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….
As the gentle reader seems to have appreciated the trope of Sunday night in Modena as an abandoned mining town in a spaghetti western, I keep pushing it. But first, a scene from Palermo.
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.
Lately Senator Ed Markey has been threatening a congressional attack on Elon Musk’s neo-Twitter over “public health” concerns. He said, “Someone could impersonate the CDC for eight dollars, pay for it, not be authenticated and then on that site, say, ‘CDC says vaccinations are not good for you,’ That’s a public health and safety problem.”
Sunday, ten in the evening, Piazza Roma in Modena. Not a soul in sight. At lunchtime, this, one of the city’s main squares overlooking the Palazzo Ducale, was swarming with people in their Sunday best. A skating rink had been set up for the children, their unsteady shuffle on the ice choreographed to Tchaikovsky and Lehar.
2022 Fleming Foundation Summer Seminar Lectures available now 99$ Through Christmas.
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.
These two poems of Lionel Johnson, included by his friend William Butler Yeats in a little volume of 20 Poems of Lionel Johnson, attest to Johnson’s deep sense of the sacred.
