The Original Nakedness and Shame

 

 From Justi Andreasen:

It is true that Adam and Eve before the Fall were naked and not ashamed. But the old Christian writers did not think of them as bare in our poor modern way. They say man was clothed with glory. That is to say, there was a rightness in him which made outer covering unnecessary. The body was not a trouble because the soul was not yet at war with itself. St. Ephrem says they were surrounded by glory. One can say it more simply still: grace had not yet gone out of them.

As the serpent is called the most subtle of the beasts, it is the most "naked" and closest to nature. It belongs to the raw pull of undifferentiated matter, the current that drags everything back toward dust. The serpent is not evil because it is powerful. It is dangerous because it is uncovered by any purpose higher than itself. It has not been named and integrated by Adam.

So when Adam and Eve ate, they felt shame because something had been lost. Like the serpent, they were now uncovered, no longer clothed in higher purpose. They had broken the law and, with it, the purpose God had given them. And so they snatch fig leaves.

Then comes that strange and merciful thing. God makes them garments of skin. The world is hard now, and He clothes them for hardness. Leaves are for summer. They will not do outside Eden. Since then men have been making larger and larger versions of the same defense. Clothes, houses, laws, customs, walls, roofs, medicine: all these are ways by which fallen creatures make life possible in a fallen world. (Read more.)

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McConnell’s Absence Gives Trump’s Voter ID Push an Unexpected Opening

 From The Daily BS:

President Donald Trump’s push for a nationwide voter ID and citizenship verification law remains stuck in the Senate, but one of its most persistent Republican opponents is suddenly off the field.

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s extended absence due to health issues has temporarily removed a reliable “no” vote from the equation, offering a small but politically significant break for supporters of the SAVE America Act. The Kentucky Republican has repeatedly bucked both Trump and much of the GOP conference on the legislation, helping stall one of the president’s signature election-security priorities.

The development does not solve the bill’s larger problem: Senate Democrats remain unanimously opposed, and Republicans still lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has made clear that he has no intention of detonating the chamber’s legislative filibuster to get the bill across the finish line.

“The only way you could get there is to undo or get rid of the legislative filibuster,” Thune said previously. “There aren’t even close to the votes here in the United States Senate in order to achieve that.” (Read more.)

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Book Review: "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley

 From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, Keeley’s study has been a long overdue contribution not just to anthropology but military history and theory as well. The mid-1990s was a time in which it still wasn’t altogether clear within academia if primitive cultures are capable of engaging in something like “total war,” or if the kind of violence they engage in could be considered “war” at all. Of course, the archeological record couldn’t have been clearer that primitive war is, in fact, war, and that it could be not only damaging but existentially threatening to entire communities. But Keeley’s main hurdle in writing War Before Civilization was not one of epistemology but rather ideology.

By the mid-90s, the field of anthropology had gone through two distinct phases that had impoverished the academic understanding of savage violence. The first treated primitive war with an air of condescension marked by ethnocentric assumptions. This attitude was best exemplified by Harry Holbert Turney-High and Quincy Wright, who composed their seminal works during the 1940s. They each understood primitive violence as a sort of pastime to alleviate boredom, or even a sporting affair. Actually, the idea that savages engage in war as a sport persisted in western culture for a surprisingly long time, and the educated would often refer to the idea in passing. In one interview from 1977, for instance, Marshall McLuhan says, “Tribal people — one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies.” This characterization owes a lot to Turney-High and Wright, who not only minimized the seriousness of primitive war but also seriously undervalued the skill and ability with which primitives fought while overestimating the significance of civilized military organization.

But eventually, this sensibility grew to pass in favor of the second phase of anthropology: the politically correct phase. Instead of using the phrase “politically correct,” Keeley describes this sensibility as Rousseauist in nature, citing the enlightenment-era dispute between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes in which the former posited that primitive man is a “noble savage” incapable of violence as a response to Hobbes’s view of man’s natural state as a “war of all against all.” Anthropology was in an unusual situation during this time because although field reporting had revealed that primitive tribes absolutely do engage in violent conflict, many anthropologists still preferred to maintain that these tribes were essentially peaceful.(Read more.)

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Death of Baby Sophie

Vive La Reine reminds us of the death of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette's youngest child, HERE. The portrait below was originally supposed to be a happy one, of the Queen and her children preparing the cradle for the new baby. The Queen is wearing a maternity dress. However, by the time the painting was completed the baby, Madame Sophie, had died and so the artist, Madame Lebrun, had to cover the cradle with black crêpe. Here is a quote from a letter of Madame Elizabeth's:

The queen is very kind to me just now; we are going together to Saint-Cyr, which she calls my cradle. She calls Montreuil my little Trianon. I have been to hers the last few days with her, without any consequences, and there was no attention she did not show me. She prepared for me one of those surprises in which she excels; but what we did most was to weep over the death of my poor little niece [Madame Sophie.]

The Empty Cradle 

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The Democratic Socialists’ War on America

 From AMAC:

America’s most radical left-wing movement is no longer content to protest from outside; it is now working to dismantle the republic from within. It would be a grave error to dismiss members of the Democratic Socialists of America as mere campus radicals or online agitators. In New York City and beyond, the group and its allies have scored primary victories, toppling incumbents and capturing nominations. The DSA wants power, and it is learning how to seize it.

That is why its agenda demands scrutiny.

In June, as City Journal reported, DSA national leadership adopted a revamped platform titled “Workers Deserve More!” The innocuous name belies a radical program to upend America’s constitutional order.

