“First attend to the adjustment of your own soul, particularly the regulative liberal learning of your intellect, then project your internal economy on the world as social and political justice. The other way around is headless.” – Eva Brann, The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings Eva Brann is a [...]
The following is the text of Dr. Eva Brann’s Commencement Address at Zaytuna College, the Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, CA, delivered during a virtual ceremony on May 23, 2021. Hello to the about-to-be alumni of Zaytuna College! How I wish I could be with you face-to-face and hear your individual accounts of the [...]
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.” So begins Homer’s Odyssey. Long ago I launched my ship in pursuit of the true, the good, and [...]
Our readers have come to know and to admire Eva Brann, Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative and tutor at St. John’s College, who always challenges us with her insightful writings on liberal learning, the hidden treasures in Homer’s poems, the artful devices of the dialogues of Socrates, and the wonders found in “the conservatory of the imagination.” I [...]
Jane Austen’s world is as merry as it is good. All the novels are perfect comedies—mirthful throughout and happy in outcome. Despite their brightness and lightness, these novels are in no way trivial—they are simply not concerned with those terrific follies presented to the scourge of public laughter in classical comic drama. Since this lecture [...]
What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. [...]
Let us offer to the young some clear years for becoming not a this or a that, but for learning to be a human being, whose powers of thought are well exercised, whose imagination is well stocked, whose will has conceived some large human purpose, and whose passions have found some fine object of love [...]
Eva Brann’s contributions to the larger academic community are twofold: She gives her students, colleagues, and readers a sweeping variety of writings and offers herself as a model of one who never shies from thinking, discussing, and seeking knowledge; and she is a tireless defender of the educational practices at St. John’s College, where she [...]
This book is full of observations about friendship—discerningly borrowed and observantly original; it is a credible descendant of those wonders of human perspicacity, Aristotle’s books on friendship. One of those borrowed observations is that “the point of being friends is to charm each other.” Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs by Gary [...]
This is what Courage means to Socrates: It is descriptively distinct from and essentially identical with all the virtues. For us this “paradoxical” outcome sets a task—we are to figure out how it might become intelligible. Euripides, it is reported, was “Socrato-nailed-down” (σωκρατογόμφους) – that is, patched up, bolted together, by Socrates.1 I understand this term [...]
James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" is in truth among the finest of those works of republican rhetoric in which one finds an adroit enunciation of liberty. The document entitled “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial and Remonstrance” is a jewel of republican rhetoric.[1] Nor has this choice example [...]
Fairness is an acknowledgement of just desserts, and therefore implies equality in dealings with similarly entitled partners. So it is indeed equality adjusted to circumstances that I desire. Thus there is an intimation that equality will come into play when justice is administered communally. Regarding the title: 1. The question mark expresses a genuine perplexity [...]
My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once [...]
The “Eumenides” is not a tragedy of the unresolvable impasse, of the unavoidable fatality. It is a “pragma,” an affair practically handled, whose outcome is not all-round cleansing by devastation, but a future of good daily living. Aeschylus invests this drama of sweet reason, of moderation triumphant, with exhilarating solemnity and participatory splendor. Aeschylus’ Eumenides is [...]