August 22, 2025

I AND THOU:

August 22, 2025

sex! swing dancing! sixtine!: come for the Renaissance erotics; stay for my problems with Brideshead Revisited (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 07, 2025, The Lost Word)

This idea, like so much of the magical tradition, comes out of Plato, via hs late antique Alexandrian followers. We have an inherent attraction – and it is attraction – towards the good, and the true, and the beautiful, and God; erotic love, rightly understood, pulls us not just towards physical beauty but towards what that beauty represents: which you can find in higher forms of symmetry, or knowledge of prime numbers. Matthew Crawford helpfully touches on this in another context: in his recent First Things/Substack essays “Is Math Erotic?”/”Math is Erotic”. We’re attracted not just to the beautiful but the beautifully true. (I admit I want to read an even nerdier second postscript from him that goes into more detail about how eros differs from mere contemplative appreciation).

That attraction is, basically, hackable, by magicians capable of hacking it – but ultimately our attraction is to God, or the Good, or the One, or whatever Platonic words you want to use. Everything else is cosmological flotsam.

So far, so fair.

Oh, but, God, what do you do about other people?

This is the part where, I think, the magical worldview, and maybe the Platonic worldview, and whatever version of Christianity isn’t magical (or you might say, is magical differently) diverge. Maybe I’m too much of a Protestant, or a Kierkegaardian, or too much a nineteenth-century scholar, or a twenty-first century post-Kantian in my moral horror of treating people as means, but what always galls me about these ideas of ascent and descent, of loves that really mean the love of God, is that they seem to have so little to do with loving a person. The other night at a Cracks in Postmodernity event, a friend was explaining their reading of Brideshead Revisited to me: that we move from the aesthetic realm of Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian, to the more explicitly romantic nature of Charles’s love for Julia, to the final completion: Charles’s conversion, his love for God. But does that mean Sebastian and Julia are just waystations? Is Charles’s love for them just a metaphor for divine love, the way, say, dancing is a metaphor for sex?

This idea may be the right one. It may – I’m not sure – also be deeply Christian; of course Christians have our own version of it; the batter my heart, three person’d God, the Bernini angel that pierces St. Teresa’s breast – He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart,…when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God…[that] made me moan. There’s precedent, too, of thinking of all the things of this world, love included, as merely conveyances for the knowledge and love of God. Augustine himself (as the always-insightful Sam Kimbriel reminded me, when I was driving myself nuts over this exact topic back in May) distinguishes between right objects of enjoyment (basically: God), and right objects of use (basically, everything else).

But is that all we are to each other? Objects?

Here’s what I can’t get past: the idea that whatever’s going on, with someone, at whatever communication is happening at the level of dance, or whatever dance is a metaphor for, is only real insofar as it points to this other, better, higher thing. Are we really supposed to conclude that desire for someone obviates all the particularities that make them them, in favor of a passion for unmoved movers and parallel lines? If I could be convinced that this were the right way to be I could, I think, accept it with resignation; but I don’t understand how you can love somebody, or want somebody, if what you actually want from or through them is something that has nothing to do their their them-ness, if they’re just an occasion for the real relationship between you and math, or even you and God. How is that fair to Sebastian? How to Julia? Is God that kind of jealous God?

When Christ commanded that we love one another as He loved us, He means as subjects, not objects.

Presidents

“GREAT GOBLIN-BEAST”:

August 22, 2025

The Ghost Bear (Theodore Roosevelt, Forgotten Tales and Vanished Trails)

They were surprised to find that, during their short absence, something — apparently a bear — had visited camp and rummaged about among their things, scattering the contents of their packs and, in sheer wantonness, destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain, but at first they paid no particular heed to them, busying themselves with rebuilding the lean-to, laying out their beds and stores, and lighting the fire.

While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his companion began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out, he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two, peering out into the darkness, and suddenly remarked: “Bauman, that bear must have been walking on two legs.”

Anglospherics Uncategorized

WHERE’S GERALD FORD WHEN WE NEED HIM:

August 22, 2025

The American Revolutions of 1776 (Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Summer 2025, National Affairs)

As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, not everyone is eager to celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the political revolution it sparked. The left has long been skeptical of 1776. Their critique is familiar: “[A]ll men are created equal” did not really mean all individuals because the Constitution did not include African Americans or women, and the founders’ alleged commitment to the rights of man was really a cover to advance their own economic interests.

While most, if not all, of these arguments have been addressed, a different criticism has emerged in recent years from the “post-liberal” right. Liberalism has failed, political theorist Patrick Deneen alleges, because liberalism has succeeded. On natural rights, the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote: “The truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.” The political philosophy of the American founding, some on the right now claim, was untrue, and it has eroded traditional morality and undermined sound religious belief.

There is, however, an alternative interpretation of the Declaration — one that rejects the arguments of both the progressive left and the post-liberal right. The American founding was indeed animated by a revolution in political thinking, but it was hostile to neither human equality nor religion. Moreover, the American founding’s political philosophy of natural rights placed limits on political authority in recognition of, and out of deference to, legitimate religious authority.

America’s separation from Great Britain in 1776 set in motion three interrelated revolutions. In the Declaration and their writings on religious liberty, the founding fathers instituted a new understanding of the foundations of political authority, advanced a new conception of government’s purpose, and recognized the existence of religious truth and the legitimacy of religious authority. America’s founding was animated by both the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion — a philosophical and practical achievement worth understanding and attempting to recover today.

It’s a shame that the Oval will be occupied by a man who doesn’t believe in the Founding whenm we celebrate the 250th.

I AND THOU:

“GREAT GOBLIN-BEAST”:

WHERE’S GERALD FORD WHEN WE NEED HIM:

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