About Face

On Beauty & the Personal Being of God & Man

by Anthony Esolen

I shall retire unto the cave of my self, the self that is old as a cave.

Man once dwelt in caves, to keep warm in the winter and to be safe from wild beasts prowling the night. But as it was man who dwelt there, and not a beast, he liked to surround himself with beauty. “The prehistoric period,” says Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, “need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.” Whatever we may guess about the cave dwellers, including whether they wore clothes, “we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained,” . . .

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Anthony Esolen is a professor at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and the author of many books, including Life Under Compulsion (ISI Books), Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2019). He has also translated Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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