For decades I have been studying the institution of marriage, and when, about a dozen years ago, conservative Republicans began agitating for laws defining and strengthening marriage, I attempted to make an argument, rooted in human history and biology and framed by the Christian tradition, that government intervention would only make matters much worse.
This is the title poem of the only volume of verse Reed published in his lifetime.
Our hero Mark Robarts, then,m is neither devil nor angel, with aptitudes for good and evil. The spectacular insight, given go early in the novel, is that if he had been more conceited, that is, thought too highly of himself, he might have been better able to resist temptation, when it came his way.
Note: This letter and the commentary that follows were found in the lava-covered ruins of Herculaneum. It is apparently a copy of a letter sent by a learned Greek to a young Roman friend of Greek ancestry, the poet Statius. The commentary is the response of an educated pagan upon first reading a Christian text, The Gospel According to Saint John.
For anyone who has the time to read a good work of English fiction, I have started to reread Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. I’ll post an occasional comment and perhaps also put up a very old piece of mine on Trollope. After this, we shall certainly do Plutarch’s dialogue on the Delay of Divine Punishment
Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge. Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation. Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.
In the midst of war and rumors of war, the ongoing soap opera of “The Sussexes” seems hardly worth mentioning, but if–like some future archeologist, holding his news and sifting through the middens of a 21st century….
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.
