/lit/ - Literature

>>21976224
>Saw Pope Benedict had it on his desk
It was St. John Paul II, but there is a laudatory afterword by Hans Urs von Balthazar, whom I have heard was one of Benedict's favorite theologians of all time.
>Mind giving me a QRD on why it's your favorite non-fic outside the Bible?
I started reading this book at a time when I had long been frequently driven nearly suicidal by the pessimism of people like Schopenhauer and (especially) Zapffe, but I was at the same time nursing three fledgling curiosities: Neoplatonism; Christianity, including but not limited to the Gnostic heresies; and utterly anti-Christian occultism like that of Aleister Crowley. This book beautifully synthesized all these budding interests in a way that finally gave me an immediate and absolute confidence that the world is not fundamentally evil and that life is worth celebrating. It introduced me to the Saints, not as an idea, but as friends. It showed me what it means to cultivate a healthy and constructive esoteric spirituality and why such a one must be united with and subservient to the exoteric Tradition. It showed me the beauty of the Sacraments, which is part of the reason I am now engaged to be married, and part of the reason my fiancée and I are preparing to start RCIA.
The title really doesn't give you any sense of the book's scope. It never once mentions the practice of cartomancy commonly associated with the Tarot. It uses the Major Arcana of the Tarot as a point of entry into gentle, graceful, but extremely compelling meditations on a wide variety of spiritual matters. I have never been sadder to finish a book, because by the end the author had long since begun to feel like a personal friend.

>>13908325
Hmmm

>>13907719
>>13907720
What should I read to really understand numbers?