Does this constitute progress? Or is it rather a decline? Clearly the latter. The Enlightenment and Romanticism have effected a closing of the Western mind to the truth about man. If we don’t succeed in turning the tide, they will eventually throw us back to the level of the cavemen. And it already shows, both in public and in private life.

1. Michael Oakeshott, “On being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics (Indianapolis, 1991 [1962]), 407–436. Jerry Muller promotes this conception of conservatism in his Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, 1997).
2. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1999), 172173. Italics added.
3. With one exception: the politeness and even reverence demanded of men towards women. That became part of the spirit of the gentleman only with the cult of courtly love, which originated in late eleventh-century France. See Philip Mason, The English Gentleman (London, 1982); Harold Nicholson, Good Behaviour (London, 1955).
4. Though its influence was often indirect, via writers like Aquinas in the Catholic, and Melanchthon in the Protestant part of Europe.
5. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b 22–24 (Rackam translation). Aristotle discusses megalopsychia in 1123a35–1125a35. Cicero translates this into magnitudo animi.
6. Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b35–1124a1.
7. Ibid., 1124a21–29.
8. Matthew 22: 37–39 and 5: 44.
9. In this, as in many other respects, Islam is much closer in spirit to the Old than to the New Testament.
10. Tertullian, Apologeticum, 46.18; Luther, An Open Letter to The Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, part III: Aristotle’s Ethics according to Luther “is the worst of all books. It flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues, and yet it is considered one of his best works. Away with such books! Keep them away from all Christians!”; Karl Barth’s dislike of natural theology, and hence of the ancients, is everywhere in his works. See esp. Church Dogmatics, III/4 (London, 2004 [1951] ).
11. Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity (Gloucester, Mass., 1970 [1890]). This volume is old, but not superseded.
12. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6.
13. Both doctrines are of course famously expressed in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, but they are already present in Hobbes.
14. Nicomachean Ethics, ch.13.
15. There is an old quip about those who are under its influence: they want to improve everything, except themselves.
16. One of the finest books in English on Romanticism is H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (Oxford, 1979).
17. Mill, On Liberty, ch. 3.
18. Matthew 7: 13–14; Hesiod, Works and Days, 287298; Plato, Republic, 364d; Xenophon, Memorabilia, II.i.23–24.