"For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I was born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with- about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold- were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of 'human nature', but very distinctly of that civilisation's Christian past."
From the introduction to Andrew Klavan's work:
" For a Westerner, there is no walking away from the Christian mindset. It is the skin we wear, the air we breathe, a world that travels with us. Even when we reject God it is a rejection of the Christian God specifically."
If Dominion is Tom Holland's examination of the lasting effects of Jesus' earthly ministry, The Truth and Beauty is Andrew Klavan's attempt to know the mind of Christ: why He said and did the things He did during that ministry. And he does this rather indirectly, by examining the works of some of England's greatest poets who were living- and writing- at a time which in many ways paralleled our own. These men were children of the Enlightenment, a time of great scientific- and artistic- discovery and upheaval. As scientific advancements seemingly explained away the need for God, there was a great if gradual falling away from faith and this was reflected in the art of the time. Biblically themed paintings and poems fell out of favour in this new age of unbelief; libertinism and licentiousness abounded as many considered themselves free from the fear of eternal consequences. But then, as is so often the case, reality dropped by to administer a kick to their collective backsides in the form of the French Revolution and a seemingly endless series of European wars. So much for their vaunted principles of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité; as they stood looking around at the shambles of their utopian dreams, many writers of the time period put pen to paper in an attempt to contemplate where it all went wrong. And, as they composed some of the greatest poetry ever written in English, some of these men found themselves stumbling back to the God and faith that they thought they'd left behind in the dust of the past.