The people of a dying culture produce almost no art worthy of the name. - Esolen

Destruction (1836) part of the Course of Empire series by Thomas Cole 


The people of a dying culture produce almost no art worthy of the name. Boredom sits heavy upon the soul. Nothing is sacred. The Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, often residually Christian at best, believed that the impulse for great art and music and poetry must be divine. What inspires? They who lose the divine lose the human also. It is as Jesus says, that to them who seek the kingdom of God, all the good things of the earth will be given also. The converse is true: from those who have little, from those who seek only the things of earth, even that little which they have shall be taken from them. The art of the dying culture not only loses its excellence. Whole kinds of art disappear; no one cares for them anymore; no one cares to learn with great patience and many failures, or to appreciate, which requires patience also, or to preserve. Many of the skills the true craftsman required, often skills with no name, known in the hand or the eye or the ear, are forgotten. Artists and architects turn to the hideous, the brutal, and the inhuman. - Anthony Esolen

Comments

Popular Posts

Life At The Altar Rail: 22 Behaviours Categorized

You Know You're In A Progressive Catholic Parish When... .

Review: Saint Gregory's Prayer Book

You know you're a REAL altar server when... .

TRUE PARTICIPATION IN THE MASS

"I was gathered into the offering of the Son to the Father. I participated in the self-offering of God today."

FEATURED SCRIPTURE | Revelation 3:1-3

I know your works; you have the name of being alive, and you are dead. Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God. Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.

FEATURED QUOTE

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society. | Thomas Sowell