By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Sept. 30, 2024
Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College
It’s hard to state what depths of farce, ineffectuality, and effete sentimentalism American politics has descended.
At the beginning of his autobiography, Witness, which tells of his intellectual, spiritual, and political passage into communism and then out of it, as by a hair’s breadth escape from Hell, Whittaker Chambers addresses his children directly, trusting that someday they will read about their father and understand him, even if he is gone. He writes with deep affection, but also with warning. For he has pierced through to the heart of communism. It is not, he says, the state’s ownership of the means of production. It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. These may be its expressions for the age. Communism, he says, is none other and no less than the prime temptation to which man fell in the beginning: “Ye shall be as gods.” …
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