be approximated (Shakespearian Variations). In his latest collection, The Soul of Wit, he tries his hand at a variety of forms, preferring the formal comfort of more demanding prosody.

In Shakespearean Variations, Ralph McInerny takes the first lines of the sonnets and their end rhymes, and composes sonnets of his own. The formal structure of the sonnet has always provided a salutary discipline for the poet – iambic pentameter, the delicate symmetry of octet and sextet, the closing couplet which epitomizes the poem. The stamp that Shakespeare put upon the form, the themes of love and death, age and youth, loyalty and betrayal, have come to seem to adhere to the very form.

These stories represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of the Knight brothers in Ralph McInerny’s fiction. In The Noonday Devil, Phil, in his capacity as private detective, was fairly close to the action, but by no means the major character. Roger, his blimpsized brother, entered obliquely into the story but ended by starring in the finale.

In a series of swift aperçus, Ralph McInerny puts before the reader a number of writers who in their different ways were influenced by their Catholic faith – or in the case of Willa Cather by a faith that was a near cousin to Catholicism. Many of these writers would have been surprised by, even unhappy with, the designation Catholic. The adjective may suggest that their fiction is apologetic, catechetical, pastoral. But the point of noticing the influence of faith on the outlook of these writers is not to separate them off from writers tout court, but to emphasize that they occupy in a way noteworthy in these last times the mainstream of Western literature. It would seem gratuitous to refer to Dante and Shakespeare and Dryden as Catholic authors. There is no need to point out that the faith was the very air they breathed. Nowadays it seems useful to make the point explicit.

Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, was one of the few unalloyed heroes of World War II. At great personal risk, he saved some 800,000 Jews from extermination by the Nazis. Jewish refugees were given asylum in the Vatican, swelling the number of Swiss Guards. No Allied leader can match his glorious record. Golda Meir lauded Pius XII after the war, and the chief rabbi of Rome became a Roman Catholic, taking the name of Eugenio in tribute to Eugenio Pacelli.

For most of the twentieth century, discussions of McTaggart has revolved around his notorious denial of the reality of time. Some Dogmas of Religion is a popular exposition of his philosophy that provides an accessible route into the central elements of his fuller metaphysical system without becoming embroiled with this still contentious issue. First published in 1906, this, the second edition, appeared in 1930 and includes an introduction by C. D. Broad.

This work contains the essence of McTaggart’s idealistic philosophy. In his lucid and well-argued style, he tackles the fundamental aspects of metaphysical inquiry: the existence of God, belief and mysticism, time, eternity, causality, self, immortality, the nature of good, individual purpose, and value.

The work is given in three parts. The first section on law explores legal minds, rules and commentary on seminal jurisprudence. The second part explores literature and the influence of the writer and the disconcerting truths stories often seek to convey. Thirdly, Mendenhall delves into culture and the more obvious situations wherein we gain insight into our manner of living, and here Mendenhall exudes a Southern accent that in no way compromises his universal bearings.

Why are human beings so attracted to information and communication technologies? Developments in this field have formed new social networks around these technologies and that seem to compete with pre-existing structures in human lives. Cristian Mendoza and Lluís Clavell confront this phenomenon and its effect on human happiness, but have no desire to condemn the trajectory of human reliance on communication technology. Rather, they see an opportunity to explore human nature at greater depths. Only in this way can our use of technology properly support human activity and not sabotage our grasp of reality.

The first sustained modern investigation of Plato’s theology, which focuses on the Timaeus as Plato’s most complete effort to provide what (according to the Phaedo) Anaxagoras had failed to deliver: an explanation of the world through Reason.

In addition to “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government,” this new selection of Mill’s writings includes, among others, a number of less known of his writings, such as: “Civilization,” “Perfectibility,” “The Negro Question,” “On Education,” “On Aristocracy,” “On Marriage,” “On Free Press,” “Socialism,” Mill’s review of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” his letters to Tocqueville, and several other writings.