The document calls for scrapping the U.S. Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with bodies chosen by and subordinate to Congress, drafting a new constitution, and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” It goes far beyond higher taxes or regulation: it seeks to abolish the separation of powers crafted by the Founders.

The DSA is not demanding different policies. It is demanding a different country. (Read more.)

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“Animalia"

 From Galerie:

When Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani sold off the Hotel Lambert in Paris and its extraordinary contents in 2022, the depth and extent of his collecting became a thing of legend. A soup tureen gifted to Catherine the Great by Count Orloff; a gilded candelabra commissioned by Marie Antoinette; a hand-painted screen of the Bay of Naples that had belonged to Coco Chanel… it took five distinctive lots to deliver this unparalleled treasure trove of decorative arts to the market. The sale made $76.56 million, and the house—an early baroque palace by architect Louis Le Vau with interiors by Charles le Brun and Eustache Le Sueur—sold for $226 million to the French businessman and art collector Xavier Niel. Actually not bad for a mini-Versailles: the same design team went on to make the most famous palace in the world.

But Sheikh Hamad, a key member of the Qatari royal family who is now in his mid-40s, has not stopped collecting. Since 2021, carefully curated exhibitions at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris have shown highlights from The Al Thani Collection, which now contains over 5,000 works of art, including very contemporary paintings by artists including Issy Wood and Adrian Ghenie. The latest exhibition, called “Animalia,” offers a look at man’s relationship to animals through the medium of finely crafted objects, from Neolithic times to 1900.

“Sheik Hamad has the mind and the eyes of a falcon,” Giambatista Valli, the couturier who is a friend of the prince, told me at the time of the Hotel Lambert sale. “He is passionate about beauty first and foremost. He is driven by a curiosity which is backed up by incredible knowledge.” (Read more.)

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The Mysterious Frescoes of Castelseprio

 

 From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

It might seem surprising that this fresco of Christ Pantocrator, discovered in the apse of a small obscure church in the north of Italy, is so unusual that it caused a major re-write of the art-history timeline. It looks like any early Byzantine image that we’ve seen hundreds of times: serene, otherworldly, with the face symmetrical with classical proportions, modelled with lights and darks to give the impression of lifelike three-dimensionality. But at the same time, we can see it is stylistically different: the softness of the facial modelling, the natural fall of the hair, the subtly rendered shadow beneath the chin, the piercing gaze and human expression.

In fact, it immediately reminds me in its naturalism of the frescos discovered at Pompei and Herculaneum. It might not be surprising to find that it dates to the earliest paleo-Christian period, when Roman standards were still in use.

But that would be the wrong guess. 

In today’s post for all subscribers, we will explore the treasure left forgotten in a tiny church in the forests of Lombardy. Hidden for centuries beneath layers of plaster, the exceptionally beautiful and lively Byzantine frescoes of Castelseprio challenge everything scholars thought they knew about Western art of the early middle ages - the time of the Lombard Kingdom, Carolingian and Ottonian empires.

Were they painted by a wandering Byzantine master, or do they reveal a local tradition that quietly preserved the grace and theology of late antique sacred art? (Read more.)

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Kavanaugh Hands Republicans a New Path

 From The Daily BS:

The Court ruled against Trump’s executive order that sought to limit automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrants and certain temporary visa holders. The majority concluded that the order could not stand, preserving the long-standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

That headline generated predictable celebration from immigration activists and predictable frustration from conservatives. Yet the more interesting story may be found in the concurring opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh agreed that Trump could not simply rewrite existing law through executive action. At the same time, he suggested Congress could potentially revisit the issue legislatively.

“Congress could — consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment — amend” existing citizenship statutes or “otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country,” Kavanaugh wrote, according to reports summarizing the opinion.

That single paragraph immediately electrified Republicans who have long argued that modern immigration realities bear little resemblance to the circumstances lawmakers faced when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War. (Read more.)

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Pensées on the Pascal Institute

 From The New Criterion:

The third-oldest college in the United States is small and, to borrow a word from the headline of a recent positive article about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “weird.” Founded in 1696 as King William’s School, St. John’s College in Annapolis has since 1937 provided its undergraduates, all of whom study Ancient Greek and are working toward a BA in liberal arts, with a University of Chicago–inspired curriculum in the great books that eschews nearly all secondary material. My mother-in-law went there, and two of my most talented former students are “tutors,” as the members of the faculty who teach small groups of self-motivated “Johnnies” are referred to locally.

Great books programs are a North American, and largely American, phenomenon. And there is—or, rather, has been—nothing like St. John’s outside the United States. What is surprising, in view of the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum, is that the idea of great books hasn’t had much of a hold in Europe. At least, that is, until now, with the advent of the Pascal Institute, in the Netherlands, with which St. John’s has formed a partnership.

This is the first thing one sees when going to the St. John’s website: “The following teachers will return to St. John’s College next year,” followed by a scrolling list with such names as Sappho, Sophocles, Lucretius, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin—and, oh yes, Blaise Pascal. Some are American, true. But most of these remarkable figures are European.

Also European, by birth, was St. John’s most famous tutor-teacher of the past few decades, the classicist and philosopher Eva Brann (1929–2024), though she became as American as apple pie. To quote the beautiful appreciation of Brann in The Lamp by St. John’s best-known current tutor-teacher, the classical philosopher Zena Hitz, “Her American identity was the strongest of anyone I have known.” (Read more.)

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