A Tour of Wes Callihan's Personal Library

these are my books I have them in chronological order starting with the ancient works here I've got some works of the Egyptians some babylonian epics but really this is where the Greeks start here's the Iliad here's the Odyssey commentaries so I've got three shelves of Homer this is my favorite see how worn it is commentaries various translations I can't get enough of Homer down here I've got poetry history hoorah Titus and Thucydides and then I've got philosophy progressing up here I've got a bunch of Aristotle got Plato and then kind of concluding the Greek section modern works of scholarship on Greek culture Greek education essays on Greece archaeological studies of Troy mm-hmm and then I transition into the Romans so I've got quite a bit of Greek stuff here there are libraries that are much more massive than this but as I as I as I grow older I weed it out and try and keep the things that I like best here's the Romans stuff I've got again poetry I've got history I've got Virgil is Aeneid and a bunch of translations of the need because of course like with the Iliad the Aeneid being the great epic I want as many translations like as I can get so that I could see how different people have understood it I've got Plutarch and Tacitus I've got two Catullus and Caesar and I've got Horace and Livy most of the great of the great Romans and then again I have culminating the Romans section I've got some commentaries and in history's modern works of scholarship talking about the Romans and it concludes about here so I've got nearly as much roman work as I've got Greek Greek literature and I'm trying to keep everything chronological from the to the to the to the end and so the authors are organized not a not by last name or by any other system except where they fell in history so the later authors are going to be later on my selves and that way as I run my fingers along the spines of my book my fingers are tracing the leaves of time by the time I get to get here I've reached the early Christian writers but since I've got Greek and Roman literature here I try to keep my works of language study on top so I've got Greek Greek texts Greek primers and grammars and dictionaries up here and Roman ones up here near the the sections that they pertain to so that if I have questions about about a word or about a or about a comment in the original text and I've got a lot of original text in here as well besides translations I can look right up here and do my word studies if I need to and I've got the early Christians beginning somewhere in here the first several centuries the apologists and then the great the great Nicene and post Nicene fathers augustine here got a lot of augustine a--'s every right-thinking person should have they've got some original texts of augustine the original latin he got some some of the old texts that I've collected I'm not a huge collector of rare and antique books but I do like to get my hands on them when I can a set of the early church fathers edited by Philip Schaff one of my favorite church historians another set of early church fathers down here and the Fathers of the Church Akim accumulated randomly over time book sales garage sales library sales but I think that the study of the Church Fathers is a critical element of of not just church history but all of church history because the writings and the thought of the early church fathers affected Western civilization every bit as much as any other philosophers we can think of and then up in here I have got a among other things I've got the works of of the of the first century of northern year as Christianity carried greco-roman culture and civilization up into northern Europe in the great missionary movement of the first millennium after Christ with the calf to the collapse of the of the western Mediterranean Empire we have the beginnings of the works of the anglo-saxons we've got to Beowulf and and some of the some of the Norse works and so on still more early Christian writers woven and amongst them is the door of Seville in the 6th century who was the great encyclopedias trying to preserve the learning of the Roman world in the middle of what he saw as a dark barbaric age all around him and so is the door like like a bead and some other Christian writers in the toward the end of the first millennium are really valuable because they knew that the world was decaying around them and they're trying to preserve the learning of the of the ancient greco-roman Christian Age the anglo-saxon works like like a Beowulf the anglo-saxon Chronicle Old English verse and prose Christianity moving into the north is taking these pagan works of literature and starting to and starting to to bring the gospel to it and then we have moving into the high middle ages we've got Thomas Aquinas and Anne zome and Dante and some of the great thinkers of the scholastic age from 1100 to 1300 and then of the poetry of Dante and Chaucer as we as we see the Middle Ages culminating in some of the greatest works of literature and philosophy as we're lead as were led up to the to the Reformation and some less known works the golden legend which is a work of hagiography a collection of saints lives and saints lives were tremendously popular in the Middle Ages unlike the modern time when saints lives ha geography is an unknown genre outside of perhaps Roman Catholicism but certainly not in Western culture in general and yet it had a huge influence on on civilization more late medieval early Renaissance works our three in legends some of the Germanic legends the Nibelungen lead which is a late Germanic story that got translated by vogner into the into the Ring cycle in the in in the his great operas of the 19th century and then just as with the Greeks and the Romans here I've got some scholarly works about the Middle Ages at the end of the section on medieval literature various works by modern writers interpreting the mind of the Middle Ages what it was what it was all about and what it means to us then I have the Reformation down here I've got Erasmus Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and Renaissance and Reformation poets Edmund Spenser Sir Philip Sidney Sir Walter Raleigh collections of the of the of the poet's anthologies try I've tried to accumulate a good sample a good representative sample of the of the poetry of this new outburst of the Elizabethan age and the and the Reformation and 17th century literature milton john bunyan the Augustan age samuel johnson the the writings of the founding fathers in the federalist the the writings of the 18th century Edmund Burke and and and other writers in the age of Jefferson and and Franklin around the time of the American Revolution and then we move into the into the 1800's the 19th century here I've got a bunch of works by Sir Walter Scott the romantics some other Romantic poets and fiction writers here