Becoming Human Is an Art

By Cultura Animi, Ingrid D. Rowland, George Steiner, and more

2020

First Published

4.25

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1H56M

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For all autodidacts who want to practice the art of becoming human, in this third volume in the series Cultura Animi we are publishing essays intended to serve both as inspiration and as exercise material. Cristina Campo’s ‘The Unforgivables’ is a brilliant apologia for the aristocracy of the spirit and all who strive for such perfection. The essay ‘Universitas?’ by George Steiner, a text that he gave us as a friend of the Nexus Institute, then argues for the true university as a place where—in contrast to academia and the countless institutions that so shamelessly dare to call themselves universities—still cultivates the universitas ideal and where aristocracy of the spirit can be acquired. Ingrid Rowland takes us with her to the two Greek patriarchs of the aristocracy of the spirit, philosopher Plato and poet Sophocles, who with their work attempted to liberate humanity from a timeless lockdown, that dark cavern of soullessness.

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Authors

Ingrid Drake Rowland is a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Based in Rome, Rowland writes about Italian art, architecture, history and many other topics for The New York Review of Books. She is the author of the books Giordano Bruno: Philospher/Heretic (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe; The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth Century Rome; The Roman Garden of Agostino Chigi Horst Gerson Memorial Lecture, Groningen: University of Groningen, 2005; The Scarith of Scornello: a Tale of Renaissance Forgery (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Her essays in The New York Review of Books were collected in From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance (New York Review Books, 2005).

Cristina Campo was the pen name of Vittoria Maria Angelica Marcella Cristina Guerrini, an Italian writer and translator. During World War II, she began translating into Italian literary works by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Eduard Mörike and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. She began translating works by Simone Weil into Italian.

Rob Riemen

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