The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

by Michael Walsh

Overview

Without an understanding and appreciation of the culture we seek to preserve and protect, the defense of Western civilization is fundamentally futile; a culture that believes in nothing cannot defend itself, because it has nothing to defend. The past not only still has something to tell us, but it also has something that it must tell us. In this profound and wide-ranging historical survey, Michael Walsh illuminates the ways that the narrative and visual arts both reflect and affect the course of political history, outlining the way forward by arguing for the restoration of the Heroic Narrative that forms the basis of all Western cultural and religious traditions. Let us listen, then, to the angels of our nature, for better and worse. They have much to tell us, if only we will listen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594039454
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,174,606
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

MICHAEL WALSH is a journalist, author, and screenwriter, whose work includes six novels, nine works of nonfiction, and a hit Disney movie. The former classical music critic and foreign correspondent for Time magazine, he is now a regular contributor of political and cultural commentary to PJ Media and American Greatness, as well as a Sunday op-ed columnist for the New York Post. His awards include the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music criticism in 1979, and the American Book Awards prize for fiction for his gangster novel, And All the Saints, in 2004.

Table of Contents

Introibo iX

Prologue Into the West 1

Introduction The Unanswered Question 15

Chapter 1 The Fiery Angel 25

Chapter 2 Gaspard de la Nuit 39

Chapter 3 The Raft of the Medusa 61

Chapter 4 The Woman Without a Shadow 73

Chapter 5 The Mystery of Dorabella 91

Chapter 6 The Birth of Tragedy 109

Chapter 7 La Belle et la Bête 121

Chapter 8 Deus lo Vult 139

Chapter 9 La Commedia è Divina 153

Chapter 10 Miraculous Mandarins 169

Chapter 11 Adrift in Bistritz 179

Chapter 12 The Stone Guest 193

Chapter 13 O Magnum Mysterium 207

Epilogue From Erinyes to Eumenides 221

Bibliography 225

Acknowledgements 233

Index 235

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“For decades now, the cultural Left has been waging a war for our souls and freedoms, and their success depends on our increasing inability to comprehend and appreciate the rich spiritual and intellectual heritage of Western civilization. In The Fiery Angel, Michael Walsh's dazzling intellect is on full display and readers will walk away not just with a tremendous appreciation of the Judeo-Christian beliefs and heroic narratives that have preserved and protected us for thousands of years, but he also gives them the tools to go out and defend these ideals from the cultural onslaught.”

—Mollie Hemingway, Senior Editor of The Federalist and Fox News contributor


“From Aristotle to The Marriage of Figaro, Michael Walsh seeks light in these dark times in the deepest sources of our culture and its most illuminating works of art. From the divine to the erotic and from the contemplative to the heroic, it’s all there, waiting, in The Fiery Angel.” 

—Kevin Williamson, author of The End Is Near and It's Going To Be Awesome


“This unique book teaches Western civilization and its agonists by acquainting the reader with the fundamentals of western art—music, literature, and painting. Walsh reminds us that the arts are the basic means by which any and all peoples interpret the experiences of life. The arts are civilization’s substance. Empires are epiphenomena. Shakespeare counts for more than Elizabeth I and Solzhenitsyn more than Brezhnev. Politicizing the arts destroys civilization, understanding them preserves it. Read this book. You will learn from it.”

—Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University


“In his magisterial defense of Western Civilization, Michael Walsh shows how the cultural Marxist Left’s war against human nature, virtue, norms, and a nation’s culture is actually a war against God’s creation. It will ultimately be trumped by honest history and art that faithfully reflects the human condition—our perennial struggle between the better and worse angels of our nature. Ultimately, when we seek beauty and reject Promethean ugliness, we will come closer to basing our society on goodness and truth—and our civilization may even survive.”

—Dr. John Lenczowski, Founder and President of The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

06/04/2018
Walsh (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace), former music critic at Time, discusses nearly 100 musical, artistic, and literary works, from the epic of Gilgamesh to a Tom Wolfe novel, to illustrate “the soul of the West” and how it supposedly is threatened. Exactly what that soul is, however, Walsh never succinctly spells out; it seems to involve a struggle of God and good against Satan and evil, as well as heroic struggles by (male) protagonists, sometimes against fate. Unfortunately, Walsh’s style is often rambling; he doesn’t build an argument so much as make claim after unsupported claim. He undermines his credibility with blanket statements, some counterfactual, such as that women entering the workforce has caused “an effective halving of the family’s income” because of additional expenses in “child care, meals, etc.” Other assertions are simply bizarre (“Homer has more to teach about governance than Harvard, and always will”). Walsh will lose many readers with his mini-tirades against the “satanic” Left; feminists, whom he contemptuously sees as obsessed with “transvestism, transsexuality, and non-gender-specific personal pronouns”; and Muslim refugees, who he claims have turned “English cities hotbeds of radical Islamic theology Pakistani rape gangs.” Aside from educating readers about important cultural artifacts, this diffuse, often bilious work does little, if anything, to advance the author’s goal of uncovering “the soul of the West.” (May)

Publishers Weekly