A Note on Aeschylus

Kirk

The purpose of humane letters is to teach us what it is to be a man. Our civilization, these many centuries, has learnt the norms of the human condition, in its greatness and its misery, from the Bible and from Greek drama. Both sources of normative knowledge are neglected nowadays. As religious observance has declined into “the ethos of sociability,” so the Christian teaching that once dominated the schools is now positively forbidden in the classroom. And the glory that was Greece had begun to trickle away from us even before President Eliot, of the Five-Foot Shelf, informed Harvard that translations were quite good enough for such busy folk as we.

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Russell Kirk

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Kirk

The purpose of humane letters is to teach us what it is to be a man. Our civilization, these many centuries, has learnt the norms of the human condition, in its greatness and its misery, from the Bible and from Greek drama. Both sources of normative knowledge are neglected nowadays. As religious observance has declined into “the ethos of sociability,” so the Christian teaching that once dominated the schools is now positively forbidden in the classroom. And the glory that was Greece had begun to trickle away from us even before President Eliot, of the Five-Foot Shelf, informed Harvard that translations were quite good enough for such busy folk as we.