Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen, 193 pages

Anthony Esolen's examination of our current cultural collapse casts it as the consequence of a wholesale flight from reality - a preoccupation with what we can make of things which blinds us to the nature of things as they are.  The only cure, then, is a renewed commitment to truth - truth about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, human nature and the nature of the world around us.  That means confronting what he calls the "higher cant", the slogans, propagated with unprecedented power by the modern media and educational establishments, which serve to replace thinking.

As is frequently the case with Esolen, his contagious enthusiasm and far-ranging interests are accompanied by a lack of organization and focus, a combination which is alternately thrilling and frustrating.  It is easy to dismiss much of what he writes as tendentious - an unrealistically bucolic vision of the past contrasted with a rhetorically denigrated present.  Yet it is only possible to do so consistently from within the same narcotic cloud of unreality he seeks to disperse - his central argument is as reflexively simple as asserting that children ought to have childhoods, educators ought to educate, art ought to be beautiful, and that we should be defined more by the homes we build than by the work we do.

Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching

Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church's True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State by Anthony Esolen, 187 pages

Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching is Anthony Esolen's book-length examination of the seminal encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII.  The result is a thorough refutation of the premise that faithful Catholics can advocate for politics "as if God didn't exist".  The social teaching of the Church does not stand apart from - still less in opposition to - the religious doctrines, since neglecting theology results in a flawed anthropology.

In the Catholic view, as drawn out in the writings of Leo XIII, society is not a contract that individual parties enter into voluntarily, but a community into which we are born and without which we are less than human.  The fundamental type of this form of community is, of course, the family, and it is on this community that all others are built.  This results in an emphasis on the importance of small business, local government, and a healthy civil society - politics and economics on a human scale.  

Esolen explores what this means with his customary lyricism, and although some readers may find him absurdly nostalgic and sentimental, others will find him inspirational and entirely reasonable.

Jerusalem Delivered

Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, translated by Anthony Esolen, 419 pages

In the masterpiece he labored over for much of his troubled life, Tasso set out to translate the history of the First Crusade into the language of epic poetry, substituting the fancies of chivalric romance for those of pagan mythology.  In keeping with his models, Tasso fills his work with subplots beyond the story of how with great effort and even greater faith Godfrey de Bouillon held together the quarrelsome Christians and led them in the capture of the Holy City.  Memorable stories include the love quadrangle between the fierce warrior Argante, the impetuous knight Tancred, the gentle princess Erminia, and the proud warrior woman Clorinda, the sinister schemes of the seductive sorceress Armida and the enchantment with which she captures the peerless Rinaldo, and the sacrifice of the earnest Olindo and the chaste Sophronia.

Tasso uses his poetry to entertain, but also to explore inner struggles of faith and virtue, to illuminate the nature of true love and the nature of true leadership.  Esolen ably translates the language of the poem while providing keys to open the layers of allegorical meaning locked into the text.

Life Under Compulsion

Life under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child by Anthony Esolen, 212 pages

Life under Compulsion, Esolen's follow-up to Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, is a prolonged jeremiad on Western civilization's moral, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic decay.  Esolen describes a world where children are shuttled to drab institutions to be taught inhuman doctrines by uncaring civil servants.  Where work is subject to the schedule and the clock rather than the needs of craft.  Where reason is subordinated to appetite, and unthinking appetite is the engine of the economy.  Where everything is tolerated and nothing is forgiven.  Where vice is liberation and virtue slavery.  Where the greatest fear is of silence and solitude.  In short, the world many people live in today.  Then Esolen offers an opportunity for reformation - a real reformation, a return to form - through the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

The book overall lacks focus - the "ten ways" correspond to the ten chapters, but there is no programmatic unity.  Esolen's arcadian yearnings for a simpler time at times resemble naive nostalgia.  Weighed against this, there are sections that are table-thumpingly good, passages where the true order of things stands nakedly exposed, where we can really see what is on the end of every fork.