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Philosophical Haiku

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

by Terence Green

Past, present, future
Woven seamlessly as one,
Dread Reason’s hubris.

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. It is tempting to think that this was the source of Burke’s lasting distaste for discord and his commitment to social order, but there is no evidence to suggest that religious differences were ever a cause of tension in the Burke household. Although he was a member of the British House of Commons for nearly twenty-nine years, it was rather as an observer of politics and as one of the greatest prose stylists of his age that Burke made his name.

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