John Dunn

First posted on Thursday, 7 March 2013 at 21:29




Ezra Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska






Here is a telling observation by Ezra Pound on the ‘revival’ of the Old Testament at the time of the Reformation. Until this time, Christianity had been based largely on Jesus and the cross. The return to the Law in the beginnings of a covenantal Calvinism was a development that Luther would come to regret intensely. (Reproduced here with Pound's idiosyncratic note style and spelling.)

John Dunn.

Nothing cd. be less civil, or more hostile to any degree of polite civilization than the tribal records of the hebrews. There is not a trace of civilization from the first lies of Genesis up to the excised account of Holophernes. The revival of these barbarous texts in the time of Luther and Calvin has been an almost unmitigated curse to the occident. But Leo X. and the Hegxis of catholicism during the Renaissance left a void into which this beastliness poured.
(From Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound.)