Quotes from Arthur Herman

This is another persistent myth: that Highlanders supported Bonnie Prince Charlie out of some ancient, mystical loyalty to the Stuarts. The truth was that the alliance between the Crown and the clan chieftains was one of mutual self-interest.

And in the middle is man, the highest and most rational of material beings but also the lowest of the spiritual beings, "the boundary line of things corporeal and incorporeal." Human beings occupy a crucial place in Aquinas's ordered nature. They are the one material being gifted with a soul. They are also the one spiritual being gifted with a mind, meaning an active intelligence ready to take on the challenges the material world offers.

He believed the instrument of its destruction would be the very thing that gave Victorian Europe its great sense of pride: its reliance on science.

In a 1948 essay, Toynbee blamed all the false and brutal political movements of the modern world on this baneful Jewish influence, including both Communism and Nazism.

our goal must be to bring man's unique fusion of body, mind, and spirit to its highest perfection.

For Plato, then, all certain knowledge requires an element of abstraction from concrete reality. Through Socrates, Plato tells us to constantly reach for the highest level of knowledge beyond mere individual examples, toward a universal standard for judgment that will give us a stronger, more confident position for acting in the world.

the purpose of all these rules and regulations was to end what Plato saw as the worst aspect of normal Greek politics: the bitter class conflict and clashes among competing factions. In the average Greek city, rich and poor were literally out for each other's blood

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

God is always doing geometry. —Saying attributed to Plato

Under his leadership, the Cistercians had grown from a handful of monasteries to more than 350 houses by 1140. Although he was ten years younger than Abelard, Bernard was already the single most influential churchman of the age.

Above all, he seems to have taken from Socrates the notion that man's freedom depends completely on the state of our soul, not on some physical or material condition; and on our capacity to endure adversity and to be indifferent to our outward fate.

Being human means understanding the reality around us not because God commands us to, but because that is what our mind does as part of its nature. The Augustinian and the Neoplatonist mind passively contemplates the world and waits for a connection to a higher truth to be revealed. Aquinas saw the mind as Aristotle did, as actively analyzing that world in order to forge those connections for itself.

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato's theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. "A horse I see," Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, "but not horseness": words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

The Aristotelian and Thomist mind works: it doesn't just wait around to recover something hidden or something lost. This includes the laws governing nature as understood by science and the laws that govern our own behavior in terms of morality and ethics.

Dion now encouraged Plato to cleanse Syracuse of her luxuries and vices "and put on her the garment of freedom," along with laws to make the citizens orderly and virtuous. Plato may even have contemplated abolishing private property as he had in the Republic, or at least imposing limits on wealth. Certainly he hoped to train the young Dionysius to become the kind of conscientious ruler a true Platonic state would need to maintain order: in short, a living Philosopher Ruler.

Diogenes's quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free.

For Aquinas as for Aristotle, human freedom boils down to the power to make choices. In the end, the morality of our actions must always be judged by the active will and the intentions behind them. It also implies the freedom to choose good over evil and the mental capacity to know the one from the other (which is why dogs and infants can't commit mortal sins).

No one can ever know true Justice or Beauty in his mortal lifetime. He can, however, make the search for that higher knowledge his life's work, just as Socrates did.

Dionysius II had every gift except good sense; he was also an incurable alcoholic. He soon lost patience with his two would-be political tutors and threw them out.

He wanted to show that man has to return to his most basic nature in order to discover his true self and that everything that is not part of that self, including property and normal social and political obligations, was a useless distraction.

This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil. For Plato and all Platonists who come after him, grasping a standard of perfection is what we need in order to be virtuous and ultimately happy.

But how do we do that? Especially since, as we have seen, the Forms do not exist in time and space, and none of us ever really knows them until we are dead.

Aquinas demonstrates how the laws of nature could unlock the mysteries of why and how human beings built communities, how and why they framed laws, and how they interacted with one another in society. His analysis of the role of natural law in politics would set off a revolution that had huge consequences for the future.

For Aristotle, it was man's nature to know things. For Aquinas, to know is to be in an existential sense; to know the world is to be part of the world ourselves. God has put us into the world for a purpose, His purpose. We need to use and understand that world to catch a glimpse of that purpose, and thus a glimpse of God Himself.