by George A. Panichas

Irving Babbitt

Richard Weaver

Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn

Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard M. Weaver, with a foreword by Russell Kirk

Two modern American teachers and critics who can now be honored as Sages and, indeed, included among the Sacri Vates, are Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) and Richard Weaver (1910-1963). One who in any way studies two recently reissued books, Babbitt’s Character and Culture (originally titled Spanish Character and Other Essays) and Weaver’s Visions of Order, will need very little convincing as to the appropriateness of the sapiential ascription. To read these two books again, or even for the first time, is to make contact with men of vision who are quintessentially men of wisdom. Perhaps at no time of our history do we have more urgent need for wisdom than now. For the wisdom we gain here is both salvific and restorative; it enables us to climb the ladder of illumination. Babbitt likens this process to “the ascending path of insight and discrimination”; Weaver describes it as the need to “have something ascending up toward an ultimate source of good.” This moving upward requires strenuous effort, and its rewards are to be found in the higher experiential contexts of what is self-cleansing and self-disciplining. [Read more...]