The Son of righteousness

The King James Version of the fourth chapter of Malachi begins with these two verses:

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

The fact that the word Sun is capitalized, even in modern editions of the KJV, suggests that some editor interpreted it as a reference to God or Christ. (Sunne is usually but not always capitalized throughout the original 1611 edition; modern editions do not capitalize sun except in this verse.) And indeed if you were to hear this passage read aloud it would be natural to misinterpret Sun as Son. Google Ngrams shows that, in literary use generally, people generally capitalize both nouns — Sun of Righteousness — implying that, although they may use the correct vowel in Sun, they are nevertheless interpreting the Sun as the Son and Righteousness as a name of the Father. And the solecism (or perhaps, in some cases, intentional wordplay) Son of righteousness, while much less frequent than the correct version, is far from rare.

But it is of course only in English that such confusion or wordplay comes naturally, since sun and son are not homophones in other languages. It might just pass muster as a pun in certain other Germanic languages (e.g. zon/zoon in Dutch), but certainly not in Malachi’s original Hebrew, where the word shemesh carries not the faintest echo of ben. In context, Malachi is clearly making no anachronistic allusion to the Son of God’s arising from the tomb, but is rather playing on the double nature of the sun’s heat. The Lord maketh his sun of righteousness to rise on the evil and the good — but the evil will experience it as a consuming fire; the good, as lifegiving warmth. (William Law makes this point eloquently, though without reference to Malachi, in his Spirit of Love.)

For us modern (post 17th-century) readers of the KJV, another factor encouraging the misinterpretation of Malachi is the use of the possessive determiner his, which seems more appropriately applied to a masculine son than to the inanimate sun. The word its did not make its literary début until several decades after the publication of the KJV — it appears once in modern editions (Leviticus 25:5) but not at all in the 1611 original — so his had to do double duty as the possessive determiner corresponding to both he and it. See for example Genesis 3:15 — “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” — where it is clear that his is to it as thy is to thou. (Here, too, this archaic use of his may have influenced later readers to interpret the “seed” as a specific person, Christ, rather than in a more general sense.) However, Jacobean writers still felt a little uncomfortable with this neuter use of his, just as we feel vaguely uncomfortable writing “the car whose window is broken,” and they tended to avoid it. The KJV translators did this either by using such alternative locutions as thereof and of it, or — in the case of the sun — by poetically masculinizing a neuter noun. The KJV refers to the sun as it four times (when there is no accompanying possessive) and as he only twice (and only in sentences with his).

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The Book of Mormon — purportedly written by the Nephites, American descendants of Hebrews who left the Old World circa 600 BC — quotes the third and fourth chapters of Malachi in their entirety, as chapters 24 and 25 of Third Nephi.

At first blush, this seems like a glaring anachronism, since Malachi prophesied circa 420 BC, long after Nephi and his family had left Jerusalem, and the Nephites should therefore have had no knowledge of his writings. The Book of Mormon has an explanation, though. The book of 3 Nephi deals with the visit of Jesus Christ to the Nephites following his resurrection, and in chapters 24 and 25, Christ — who did know the writings of Malachi — dictates them to the Nephites and “commanded them that they should write the words which the Father had given unto Malachi, which he should tell unto them” (3 Ne. 24:1). After the dictation — which for some reason includes only the second half of the Book of Malachi — is complete, Christ explains “These scriptures, which ye had not with you, the Father commanded that I should give unto you; for it was wisdom in him that they should be given unto future generations” (3 Ne. 26:2).

So quoting Malachi was not a mere ignorant blunder on Joseph Smith’s part. Whoever wrote the Book of Mormon clearly understood that the Nephites would not have had access to the Book of Malachi by any normal means and provided an explanation of how they could nevertheless know some of its contents.

There is still a blunder, though. In dictating Malachi 3-4 to the Nephites, when Christ comes to the passage discussed above, he says — you guessed it — “the Son of righteousness.” As discussed above, this is an error that would never have been made by Christ himself, nor by the Nephites who recorded his words, but only by an English speaker who knew the KJV but was not terribly literate. Joseph Smith fits the bill.

