A sudden realization

[fpb]

I suddenly realized the reason for the fad for the Sorry Trinity - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hutchens. By all sane critical standards, their criticism of what they call "religion" is astonishingly incompetent; much worse than the notorious pamphlet by Bertrand Russell that gave Christian apologists so much matter for mirth and so

Comments

[fpb]

Oh, absolutely. Some of Catullus' pieces are of a piercing and profound intensity - those that are purely about love, rather than indulging his potty-mouth tendencies. And a few of the insulting ones are rather impressive, at least in the cases where he tells the most powerful men in Rome - Caesar and Cicero - what he thinks of them. Poets of the Imperial age would certainly never again dare to speak with such freedom. But I do not think that most of his dirtier items deserve higher praise than "cheerfully irreverent and well-expressed". Juvenal and Lucian are more complex cases, but I do not think that their erotic passages show them at their best. Juvenal is out to condemn, and sometimes he does it amazingly well, but when he describes what he imagines that a lesbian couple would do with sacred altars, it is hard not to have a sense that he is half aroused himself. Certainly it falls below his great plea for human decency in Satire 12: "What man who is good and worthy of the mysterious torch,/ Who is such as the priest of Eleusis would want him,/ Considers anyone's misfortune as no business of his?"