Mintz examines the contemporary reaction in England to the “Monster of Malmesbury,” with a particular focus on his materialism and moral philosophy. He argues that most scholars have ignored the contemporary reaction to Hobbes and thus have failed to realize the importance of the historical context against which the analysis of Hobbes’s ideas can be measured.

For Notre Dame gathers together the important contributions of a devoted Holy Cross priest to the continuing debate over the mission and identity of the University of Notre Dame. Read together, these essays and addresses by one of the most consistent and committed participants in this ongoing discussion serve to cast vital light on many of the major issues that Notre Dame has confronted in the past two decades.

This collection of new essays from distinguished philosophers and Russell scholars explores Russell’s own unique and enduringly important contribution to shaping the concerns and the methods of contemporary analytical philosophers. It includes both general discussions of the nature of analytical philosophy and minutely detailed analyses of Russell’s own arguments, and covers the whole range of Russell’s famously varied output. Contributors include Nicholas Griffin, Peter Hylton , A. C. Grayling, C. M. Kilmister, and others.

“Jokes in a serious work are acceptable on the condition that they hide a profound sense beneath a trivial form. It is in this way that Montesquieu, in his novel, Persian Letters, has written one of the most philosophical books of the eighteenth century.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

Montgomerymakes a retrospective journey with Walker Percy, as Percy comes to an accommodation with the modern world in company with other companionable journeymen. Percy himself enjoyed a large company of pilgrims who prove amenable to his vision of the human condition – in Percy’s words, man is “in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery,” words celebratively spoken of as “the holiness of the ordinary,” as opposed to what he called the “losangelization” of the popular spirit, a spirit which increasingly takes refuge in enclaves of “selves” in the relapse into tribalism celebrated as our “New Age.”

The concern in this essay is for our age as one suffering an intellectual severance between our response to existential reality in which the beauty of a created particular thing is divorced from the Cause of that thing’s existence. The separation speaks of a deracination of homo viator – the person on his way. It is a consequence of what may be called the Modernist Ideology of the Self, by which the ideological reduction of reality usurps the mystery of soul into the concept of self.

A positive engagement of the complementary dimensions of intellect that St. Thomas calls the intellectus (intuitive) and the ratio (rational), Making enlarges the concept of making as that capacity to our nature as persons whereby we exercise stewardship in the world, whether in the making of a garden or of a poem. Demanding and provocative, Making examines significant levels of “disorientation of intellect” in the modern world.

Why would a priest turn his back on his priesthood and walk away from his religious vocation and its demanding responsibilities? Why did he become a priest in the first place? And how do such men make reparations for their defection? Both Sides of the Altar strives to look at these questions through one such priest’s life, that of Frank Morgan.

Will Morrisey again considers the political dimensions of literary classics, as previously seen in Melville’s Ship of State (2019). His attention to Shakespeare’s comedies is a reader’s and playgoer’s delight. 

Morrisey writes with lucidity and weaves together elements of history, literature, politics and perhaps his own affinity for Ishmael’s passenger spirit to reveal just how broad and boundless of a narrative Melville’s Moby Dick truly is.

These quiet, surprising, amazing poems deliver to the reader fresh contact with wisdom for life––lessons we should have known had we paused a little more and looked, things we may have known and lost track of, insights we perhaps sense and now can finally grasp with these words of Moling––of Paul Murray––sharing with us his thoughts, his prayers, his stories of struggle and grace. These poems are “the hidden lost language of the soul” revealed.

 Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B. Abbot of Mount Angel Abbey

Seventeenth-century mathematician Craige attempted to determine the earliest possible date of the Apocalypse by using the most current mathematical and philosophical reasoning, but, more often than not, he was ridiculed as an eccentric and a crank.

Not much escapes the intellect and imagination of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. Whether it be love, children, education, moral reasoning, happiness or the proper dispositions for human existence, St. Thomas seems an expert in all of it. Crime and criminal conduct are no exceptions to this general tendency with him. Not only does he have much to say about it, what he relates is perpetually fresh and surely the bedrock of what is now taken for granted. In this short treatise, the focus targets St. Thomas’s criminal codification – his law of crimes.