Reviews

Book Review

by John von Heyking

 Roger Scruton. I Drink, Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine.  London: Continuum, 2009, pp viii & 211, hardcover. $24.95.

Roger Scruton, author of numerous books on political philosophy, music, modern philosophy, beauty, hunting, and this year’s Gifford lecturer, has written a witty yet philosophically rigorous account of wine. Scruton is not only a connoisseur of wine (with a special love of French wines), he is also a wise philosopher who teaches us how wine cultivates our moral virtue and our civilization. He encourages us to recognize that stream of liquid descending from our pursed lips into our throat as the red or golden chord that runs from heaven to earth, and binds everything in-between into a cosmic whole. Wine both reflects and helps constitute our participation in all strata of reality, and points the way to our redemption.

The first part of the book is a tour through the wine producing areas of the world whose main point is primarily to sustain Scruton’s argument that in drinking wine, we drink not just the material product of a process of fermentation, but we drink a region’s history.

The Australians and Americans are unwise, but typically modern, in listing the grape (or grape blend) on their bottles because the real significance of drinking wine is in learning the culture of the soil that sustained the grape. Listing a wine as a merlot tells us nothing except the artifact that is the grape. More important is the region, which has a history and civilization that forms the production of that wine. In drinking wine, we drink not just an artifact, but we commune with a civilization. Thus, the well-traveled wine connoisseur need not join the masses of tourists in Burgundy because the essence of the region is transferred from its soil into the grapes, and the process of this transfer is the cultural history of the region.

Briefly Noted

 Laugh Out Loud

Evelyn Waugh.  Scoop, Chapman & Hall, Penguin Books, 1938, 220 pp., many reprints.

Movie comedies do not age well. Things that seemed funny 60 or 70 years ago seldom make us laugh today.  That is even more true of books.  Rather than laugh one is more likely to be bemused that our parents or grandparents found them funny.  Yet there might be a few books that test the rule.

In 1938 Eric Voegelin slipped out of Vienna, without his boots, so to speak, just ahead of the Gestapo.  In that eventful year he probably had other things to keep himself occupied besides a new British comic novel. And one must doubt he ever read it, for if he had, he certainly would have quoted from it when he wished to lighten the atmosphere.  The book's name is Scoop and the author is Evelyn Waugh.  He wrote a number of comic novels but this one has always stood out.  I reread it every five or ten years and surprise myself by occasionally laughing out loud. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that it was also the favorite comic novel of the late Richard John Neuhaus.  And worlds apart, it became the inspiration for socialite Toni Morrison’s website, The Daily Beast.

Curing the Disorders of the Age?

Book Review by Robert Cheeks

A Citizen Legislature. By Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips.  A People's Parliament: A (Revised) Blueprint for a Very English Revolution. By Keith Sutherland. (Published together as a single volume) hardcover, 350 pp, $58.00. Charlottesville, Va. and Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.

During the process of engendering a constitutional republic, the American founders knew of the dangers inherent in an unchecked democracy. They were keenly aware that a predominately democratic regime would eventually threaten the cornerstone of the republic, private property rights, and never permit Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” to rise to the leadership of the state.

The founders hoped to solve this dilemma by installing mechanisms adapted from Montesquieu’s model whereby the central government (Leviathan) would be divided into three estates: the executive, legislative, and the judicial, by introducing the concept of “states rights” via the ninth and tenth amendments of the Bill of Rights, limiting the power of the executive, and by constitutionally requiring that election to the upper house (Senate) by the state legislature.

Today thanks to the pressures brought about by party politics, demagoguery, the “disproportionate influence of big money and the media,” and the inevitable rise of the libido dominandi, the American government has completed its journey from a constitutional republic to a social democracy. As a recent cover of Chronicles magazine proclaimed, We Are All Socialists Now!

Well, maybe.

Balancing Erudition and Piety

Book Review by Robert Cheeks

Christian Faith and Human Understanding. By Robert Sokolowski. Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2006. Paper, 317 pgs., index, bibliography.

“Reason in man is rather like God in the world."

                                        —St. Thomas Aquinas, Opuscule II, De Regno

Professor Mark Malvasi in his delightful book, The Unregenerate South, says that John Crowe Ransom, the Fugitive Poet, Agrarian, and noted critic, believed “Science flattered men’s vanities and quieted their apprehensions. Like modern Christianity, science offered men hope that they could escape death.”

In his poetry, essays, and novel, Ransom was able to bring forth a powerful criticism of technology and technique while decrying the failure of “modern” Christianity to respond. The apparent incompatibility of reason and revelation was exacerbated by the failure of the Church in its effort to mollify the divine Word of God (Logos) and the “scientific worldview.” In the end, Ransom rejected the notion that contemporary man would return to orthodox Christianity, commenting that man had become so caught up in the exigencies of modernity he could never again find the “words of the prophets or psalmists congenial or meaningful.”