As another reviewer mentioned, this is not an easy book, but it is certainly a delight to read and to savor.
The authors that Esolen discusses used to form the basis for the average college English lit class; nowadays, most students wouldn't recognize even the authors, let alone be able to claim they read the poems or books. Well, perhaps they'd know Shakespeare wrote plays...but that's about it.
Esolen and his insights reminds us of what a catastrophe this is for those students.
Augustine sketched out a Christian theory of history, the belief that God had created man to love him and worship him. Mankind was not a plaything of capricious fates, or sentenced to endure suffering without hope or justice. The knowledge of God suffused western civilization with the knowledge that all of our lives had meaning, and that even great suffering would be turned, ultimately, to good. With God, "a providence abounds in meaning, a cascade of it, from every least word or action" (p 58).
The irony of Christ was that he was the expected messiah, and he came at the exact moment Daniel predicted he would, but he was not the glorious king that elevated Jerusalem to an earthy kingdom.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (if you don't know the poetry of Hopkins you have missed a truly supreme joy) doesn't "settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefor a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush's eggs and not love man?" (p 307), and although many people today drape themselves in love of nature we are woefully without real care for our brothers. .
Hopkins saw real love in the mother superior lashed to the rigging during a violent storm that would shipwreck her and the other nuns, killing them all. Yet the nun called, "'O Christ, Christ come quickly'" (p 36).
The irony is that "When men are blind to the beauty of heaven, they cannot fathom the beauty of earth" (p 318). Without God, man finds himself little better than an animal.
A wonderful book.
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