Since my most recent post, discussion has been active. Just as I was closing in on a “Final Four”, two readers suggested new nominees. One suggested Isaac Asimov–the renowned science-fiction writer and “genius extraordinaire”. I know enough about Asimov and his work to think this suggestion is reasonable.
Another reader asked whether I had considered Will Durant. My answer: No, I had not. The historian Will Durant was not one of my two nominees, nor did any reader suggest him. I am giving his credentials serious consideration now.
A Revised “Final Six”
With these revisions, the list of candidates is now as follows (in chronological order):
- G.K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)
- Will Durant (1885 – 1981)
- C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)
- Mortimer J. Adler (1902 – 2001)
- Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992)
- Umberto Eco (1932-2016)
These revisions make for an interesting “Final Six”, if only because of the pairings of similar candidates. How so?
I tend to view Umberto Eco and Isaac Asimov as similar in persona and other ways. Mortimer Adler and Will Durant are quite similar in the nature of their life’s work, which is compiling a compendium of Western civilization. Lastly, I believe most readers will agree that G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis have much in common.
This “Playoffs” post was getting rather long, so I restructured it as two separate posts:
- Part 1: Narrowing the Field
- Part 2: The Final Two
I now move forward with my thoughts on the four least compelling candidates. (Somehow the words “least compelling” seem inappropriate given the “genius of erudition” of all six candidates.) These are my thoughts, and yours will likely differ.
I begin with the #6 ranked candidate and move up from there. At the end of this essay, there will be only two remaining. They will be the subject of my next post.
By the way, readers should feel free to submit additional nominees, but with this one caveat: the roster is now officially closed. No further nominees, no matter how compelling their credentials, will be factored into this assessment.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco is difficult for me to process. He was an academic who taught at many of the world’s greatest universities and also a prolific, if idiosyncratic, author. Eco was renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge. He had a reputation as one of the foremost thinkers in academia though the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Was Umberto Eco brilliant? There can be no doubt he possessed a massive intellect. He wrote seven novels, plus over 40 nonfiction works, and three children’s books. He is best known for his theory-intensive novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
The latter, his postmodern magnum opus, is full of esoteric allusions to secret societies, pseudoscientific sects, and other medieval arcana. It is said that this encyclopedic novel is a test of one’s will (to finish it).
Reviewers have commented that Eco’s text is needlessly complex. One reviewer said: “There’s never any room in Eco’s novels for dumbing down, or for stopping and explaining, and often times it’s very hard to get your bearings without the requisite background knowledge.” Another critic said of Eco: “He plays with the mind of the reader.”
In his 1980 review of The Role of the Reader, the recently deceased British philosopher Roger Scruton, attacked Eco’s esoteric tendencies. Scruton wrote: “Eco seeks the rhetoric of technicality, the means of generating so much smoke for so long that the reader will begin to blame his own lack of perception, rather than the author’s lack of illumination, for the fact that he has ceased to see.”
Umberto Eco is on the list primarily because his personal libraries were the stuff of legend. He owned 50,000 books. To his credit, he never claimed to have read them all, so that data point is less meaningful. How many books he actually did read is unknown.
If you were to do a Google search on Umberto Eco, you would find most listings describe Mr. Eco as “erudite”. Surely, he must have been exceedingly well-read. But I am a tad dubious. It almost seems as if his PR firm was burnishing his brand with the notion of “erudition.”
I mean no disrespect for a such a profound thinker whose works of erudition I know not in the least. However, as I look at his output, I do not see much that intrigues me. Moreover, it is curious that have no friends who talk about Umberto Eco or report having ever read his books.
Umberto Eco comes in as #6 on my list.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992), the renowned a Russian-born American science-fiction writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University was a brilliant man and an innovative writer. It is reported that he wrote or edited over 500 books and 90,000 letters and postcards. Fittingly, his nickname was “The Human Typewriter.”
