Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell. Continue Reading »
When British historian Martin Gilbert died earlier this year at the age of seventy-eight, the world lost one of its leading scholars and a man of exceptional integrity. Best known as the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, Gilbert wrote almost ninety books and became a renowned authority on the Second World War and the Holocaust. Beyond his extensive writings, he also found time to teach, lecture, advise governments, and champion human rights. Continue Reading »
Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern . . . . Continue Reading »
TS Eliot presciently warned in his “Idea of a Christian Society” (in Christianity and Culture) that liberalism has the capacity to turn into its opposite: “Liberalism still permeates ourminds and affects our attitude towards much of life. That Liberalism may be a tendency towards . . . . Continue Reading »
Chesterton (The Thing), pre-channeling Alasdair MacIntyre: “the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenstock (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 127-8) objects to Rosenzweig’s characterization of church history as a move from the church of the spirit to the church of dogma and tradition. Rosenstock thinks the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenzweig locates a fundamental similarity between Judaism and Christianity in their mutual affirmation of protology and eschatology, which give form and meaning to the “middle things” that occur between A and B - that is, the middle things of world history. Rosenstock objects that the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 157) offers this profound rejoinder to the professorial habit of trying to modify the traditional epochs of history:“It is necessary . . . to accept the traditional . . . . Continue Reading »
