Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1917-2008: Ave Atque Vale

The great Irish intellectual, scholar, and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien has died.  Although for many OJ readers, he is remembered most as a diplomat – at the center of the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1961 – his greatest influence on me was through his massive study of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody.  

One passage that O’Brien cited among Burke’s early writings always stuck with me, from a letter of the very young Edmund Burke to a Quaker friend, in which Burke expressed, even at so young an age, acute discomfort with the idea of being politically guided by the “inner light” and religious passion rather than exterior reason:

I dont like that part in your letter wherein you say you had the Testimonies of well-doing in your Breast, whenever such motions arise again endeavour to suppress ’em.