Suzannah Rowntree > Recent Status Updates

Okay but this stuff tracing Rousseau's influences to interactions between Native Americans and Jesuits in New France is extremely fascinating

So far this is polemical in a way that grates and stomps some important distinctions fairly flat, but also it's discussing interesting topics in interesting ways so I'll consume with a plentiful helping of salt. Anyway turns out Thomas Hobbes was a Civil-War-era royalist which sure does explain why he thought human life without autocratic government would be "nasty, brutish, and short".

"O thou in whom my hopes securely dwell,
/And who, to bring my soul to Paradise,
/Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell,"

this is just beautiful and also Beatrice I know exactly how you feel

Dante genuinely sitting here writing "and then when St Peter had examined me in theology he said he wished more people had a fraction of my insight. Like down there on earth everyone is is a fake and a sellout but I'm the real thing apparently"

"As in a clock the movements synchronise
/So that there lowest wheel appears to sleep
/To an onlooker, while the topmost flies"
- now that I know clocks were invented right around 1300 I'm so ridiculously excited to see Dante using the cutting edge technology of his day as a simile :')

I feel that a lot of people would understand the war in Ukraine vastly better if they had the slightest idea what went down in February 2014 on the Maidan. We haven't even got to the revolution's bloodiest day yet and over 106 unarmed people had already been shot dead by the forces of the pro-Russian Yanukovych. Someone's old mum just bought an axe. And Putin thought he could conquer these people in three days?

This history of Ukraine's Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014 is as gripping and immediate as one would expect from the wonderful documentary "Winter on Fire", but with a lot more added context. I keep wanting to underline quotes. Required reading for anyone who thinks they might find themselves protesting an overreaching government soon.

Beatrice: "you should smile more"? no. my smile would strike you like a thunderbolt and burn you to ash.

Goals tbh.

Can't believe I'm less than 10% in and already we've had a kidnapping, an impersonation, two meet cutes and a fight scene. Finally a 2020s YA fantasy that's wall to wall princesses, enemies to lovers and banter. Get your tongue in your cheek we're going for a ROMP.

Okay but I love that STRAIGHT after Dante has asked the Just "what about those who die without hearing of Christ", and has been told "whatever God wills is the definition of justice, it's ineffable" he's immediately introduced to two pagans who have found their way to heaven by an unexpected grace of God :')

Ironic that Dante uses Ethiopians and Indians as examples of people who might live without ever hearing the Gospel when the church in India goes back to St Thomas the apostle and the church in Ethiopia goes back to the 4th century at the latest, if not the meeting of the Ethiopian official with Philip the Evangelist in the first century.

well Paul's injunctions to women to be "keepers at home" sure hits different once you know how homes in the Roman world were partially public spaces from which women did business, exercised patronage and administered estates. in fact this whole book is adding up to a stirring defence of the Apostle Paul's respect for women, we love to see it.

Okay but this:
"The limpid and distilled benevolence
That from true charity is are diffused
As malice issues from concupiscence"

Malice inescapably issuing from concupiscence. Pithy.

I'm bit past it now but it's wild that in one of the Mercury cantos Dante argues the Roman empire had proper jurisdiction to put Christ to death, so to this day the empire should rule everyone. ...but in the next canto he argues that it was right for Jerusalem to be destroyed for putting Christ to death. so both of them teamed up to kill God but Rome gets rewarded and the Jews destroyed for it?

Dante: at least I have found my dear lady and guide, her eyes aflame with holiest love
Beatrice: *roasts him for 6 cantos straight and counting*

I am reading this as slowly as I like but canto I was gorgeous actually? the big where Dante's like "Beatrice looked at me like I was a delirious infant" made me laugh out loud but the part about how gravity draws the human soul to God as surely as it draws a stream downhill was utterly beautiful

"and I, being in, would have been glad to throw/myself for coolness into molten glass,/with such unmeasured heat did that fire glow" I am throwing myself directly into the sun

Canto IX rewrote my ENTIRE BRAIN when I was 16 and I'm still not normal about it

oh Ernest has never been more unhinged

Okay but HOW is this the first time I'm seeing ANYONE in Protestantism focus on the role of Mary, mother of God during Jesus' ministry and providing continuity for the church after his death. Like if NT elders really are just those in a congregation who have been in the faith longer, who could have been in the faith longer than her?

Dorothy Sayers coming in swinging at some of the nonsense that's been said about Beatrice? ideal

19th century fabulists: "oh medieval people believed the earth was flat"

actual medieval people: "so, having descended to the centre of the earth and found Satan stuck in the middle like a plug in a hole, we had to climb down his body until we came to the earth's centre of gravity, then gravity flipped and we turned around and climbed UP his legs. Did you know the Antipodes has no landmass, only ocean?"

Okay this nuanced take on women in the Roman Empire is what I needed, thank you (I never believed the "ACTUALLY women in ancient Rome did LOTS of things" take. Like yes I'm sure they did but was it allowed?). Also was no one going to tell me that women in the Jewish diaspora acted as synagogue leaders???

More protestants should critique highly respected churchmen with the same vim Dante critiques literal popes of his own day.

Dante's Hell, I suddenly realise, has the same atmosphere as only one other setting I've ever stumbled across in literature: Tolkien's Mordor.

maybe I'm basic but I've always had a soft spot for Francesca, and Dante writes her so compassionately.

which ALMOST makes up for the fact that he has Julius Caesar enjoying a virtuous pagan existence in Limbo while Cleopatra is being blown around in the circle of Lust.

Can't believe this is the first time I've ever heard anyone point out that the Old Testament judge Deborah is the only judge in the book of Judges about whom nothing, not a single discreditable thing, is recorded.

the guelphs and ghibellines always do my head in

Ruko is literally the character you get when you splice Kylo Ren and Zuko together. In not entirely unrelated news I AM LIVING

It's helpful to remember (in my unshakeable antipathy towards THE LAST BATTLE) that what different people find imaginatively satisfying and plausible may differ widely. Lewis had lived through two world wars and suffered greatly. To him TLB's temporal disaster remedied by heavenly healing likely did feel a lot more hopeful than it ever has to me. (Still think it could have been executed better!!!!!!!!)