Dad29: Swinburne's Song of Christ

Monday, April 02, 2012

Literature one should know over at Grim's place.

Aquinas said...: What an odd choice for Holy Week! Swinburne was virulently anti-Christian. A close reading of the posted piece reveals deep despair and nothing of Christian hope—the suicide of death itself. Even Oscar Wilde thought Swinburne a poseur. Our champion, Chesterton, has it thus:

For the purposes of intelligent insurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to have described the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved from this both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains. Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried to rebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he had done. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorrow are. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh is grass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrained answer, "So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark." When he went forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, he heard uplifted the grand choruses of his own Atalanta, in his rear, refusing hope.

So... not exactly edifying Holy Week reading.; 4/02/2012 4:03 PM

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