I would have things as they were in all the days of my life, as in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.
Envisioning Trump as the restorer of heroic Western life — whether imperial, kingly, or mythical — is quite an act of creation. There is nothing about Trump that suggests he can hasten the end of Enlightenment principles through political rule. (Although an itchy nuclear trigger finger could.) These dreams are funnier still when considered next to Trump’s style, which is lamely democratic; his culture, which derives entirely from cable television; and his personal taste, which resides about one remove from Uday Hussein’s debauches. The man is clearly a product of a decadent society, not the scourge or redeemer of one.
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The city of Liège, Belgium in 1914, under siege, and in 2009. When, in August 1914, the German armies decided to cut through Belgium on their way to France, thereby mocking the treaty Germany had signed to protect the integrity of Belgium, they expected no resistance. They got resistance.
Their immediate response was to burn a nearby village to the ground, shoot a good many random civilians, and round up Catholic priests and execute them on the totally spurious, invented-on-the-spot grounds that they were spies working against Germany. All that happened on the first day of the German invasion. When those actions did not lead to a Belgian surrender, the Germans sent zeppelins over the city to terror-bomb it into submission.
The notion that the Great War was fought in a relatively civilized way, and that it was only World War II that introduced terror against civilians as an essential element of military strategy, is belied by these first events of the earlier conflict. The German army didn’t continue in this vein simply because it couldn’t: it had limited access to major population centers for the rest of the war. But from the moment the war began the Germans were prepared to destroy anyone who stood in their war, without regard to any other consideration, no matter how time-honored or essential to humanity.
Francis is a Jesuit, and like many members of Catholic religious orders, he tends to view the institutional church, with its parishes and dioceses and settled ways, as an obstacle to reform. He describes parish priests as ‘little monsters’ who 'throw stones’ at poor sinners. He has given curial officials a diagnosis of 'spiritual Alzheimer’s.’ He scolds pro-life activists for their 'obsession’ with abortion. He has said that Catholics who place an emphasis on attending Mass, frequenting confession, and saying traditional prayers are 'Pelagians’ — people who believe, heretically, that they can be saved by their own works. Such denunciations demoralize faithful Catholics without giving the disaffected any reason to return. Why join a church whose priests are little monsters and whose members like to throw stones? When the pope himself stresses internal spiritual states over ritual observance, there is little reason to line up for confession or wake up for Mass.
Has Pope Francis Failed? - The New York Times. I think Matthew is precisely right about this. If God is perfectly happy with me as I am, then why should I do anything on Sunday morning except drink Starbucks and watch ESPN? In my heart I’m doing the right thing.
One thing can hardly come under the Hush Hush — I mean the beautiful planetary conjunction last Tuesday. Did you happen to see the moon (first quarter), Jupiter and Venus, all in a line and not more than three fingers apart? I saw them on a clear evening, emerging from the cloister of New Building to go to dinner, and understood what is at the back of all astrology i.e. the difficulty of believing that anything so splendid is without significance.
C. S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warnie, 18 February 1940. Warnie was serving in the Army, and “the Hush Hush” is the forbidding of sensitive topics by Army censors.
I thought of this passage this morning as I was walking my dog. It was still dark, and Orion stood at the top of the sky, and near the horizon the crescent moon lay on its back with the outline of the whole orb just visible. It’s hard at such a moment not to think that the constellations are indeed “the pattern and the mirror of the acts of earth.”
The general Ptolemy
founded the Greco-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty
that ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years after Alexander
the Great’s death. The Ptolemies tried to gain
the support of Egyptian priests in order to be recognised as legitimate
pharaohs. They renovated temples and also built magnificent new ones.
These royal portraits illustrate
the determination of the Ptolemaic rulers to
present themselves to their Egyptian subjects as legitimate successors to the
native pharaohs.
This
skilfully executed head shows a Ptolemaic king depicted entirely in accordance
with ancient Egyptian traditions. His head
is adorned by the rearing cobra (uraeus) protruding from the traditional
headcloth of Egyptian pharaohs (nemes).
This
royal head originally belonged to the statue of a sphinx, a type of Egyptian
sculpture usually seen flanking processional routes into temples. It is another example of the Ptolemies’ determination to
draw from Egyptian art and iconography, making them seem less like outsiders.
Find out more about the deep connections
between the ancient civilisations of Greece and Egypt in the BP exhibition Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds (19 May – 27 November 2016).
Trump announced that he considered saying something ‘very rough’ about Hillary Clinton or her family but in the end elected not to. He said this with solemnity, as if amazed at his own benevolence.
It’s odd to me that so many people other than Freddie have an opinion about whether he should have taken his new job, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s a job worth doing and that Freddie will do it well. For good or ill, assessment is now a basic and non-negotiable element of academic life, and Freddie has a very strong understanding of how it can be done responsibly, accurately, and in the interests of students and teachers alike. I wish him every success.