Despite being best known for writing science fiction novels, this amazingly prolific author also penned hundreds of mysteries, short stories, science guides, essays, and even a book of humor. Asimov was so diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for Category 100, Philosophy and Psychology. Is that true of any other author?
He was born to Jewish parents, however, Asimov gravitated to humanist beliefs from an early age, and as an adult identified with atheism until his death in 1992. He served as President of the American Humanist Association for years and was a key figure in the Skeptical Movement.
He is likely the most intriguing person on my list. How so? For one, he was rejected by every university to which he applied for admission. (This calls to mind Lewis’ struggles with “Responsions”.) For another, he consulted Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek, and later wrote a movie musical for Paul McCartney. To the best of my knowledge, he is the only nominee who has an asteroid named after him.
Isaac Asimov strikes me as being an American version of Umberto Eco. Both wrote mostly fiction, and both had reputations for being exceedingly erudite. Unlike C.S. Lewis, humility was not Asimov’s “thing” . . . for he once described Carl Sagan as one of only two people to whose intellect surpassed his own.
I read several of his most famous works during my science-fiction phase back in the mid-1970s—specifically The Foundation Trilogy, and The Robot Series. I must say, Asimov’s works did not move me. Science-fiction as a genre does not move me. Even C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is not among my favorites of his works.
I also read his Asimov’s Guide to the Bible in the late 1970s. Even though I was an “apatheist” at that time, I found Asimov’s atheism-tinged take on Biblical history unconvincing.
In the final analysis, Isaac Asimov does not fit my template for erudition. Perhaps I am biased against skeptics . . . but, frankly, I think he was too busy writing countless books to have the time to read as much as the other nominees.
Isaac Asimov comes in as #5 on my list.
Will Durant
William James Durant (1885 –1981) was an American writer, historian, and philosopher. In total, he wrote 53 books and over 120 major essays. He is best known for his work The Story of Civilization, a series of 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. Prior to that, he was noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), a groundbreaking work that popularized philosophy.
Durant was uncommonly successful as a writer. His publisher for The Story of Philosophy anticipated selling 1,100 copies, but within a few years it had sold over 2 million copies. Durant’s book introduced more people to the subject of philosophy than any other book before or since. The financial success of The Story of Philosophy enabled he and Ariel to leave teaching, to travel the world and to spend the next four decades writing The Story of Civilization.
With his wife, Ariel, Will Durant sought to humanize the voluminous body of historical knowledge which had become fragmented into esoteric specialties. Their mission was to revivify history, to make it accessible, and to make it useful.
Their vision was to write a “biography” of Western civilization. Not only would it describe the usual history of wars and corrupt politics, not only would it feature the biographies of people of greatness and villainy, but it would also describe the history of Western culture, including its art, philosophy, morality and religion.
One of the most gifted prose stylists of the 20th century, Will Durant wrote as if history were a story with real characters—some strong, others weak; some clever, others simple–and not just as a documentary. It was a monumental achievement.
The Story of Civilization is the most successful historiographical series in history. As a result of this success, the Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
Politically and theologically, Will Durant was an odd duck. Born in Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, he was slated to become a priest, but that never happened. Instead, he launched his career as a teacher at Seton Hall University before moving into full-time historical research.
By 1905 he had exchanged his devotion to God for Socialism, yet since he distrusted all political systems as “a lust of power” he rejected radical activism. He concocted a curious worldview that blended a sentimentalized ideal of love, with elements of philosophy, Christianity and socialism thrown in. This strange elixir of beliefs dominated his spiritual agnosticism for the rest of his life.
Odd as it may seem, perhaps this unique vantage point was essential to his life’s work. Durant came to see the decline of a civilization as the culmination of strife between religion and secular intellectualism. In his view, a tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. As knowledge grows and changes, it clashes with mythology and theology. In time, the intellectual classes abandon theology and the moral code allied with it. Literature and philosophy eventually become anticlerical.
As the human zeal for liberation evolves into a worship of reason, society soon falls into a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea—both secular and religious. Moral conduct, deprived of its religious foundation, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, divested of a consoling faith, becomes a meaningless thrash. In the end a society and its religion fall together in a concordant death spiral.
