Reaching Beyond the Decaying Present

Do we know what we are trying to achieve?

For what is it that we reach? I fear that our answer is something like, "not this", which is to say that we are aware of the problems but not the solutions. We feel viscerally that things are awry, but we are so deprived of history and culture that we cannot visualize a working society in which we should wish to live.

There are subtle indications though. There are times when the soul seems to awaken, and in which we feel comfort and warmth. When we get away from the modern city and its parking lots, and breathe the air atop the rolling hills. When we gasp at the beauty of the architecture of a former age – whether it's the glory of the ancient Gothic cathedrals or the chapels in the underground salt mines of Wieliczka and Bochnia (Poland). When we sob at the haunting sound of the unison of voices, combined in the magnificence of Gregorian chant. It's beauty from an age that acknowledged man's soul, whereas modern man builds only for the body. He builds as if he were soulless.

Among the aging buildings of North Carolina, many still bear faded logos on their brick walls: R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, I can make out the faded lettering. The aging paint on those red walls can make driving through the city start to feel like a foggy dream – the town seems to separate itself from the present by way of its demonstrated decay. Yet, this is the present. It's just frozen in time, not being rebuilt, and certainly not improved.

Attempts at renovating such structures are hindered by a modernist, utilitarian drive. They will take an old factory and decide to repurpose it, but as cheaply as humanly possible. They shrug at the idea of interior walls, and just paint the brick. Why build a ceiling, they argue, when it's not really necessary? Sure, you can see ductwork overhead, but people won't look up more than once. The floor is the same concrete pad that was used when it was a factory, and, well, it's easy to clean… you get the idea.

So, we live amongst the ruins of another generation's industry and artistry. We celebrate that at least it's not worse, for at least the buildings are being used, but is this all that we can muster? Is it how we are supposed to live?

It's as if teenagers moved upon such ruins, lacking the capacity to do something more, or the vision to imagine what a city fit for true humans could be. We're all cultural infants now, for the idea of having a mature culture, one with a past and a future, is so far removed from our experiences. We make buildings to fulfill a material purpose – not to edify onlookers with their beauty nor to bring communities closer, or to glorify God. What motivated the visionaries of yesteryear confuses modern man. He cannot understand reaching beyond himself.

Yet still we travel to parts of Europe to see these magnificent sights, and it seems that on these holidays, we are trying to time travel into that other age. We will spend thousands of dollars for glimpses of what people used to live amongst. If those men of the past could time travel to our present, would they want to? Would they go back afterward and tell their loved ones to visit too? I'm not convinced they would. I don't think the advances in technology or even medicine would cause them to trade their community and the beauty of their environment. Man of yesteryear had a different mindset entirely.

If we're thinking about what kind of society we ought to be building, perhaps it should be one in which the man of old would be comfortable. It should be one in which he sees the beauty around him and in which he feels his soul come alive – not by driving away from civilization, but by immersing himself in it. When we have built a society like that, men like him don't have to travel from the past. We make them.

Such men are inspired and they inspire. They know beauty well enough to produce it. They respect the splendor of the human soul because they know that it reflects God's creation. They want a city that is ordered beyond man's time in the present, and instead united towards his true home. They want an environment that might help their fellow man to get there.

Reflecting on a dismal age in European history, historian Christopher Dawson wrote, "Yet it was in this age of universal ruin and destruction that the foundations of new Europe were being laid by men like St. Gregory, who had no idea of building up a new social order but who laboured for the salvation of men in a dying world because time was short."

As times once again seem despairing, might we do like the saints of old, who cared for man's soul, and who sought only to create a world that nourished those souls, and prepared them for eternity.