ABSTRACT
The natural mode of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that followed as well. Barbaric virtues have also been challenged—usually with the aid of the orator’s persuasive power—by competing ethical visions like those expressed in the ancient wisdom literatures of the Egyptians and the Hebrews, like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, and like the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. The Barbaric Heart is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn’t know itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a spiritual principle, a logos of its own that can contest the intellectual and moral virtue of the Barbaric Heart.
