Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Flogging Brother Ass Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/flogging_brother_ass#6040 Post contents: <i>If you’d like to participate in Francis’ spirit in a tiny way </i> – also excoriate his greatest hater, the Florentine bureaucrat and inventor of that Behemoth and Leviathan, The State. I mean of course Machiavelli. The great unmentioned presence in all of ol' Nick’s work – <i>Il Principe, Discorsi, Mandragola, Dell'arte della guerra</i> – is Francis, as Buonaparte is the mentioned presence in Burckhardt’s <i>Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien </i>. The least of The Florentine’s mistakes was to assume that Francis’ way to be a Christian would be the only way. It isn’t. Machiavelli and his camp followers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Gibbon, Marx, assorted nationalists – are to be judged by their fruits. Francis’ fruits are sweeter. Mr Zmirak rightly observes, among those fruits, the work of Simone Martini, Cimabue, and Giotto in Medieval Assisi, and the work of Benedict Groeschel in the Bronx. Remaining is the question, Was the Renaissance, on ballance, “progress”, or as Burckhardt thought “regress”? The only mistake of Francis' world, it would seem, is not having read the work of another ardent Catholic, Professor Doctor Louis Jean Pasteur of the École Normale Supérieure, and of Professor Doktor Robert Koch of the Universität Berlin. Sent at: 2008 09 08