This is the ultimate message of Homer’s two epics: Where family is found, life is found; where family is found, true beauty is found; where family is found, piety is found; where family is dissolved, only death and destruction follows... The Trojan War, for our Homeric heroes, begins with marital infidelity and succumbing to temptation, [...]
On airplanes my druthers is to mind my own business. I don’t want to be rude, but I much prefer reading to chatting. And that’s precisely what I did for almost the entirety of a recent flight. Nothing out of the ordinary here. It’s my usual pattern. And it generally works, especially if one avoids small talk right [...]
It is a truism that children need adults to help them grow up. It is, however, less known but equally true that adults need children to help them grow into the fullness of maturity. Whereas children need to be taught about life in all its multifarious manifestations, satisfying their natural sense of wonder and their [...]
Is it worth it to try to do great things in business or politics or art or education—or even the Church? Recently, when I was reflecting on honor and fame as praiseworthy ambitions for our students, I ended with a famous quotation from Milton’s “Lycidas,” where Milton speaks of fame as the “spur” of the [...]
The problem with the notion that one should do good because doing good leads to happiness is that, well, what if it doesn’t? Throughout human history, the greatest thinkers and theologians have each proposed a state of being which in their view was the highest state of personal fulfillment one could achieve. For Plato, the [...]
Those who truly seek to bring about the good also have to be ambitious for power, just not for their personal satisfaction, but for the greater good; they need to “baptize” their strong personal drive and accept power when it comes so that they can root out mediocrity and accomplish what actually needs doing... On [...]
What is the worst thing about living in the rubble of a civilization? It is not that you shed a tear for the noble churches and courts and town halls you once knew, as you recall years filled with religious services, parades and block parties. It is that you do not even suspect that such [...]
The purpose of growing old is to grow up. The purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and virtue (the two are synonymous, though the latter word is banned from all polite discourse in our rancid and rotten culture). If one grows old without growing in wisdom, one is a miserable loser. For most [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in "The Abolition of Man," we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests. No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
One of the greatest causes of concern in American society by the 1820s was the perceived loss of virtue necessary to undergird a republic. All republicans knew that America would not last forever. They did, however, hope that by example, norms, education, and sacrifice, the American people would keep their republic alive as long as [...]
God is the Best. We can only get better by becoming more like the Best, knowing that we can never be the Best. This is the way of virtue which transcends relative trivialities such as virtuosity… What is the primary purpose of education? Is it to enable our children to be successful in a worldly [...]
A recent essay proposes Aristotle to have “opened a path” to today’s radical individualism and relativism. In order to evaluate this thesis, we must turn to the Great Tradition of the “perennial philosophy” and ask what the great philosophers taught about virtue, justice, friendship, and the nature of man. There is a story about H.L. [...]
Modern philosophy, empirical science, and our social sciences stand mute before moral questions and the human spirit. Let us, therefore, turn to the Ancients for their understanding of alcohol’s effects upon the soul. “What’s this chemical ferment called life all about? I shall be impelled to strong drink if something exciting doesn’t happen along pretty [...]
Aristotle’s reasoning about virtue, with its emphasis on man’s relationship to his own soul and man’s ability to perfect his own virtue, opened a path to relativism and radical individualism. All philosophical inquiry is united by two foundational elements. First the philosopher acknowledges that man’s existence is defined by his relationships. While philosophers may differ [...]