1 John 4:9: By this the love of God is manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. John Bunyan very honestly describes in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners , how he was plagued by doubts for many... Read more
Love is blind, we like to say. John says the opposite. John teaches that we need to test and discern and judge the spirits and prophets. Discernment means keeping your eyes open. Discernment means not believing everything that you hear, not jumping on every bandwagon that passes through town, not embracing every new idea. Discernment sometimes demands unbelief (Stott): “Do not believe every spirit” is how John begins chapter 4. (more…) Read more
When Frederick the Elector of Saxony protected Luther from church and imperial authorities, it was not as a personal friend but to protect the rights of the university faculty to exercise censorship in religious matters. The Reformation thus planted the seeds for the exaltation of the university Professor in German culture, an exaltation in the German name given to the professorial chair: the Katheder . As Rosenstock-Huessy says, “the universities became the heirs of the bishops’ chair, the cathedra,” and... Read more
In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society. England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s clubs, men’s colleges, men’s sports, men’s debates. Women were excluded from social life, and hence from politics. Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes: “The clubs of England, the counterparts of the French salons, excluded... Read more
In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society. England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s clubs, men’s colleges, men’s sports, men’s debates. Women were excluded from social life, and hence from politics. Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes: “The clubs of England, the counterparts of the French salons, excluded... Read more
Hobbes called it a “circular motion of the sovereign power,” but what he actually described in summarizing the Revolutionary-Restoration sequence was a chiasm: “it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and thence back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; thence to the Long Parliament and thence to King Charles II, where long may it remain.” Read more
The House of Commons, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, is a body, not a collection of individual units. MPs do not have, as US Representatives and Senators do, individual desks; there is only one table in Commons. And up to the time that Rosenstock-Huessy was writing, MPs were never addressed by name in Commons unless they were under discipline. This anonymity was “at the root of the institution”: MPs “are without personal character, anonymous like a good jury, where twelve ordinary men are... Read more
Cromwell and his co-belligerents claimed to be aiming for the restoration of English liberties; they did not consider themselves rebels. Yet, in much English historiography, the Puritan Revolution goes down as the “Great Rebellion,” the term “restoration” having been snagged by the Stuarts who returned in 1660. Significantly, as Rosenstock-Huessy points out, the Stuarts in 1660 claimed not only to be restoring monarchy but to be restoring the rights of Englishmen. Lord Clarendon penned a speech for Charles II that... Read more
Rosenstock-Huessy points out the contrast between French and English attitudes toward “old” things. Quoting on Boutmy, he says, “’ Ancien regime or ‘old France’ is objectionable in France; ‘Old England’ is a eulogy.” He adds, “To have a ‘high old time’ is as reasonable in English as it is atrocious in French to be ’ vieux jeu .’” He emphasizes the striking fact that this fascination with age was one of the great revolutionary innovations of the Puritan Revolution. Read more
Philip Roth, Everyman . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 182 pp. Paperback, $13.00. When Death comes to fetch him in the medieval morality play, Everyman is abandoned by Friends, Kin, Beauty, and Goods. At least Good Works, purified through penance, accompanies him and gives access to heaven. Philip Roth’s Everyman, the unnamed central character in Roth’s twenty-seventh novel, lacks even this comfort. Estranged from his two sons, envious of his vigorous older brother, three-time divorcee, alternately plagued by regrets and defensive... Read more
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