THE PHILANTHROPIST
(With Apologies to a Beautiful Poem)
(C. 1918-21)

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe decrease
By cautious birth-control and die in peace)
Mellow with learning lightly took the word
That marked him not with them that love the Lord,
And told the angel of the book and pen
“Write me as one that loves his fellow-men:
For them alone I labour; to reclaim
The ragged roaming Bedouin and to tame
To ordered service; to uproot their vine
Who mock the Prophet, being mad with wine;
Let daylight through their tents and through their lives
Number their camels, even count their wives;
Plot out the desert into streets and squares,
And count it a more fruitful work than theirs
Who lift a vain and visionary love
To your vague Allah in the skies above.”

Gently replied the angel of the pen:
“Labour in peace and love your fellow men:
And love not God, since men alone are dear,
Only fear God; for you have cause to fear.”

And the Inigo Montoya quote is spot-on. I had not applied it that way before. But no doubt I will from now on . . .

Thanks for the Percy quotation! Goodness, that man could write. You are ahead of me on this front; I’m still working through his novels for the first time, and have yet to reach The Last Gentlemen (I’m not going in order). It’s a wonder the folks at Korrektiv let me in, given my inadequate credentials, but maybe they don’t know.

You make a good point that many of these concepts — dignity, conscience, virtue, and the good itself — are related to deeper philosophical and religious ideas. I am told that it used to be said, during the Cold War, that “Peace is a Communist plot”, because it seemed that those who talked a lot about peace tended to be Communists. One sometimes gets a similar feeling today when it comes to “human rights” and “dignity”. I feel like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

I’ve been re-reading Walker Percy’s novels lately, and your synopsis of Esolen’s “villains and heroes” of Westen culture reminded me of the exchange between Will Barrett and Sutter Vaught (one of my favorite characters ever) when they first meet in The Last Gentleman. Alluding to the poem “Abou Ben Adhem” by James Leigh Hunt, Sutter says:

“There it is . . . the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou’s effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news–the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in? . . . It wasn’t Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”

Even if Leigh Hunt can be more-or-less identified with Rousseau, I gather Esolen would disagree with pegging it ALL on Leigh Hunt. But I also gather that Esolen and Sutter would agree that virtue, conscience, community, human dignity, and responsibility are one thing when considered in the light of the Judeo-Christian revelation, and quite another when we “leave God out of it.” (Sutter’s label for what they become in the latter case is “meretricious [excrement].”)

Christina, your comment is particularly ironic, however, because if you condone Guy’s approach (as it sounds like you do) you must also condone the conduct of the soldiers above. Were you joking?

Guy sounds like my kinda guy.