Vergil, Father of the West

Theodor Haecker’s Vergil, Father of the West may best be classified as a work transcending classification. As its translator Anthony Giambrone, O.P., remarks in his Introduction: Haecker has written a book about a poet and his poetry which is also “a book about love and work, tragedy, piety, and providence.” To the question, “Vergil—Father of the West? Why Vergil?”—Haecker responds: “It is a title cum fundamento in re.… Vergil is princeps in every respect.” Vergil is both vision and voice for that order and power called “the West.” Haecker reveals civilization’s urgent need for that vision and voice in order to return to and rest upon its divine foundations.To the unabridged translation (the first in English) of the title text, Giambrone has added the essay “On the Foundations of the West” from Haecker’s What Is Man?, and crowned it with Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue. Taken together, these elements reveal the ambitious trajectory of Haecker’s project across human culture: “to reawaken in dazed Western minds the visions of our lost poetry of the eternal in man.” Read more