“Fortitude without justice is a source of evil.”—St. Thomas Aquinas The great moralists tell us that a person’s strength is often the source of his greatest weakness, whether it is business acumen, artistic creativity, or physical excellence. Any of these things can be exercised too much or in the wrong way. The same is true [...]
Like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, conservatives must come up from politics and recognize that the roots of a truer just order are watered with the permanent ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. The insights of the arts of life are vital to make life worth living. Readers of The Imaginative Conservative know well the phrase “beauty [...]
The characters in Mozart’s “Figaro” are the furthest thing from mere archetypes. Instead, they are as real and as identifiable as the people around us today, for Mozart was interested in human nature itself, and not the ephemeral and artificial distinctions of class. “In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle,” composer Johannes [...]
In very different historical circumstances, two strong-willed, athletic men with intelligence and leadership ability survived multiple dangers, but neither attributed his survival to his abilities or to sheer willpower. Instead, both men consistently and publicly credited Divine Providence. Their stories are well-known, but worth reviewing, since they serve as witnesses to us in our own [...]
In valor, there is hope—namely, the hope that our virtue may be fully complete. It is as men of valor that we will be all we can be. In valor, there is hope. —Tacitus When it played in the movie theaters, the terrific movie Act of Valor (2012) earned notoriety for two reasons. First [...]
Even though President James Monroe could not fix the economy or dismiss the Missouri question, he could certainly distract the nation from its problems. In his second inaugural address, he gleefully announced a new target for American anger: The British were not allowing free trade between the United States and the English-occupied West Indies. Whatever [...]
Patience encourages us to accept humbly that we will not be as good as soon as we want to, due to being part of the fallen world. This understanding need not lead to despair, but rather to hope, for if we keep patiently at it, eventually we will look back on the struggle as well [...]
Liberal education is about absorbing the great traditions of the past in order to form one’s own faculty of judgment, aiming at the end of living well. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had [...]
According to Friedrich-Georg Jünger, modern man’s veneration of technology reveals his distant kinship to the Titans of myth. This ‘titanic’ impulse to dominate and consume expresses itself through our technology-driven industrial economy, which now determines every aspect of life from the air we breathe to the food we eat. Ongoing debates concerning the growing power [...]
The literature of Robert Penn Warren and William Styron describes the decline of society, an annihilation of culture. It also projects a knowledge of the eternal struggle, forever bound by memory, and the inherent yearning for a civilization that “is the refuge of sentiments and values, of spiritual congeniality, of belief in the word, of [...]
Those who read as Shakespeare wrote, seeing the facts in the light of the truth they serve, will be servants of that greater science animated by a love of wisdom (philosophy) and of the greatest of all sciences which leads to a knowledge of God (theology). Those who read reality in this way are never [...]
What makes freedom possible is beyond all knowing, but what makes the moral law possible is freedom itself. The fact that we have a faculty of freedom is the critical ground of the possibility of morality. I have called this lecture “Kant’s Imperative” so that I might begin by pointing up an ever-intriguing circumstance. Kant [...]
You seem to think that history signifies nothing more than one meaningless event after another. But you only do so because you lack eyes to see. Behind that course of events that you dismiss as chaotic and haphazard is a hidden line of purpose that is moving us and our world toward a good end [...]
Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. What song the Syrens sang, or what name [...]