“Heraclitus once said that ‘Nature loves to hide.’ Not from Aristotle. He writes as though nature is living next door and running a taverna.” This summary judgment—at once engaging, elegant, and thoughtful—typifies Armand-Marie Leroi’s The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science (Viking-Penguin, 2014). Equal parts pilgrimage, idyll, and polemic, The Lagoon is a marvelous invitation to … Read more
“To me, I confess, one thing has always seemed preeminently fitting: that every costlier or costliest thing should serve, first and foremost, for the administration of the Holy Eucharist.” If one were able to compare the great churches of France in the year 1100 to those standing a century and a half later, the marked … Read more
We are an unsteady people. Even an hour of watching the Olympics on NBC suffices to show it. Is it sacrifice and teamwork to which we aspire, or the satisfaction of our animal desires? Do we hold perseverance and moderation to be virtues, or cleverness and bold self-presentation? Is it owning that BMW that we … Read more
“Merci, mon professeur, for what you did for my father and my mother. Because of you, I am proud of myself.” These words, spoken by a young man with Down’s syndrome, were most fitting praise for the scientist who had discovered the genetic cause of his condition. It had long been thought to be due … Read more
“Master Robert, I should like to be known as a prudent man, but above all let me be one, and you may have the rest, for prudence is such a great and good thing that the word itself savors.” Thus spoke the great St. Louis IX to one of his chaplains, Robert de Sorbon. To … Read more
The 24th of November this year will afford a significant opportunity for North Americans to reflect upon their common past: the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bl. Junipero Serra. In commemoration of the founder of the California missions, the Huntington Library has assembled an exhibition devoted to his life and work, co-curated by … Read more
The Year of Faith began with a challenge from the Holy Father Emeritus: “We cannot accept that salt should become tasteless or that light be kept hidden.” During this last intense year of renewal, Catholics have been reminded again and again that our age calls for vigilance. For the embers of Western Civilization glow but … Read more
Edith Stein was an unlikely saint. A former Jewish-atheist bluestocking who died for the Faith as a Carmelite nun in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, Stein was impelled by a quenchless thirst for truth. God in His Mercy placed in her life friends who were themselves, in one way or another, “hidden with Christ in … Read more
You could call the nineteenth century stupid, but hardly dull. At its birth, it was the stage for Napoleon’s antics and for the heroism of the captains of wooden ships; at its death, the old Europe itself was giving way before the hard, cold era of aluminum, centralized planning, and the IRS. Sure, it was … Read more
Although our minds are limited in their ability to attain God in this life, we are capable of “greater desire, and love, and pleasure in knowing divine matters” than we are able to find in “the perfect knowledge of the lowest things.” Thus far Aquinas, who taught as one who knew. Saint Nicholas of Flue … Read more
The advantage that tragic poetry has over historical narrative seems to lie in the way individual deeds are portrayed: they are enacted. The confrontation of Angelo by Isabella in the second act of Measure for Measure, culminating in her speech against “man, proud man,” does something far better than naming the heroine’s courage, it invites … Read more
Speaking of his medieval ancestors and ours, d’Alembert once said that “Poetry for them was reduced to a puerile mechanism.” James Madison, echoing him, judged the result of fifteen centuries of Christian civilization to be little more than “pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and … Read more
In this season of elections and of holy souls, it is fitting to recall one of the loveliest monuments to true democracy: the windows of the trades at Chartres Cathedral. The stained-glass windows at Chartres are famous the world over, and rightly so. Thanks to the foresight of the town’s mayors and the determination of … Read more
If John Henry Newman should be declared a Doctor of the Church, the honor will be in large part due to his work as an educator. As Benedict XVI has pointed out, the “definite service” that he gave to the Church was to apply “his keen intellect and prolific pen to many of the most … Read more
Cynicism seems to come all too easily to the French. The anticlerical cry of “crush the wretched one” came forth from the sumptuous bourgeois comfort—with its viper’s tangle of adultery—of Voltaire’s estate near Lake Geneva. Two centuries later, Sartre’s bleak atheism won him plenty of disciples on the shabby-chic Left Bank of the Seine. Even … Read more
It would be a pardonable offense were one to greet the prospect of yet another book on St. Francis with a yawn. But in the case of Augustine Thompson’s Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Cornell, 2012), it would be a mistake. All of us know something about St. Francis, but few of us know … Read more
He lived in an age when artists were beginning to make names for themselves. The master-mason Hugues Libergier, whose funerary slab may be seen today in the cathedral of Reims, was his contemporary. Robert de Luzarches and Thomas de Cormont, the masters of the work at Amiens, were his collaborators. The century before, one who … Read more
“Show me what a man remembers of his past,” the late Fritz Wilhelmsen once said, “and I will tell you what kind of man he is.” Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelmsen was inclined to bold affirmation and even bolder denial, and was wont to frame his statements in the irrefragable terminology of metaphysics. The gallant Thomist … Read more
Tilman Riemenschneider may not have had the full complement of five talents, but however many he was given, none did he bury. Father, master sculptor, entrepreneur, civic leader: his was the busy life of the successful late-medieval artisan. Yet for all of his immersion in the affairs of this world, his sculpture remains as a … Read more
It is now twenty years since the publication of Centesimus Annus, yet only halting steps have been made towards an adequate reception of it. In his concluding remarks to that great encyclical, the Holy Father warned that the Church’s social teaching was no mere theory, “but above all else a basis and a motivation for … Read more