Since there are no questions or comments on Act I of The Revenger’s Tragedy, we can move on to October’s book: Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams. Williams, as I think everyone knows, was a friend of Tolkien and Lewis, and with them he helped both to vitalize Christian fiction and to lend respectability to supernatural tales.
Jerry D. Salyer, a subscriber who writes in occasionally, has written a brief review published in Catholic World Report. Here is the concluding paragraphs:
The search for a rationally perfect society always leads to tyranny. Morality and politics are rooted not in pure reason but in our attachments by love or strife to others. The Greek mystical philosopher Empedocles is a better guide than the abstract reasonings of Descartes and Kant.
Steven Bannon’s zany conspiracy theory is just a PR stunt, but the posthuman race has already arrived.
Months before hostilities started in Ukraine, the liberal press was warning us indirectly about the intentions of the Democrats, thus revealing to the world what was about to happen.
Some time ago, I abandoned the regular discussion of selected books. The reason should have been obvious. The cause has disappeared, and we can resume. Working on the second volume of Properties of Blood, I need to rewrite the chapters on revenge. This is a good occasion for looking at the classic work of the English stage, The Avenger’s Tragedy….
Men and women have been trying to reason their way into a good life for centuries. Accepting every ideology proposed by the latest crack-brained intellectual, they fall farther and farther away from the moral and political realities required by human nature.
The greatest of the philosophes, the Marquis de Sade, took the Enlightenment to the ultimate conclusion. God did not exist; religion and morality were invented to repress mankind; therefore, rape, torture, and multi-sexual orgies were all part of a program for liberating the human spirit from the shackles of Christianity.
I have been a Russophile since covering the Balkans in the mid-90’s as a journalist and news photographer. I appreciated the Russian volunteers who fought and died for Bosnian Serb sovereignty and UNPROFOR in Bosnia and East Slavonia.
