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

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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

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