classics digests, reflections and reviews
Preface In his new book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation, David Bentley Hart argues, among other things, that the traditional doctrine of eternal punishment, of which Augustine is a main expounder, is immoral and unjust. As an armchair Augustinian, I’m sorely tempted to respond to this charge, to meet my accuser face to face, so to speak, and, if I know anything about Augustine, he […]
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The Law of Audit In this city, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust. For example, the law directs that priests and priestesses be subject to audit, all collectively, and each severally and individually—persons who receive perquisites only, and whose occupation is to pray to heaven for you ; and they are made accountable not only separately, but whole […]
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On the False Embassy and On the Crown are Demosthenes’ two most important speeches, both on a personal and political level. In the former, he accused his political enemy Aeschines of treason deserving the death penalty; in the latter, he defended his own political career against the accusations of Aeschines. Suffice to say, there was no love lost between these two gentlemen. Of all the legal and political battles Demosthenes […]
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Brave New World is a first-class essay written as a third-class novel. It is intellectually stimulating, but emotionally and imaginatively barren, not to mention spiritually uninspiring — curiously similar to the world it envisions. I had known about it for a long time, but had not read it firsthand, and would probably never read it, if the philosopher Dr. Peter Kreeft hadn’t recommended it as one of twenty-six books people […]
Read moreFor, among those beings which exist, and which are not of God the Creator’s essence, those which have life are ranked above those which have none; those that have the power of generation, or even of desiring, above those which want this faculty. And, among things that have life, the sentient are higher than those which have no sensation, as animals are ranked above trees. And, among the sentient, the […]
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Day as Knowledge and Night as Ignorance And first of all, indeed, light was made by the word of God, and God, we read, separated it from the darkness, and called the light Day, and the darkness Night; … For the knowledge of the creature is, in comparison of the knowledge of the Creator, but a twilight; and so it dawns and breaks into morning when the creature is drawn […]
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The Nature of Time It is ignorance to think time to be a measure or number of motion according to antecedent and subsequent, as Aristotle said, or what in motion is quantitative, as Speusippus did, or extension of motion and nothing else, as did some of the Stoics, defining it by an accident and not comprehending its essence and potency, Pythagoras, when asked what time is, answered, the soul of […]
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