But then so do Joseph Smith’s scribes. After all, Smith didn’t actually write his English “translation” of the Book of Mormon but dictated it to an amanuensis — so it’s entirely possible that he translated the Nephites’ version of Christ’s dictation of Malachi correctly — “Sun of righteousness” — but that his scribe, misled by homophony, wrote down the wrong word, and that the error has been perpetuated in all subsequent editions of the book.

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Unfortunately, Joseph Smith doesn’t get off the hook so easily, because 3 Nephi  is not the only place where Malachi is quoted in the Book of Mormon. Material from Malachi also appears in 1 Nephi 22, and in 2 Nephi 25-26. These passages are far more problematic because they were supposedly written by Nephi, the son of Lehi, one of the original group that left Jerusalem in 600 BC and migrated to America. That is, they were written long before Christ appeared and dictated the words of Malachi — and Christ explicitly says in 3 Nephi that the Nephites had not had the Book of Malachi prior to his dictation. So how does the first Nephi come to be quoting from it?

Well, one possible explanation is that Nephi didn’t quote Malachi. After all, the entire Book of Mormon passed through the hands of Mormon and Moroni, who lived after Christ’s visit and thus had access to Malachi 3-4, so it is conceivable that the Malachi quotes represent later interpolations, not present in the original writings of Nephi. Sure enough, all the anachronistic Malachi quotations come from Malachi 4:1-2 — that is, from verses which were included in Christ’s partial dictation of the book — so Mormon and others would have had access to them. On the other hand, 1 and 2 Nephi come from the Small Plates of Nephi, and it is generally accepted that Mormon edited and abridged only the Large Plates, later appending the Small Plates complete and unmodified. Even if Mormon himself didn’t interpolate the Malachi quotes, though, someone else could have. Centuries passed between the revelation of Malachi to the Nephites and the final compilation of the Book of Mormon.

Another possibility is that the passages in question were written by Nephi, but that he was not quoting Malachi — that Malachi 4:1-2 is the work of some pre-exilic prophet whose work is now lost, and who was quoted by both Nephi and Malachi. In 1 Ne. 22, Nephi says “thus saith the prophet” (v. 15) and “this is according to the words of the prophet” (v. 23) when he quotes the Malachi material but does not mention Malachi by name. It’s just possible that he had some other prophet in mind, one whose writings survive only as unattributed quotations in the Book of Malachi.

Unfortunately, all these possible explanations are undermined by what we find in 2 Nephi 26:4-9, quoted below. The passages in bold show the clear influence of Malachi 4:1-2.

Wherefore, all those who are proud, and that do wickedly, the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, for they shall be as stubble. And they that kill the prophets, and the saints, the depths of the earth shall swallow them up, saith the Lord of Hosts; and mountains shall cover them, and whirlwinds shall carry them away, and buildings shall fall upon them and crush them to pieces and grind them to powder. And they shall be visited with thunderings, and lightnings, and earthquakes, and all manner of destructions, for the fire of the anger of the Lord shall be kindled against them, and they shall be as stubble, and the day that cometh shall consume them, saith the Lord of Hosts. O the pain, and the anguish of my soul for the loss of the slain of my people! For I, Nephi, have seen it, and it well nigh consumeth me before the presence of the Lord; but I must cry unto my God: Thy ways are just. But behold, the righteous that hearken unto the words of the prophets, and destroy them not, but look forward unto Christ with steadfastness for the signs which are given, notwithstanding all persecution—behold, they are they which shall not perish. But the Son of Righteousness shall appear unto them; and he shall heal them, and they shall have peace with him, until three generations shall have passed away, and many of the fourth generation shall have passed away in righteousness.

Yes, it’s the Son-with-an-o of Righteousness again, and this time the variant can’t easily be dismissed as an error on the part of Joseph Smith’s scribe. The context (i.e., coming right after two fairly direct quotations from Malachi 4:1) leaves little room for doubt that Malachi is being alluded to — but this time it is not a direct quote, and the rephrasing makes it clear that the Son (not the sun) is intended. This Son does not arise but appears, and “he shall heal them, and they shall have peace with him” is more unambiguously masculine than “with healing in his [its] wings.” Future editions of the Book of Mormon could easily correct 3 Nephi’s Son to Sun, but it wouldn’t be possible in 2 Nephi.

