The Lombard kingdom, aiming at a unified Italy, was defeated by the combined forces of the papacy and the Church, but the summoning of the Franks was a disastrous mistake, and the Lombard Kingdom became the foundation of all subsequent Italian development.
If Christianity is difficult to conceive without the Old Testament, then Christendom is an impossibility without the legacy of Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscans made no small contribution to the character and culture of Rome, though very little of the Etruscan legacy is obvious.
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.
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.
Robert E. Lee, who in so many ways epitomized the highest ideas of Christian civility, summed up the common feeling in his famous statement that, “Duty is the most sublime word in our language,” adding the injunction: “Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.”
This begins a series on the morality of revenge, drawn from the current text of Properties of Blood, Vol. II: The Reign of Hate. If you have not purchased Volume I: The Reign of Love, you have only yourself to blame.
Chatterton, a late 18th century poet, is more famous as a legend–the teenage poet who died at 17–than as a writer. The Romantics, French as well as English, lionized him. His best known poems are the medievalizing verses he attributed to a 15th century poet, but his talent for painting satiric portraits is evident in “Apostate Will”–a fine sketch of the clergy on the make,
