Fiery Angel

The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West by Michael Walsh, 224 pages

On one level, The Fiery Angel is Michael Walsh's celebration of the power of art and storytelling, of how they shape us and our future.  On another, it is an argument for the heroic ideal he believes is central to Western culture and civilization.  Walsh is well aware that the heroic tends to shade into the luciferian, indeed he sees this as a positive - Western man is never comfortable with the status quo and acknowledges no limits except those which he places on himself.  This is a vision that Walsh believes is threatened by the rising forces of leftism and Islam, each of which finds the concept of the heroic threatening for ideological and theological reasons.

Walsh leaps quickly from topic to topic and idea to idea in a way that is equal parts thrilling and disorienting.  It isn't clear whether this is deliberate - a little reflection reveals how thin is his distinction between the idea of progress he advances and the progressive definition he deplores, as well as how consistently his archetypal superman served as a cautionary tale rather than a model to be imitated in the premodern West, and especially how it is precisely the rejection of limits that has led us to our present crisis.  If his overall vision seems lacking, however, the passages where he discusses music are notable for their depth of thought and feeling.