(In a somewhat parallel case, the original 1830 Book of Mormon frequently refers to the “straight and narrow” path — a very common solecism, reading straight for the KJV’s homophonous, but not synonymous, strait. More recent editions have quietly corrected all of these but one: 2 Ne. 9:41 — “Behold, the way for man is narrow, but it lieth in a straight course before him,” where the rephrasing makes it clear that straight means “straight,” not “strait.” Again, a mistake only an English speaker would make. This one is not as compelling as the Malachi case, though, since the context doesn’t make it so clear that it is intended as a biblical quotation.)

Poems cut short by death

I recently read this Telegraph article about a study of the effects of poetry on the brain, which quoted the last quatrain of “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems.

Volunteers brains have been scanned while reading four lines by Wordsworth: “She lived unknown and few could know, when Lucy ceased to be. But she is in her grave and oh, the difference to me.”

As I read this, I was expecting “the difference to me” to be the subject of a full clause, and it was a bit jarring when the verse suddenly stopped short of the anticipated predicate, forcing me to go back and reparse it as an exclamatory fragment. How appropriate, I thought, what a perfect marriage of form and meaning. What a powerful way of evoking the suddenness of death, the sense of an expected dénouement canceled without notice, the abrupt transition to nothingness which the mind misses at first and must circle back on to process fully.

I quote a quote of Wordsworth rather than the original because I find that the effect is stronger when the lines are embedded in an ordinary paragraph. Reading the original, one can see at a glance, in advance, that “The difference to me!” is the end, and there is no expectation of more to come. Also, Wordsworth’s exclamation point, replaced by the Telegraph‘s Julie Henry with a more discreet period, subtly undermines the effect.

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Attempting to duplicate Wordsworth’s effect in the simplest way possible, I came up with this:

Roses are red,
And blue the sky.
Lucy is dead.

Going beyond the vague expectation of more to come, this little suicide-note of a poem should (if it works as I expect) generate a ghost-line of an ending, whispered subaudibly in the reader’s mind, unwritten because if written it would be a lie. The conventions of the roses-are-red genre leaves no doubt as to what the omitted ending should be. The strong expectation of some specific ending makes it unlike Wordsworth’s poem, and also unlike death. It is also structurally incomplete as a poem, leaving the second line hanging rhymeless, whereas Wordsworth’s is, once you realize it, structurally complete as it stands.

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The following poem uses something like the reverse of Wordsworth’s technique, but the purpose is the same — to draw the reader’s attention to the contrasting possibilities of the poem’s continuing and its being cut short.

I worry so for dear old Bill,
So long abed, so very ill.
For if old Bill does not get well,
Then he will die and go too soon
To tell the tale he came to tell
And sing out his appointed tune.

If this works as expected, the mental echoes of the unwritten word hell should leave the last two lines in a limbo of ghostly half-existence; the reader reads them but knows that in a parallel universe the poem ended without them.

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A larger-scale example of a poem which ends abruptly with death, leaving the reader expecting more and not immediately assimilating the fact that the poem is over, is the Aeneid. It’s not clear whether or not Virgil intended to end the poem that way. We know that he left it unfinished when he died, demanding on his deathbed that it be destroyed, but opinions differ as to whether he had just wanted to do a bit of editing or had planned to double the length of the poem, bringing the number of books up to the Homeric 24. But whether intentionally or not, the poem ends as abruptly as the life of Turnus — or as that of Virgil himself.

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The unfinished Faerie Queene was also cut off at a very appropriate point by the death of its author.

When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare,
Of Mutability, and well it way:
Me seemes, that though she all vnworthy were
Of Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she beares the greatest sway.
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
And loue of things so vaine to cast away;
Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Vpon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

And with that the poem became fixed forever, no more to change, and the poet went on to his eternal rest.

Revelation in Aeneid IX

The ninth book of the Aeneid contains what are in my opinion (and I admittedly know the book only in translation) two of its most beautiful passages. Both deal with the characters’ reactions to apparent revelation or inspiration from unknown sources.

