First Things RSS Feed - Algis Valiunas

Night of the World

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 03:00:00 -0500

Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the religious substance of modern poetry. Perhaps because of his own misbegotten metaphysical aspirations, Heidegger could feel and understand the anguish of those who sought but could not secure the soul’s honest exaltation in a disenchanted world. The philosopher found himself drawn to poets whose yearnings, torments, and raptures represented the modern desire for the marvelous at its most taxing reach and elusive grasp. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Heidegger prepared a lecture titled “What Are Poets For?” Forbidden to offer public lectures at the university and deprived of his chair of philosophy, he delivered it to a select few in 1946. In this extended meditation, Heidegger considers the metaphysical implications, and more specifically the religious ones, of the poetry of Rilke and of Friedrich Hölderlin.

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Arabian Knight

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Lawrence of Arabia:
My Journey in Search of T. E. Lawrence
by ranulph fiennes
pegasus books, 352 pages, $32

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The Greatest Catholic Opera

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 10:35:00 -0400

Opera has traditionally had little interest in Christian orthodoxy, except as a foil for some preferred spiritual excellence. The lyric stage has concerned itself mostly with the political life and especially with the erotic life, and left conventional godliness out of the picture. Of course Teutonic gods who go up in flames, quasi-karmic Fate, demonic religious personnel, and even some actual demons may have their appointed place, but old-fashioned Christianity is deemed out of order. So when the French Roman Catholic composer Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) wrote his 1957 masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites) , the work’s celebration of heroic piety defied the secular spirit of the art form.

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What Émile Zola’s Nana Can Teach Our Liberated Age

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 06:00:00 -0400

Of the great nineteenth-century French novelists, Victor Hugo still enjoys a certain renown in America, thanks to the popularity of the musical version of Les Misérables , while Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac have grown dimmer with age, and Émile Zola gathers dust. Some thirty-six years ago Tom Wolfe tried to revive interest in Zola as an artist who, much like Wolfe himself, went out and about in the world and delivered a nuts-and-bolts report on its workings. But any excitement that Wolfe’s Zola stirred did not last long. The loss is ours. For Zola was far more than a veteran reporter who has seen everything; he used his diligently gathered knowledge and imaginative reach in the service of moral vitality.

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My Madness

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0500

My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165, boundless curiosity, confidence, and mental energy, bold in the best sense, and less than optimally protective of life and limb, fearing neither God nor man. A school exercise he wrote when he was five or six demonstrated a religious sensibility well on its way to being fully formed: “Jesus fly over the stabel on Christmas morning. I hate chirch.”

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Devils in the Mind

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 06:00:00 -0400

Aldous Huxley was the premier twentieth-century English novelist of ideas, a rare calling among his countrymen; but perhaps it is in his non-fiction masterpiece, The Devils of Loudun (1952), that his beloved ideas live most vividly. There he recounts the apparent demonic possession en masse in an Ursuline convent in a French village in 1633. By the history’s end, the reader becomes well-acquainted with “Radical Evil,” which is found not in the malign workings of the Principalities and Powers, but in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women. To Huxley, the ordinariness of evil appears to be an inescapable feature of our life on earth. However the accepted facts about human nature may have changed over the centuries, this malignancy—the fundamental human need to have someone to hate and to persecute—has never been eradicated, and perhaps never can be.

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Nihilism for the Ironhearted

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0400

When a man proclaims nature malignant in all its parts and professes to hate life itself, one’s first suspicion is that something is profoundly wrong with him. The man’s grievance against creation must be the effect of some personal deficiency in body or soul or both, rather than a sound conclusion reached by a powerful, disinterested mind. Few things disturb ordinary, contented people more than the spectacle of a moral desperado (to borrow Thomas Carlyle’s phrase) or metaphysical berserker raging against the order of the universe. Such raw and comprehensive loathing seems downright demonic. Human beings, however they might suffer, are expected to demonstrate some gratitude for the existence they have been granted. To scorn the gift of life, to regard it as a prescribed ordeal at best or a pointless torment at worst, strikes at the deepest human desire, which is for happiness. Normal people want more and more life in the hope of better things to come, in this world or the next—not a prompt end to the whole tiresome business of living.

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Churchill in Barbary

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0500

The River War:
An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan
by Winston Spencer Churchill
edited by James W. Muller
st. Augustine’s, two volumes, 1,556 pages, $155

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Christmas by Dickensian Decree

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500

There are holy days of sobering solemnity when one is meant to reflect on the sadness of life, the weakness of human nature, the vast distance between who you are and who you ought to be: Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and Yom Kippur are such spiritually demanding occasions. But Christmas is supposed to be different. It is the consummate feast of joy, when grim thoughts are to be banished. On Easter the Passion of Christ is still close, while on Christmas one tends not to look too far past the glorious birth. Some Renaissance masters who painted the infant Jesus with his mother did foreshadow the inevitable torment and death, including a troubled look on the baby’s face or a menacing black cloud in the background. But those times are long past. We now observe this holiday according to Dickensian decree—golden family happiness, especially the adults’ delight in the children’s delight, occupies the center of the celebration.

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The Gospel According to Dickens

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

In the popular understanding of Christmas, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella looms large. A Christmas Carol seems to represent not only Christmassy warmth, fellowship, and cheer, but the very essence of Christian practice. At the end, Ebenezer Scrooge, the old skinflint, is redeemed by an act of charity. It would be too much to say that Scrooge’s embrace of Tiny Tim has replaced the Christ child at the sacred and heroic center of the season, but the Dickensian vision of charity as open-handedness to the poor has acquired the status of gospel truth.

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