Course on Russell Kirk: week 9 (second post)

Welcome to the second post of the ninth week of our course on Russell Kirk. Links to previous posts may be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

This post deals with Kirk's eighth principle of conservatism:

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. [...]
For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'Learn to love the little platoon we belong to' here

Edmund Burke: Extract from Reflections on the French Revolution here

Ben James Taylor: 'The "Big Society" and the politics of paternalism' here

Critical discussion:

Edmund Burke is one of the key figures in Kirk's understanding of politics and society. (I would suggest as others T S Eliot, Marcus Aurelius and Christopher Dawson.) Burke is important to Kirk not only in his sense that the organic growth of society must be respected, but also in his famous remarks on the importance of the 'little platoons' of society.

This emphasis on small communities is reflected in the Catholic Church's teaching on subsidiarity. But both in the way this teaching is sometimes presented and in Taylor's critical essay (above) on the elements of paternalism in the application of Burke's ideas, there is often an undue emphasis on the creation or support of such communities from above (ie from the central government of a State). In it origins, however, 'subsidiarity' acknowledges the real bonds of community that form below the State and indeed are prior to the State. It is the State's job certainly to support such communities, but, most importantly, not to stand in their way: such communities do not so much need to be created as to be allowed to grow naturally.

Although Kirk can be a bit of a name dropper in his writings, and certainly enjoyed the company of 'the aristocracy', my own impression is that this is much more part of his enjoyment of eccentricity and the odd survival of past ages than of any relish for power and social prestige. His emphasis is much more on resistance to centralising power than to a celebration of older forms of it. Although there is clearly a great deal that could be said on the subject, the differences between Kirk's American conservative celebrations of local sources of community and British conservatism which has itself long controlled centralising institutions needs to be borne in mind here.










[Details of image: Edmund Burke by Joshua Reynolds. Full details here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 9

Welcome to week 9 of the course on Russell Kirk. Links to previous posts can be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

This week, we shall be covering two of Kirk's principles. Today I shall look at principle 9:

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

(I shall address the eighth principle (on voluntary associations) in a further post this week on Friday 30 September.)

I have already drawn attention to the importance of virtuous restraint in Kirk's understanding of politics. This has two aspects: social restraints (such as law and social condemnation by others) and self-restraint by way of virtuous and rational restraint upon the passions. I want to emphasise in particular today Kirk's indebtedness to Stoicism and especially to the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.

From 'Ten exemplary conservatives' (from The Essential Russell Kirk, pp.34-5):

It was the heroic endeavour of Marcus Aurelius to conserve Rominitas, that grand system of law and order and culture. If he failed -even with his wife, even with his son- still he left an example of integrity that has endured, like his equestrian status on the Capitoline, down to our time. In [Albert Jay] Nock's words, 'The cancer of organized mendicancy, subvention, bureaucracy and centralization had so far weakened its host that at the death of Marcus Aurelius there was simply not enough producing power to pay the bills.' Eighty years of able Antonine rule 'could not prevent the Roman populace from degenerating into the very scum of the earth, worhless, vicious, contemptible, sheer human sculch.' We may make comparisons and draw analogies, near the end of the twentieth century...

The lesson I learnt from Marcus Aurelius is the performance of duty. Take this passage from the Meditations -the Emperor being on a hard Danubian campaign when he set down these lines: 'In the morning, when thou risests sore against thy will, summon up this thought: "I am rising to do the work of a man. Why then this peevishness, if the way lies open to perform the tasks which I exist to perform, and for whose sake I was brought into the world? Or am I to say I was created for the purpose of lying in blankets and keeping myself warm?" With that admonition I steel myself on January mornings at my ancestral village.

Detailed reading:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Marcus Aurelius' here

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Neo-Stoicism' here

Critical discussion:

Kirk lived with the Meditations at his side for much of his life. In being influenced by Stoicism, he was following a well-worn Christian path (see the article on Neo-Stoicism above). There are clearly difficulties in reconciling full blown ancient Stoicism with Christianity. However, in its emphasis on eudaimonia (human flourishing) as the aim of human action, and the understanding of that flourishing as lying in virtuous action, it sets the framework for much of the development of Christian ethics. Moreover, in focusing on the difficulty in overcoming passions with reason, it echoes a central Christian theme of struggling against temptation:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. 15 For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. 16 If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. 17 Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 18 For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. 19 For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. 20 Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 21 I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. 22 For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: 23 But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.

 

[Romans 7:14-23; Douay-Rheims version]

[Next post 30 September 2016]

[Details of image: equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Full details here.]

Everyone who contends against odds in defense of the permanent things is an heir of Marcus Aurelius.

Additional video:

The following is an interview with the English conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton. The criticism of Kirk made by Scruton are of particular interest as they share so much in common. In particular, Scruton's claims that Kirk places more emphasis on the religious and transcendent than he does, and that Kirk's politics are unrealistic strikes me as well placed. Kirk is a Catholic and takes this much more seriously than Scruton's rather cultural support of the Church of England. Moreover, Kirk places much more emphasis on a romantic and virtuous individualism than does Scruton. (One of Kirk's key phrases which is constantly repeated throughout his career is the importance of 'ordered liberty'.)

Series of talks at Albertus Institute begins this Monday

Our next face to face session this Monday!

Update Saturday 24 September:

[UPDATE and change of speaker on Science and Theology talks:

Dr John O'Connor OP will now speak on ‘Making something out of “a whole lot of nothing”: the Dominican approach to teaching philosophy’ on Monday 26th September at 7pm in the Garden Room at St Albert’s, 24 George Square, Edinburgh (entrance via George Square Lane),

And Peter Hunter OP will talk on Monday October 3rd...]

Autumn 2016 Science and Theology talks at The Catholic Chaplaincy George Square Edinburgh. In the Garden Room at 7pm....

"The Dominican Order and the Teaching of the Sciences” is a series of three evening talks on
Mondays at 7pm in the Garden Room this autumn. First up...

Peter Hunter O.P on Monday 26 September: 'Science before Galileo? Early Dominican Physics'.

Admission is free but a donation of £5 would be welcomed from those who can afford it. Further
details on the lecture series can be found on the Institute's website here.

[And don't forget our conference on 26 November: Modern Security and Human Values: The Changing Face of Conflict. Full details here.]

Details of image: Albertus Magnus Expounding his Doctrines of Physical Science by Ernest Board from here.

Course on Russell Kirk: week 8

Welcome to the eighth week of the course on Russell Kirk. Full details of the course and links to previous posts can be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

We now reach the seventh principle of Kirk's ten principles of conservatism (detailed here).

For the institution of several property—that is, private property—has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own—these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'Capitalism and the Moral Basis of Social Order' here

Russell Kirk: 'The ideologies of capitalism and socialism' here

John Attarian: 'Russell Kirk's economics of the permanent things' here



Critical discussion:

Kirk's position on private property is that it is necessary for the fulfilment of human nature, particularly in allowing the pursuit of long term goods which go beyond an individual's lifetime. (Family life in particular would be undermined if people are unable to pass on property to the next generation.) On the other hand, unrestrained capitalism is just as evil as communism:

Of course one encounters here and there, still, well-meaning individuals who think of themselves, somewhat vaguely, as socialists. But one has only to observe at close range the exiting Labour Party of Britain—which, after all, is more humane than most socialist groups—to apprehend how dismal a socialist order would be. The aspirations of the 19th-century Christian Socialists of France and Germany, or of the British guild socialists, have gone glimmering altogether. How can one make an alliance with ghosts?

The “capitalist” ideologues who proclaim that the Holy Market is the be-all and end-all are working their own destruction. As truly private property gives way to colossal mergers and combinations, the prediction of Marx is increasingly fulfilled: monopolies and oligopolies find few defenders in rough times, and are converted readily into agencies of the state. As the liberals’ moral nihilism dissolves the inner order and the outer, truly things fall apart. For the sake of the permanent things, we ought to transcend mere faction and unite to redeem the time.

But to exchange “capitalist” claptrap for “socialist” claptrap will not suffice. So long as the socialist genuinely remains attached to socialist dogma, he will be the conservative’s adversary.

What defenders of the permanent things should seek is not a league with some set of old-fangled or new-fangled ideologues, but the politics of prudence, enlivened by imagination. Politics remains the art of the possible.

[From 'The ideologies of capitalism and socialism' -link above.]

Attarian's essay above, I think, rather understates Kirk's suspicion of capitalism, particularly as it existed in America at the end of his life. Kirk's own essays above seem to me fully within the spirit of the social teaching of the Church, for example:

The Church's social doctrine, while recognizing the market as an irreplaceable instrument for regulating the inner workings of the economic system, points out the need for it to be firmly rooted in its ethical objectives, which ensure and at the same time suitably circumscribe the space within which it can operate autonomously.  The idea that the market alone can be entrusted with the task of supplying every category of goods cannot be shared, because such an idea is based on a reductionist vision of the person and society.

[From the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, para. 349  here]

Scottish snippet:

Kirk was friendly with the sculptor, Hew Lorimer and his wife, Mary, both Catholic converts. (Lorimer trained under Eric Gill.) Kirk says of the Lorimers in his biography, The Sword of the Imagination  (p114):

Kirk's friendship with the Lorimers has endured warmly for three generations. Kellie [Castle] is National Trust property now; kindly Hew died in a Fife nursing home; but the two Lorimer sons and the daughter remain intimate with the Kirks, in whose library building at Mecosta are fixed the originals of three of Lorimer's allegorical figures for the National Library of Scotland -that is, the models in Hopetounwood limestone from which the colossal reliefs in Edinburgh were carved in situ, Kirk on the scaffolding with the sculptor one fair day. Kirk's three stone reliefs are Theology, with the sword of faith; on Theology's right, Law, bewigged and clasping a book; on Theology's left, History, with a long scroll and a quill pen. These carvings, with their Celtic dignity, may outlast the Common Reader.

People are meant to live forever, Kirk came to reflect with the passing of the years. Why do they perish? Plato and St Paul tell us that they do not perish -and St Augustine of Hippo, too; they merely depart from us. Mary Lorimer is in her grave now, but is fixed in Kirk's memory by her blithe spirit, her humor, and her coffee -the best ever brewed for guests; and Hew Lorimer, solitary, later entered eternity. What timeless moments Kirk spent with them!

[Next post: 26 September 2016]

[Details of image: Kellie Castle Fife, home of Hew and Mary Lorimer. Full details here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 7

Welcome back to the seventh week of the Albertus Institute's blog course on Russell Kirk and Catholic social teaching. The previous posts can be followed from the Russell Kirk page .

This week we turn to the sixth of Kirk's principles, that of imperfectability:

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. [The full ten principles can be found here.]

Reading:

Russell Kirk [synopsis of his book, The Roots of American Order] here

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Augustine: political and social philosophy' here


Critical discussion:

Kirk's vision of human imperfectability reminds me strongly of the Augustinian vision of the tension between the City of God and the Earthly City:

while Augustine doubtless holds that it is better for Rome to be Christian than not, he clearly recognizes that officially embracing Christianity does not automatically transform an earthly state into the City of God.  Indeed, he regards Rome as “a kind of second Babylon.”  Even if the Roman Emperor and the Roman Pontiff were one and the same—even if the structures of state and church merged so as to become institutionally the same—they would not thereby become the City of God, because citizenship in the City of God is determined at the individual and not the institutional level.
Augustine does not wish ill for Rome.  Quite the contrary, he supplicates God for Rome’s welfare,  since he belongs to it, in temporal terms at least.  He sees Rome as the last bastion against the advances of the pagan barbarians, who surely must not be allowed to overrun the mortal embodiment of Christendom that Rome represents.  Nevertheless, Augustine cannot be overly optimistic about the future of the Roman state as such—not because it is Rome, but because it is a state; for any society of men other than the City of God is part and parcel of the earthly city, which is doomed to inevitable demise.  Even so, states like Rome can perform the useful purpose of championing the cause of the Church, protecting it from assault and compelling those who have fallen away from fellowship with it to return to the fold. [From Encyclopedia article linked above.]

There is certainly room for the aim of improving human societies, but our final home is only with God, and any earthly city and politics will fall short of that.

One of the interesting things about Kirk's analysis above is the favourable attention given to Calvin. To quote from the above synopsis:

in Kirk’s phrase, there was still “a reserve of genius in Christianity,” something that ensured its self-preservation by making it a counterpart to temporal society. This aptitude came to the fore in the person of John Calvin, a Swiss lawyer and theologian. Kirk contends that Calvin—probably more than any other person during the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the founding of America —created a climate where church and state could complement rather than compete with one another. His intellectual feat was the joining of religious obligation of fealty to church and clergy and Scripture with equally valuable social and civic obligations—pay your taxes, obey the civil rulers, adhere to legal precepts, etc.—and he thereby helped make a functioning society possible.
     The application of the idea of responsibility to civic duty, which grew out of religious obligations, caused people to understand how order was to be achieved in both secular and religious affairs. Calvin’s influence was so fundamental and practical that he can be credited with having helped to make order pre-eminent in the theory and the practice of Western civic construction. His reality was the antithesis of the religious corruption of the Middle Ages when dispensations for any sin could be purchased from the clergy. The incongruous and sinister religion that Christianity had become was intolerable to those who witnessed the disjunction between the words in the Bible and the conduct of priests in the public square.      Once religious corruption was made a public issue during the Protestant Reformation and the clergy were “forced” to resume pious ways, freedom of thought (that is, the clergy and the church were no longer controlling minds through religious terrorism) allowed the flowering of the Renaissance. The Reformation’s intellectual revolt against thieving religious administrators (in both their temporal and spiritual aspects) became open conflict between the reformers and the clerisy. As Kirk explains the history of this era he observes that people no longer cowed by religious bullying could perceive a profound insight:
  

            Truth was knowable; order was real. Truth was obscured by man’s follies and passions, and order was broken by man’s appetites and desire for power. Yet right reason might disclose truth to men’s eyes again, and order might be regained by courageous acts of will. 

Kirk certainly described himself regularly as an Augustinian (Birzer, 2015, p.501 n.38). Moreover, he emphasises the way that Calvinism was the source of an emphasis in American culture on the Old Testament.

'Because freedom from slavery and oppression were dominant themes in the Old Testament,' Neal Riemer writes, the legacy of Israel and Judah nourished American liberty. 'It warned -as in the story of the Tower of Babel- against Man's attempt to be God. It forced Man- as in the story of Adam and Eve- to recognize his mortality and fallibility and to appreciate that there can be no Utopia on earth. Again and again, it inveighed against the belief that Utopia can be captured and made concrete in idolatry. On the other hand, however, it left ample room for effort to make life better. This is the central meaning, as I read it, of God's covenant with Noah and its reaffirmation with Abraham, with Moses, and with the later prophets.'

[From 'The law and the prophets' in The Essential Russell Kirk, p.78]

However, that historical truth did not prevent Kirk from having, in general, a highly critical view of the reformation and its effects:

Certainly, Kirk held no affinity for the Reformers, and he feared their  'moblike' actions in the sixteenth century nearly destroyed the town [of St Andrews]. 'When Knox and the Reformers dinged down the cathedral and the archbishopric of St Andrews, the soul would have gone out of this remote place had not the little University remained to shelter [the community].'

(Birzer, 2015, p.94).

What is one to make of all this? It should certainly be kept in mind that Kirk is not a systematic thinker and that his writing career lasted half a century and straddled shifts from Stoicism to Christianity to Catholicism. (Although the above dismissals of the Reformation precede his conversion and the praise of Calvinism postdates it.) The main thoughts, however, are the imperfectability of politics and the Burkean importance of tradition. Neither medieval Catholicism nor Calvinism produce the perfect society because, in his Augustinianism, Kirk sees that nothing can do this. In Europe, the Reformation destroyed tradition, not completely, but to a great extent. Kirk, as a conservative, is therefore critical of it. In America, on the other hand, it was part of the founding DNA. Whatever, problems that may have led to, it was not a wholly bad inheritance, and any correction of those problems has to respect that organic inheritance and work with it rather than wholly dismissing it.

[Next post: 19 September]

[Details of image: here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 6

Welcome to week 6 of the online course about Russell Kirk. Details of the course (which can be joined at any time) are here.

This week, we look at the fifth principle of Kirk's Ten Principles of conservatism,  that of variety.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.


Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'The aim of the conservative' (here)

Bradley Birzer: "More than ‘Irritable Mental Gestures’: Russell Kirk’s Challenge to Liberalism" (here)


Critical discussion:


Kirk states in the above article:

 “The American industrialist, by and large, has been a liberal, and so has the American labor organizer; they have different about means, rather than ends. I do not mean that no industrialists, or no union organizers, are conservatives; some are truly conservative, but they are exceptions. The session with economics—a Benthamite and Marxist obsession—which is oppressed nearly all discussion of the wants of Americans for a good many years, is only now beginning to give way to some serious discussion of what we really want from life, and of how we may keep life tolerable.”

To paraphrase this, Kirk is rejecting the modern obsession with productivity: with human beings producing things which are then alienated from them by being bought and sold. (In short, having produced a service or physical good by pouring your labour (heart and soul) into that production, you are left: a) with that good which is no longer yours and which benefits someone else; b) money.) This element of the criticism is not so very far away from Marx's in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (here):

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. [...] The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Kirk is not a systematic thinker, but at least part of his attack here can be articulated in the following:

a) Modernity, by abolishing the variety of inherited patterns of life, leaves a blank slate which, at best, takes an awfully long time to fill.

b) An obsession with money rather than other human goods reduces the variety of human life.

c) The emphasis on equality rather than traditional hierarchies again tends to reduce the variety of life.

Kirk would surely point to the liberal desire to remove or abolish as evidence of action to reduce variety. A liberal, however, might reply that this destruction of variety is only intended to free human beings from a 'traditional' oppression: if, in the short term, that results in a loss of variety, then it is only because it serves to liberate the forces of individuality and thus variety for the future.

Part of Kirk's response here is that societies will always embody differences between people: to pretend otherwise is foolish. But instead of such differences being sustained by oppression and power, they can be exercises of love. In his lecture on Malcolm Muggeridge, Kirk quotes with favour the following passage on the triumph of love:

As Ian Hunter writes in his able biography of Muggeridge:

...[he] has always been fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of power and those who wield it....Power is to the collectivity, he believes, what lust is to the individual-'an expense of spirit in a waste of shame' in Shakespeare's elegant phrase. Through the practice of half a century of journalism, and particularly since the advent of television, he has been brought in contrast with prime ministers, potentates, and despots, people who have achieved power over their fellowmen by acclamation, birth, persuasion, the ballot bow, or the barrel of a gun. Its effect on almost all of them, he has observed, is to corrupt-not in the more obvious sense in which Lord Acton spoke of power corrupting, but in subtler, more insidious ways; principally, by diverting their attention from what is enduring, true, and worthwhile to what is evanescent, circumstantial, and tawdry. 'Here am I, Captain of a Legion of Rome,' runs an inscription Muggeridge is fond of quoting, 'who served in the Libyan desert and learns and ponders this truth-there are in life but two things, love and power, and no man can have both.'

 Differences between human beings are not always the result of power but of love and nature. Instead of workers being exploited by capital or attacking their managers, the possibility of a variety of authorities and hierarchies exists which is sustained by love rather than force. This is very much in keeping with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum:

19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvellous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.

It is also reminiscent of Dante's Paradiso, Canto 1:

All things, among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.    Here do the higher beings see the imprint of the Eternal Worth, which is the end to which the pattern I have mentioned tends.    Within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Kirk's emphasis on love and the limitations of reason in expressing truth are also echoed by the closing words of the Divine Comedy: Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!    That circle—which, begotten so, appeared You as light reflected—when my eyes had watched it with attention for some time,    within itself and colored like itself, to me seemed painted with our effigy, so that my sight was set on it completely.    As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs,    so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it—    and my own wings were far too weak for that. But then my mind was struck by light that flashed and, with this light, received what it had asked.    Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by    the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. In sum, unless illuminated by God and love, the human mind will tend to see all variety and all hierarchy as an exercise of power and oppression. Certainly, such oppression will exist and even, in our earthly life, is not totally avoidable. But the possibility exists of an earthly variety that reflects divine justice. Unless the possibility of such a beauty in traditional forms of life is considered, the correction of imagined injustice will itself become an exercise of the lust for domination. [Next post: 12 September 2016] [Details of image: From Russell Kirk Center here]