Professor Milward of Sophia University, Tokyo, investigates the features of the genius of Western civilisation that have so influenced the course of human history, and asks where the West has gone wrong in our age. This distinguished literary and cultural scholar, resident in the East for the last forty years, argues that tradition and nature are fundamental to the soul of the West, and that a renewed appreciation of these is essential to our recovery.
Taking the notion of simplicity - the idea that "less is more" - as his central theme, Fr. Milward explores the thought of Socrates, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton and other great Western thinkers. Comparing these with some of the native wisdom of Japan and China, he incorporates their insights into his own convincing synthesis.
The Simplicity of the West is at once a sharp critique of the predominant trends in modern thought, and a positive antidote to them. It also provides the reader with an exhilarating tour of the Christian civilisation of the West from the unique vantage point of an Englishman who has spent most of his life in Japan.
| "The deceptive economy and simplicity of everything Milward writes in The Simplicity of the West is only made possible by the greatest background knowledge and writing skill. I have read it twice and enjoyed it immensely. It is surely a very timely book for the closing years of the century." |
| Ian Wilson, author of the best-selling The Turin Shroud, The Blood and the Shroud and Shakespeare: The Evidence. |
The Simplicity of the West, by Peter Milward SJ.
150 pages, paperback. ISBN 1 901157 95 4.
£9.95 ; $16.95 in the U.S.A.
Published by The Saint Austin Press.
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Saint Austin Literature & Ideas Series
Other titles:
The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays - Peter Milward SJ
Vertical Man - J. C. Whitehouse
Shakespeare's Apocalypse - Peter Milward SJ
Series Editor: F. D. McDermott, MA