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Chesterton (and the rest)
A Big Round Subject
by Max Arnott
G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Although we don’t usually review books in this space, Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton deserves an exception.
It is certainly a great thick square book (on a great thick round subject). A lot of work went into this book and we will spread our review over a couple of columns. This time we will speak about the book itself, asking, Is it worth reading? Is it worth buying? And in the next column we will reflect on the image of Chesterton as herein presented, asking the tougher question, What can we do with it?
This is not the first biography of Chesterton, of course, by a long shot. Maisie Ward Sheed published hers in 1944, and in later decades Dudley Barker (1973), Michael Finch (1986) and Michael Coren (1989) have had a go. Ian Ker, who teaches theology at Oxford and is an expert on John Henry Newman, has now written what the publishers describe as the “first comprehensive biography of the man and the thinker and writer.” It is certainly the longest (729 pages).
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Sir John Fortescue
Securing Liberty Through Law –Part 1
by Ellis Sandoz
Government both Political and Royal
The greatest English political thinker of the fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue (ca. 1394-ca. 1477), served as a member of Parliament in eight Parliaments, as chief justice of King's Bench for nearly two decades, and as Lord Chancellor of England to Henry VI, the last of the Lancastrian kings.
He is chiefly known for the instructional dialogue he composed for the young heir apparent to the throne, Prince Edward, titled In Praise of the Laws of England.1
The fame attaching to that work arises mainly from its prominence in the dispute two centuries later over the nature of the English monarchy and constitution conducted between the first Stuart kings (James I and Charles I) and Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, and Parliament leading up to the Petition of Right (1628) and the subsequent civil war.
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Hunting the Devils
Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 3
by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes. She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.
An Unbaptised Christian Mystic
Simone Weil, for her part, thought that our time needed a "new saintliness," saints working among the unfortunate and not behind a frock or in a convent, as she objected to Father Perrin who planned to create a feminine secular movement under the aegis of Catherine of Sienna.
Born to a very assimilated Jewish family and brought up a complete agnostic, she later claimed, surprisingly perhaps, "I was born, I grew up, and I always remained within the Christian inspiration."71
Her own movement toward Christianity began at the time she experienced three mystical "person to person" encounters with Christ. They occurred between 1935 and 1938, after she had worked in the French factories in which she had endured in her own flesh the sufferings and misfortune of the workers.
Because she had not previously read the works of Christian mystics, her mystical experiences were not affected by such influences, and that made them that much more profound for her.
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Hunting the Devils
Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 2
by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.
The Cure for Uprootedness
The disease of uprootedness is in fact, for Weil, a spiritual one. “We suffer from a lack of balance, due to a purely material development of technical science. This lack of balance can only be remedied by a spiritual development in the same sphere, that is, in the sphere of work.”33
This imbalance is, moreover, the result of our failure to understand the “Needs of the Soul,” which is the title of the opening chapter of The Need for Roots. For Weil, we may discover what these needs are by analogy with the needs of our bodies and they, too, must be satisfied in order that the soul should not die.
These needs are “sacred” inasmuch as they are those of a human being. To each of these needs corresponds an obligation which testifies indirectly to the bond which unites man “with a reality.”34
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A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 4
by Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.
Transcending Christian Symbolism
Beyond their Christian dimension of symbolization, the poems of the Quartets draw explicitly from Buddhist, Hindu, and Platonic or Neoplatonist traditions and language, and their evocations of mystical and meditative experiences are clearly intended to suggest a global range of references.
What seems obvious is that Eliot wanted to speak in the Quartets to the universal experience of human existence as situated in the in-between of time and timeless meaning and knew that he could do so only through a poetic language that both avoided a deliberately liturgical use of Christian language and employed a universal range of symbolic articulations of human-divine encounter.
He is writing of every person's existence and participation in history. Therefore he must establish the poem on the basis of experiences recognizable to any open mind and then show, through the employment and correlation of symbols and phrases from a multitude of religious traditions, how these speak to and illuminate such experiences.
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A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 3
by Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.
History as Metaxy
Though Four Quartets is described most simply as "a series of meditations upon existence in time," it also necessarily includes meditation on the meaning and structure of history.18
Through his understanding of incarnate human consciousness as participating in the timeless meaning of divine reality, Eliot draws the conclusion that it is improper to conceive history as being principally a process of chronological development.
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Hunting the Devils
Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 1
by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.
Rejecting Ideology
With Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), we are confronted with two philosophers who examine events, understand their present, and consider the "disorder" of their time caused by Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism.
Their respective works constitute acts of resistance against ideology.
Wondering about the "dark times" (Bertolt Brecht), they diagnose a Europe that suffers from a disease that is not without precedent, a disease that affects the spirit, the soul, and a disease that can be grasped by its several symptoms.
In order to cure this disease, it is necessary to find remedies, and they both believe two countries in particular offer some hope.
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A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2
by Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.
Time and Timelessness (concluded)
Eliot is intensely aware, of course, of the degree to which an explicit awareness of human life as existence in the in-between of immanence and transcendence is absent from modern consciousness.
And when awareness of the metaxy is eclipsed–as much of modern thought shows very well–human life comes to be conceived as an existence whose meaning is completely contained within nature or immanence–within the rhythms, repetitions, and inevitable defeats of temporal and material being.
Interpreted and self-embraced as such, this is an existence whose enjoyments tend to mask, if they don't yield to, a despair that reflects that the course of time unredeemed by a relation to timeless meaning is finally a pointlessness of "rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death." (East Coker, I, 45-46).
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