Tagged: Classics

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Ancient Vengeance

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.

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From Golding’s Ovid

I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.

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Reason vs. Passion

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.”

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Civilization, by Dr. James Patrick

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By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time

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Unjustified Justifications

On FB I am forever seeing disputes breaking out over various theological points, disputes between Catholics and Protestants of course, but also between Tridentine and Vatican II Catholics and between various schools of Protestant thought (Lutheran, Calvinist, Pre-millennialist).

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The Autodidact: Homer

The Homeric Mind: Introduction In this series, I want you to do your best to forget what have been told to believe.  We are going to concentrate more on what the Greeks said about themselves, and, more than that, we are going to compare what they said with how they lived.  In other words, we are going to do something like what an anthropologist does when he goes to visit an alien and primitive culture.  We must set aside our preconceptions, interview the subjects, and observe their behavior.  What we find may be shocking, but we shall report the truth,...