writings on the French Revolution writings on the Italian and German revolutions of the early 1800s and then the works some of the political theory of the Marxists Karl Marx himself and angles from the mid 1800s and then a lot of the Victorian literature I've got Victorian literature from the mid and late 1800s Tennyson and Dickens and browning and Arnold Christina Rossetti and then late 1800s literature Tolstoy Dostoevsky Robert Louis Stevenson and then the Mark Twain and the Americas and then finally as we get into into the 20th century the early 20th century I've got a number of works of literature imagined fiction and some works of history here so by the time I reach this bookshelf I've covered about 9 or 10 9 to 10 bookcases comprising what I've been able to collect of the works of Western culture Western civilization and I like to think to myself that if I lost everything else in my library if I just had these cases and have a good representative sampling of the old Western culture that I that I try to teach after this I have works of history and a theology of church history liturgy a worship and so on so these cases here are books / by topic up on top of God Education Culture rhetoric and poetry and so forth but really by the time I've reached this point I've got 8 or 9 cases of the of the great books up on top I have a set of what most people know of as the great books the Encyclopedia Britannica great book set published by the University of Chicago Mortimer Adler and and those fellows who put together this set in the early and mid eight 1900s as a way of preserving what was being lost in American culture this idea that there are great books and so here's a 54 volume set of what Mortimer Adler and the other people at the University of Chicago thought were the greatest works of Western civilization but there's an interesting contrast between this set and the books I've been panning my hands over down here these are these are my great books and these are Mortimer Adler's great books and here's the difference if we look up at this set I can find Ptolemy and I can find a st. Augustine here and Augustine lived around 1400 the very next book is Thomas Aquinas who lived after 1200 from 1400 to 1200 is 8 or 900 years that's a huge gap after Thomas Aquinas we've got Dante and Chaucer and the works of the Renaissance and the Reformation and the modern age so the modern age starts not even halfway through this set what was lost in this gap well in this gap there are these books in this case that I showed you earlier contains just a tiny sampling of the works of the Middle Ages which are immensely important the works of the of the of the of the early church fathers the works of Isadora and of bead to the venerable venerable bead who's the greatest historian of English history in fact one of the only certainly a primary source of English history Beowulf we've got the works of st. Anselm who's one of the greatest of the medieval Christian theologians before Thomas Aquinas the golden legend there's a vast vast number of books from the Middle Ages that are not represented in Adler's collection here there's this there's this 800 year silence this gap between Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and I think that's because this set is influenced by enlightenment thought enlightened the Enlightenment thinkers by and large had the idea that the Middle Ages being characterized by Christian faith were a Dark Age now people have never thought of darkness in terms of when they're thinking about cultures they've never thought of darkness in terms of religion they've never thought of they've never thought of darkness in terms of Technology in the Middle Ages there was certainly poor technology but there was a the the life of the mind was flourishing tremendously if you look back at Golden Age Athens in the 400s if we could walk the streets of Athens during the time of its Golden Age when there are great thinkers historians and poets and dramatists and mathematicians in geometers and so on we would see very simple straits and whitewashed houses there was not high technology but the life of the mind was flourishing well in the Middle Ages there wasn't much high technology either I suppose the average village in medieval Europe didn't look that much different from ancient Athens but in the same way the life of the mind was flourishing in the High Middle Ages when you have Thomas Aquinas writing the Summa Theologica and Dante writing his Divine Comedy and cthe in the Gothic cathedrals being built there is no way that you can sanely say that a Dark Age there was a short Dark Age after the collapse of the Roman Empire eight or nine hundred years earlier but the middle age is not a Dark Age unless you think that being characterized by Christian faith is darkness and that's what the Enlightenment thinkers thought the Middle Ages is this thousand-year stretch of Western of Western history of Western culture that was dominated by belief in the scriptures and in the Christian Church and then and in the reality as described by the Bible and the Enlightenment thinkers of the 1700s were men who were beginning to reject revelation as a source of meaning and truth and significance and adopting reason now the Christian Christianity has never rejected reason but reason always works with Revelation reason is guided by the revelation of the truth that God gives us but the Enlightenment thinkers are beginning to reject that and consequently that they reject an age that trusts in Christian revelation so I think that explains this this odd and and rather shocking gap in this great book set there is no medieval literature in here between Agustin and Thomas Aquinas or as I've been able to accumulate then this is pitiful compared to some libraries I've accumulated several bookcases full of medieval literature that show the astonishing variety and the richness and the profound thought of medieval literature so the old Western culture series that I've been lecturing about and the great books courses that I teach online attempt to remedy that there's far more than it could be easily taught an ear out of the Middle Ages in fact I think we could safely say there are they're vastly more books written in the Middle Ages that have survived to us then books that have survived from the Greek and Roman worlds so our emphasis on Greek and Roman culture in modern times also as a as an inheritance of Enlightenment thinking as is our ignorance of the Middle Ages so I hope that my book cases have attempted to remedy that balance and then I might just point out that one of the great pleasures of having one's own library a collection of books and this as I said this is a I think this is a fairly good library it's it pales in comparison to the personal libraries of some of my friends but just the physical appearance of a library look at the colors look at the textures look at the different