Chesterton the Prophet
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.
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,
Nonetheless…if there is one thing we Americans take seriously, it is money But even on that most vital subject, we cannot bring ourselves to tell the truth.
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
The obligation to care for one’s offspring is a human universal, like the incest taboo or the prohibition of murder. Human and primate mothers, as a rule, devote themselves to their children, and mother-love is regarded conventionally as the most selfless and irrational forms of human attachment.
Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, so-called palaeoconservatives (a term that has lost all utility) might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality. Instead, they have been more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition