Ancient pathos, passion, was an affect emanating from an object; the object elicited the responsive affect, from the outside in. Modern emotion comes from inside out; it emphasizes expression; subject prevails over object. It is the Romantic worm eating its way out of the Enlightened apple... Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating [...]
When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Jacob Terneus, as he reflects upon the character of Don Quixote. —W. Winston Elliott [...]
Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the cosmos is meant to reflect and embody the graces of God: his beauty, love, and goodness. Such is to what all things are [...]
Of all the writers who came at the end of the Roman Republic and at the beginning of the Empire, most make note of the loss of traditional morality. It was Cicero who advocated an adherence to nature and order by recognizing the proper meaning of a thing within and around the very existence [...]
There is Odysseus, a vivid, viable, versatile, multifarious man, the man by whose agency alone Achilles is admitted to blood and voice, the man who made the odyssey—a poet. And so it is shown that the “Odyssey,” a poem about a poet, is a work of reflection. 1. On Seeing Homer Epic is that kind [...]
Cicero’s “On the Republic” has influenced the West for centuries, calling to harmony the various aspects of government. In his call to harmony, Cicero portrays a republic in which a proper action demands the balance of the three faculties of man, as well as one in which true law is understood as coming not [...]
We live in a mad, mad world where anything goes and many things have gone. One of the things that appears to have gone is a sense of sanity. Take, for instance, a recent essay in The Atlantic which claims to show that William Shakespeare was in fact a woman.[*] The essay itself, which was [...]
According to Cicero, the Republic follows the paths of nature and god in all its activities. As such, the true statesman—like the gardener—knows when to plant, when to fertilize, when to water, when to weed, when to prune, and when to harvest. Yet there is still, to be certain, a season for everything. And, [...]
Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages had been given the gift, not only to peer into the twenty-first century, but to correspond with us who live in that most confusing and rudderless of centuries. Had it been in their [...]
As this year’s seniors take their last exams and prepare to walk across the stage on Saturday morning, I’m led to think about the effect of this whole unique education at Wyoming Catholic College on them. How will it all come together—all the theology and philosophy, the literature and history, the Latin, music, and [...]
For the scientist who knows how to read the face of nature, every object in our world can be explained by way of a cosmic dance. Given enough time and enough swerves, every mountain, every stream, every tree, every animal—even every human soul—will find its way from lifeless atom into living entity. And yet, [...]
A republic, by its very essence, imitates the highest of creation: man endowed with understanding and free will. Yet, in this greatest of strengths also resides the deepest of weaknesses. When the people enjoy true liberty, they often fail to identify its source, admiring its effects rather than its causes. In particular, they misunderstand [...]
The best society, Cicero argues, cultivates us as free individuals for the benefit of the community. Virtue exists in every being, but few realize it or cultivate it. Yet, it is what makes men, men, and allows them to be free. Usually remembered for his political triumphs and defeats as well as for his [...]
Only fools would send their children to school to listen to some teacher’s opinions, unless, of course, those opinions also happen to be true. Discussing St. Thomas Aquinas’s love of teaching, Josef Pieper writes: Teaching does not consist in a man’s making public talks on the results of his meditations, even if he does [...]