Great piece about Nock at NRO

Aside from being an informative intellectual bio about a writer I'm barely familiar with, Jonah Goldberg has penned one of the better essays I've read in the last few months. I recommend the whole, but I love this passage:

But here is the odd, or wonderful, thing about Nock. For all his clarity and passion, he professed no interest whatsoever in trying to persuade anybody. “The wise social philosophers,” he wrote, “were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them.” Indeed, Nock struck a pose of bemused disdain for the self-proclaimed prophets of the New Age — the Father Coughlins, the Huey Longs, the Upton Sinclairs, and even the Liberty Leaguers. Surveying the landscape of demagogues, mountebanks, and experts sucking the oxygen out of democratic discourse in the 1930s, he wrote, “I cannot remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved.”