Here is Robert Fitzgerald’s pitch-perfect rendition of Turnus addressing the divine messenger Iris:

Glory of the sky,
Who brought you down to me, cloudborne to earth?
What makes the sudden brilliance of the air?
I see the vault of heaven riven, and stars
That drift across the night-sky. I’ll obey
This great presage, no matter who you are
Who call me to attack.

And here is Nisus addressing Euryalus before their foray into the enemy camp, as rendered by Allen Mandelbaum:

Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man’s relentless longing
becomes a god to him?

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(Fitzgerald’s and Mandelbaum’s are the two best Aeneids of which I am aware, decidedly superior to those of  Patric Dickinson, Theodore C. Williams, and John Dryden. Having no Latin myself, I base that judgment on the poetic power of their verse, not on their fidelity to the original. Fitzgerald handles some of the passages better; Mandelbaum, others.)

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For Turnus, as Fitzgerald so convincingly portrays, the sheer aesthetic glory of his experience carries an authority of its own, so much so that he is willing to answer the call to battle without caring overmuch who it is that calls him. In fact it is the malevolent Juno, and she is calling him to his death — but even we who know that still feel that Turnus’s reaction is the right one, that it is an expression of his greatness of soul more than of his gullibility.

Joseph Smith has Moses apply a similar standard in his Book of Moses:

And it came to pass that Moses looked upon Satan and said: Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten; and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee? For behold, I could not look upon God, except his glory should come upon me, and I were transfigured before him. But I can look upon thee in the natural man. Is it not so, surely? Blessed be the name of my God, for his Spirit hath not altogether withdrawn from me, or else where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me? And I can judge between thee and God (1:13-15).

For Moses, glory is a guarantee that the revelation is not a malevolent one. Virgil is not so sanguine. We take our chances, we mortals.

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In the same spirit, Nisus’ question is a rhetorical one, the answer to which is not truly important to him. Whether god-given desire or desire-turned-god, he intends to follow it. And because this is the relentlessly pessimistic Virgil we are reading, we know that he, too, will follow it to his untimely death. We never find out whether he and Euryalus were following a god or their own desires.

In Virgil, everything noble, without exception, comes to a bad end. But it is still noble for all that. That, I suppose, is the point of the Aeneid and what makes it, against all odds, an inspiring read.

A bit of Taiwanese folk religion/magic

I was talking to one of my students, an engineer in his fifties, and he told me about a local (Yuanlin, Taiwan) magical or religious custom I’d never heard of or read about before, so here I am documenting it for the benefit of whoever may be interested.

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There is in his town a centuries-old maple tree which has become a god (as, according to Chinese folk belief, various plants and animals are sometimes able to do, given enough time) and has a small shrine.

When he was young, my student says, the local men would go to this shrine and consult the divine tree on the question of which lottery numbers to pick. (This was before the introduction of state-sponsored gambling in Taiwan, so they were playing an underground lottery run by gangsters and tied to the results of the state-run lottery in Hong Kong.)

The tree was consulted in the following way. The querent would fill a bowl with flour, packing it down and scraping the top surface smooth, set the bowl out in front of the tree, and leave it there overnight. In the morning, lo and behold, there would be strange scrawling patterns on the surface of the flour — made, in my informant’s opinion, by ants come to truck away the flour, but popularly believed to be the work of the tree itself.

The querent and his partners in crime would then break out magnifying glasses and pore over the scrawlings, trying to read numerals in them — the winning lottery numbers which, they were sure, were hidden somewhere in the ant-doodles. (“If ten people looked at the flour,” my informant says, “they would come up with ten different numbers — so usually at least one of them would be right.”)

Once they were satisfied that they had decoded the tree’s message, they would buy lottery tickets with those numbers. If they didn’t win anything, well, they must have misread the doodles. (In hindsight, that was clearly a three, not a two! Well, next time….) But if they did win something, then they would donate a sizable percentage of it to the tree’s shrine, the local rag would run a front-page what-hath-the-tree-wrought story, and more worshiper-gamblers would flow in. My informant remembers that a shockingly large number of local men opted to forgo gainful employment and spend all their time at the shrine trying to crack the lottery code.