Meanwhile, among the oppressed another myth arises. It gives new hope to human destiny, undergirds new courage to pursue initiative, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization. The cycle continues.
I see parallels between Will Durant and Mortimer J. Adler. Both wrote great works on the course of human history and the ascent of mankind. But their approach was different. While Durant wrote mostly about people and events, Adler wrote about books and ideas.
Clearly, Will Durant was a brilliant researcher with profound insights into the human condition. He must have read a great many books of all kinds. However, I have found no references to the breadth of his erudition nor any mention of his mental capacities, such as comprehension and retention. Neither do we know how much of the research and reading was done by Ariel Durant. So, while there is little evidence of which, or how many, books Durant read, Mortimer Adler’s source of erudition is well documented.
Will Durant comes in as #4 on my list.
G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton (1874 –1936) was an English writer, philosopher, journalist and lay theologian. He was also a literary critic, art critic, social critic, historian, novelist, playwright, mystery writer and debater.
A prolific author, he wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories several plays, and 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns). His 4,000 essays alone would be like having to produce an essay a day for 11 years. By any measure, G.K. Chesterton was a busy man.
Chesterton was similar to C.S. Lewis in several ways. As a young man both were intrigued by the occult. Later, both men found the works of George MacDonald to be inspiring. In 1931, the BBC invited Chesterton to give a series of radio talks, just as they did with C.S. Lewis ten years later. From 1932 until his death in 1936, Chesterton delivered over 40 talks per year—far more than Lewis.
Also, much like Lewis, Chesterton loved to debate. He often engaged in friendly public disputes with such renowned thinkers as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Clarence Darrow.
Chesterton had a profound influence on Lewis. The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), Lewis called the book “the best popular apologetic I know”.
I am adequately familiar with Chesterton, having read Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man four or five times each. I have also read What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, The Man Who Was Thursday and a number of his essays.
Of his writing style, he was referred to as the “prince of paradox”. Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out into paradoxes. I am intrigued by Chesterton’s philosophical ideas and theological insights and am for his books. However, when it comes to reading them, I struggle. His incessant use of paradox can grow tiresome, and I sometimes find his protracted trains of thought difficult to track. I much prefer Lewis’ concise, clear and cogent style.
By any measure, G.K. Chesterton was an incomparable genius—not greater that the other five people on the list, but a genius in a unique sort of way. He was, beyond doubt, the most lovable and charismatic personality on this list—larger than the others in both mirth and girth.
In the early part of the twentieth century, he was exceedingly popular, and known by nearly everyone in English society, especially Roman Catholics. Sadly, he is largely forgotten today. Still, Chesterton has a large and loyal community of followers, albeit it is modest in size compared to that of C.S. Lewis.
I would very much like to believe Chesterton was exceedingly “erudite” (and I do) . . . but I would like that opinion to be based upon evidence.
It would be logical to assume that anyone who wrote as prolifically as Chesterton, and faced the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell in debate, must have possessed vast knowledge. However, I have seen no tangible evidence, nor even any anecdotes, regarding his erudition. Did Chesterton have a depth of comprehension like C.S. Lewis? I cannot say . . . but I doubt it. Did he have unparalleled powers of retention like C.S. Lewis? Again, I doubt it.
Regardless, one can only assume he was divinely gifted. There was nothing mundane or mediocre about this monumental man.
It seems to me that Chesterton, like Isaac Asimov, was simply too busy with his immense writing workload to have had the time to read as much as Durant, or Adler, or Lewis.
G.K. Chesterton comes in as #3 on my list.
Where Are We and What Is Next?
I have trimmed the field from six candidates to two:
- Mortimer J. Adler
- C.S. Lewis
My next post will assess the merits of each man and reveal what I consider to be a plausible outcome. I think you will find it interesting. I could be wrong.
It will be followed by a final post in this series in which I will explain my rationale for doing this.
Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30
Erudition Series Index
