Civilization Trembling While the Church Burns

“As the spire cracked and then buckled, millions of us felt civilization trembling.  But trembling at what?  At the loss of God?  At the sudden recognition that, for all our progressive confidence, deep down everyone knows that Western civilization lacks the philosophical and religious principles that once made such a structure possible in the first place?  We tremble because we know that the world has been drawing down a Christian inheritance for centuries, drawing down the cultural wealth of the Faith into rampant prodigal decadence.” – C.C. Pecknold, “Only by Returning to the Faith Can We Truly Rebuild Notre Dame”

Courtesy of the BBC
View a twenty minute video discussing the event.

Years ago I read a book by George Weigel, “The Cube and the Cathedral:  Europe, America, and Politics without God.”

The take away from the book for me was the loss of goodness, truth and beauty in western architecture.  This is signified by the skyscraper … a feeble cube, an ode to superman … compared with the sweep and grandeur of Notre Dame.

I learned this morning that Victor Hugo’s great novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” was written to draw the public’s attention to the fact that the great cathedral was falling into disrepair.  He published that book in 1831.

Christianity has been burning down in the West for a long time.  Nothing becomes or remains good, true or beautiful without hard work – maintenance.  Unlike the pop cosmology that informs our modern affirmation of evolution everything humans create suffers the effects of entropy.  Everything is devolving.  Nothing in nature gets better with time.  The little slice of time we know about screams devolution not evolution.  We are falling away from something.

People used to live a thousand years.

The effects of sin cause many of us to wonder at the idea of living for one hundred.

If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ,which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. – Philippians 1:22-24