heights of the books there's an aesthetic to a library that's immensely pleasing and there's something pleasing about being able to run ones fingers over the spines of the book you could never do that with a Kindle this is a very different experience from the digital experience a digital experience of verges on the Gnostic this is might I say a much more Christian experience of books and learning and I say all that partly in jest but partly seriously I like to have a you know my leather reading chair sort of backed up to these shelves and and while I'm reading one book my fingers can idly trace over the spines of others and I remind myself when I do that that the book that I'm reading at the moment is in the context of a great a great choir of voices over the centuries you know arguing yelling at each other agreeing disagreeing I don't give as much stock as some people do to the idea of the great conversation that Mortimer Adler talks about as though everybody Plato Karl Marx Augustine Charles Darwin are all sitting around Emily amicably having a nice conversation over hors d'oeuvres there is a great more a great deal more hostility between the voices of this conversation but Adler is right there is a sort of conversation going going on in in a library you can see all these if you listen carefully you can hear as well all these voices still speaking so whenever I pull a book off the shelf and I start to read that book I remind myself that it's in the context of other voices in its own time and earlier times this book cannot possibly be understood apart from the from from the vast conversation that is Western culture and and it's a nice to be reminded of that physically when when you're reading in your library be sitting next to the rest of the books that have been speaking over the centuries as you're reading one as we as we go through the old Western culture series of lectures I certainly would like you to trace the the thought patterns the ideas the development of philosophy and so on but here's another thing that you might think about as you're as you're going through the series you can be purchasing the books that we offer and so on but think about all the other books are that are out there that will complement your learning think about how you can begin your own personal library if you haven't already and if you have a library that if you're if you're an adult and you've spent quite a bit of time buying books as you should remember what Erasmus said when I get a little money I buy books if I have anything left I buy food and clothing he had his priorities right but think about buying books buying good books buying the books that people recommend not just from the modern times but books that that were being written and it composed in the times that we're talking about as we go through all the Western culture acquire other books and I'll mention them in this in the in the series as I go through the lectures but but acquire books buy books have them on your shelves read them when you can that you should always have more books in your library than you have read you should never have read all of your books if you've read them all you're not buying fast enough not to have books on your shelves that you haven't read is to have potential it's to know that you haven't learned at all it's to still be able to wonder to say no I haven't read everything if you've read all the books in your library you're in danger of thinking that you know everything so buy books and finally as we go through the series and you listen to my comments you can read other comments about the books think as you as you read the books that we're talking about in old western culture in comparison with other books from from from from the from the same time earlier books later books all of the books that you've read think about them the connections that you can make and as a lecture I try to offer some of those connections and show you you know how we can connect a antiquity and and medieval times with modern times and how things from the ancient world are relevant in our own time but but learn to think that way and learn to look for the connections and find the patterns because they're there in modernism we're often told that there are no real connections that connections are just things we make up in our own minds but that's the product of evolutionary atheism and that's not us God has made a world where there's connections between everything and seeing the books on your shelves and trying to make connections between them between the books that you're reading and books that you that you've read in the past or books you haven't read yet but you know a little something about trying to make those connections and fit them all together into the vast synthesis that should be your understanding is a more Christian way of thinking things don't exist as a bunch of random particulars floating in a meaningless void they're all part of a universe that God has made and our libraries and our books and the knowledge we get from those books is one expression of that of reality as God has made it well having said all that I hope that you'll join me in the old western culture series where I talk about all these books offer comments that I've generated from my own reading of them and whether you're a high school student and this is part of your liberal arts curriculum and I hope it'll be a useful one or an adult who's out of school but wants to do some learning on your own you realize that you didn't read these books when you're young and you may have missed out I'm certainly welcome you to join me and and participate in this curriculum as well for your own sake and possibly for the sake of your children if you anticipate teaching your own children and reading to them and you want to understand the great books of Western culture so that you can say meaningful comments to your children about the old books and why we should read them so whether you're a high school student college student and adult on your own or a mom or a dad with with young children both for your sake and for the sake of your children I think reading these books is extremely valuable and I hope to help you in in the lecture series so do join me in our old Western culture series as we talk through these books you

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Rating: 4.8974986 out of 5

Keywords: Wes Callihan, Wesley Callihan, Old Western Culture, Great Books, Adler, Hill Abbey, The Greeks, The Romans, Roman Roads Media, Schola Classical Tutorials, Library Tour

Id: 1E8PGchwuGA

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/vita4u]

just hahaha, thanks for sharing, it was kinda hilarious.

Love books too though.. but the way he explains... "you can run your fingers over the books" :')

[u/cburns33]

I have Analyst/debater friends who are Christians like myself, and I can tell you....he's not too far off.