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The flour-bowl ritual has apparently fallen out of practice, but the strange god-and-mammon sandwich of Taiwanese folk religion is still going strong. Some time ago I had a dream that brought the number 7,381 to my attention, and when I told a few Taiwanese acquaintances about it, their reaction was always the same: “I think God’s trying to tell you something.” What? “You should buy a lottery ticket with those numbers.”

A Mormon taxonomy of revelation

A recent post at my brother Luther’s blog discusses three terms which are used differently by Mormons than by most other people: gospel, testimony, and prompting. Luther does not suggest that the three terms have anything particular in common other than their atypical Mormon usage, but it occurs to me that they constitute a very systematic way of classifying revelation, and that when analyzed as such they reveal a gap in the lexicon — a type of revelation for which there is no name.

The table below classifies revelations on the basis of what is revealed and how it is revealed — the content and manner of the revelation, respectively. By public content I mean timeless truths or principles which are applicable to all people (for example, “there is a God” or “thou shalt not steal”). Private content refers to propositions — or, more often, imperatives — which have reference to a particular person in a particular situation and do not necessarily have wider applicability (for example, “thy sins are forgiven” or “give Bob a call”). The manner of revelation can likewise be public (proclaimed to the world through the mediation of prophets, apostles, and scripture) or private (communicated directly to the individual by the Holy Ghost).

	Content	Manner
Gospel	Public	Public
Testimony	Public	Private
Prompting	Private	Private
(no name)	Private	Public

 

The gospel, as the term is used by Mormons, is not limited to the good news of salvation but encompasses all publicly revealed truths of universal applicability. (For example, the law of tithing is part of the “gospel” for Mormons, though I believe that usage of the term would be atypical in the wider Christian world.) When Mormons are talking among themselves, they refer to the religion they profess not as Mormonism or Christianity, but as the Gospel.

A person’s testimony consists of direct, personal confirmations of gospel principles. There is only one gospel, but there are as many testimonies as there are individual Mormons. Each person’s testimony is a subset of the gospel, constituting only such truths as have been specifically revealed to that individual by the Holy Ghost. The paradigmatic example is the testimony of the Book of Mormon which the reader of that book is encouraged to seek in Moroni 10:4. The content of the Book of Mormon itself is part of the gospel; when the Holy Ghost manifests the truth of the book to a particular individual, typically in response to a prayer requesting such a manifestation, that’s a testimony.

Promptings are direct communications from the Holy Ghost relating to personal matters which are not included in the gospel and are meant only for the person to whom they are revealed. Typically this comes in the form of a sudden “gut feeling” that one ought or ought not to perform some specific action. Every Mormon will have stories to tell of promptings which saved him from danger or directed him to someone in need of help. Actually, the meaning of prompting is somewhat narrower than the above table implies, since it is typically limited to unsolicited revelations in the imperative mood. “Thy sins are forgiven” would not normally be called a prompting but a personal revelation. Even personal revelations in the imperative mood are not usually referred to as promptings unless they come to one unbidden. If, for example, a person prays before making a major life decision (such as getting married) and asks for confirmation that it is the right thing to do, the answer would again be called a personal revelation, not a prompting. If on the other hand one were to ask a more open-ended question — “O God, what career shall I pursue?” — and receive a distinct impression that one ought to become a large-animal veterinarian, which possibility had never crossed one’s mind before — that could well be called a prompting. I suppose the key distinction is that the content of a prompting comes from outside; it cannot be a mere confirmation of an idea the individual was already entertaining.

The final, unnamed category would include public revelations — proclaimed to the world by prophets or in scripture — which are nevertheless of limited personal applicability. It seems odd that such a category of revelation should even exist, but it does. The Doctrine and Covenants is full of such revelations — revelations to specific individuals about specific situations, but recorded and published for all to read in scripture. There is no name for this type of revelation, but the taxonomy implicit in the other three terms draws our attention to its existence.

Not very factual on motorcycles

Robert M. Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance begins with a disclaimer stating that the book “should in no way be associated with the great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice” and that it is “not very factual on motorcycles, either.” I was willing to believe the first part of the disclaimer, since the author shows no special knowledge of Zen, but I always kind of assumed that he really did know what he was talking about when it came to motorcycles.

