I just picked up the book and found a very moving passage:"The Middle Ages knew this order. The Renaissance shattered it. After three centuries of infidelity, prodigal Art aspired to become the ultimate end of man, his Bread and his Wine, the consubstantial mirror of beatific Beauty. . . And now the modern world, which had promised the artist everything, soon will scarcely leave him even the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful, multiplying needs and servitude without the possibility of there ever being a limit, destroying the leisure of the soul, withdrawing the material factible from the control which proportioned it to the ends of the human being, and imposing on man the panting of the machine and the accelerated movement of matter, the system of "nothing but the earth" is imprinting on human activity a truly inhumane mode and a diabolical direction, for the final end of all this frenzy is to prevent man from resembling God,
dum nil perenne cogitat,
seseque culpis illigat.
Consequently he must, if he is to be logical, treat as useless, and therefore as rejected, all that by any grounds bears the mark of the spirit.
Or it will even be necessary that heroism, truth, virtue, beauty become useful values - the best, the most loyal instruments of propaganda and of control of temporal powers.
Persecuted like the wise man and almost like the saint, the artist will perhaps recognize his brothers at last and discover his true vocation again: for in a way he is not of this world, being, from the moment that he works for beauty, on the path which leads upright souls to God and manifests to them the invisible things by the visible."
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I detect a certain approach to history which is very consonant with the views of our Distributist brethren. I am not saying that I disagree or agree, only that I find the passage very passionate and moving. I think it is worth some reflection and comment.
1 comment:
Not just consonant with distributist economics, but with St. Thomas and Aristotle. After all, the distributists simply took the social teaching of the Church seriously, and, from what I can tell, the social teaching of the Church follows St. Thomas and Aristotle.
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