Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of the men and manners of antiquity.” Plutarch, of course, is not read because we do not know why we need any “general sense of men and manners of antiquity”. Nonetheless, if we leave college or university or seminary or convent to lead our lives with no sense of what Werner Jaeger called “paideia”, no sense of the claim of the classics to be a universal culture, addressing itself to man as such, no matter what his accidental qualities, are we fit for anything but a chaos of the now, a myriad of impressions with no clue about how to reduce them to a common order based upon something other than just one more subjective opinion? Is the cosmos, is our society, safe for us if we do not know what the cosmos, what society means?
–James V. Schall, S.J., Another Sort of Learning, 208
