Tagged: milton

Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

Hell is everywhere we look. It is integral to religious belief systems, literature, and even popular TV shows. As editor of the new compilation “The Penguin Book of Hell,” Scott Bruce explores 3,000 years of this damnation, from Odysseus traveling to Hades to Climate Change as Hell on Earth. While doing so, he reckons with […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on reigning in Hell

Professor Ricks lectured today on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. From this spawns today’s analect: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (Paradise Lost, Book 1, 258-263).

Aeschliman on Silber

Silber’s lifelong meditation on the strengths and limits of Kant’s ethics was like Jacob wrestling with the angel. A Germanophile, Silber was haunted by the fact that the noble Germanic philosophical tradition best represented by Kant had not been able to do more to prevent luciferian National Socialism: He thought this revealed an inadequacy in […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on charity

This having learnt, thou hast attained the sum Of Wisdom; hope no higher, though all the Stars Thou knew’st by name, and all th’ ethereal Powers, All secrets of the deep, all Nature’s works, Or works of God in Heav’n, Air, Earth, or Sea, And all riches of this World enjoy’dst, And all the rule, […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on happiness and fear of harm

In a narrow circuit strait’n’d by a Foe, Subtle or violent, we not endu’d Single with like defence, wherever met, How are we happy, still in fear of harm? But harm preceeds not sin: only our Foe Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem Of our integrity Today’s analect — suggested by Sarah Cole (Core […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on perception

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. — from Paradise Lost by John Milton, Book I, ll. 254-5. Today’s analect was suggested by Tom Farndon (Core ’10, CAS/SMG ’12), who writes: “The Core reminds us that perception is our most powerful tool, endowing […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on wand’ring steps

The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. – lines 646-9, from Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Signet Books, 2010)