So when my wife’s motorcycle wouldn’t start and we were wondering if it was because the battery was dead, I remembered an example Pirsig had used to illustrate deduction and hypothesis testing. If “the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work. That is deduction” (pp. 92-93). He can then try to honk the horn as a way of testing the hypothesis that the battery is dead.

I honked the horn, and it worked fine, so I confidently announced to my wife that the problem was definitely not the battery. Probably the spark plug. And then, since I’m not Robert M. Pirsig, I walked the motorcycle to a nearby mechanic’s shop to have it fixed.

He told me it was the battery. I tooted the horn for him and told him he was wrong. He looked at me like I was an idiot, replaced the battery, which was ancient and badly corroded, and sent me on my way with a perfectly good motorcycle.

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It seems like there ought to be some deep “Chautauqua” lesson to be learned from this. Always believe disclaimers, I suppose, even when they appear to have been written in jest.

What I read in 2012

• Abelard, Peter. Historia Calamitatum. Translated by Henry Adams Bellows.
• Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Translated by Richmond Lattimore.
• Aristotle. Categories. Translated by E. M. Edghill.
• Aristotle. On Interpretation. Translated by E. M. Edghill.
• Atwater, Richard & Florence. Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
• Augustine, St. Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love. Translated by Albert C. Outler.
• Augustine, St. On Christian Doctrine. Translator not credited.
• Bacon, Francis. Essays.
• Balzac, Honoré de. Le Père Goriot. Translated by Henry Reed.
• Barzini, Luigi, Jr. From Caesar to the Mafia.
• Baugh, Albert C., & Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. Third Edition.
• Bell, Michael. “Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees.”
• Bernard of Clairvaux, St. On Loving God.
• Carlyle, Thomas. Latter-Day Pamphlets.
• Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Translated by Nevill Coghill, omitting two of the tales.
• Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man.
• Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.
• DuQuette, Lon Milo. The Book of Ordinary Oracles.
• Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy.
• Durant, Will & Ariel. The Lessons of History.
• Evola, Julius. Men Among the Ruins. Translated by Guido Stucco.
• Evola, Julius. “On the Secret of Degeneration.” Translator not credited.
• Evola, Julius. “Race as a Builder of Leaders.” Translator not credited.
• Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World. Translated by Guido Stucco.
• Evola, Julius. Ride the Tiger. Translator not credited.
• Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by G. Stanley Hall.
• Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods.
• Harris, John R. Footprints in the Snow of the Moon.
• Harris, John R. From Arcadia to Empire: The Aeneid‘s Elusive Allegory.
• Harris, John R., editor. Ivory Rubble: Essays on the Collapse of Literacy in Higher Education (With Modest Proposals for Partial Salvage).
• Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton beau de Marot.
• Hutchinson, F. E. Cranmer and the English Reformation.
• Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat.
• Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy.
• Kopff, E. Christian. “Julius Evola on Tradition and the Right.”
• Kreeft, Peter, & Ronald Tacelli. Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
• Larkins, Lisette. Calling on Extraterrestrials.
• Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding.
• Locke, John. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures.
• Locke, John. A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. from Mr. Edward’s Reflections.
• Lowry, Lois. The Giver.
• Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Translated by R. E. Latham.
• Maine, Sir Henry Sumner. Popular Government: Four Essays.
• McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary.
• Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech.
• Morgan, Alice Rose. Calls to Mystic Alice.
• Novalis. Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance. Translated by John Owen.
• Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
• Plimmer, Martin, & Brian King. Beyond Coincidence.
• Plutarch. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden, revised by A. H. Clough.
• Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate.
• Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra.
• Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar.
• Shakespeare, William. Macbeth.
• Shakespeare, William. Sonnets.
• Sheldon, William H. The Varieties of Temperament.
• Singleton, Peter T. Return to Chivalry.
• Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by David Grene.
• Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by David Grene.
• Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by David Grene.
• Virgil. The Eclogues. Translated by Guy Lee.
• Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character. Translator not credited.
• White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web.
• Williams, Charles. The Place of the Lion.