For I dine on Celestial Food
And now, in case you have heard so much rock and pop and rap that you consider that music, dear reader, or if you have read one too many a nihilistic story where anti-heroes and anti-villains get away their various crimes that you consider such to be a tale worth telling, here is something more old school:
For those of you not familiar with the set-up, Don Juan, notorious womanizer and murderer, earlier slew the Commander, whose daughter he outraged, and when she erected a statue in the churchyard to his memory, Don Juan mocked it by inviting the statue to dine with him.
That night as he dines, he and his manservant Leparello are visited by a supernatural apparition. Being a noble Don to the last, the proud Don Juan shows no fear, but invites the horror to his table, as the customs of honor command.
Something of the dark majesty of Don Juan as he is dragged unrepentant to hell by the man he has murdered is lost on the modern spirit, since Don Juan’s insistence that he follow his own moral code, invented only to please himself, without concern for worldly or heavenly or hellish condemnation is to this generation the bland and even boring platitude heard from ten thousand tales and cartoons and bumper stickers and stump speeches and all advertisements for products both commercial and imponderable.
The fire of rebellion is impossible to capture, and the defiance of God is not blasphemous, but boring, to the modern ear which not only disbelieves in God, but regards such disbelief as a sign of elevation and enlightenment.
In the same way that the modern attitude toward sex, where all things are permitted except fertility, makes even glancing-eyed Aphrodite yawn, so too the Miltonian pride of Lucifer is routine. No modern author would show the natural result of such arrogance, crashing to its own hideous and infernal ruin.
The modern author would call it self esteem. The modern author would side with Don Juan, being unable to see the Stone Guest as anything but a bully imposing an arbitrary will upon the helpless victim.
It the creepy Looking Glass world of the modern mind, the rapist and womanizer and murderer is the cherished and beloved figure, and the divine judgment is the hated figure. The only evil a generation deeply in love with evil recognizes as evil is this: Heaven is intolerant of sin.
The intolerance of Heaven toward those things that separate Man from his Father, that intolerance is the indeed only sin the permissive generation finds intolerable.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
