Paul Krause is the editor of VoegelinView and the author of Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023) and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
The liberty and justice which republics are erected to safeguard requires, as Milton and the Founders knew, a moral, virtuous, and religious citizenry. Without this moral and virtuous spirit, the citizenry is slothful and servile. Despotism takes hold once the bulwark of liberty and justice, moral love, has withered away. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
“Truth, wherever it is found, belongs to God.” This is true, then, when dealing with ancient writings of cultural value and significance. The truth and beauty found therein belong to God, and as children of God, we need not fear what properly belongs to the Father.
Livy asserts that shamelessness led to decadence which, in turn, led to greed and eventually devolved into demagoguery and tyranny. His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by the decadence of the civil wars and buried with the emergence of the Augustan regime had far reaching influence.
Christians, then, have the proper perspective from which to read literature. We can see the profound truths of literature, be they ancient or modern, “pagan” or Christian. Furthermore, we can also rebut those scholars and interpreters who would rather praise the rage of Achilles and the false love of Heathcliff and Catherine instead of accepting the plainer truth that peace and new life come through acts of reconciliatory forgiveness, however hard it is to live by that standard ourselves.
Aaron Weinacht’s book is a needed corrective to the public misperception of Ayn Rand as radical capitalist. She was, first and foremost, a radical nihilist. Insofar as Rand embraced capitalism, it was secondary to her axiomatic nihilism embodied best in John Galt.
I give two cheers for Mark Clavier’s timely and eternal reminder to us that we should seek the encounter with God in the world; it may just give us a better appreciation and explanation for the Love that governs our world.
Catullus is not a saint. He is not a moral poet. But his crudity and madness still dance with the shadows of truth and echo with the cry of the human heart.
Paul Krause examines the politics of Latin literature and discovers a desire for peace and joy, a peace and joy found in an intimate environment of beauty which the poets, even theologians, described as a garden. But the race to Arcadia runs through strife, war, and murder.
Thomas’ cosmological theology was thoroughly enchanted and magical, and it is his enchanted and magical view of the cosmos that we so critically need today.
Deep within the Western psyche and tradition is this yearning for return. Horace, more than any other of the grandiose poets of antiquity, captured that call, that cry, for return—a yearning for a restored Eden where the peaceful harmony of life in a garden would be our eternal home.
