Francesco Zurbaràn, Agnus Dei, 1635-1640, oil on canvas, 38cm x 62cm. Museo del Prado

"Plato used to say that many good laws were made, but still one was wanting ; a law to put all those good laws into execution. Thus the citizens of London have erected many famous monuments to perpetuate their memories; but still there wanted a monument to continue the memory of their monuments ..."
                                                                                                                                      — Fuller's  History of the Worthies of England, 1662

In the Shadow of the Malaspina
On the Consequences of Destroying Our Hierarchies

Winter 2025

"As to my mind I swear it cannot be more tranquil, it does not harbor any fear that would turn me from my road, nor despicable apathy, nor deep dejection.
The cause that brought me here makes me repeat that in like circumstance I would do the same again a thousand times."
                                                                                                 Alessandro Malaspina, nobleman and voyager,  imprisoned at the castle of San Antonio in Corona eight years, from his memoirs, Voyage Around the World

The stemma or coat of arms of the Malaspina dallo Spina Secco family branch, at Rocca Malaspina in Massa, off the Tyrrhenian coast.

The legendary and longest-term president of Harvard, Charles Wilson Eliot, once gave noble expression to the idea of religion in an address on the 'Future of New England Churches' in 1915.   "Does any one ask," he says, "why universities, which must inevitably be occupied chiefly with secular knowledge, should feel any great concern for the permanence of religious institutions? I answer, that universities exist to advance science, to keep alive philosophy and poetry, and to draw out and cultivate the highest powers of the human mind. Now science is always face to face with God, philosophy brings all its issues into the one word duty, poetry has its culmination in a hymn of praise, and prayer is the transcendent effort of intelligence." Religion is thus the greatest possible activity of the soul. It is man at his best. It is religion, as Hegel said, that constitutes the true dignity of man
      It has been said that religion is the profoundest subjective experience possible to man, it is also the most objective. If it were not due to a direct relation with a divine reality, it could not hold or win the attention of serious men. When we are profoundly religious, we are compelled to become philosophical and theological. We must seek to know the objective reality with which our religion links us. There is the same reason for believing in the divine reality into relation with which we are brought by our religious experience as there is for belief in any other objective reality which comes into our experience. The venture of faith here is the same the soul makes in practical con- duct, science, and philosophy.  He finds in Christ the man who is the measure of all things. While he is indebted primarily to Greek philosophy for the humanistic principle, he is indebted to the Christian religion for the person who is great enough to serve as the principle. Protagoras was the first to assert the principle that "Man is the measure of all things". things."
      He evidently intended it to be a skeptical principle. He meant by it that in our interpretation of life we cannot get beyond the human point of view, and, indeed, each man is shut up to his own point of view. It is impossible to get an objective criterion. There is therefore no use in wasting time and strength in this futile endeavor. The first attempt at a deeper reading of life through a constructive use of this humanistic principle was made by Socrates. Renouncing the attempt to interpret the natural world, he gave himself the more strenuously to the interpretation of the inner nature of man. He held that there is a real science of human nature. If man is the measure of all things, then the measure is at least a being with moral ends which can be brought into the light of consciousness by reflection and fashioned into beautiful ideals. While Socrates did much in giving a nobler interpretation of the moral nature of the man who is the measure of all things, he did little or nothing in the larger interpretation of the world through man. He did his work so well, however, in making man fully intelligible, that his followers, from Plato to the modern idealists, have been free to make the larger use of the principle. 
    This is the great truth which the Christian church has ever striven to express and to conserve in its doctrine of the divinity of Christ. It has felt assured of the nature, character, and purpose of God when it has seen him revealed and incarnated in Christ. The human as human is the medium of the divine. One has a duty to his truth and to his time
      This is one of the ominous facts of our day. It is a grave question whether the church has not lost its intellectual leadership. There is no doubt of this as respects the Catholic Church, for it is dead set against the whole modern movement of thought. Unless the religious thinkers in the Protestant churches win the place of leadership, grave consequences will be inevitable. We can still count upon the moral sentiment of the community, which is largely Christian, and still more upon the Christian ethical ideal. But both the sentiment and the ideal are due to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion. We cannot expect that men will long feel the power of the moral sentiment and hold to the Christian ethical ideal when they are perplexed, or in grave doubt, about the fundamental truths of the gospel. Our only hope of keeping the sentiment of the age Chris- tian and of maintaining the Christian ideal in its rightful place lies in making these fundamental truths the dominant ideas in the minds of men.      ​​

Let us concede, then, that the distinct and separate threads woven into the cultural life of a nation are not of anonymous origin but descend from distinguished men of excellent minds and lives.  A social "ethos", the morality of custom, may have humble origins. a folk evolution.  But later, higher stages of this demanded genius, and nothing less, if a nation were to survive.  -To paraphrase the social psychologist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866-1951), a pot, or a hammer, may be of unknown origin but a printing press or the sextant is not.  A taboo might be enforced by a clan, but the Golden Rule is the result of high intellect.  These advances have superior beings initiating them.  The Greek gods were at first nature gods, whose public worship demanded "cleanliness and comeliness" at the altar. But the idea of moral cleanliness grew into this Greek concept of religion, the demand that the person 'stained' with moral guilt was an offensive to the god he worshipped and the ideas of expiation, atonement, reparation began to permeate the Greek moral culture.   The belief that the guilt of a worshiper gave offense t the god and that only in innocence could approach the altar was not due to the slow, pensive reflection of popular belief, nor to mere selection-and-survival strategies but to an elite of the best thinkers, the best men.  This idea radiated from the masters of the Apollo cult at Delphi and was diffused by poets like Pindar.  As Pfleiderer wrote, "[t]he rules by which purificatory rites were fixed by the priesthood of Delphi and by tradition and public law received public sanction".  
      It was the idea of the classical world, for centuries, that life was lived by a plan, a life that was superior to the comings and goings of emotion. a life framed in accordance with reason. having the beauty of unity, simplicity, symmetry.  This ideal was perfected by the Stoic philosophers.  The Romantic idea came from the Troubadours, the wandering minstral, whose longing lyrics were always dedicated to a woman high above him in social position.  Through the castles and courts of the Middle Ages this thought-world spread and worked its way through society, a knightly valor perfected within a religious-military caste among the few and for the few but eventually universalized right down into modern times of the gentleman. The Bustido, the knightly ideal of the fighting caste of the Samurai, also followed this sense of high moral standard being the responsibility of an authentic elite.  Says  Nitobe:  "As the sun in rising first tips the highest peaks with the russet hue, then caste rays more broadly, so follows the ethical system of man".[continued in print edition]