Most of the Prodigies . . .

Note: The following remarks were delivered at the 2024 Napa Institute.

In late March of 2018, early one morning, my wife told me that she was pregnant with our fifth child. He would be our third son, born in November of that year and named after Saint John Cassian. That same day, I sat down at my writing desk and composed the following short poem, titled “To an Unborn Child” (First Things, December 2018):

Storm clouds move in and darken all the house,
The morning paper on the kitchen table dim,
Where I’ve been reading some reporter’s grouse
At things already bad, now growing grim.
Most of the prodigies agree with him.

I rise to light a lamp, and hear the thunder,
And watch the first drops thudding on the lawn.
Your mother joins me. Here we stand, in wonder,
Between the hour that marks your life’s first dawn
And that one, still obscure, we’re counting on.

These verses reflect faithfully my own position some six years ago. I am one of those people who continue to get the news from an actual newspaper (or did until very recently), so that I can spread the sections out on the table. I like to glower over the catastrophes of the world while drinking my morning coffee. It is true that I sometimes used to run over the paper with my car a couple times before taking it in for reading, just to crush the left-wing bias out of it. Nonetheless, I find that there is no substitute for the experience of the densely-packed columns, running sheet after sheet. No matter how one reads the news, however, it’s all the same: “things already bad, now growing grim.” So ubiquitous is the sense that we are entering ever more deeply into a long and even endless catastrophe that those who might claim otherwise are hard to come by.

To this or that report on the opinion page, lamenting one thing or another, we can rightly answer, “Most of the prodigies agree with him.” The darkness of our times moves in like a storm and, at the sound of thunder, this poem records my wife Hilary and I rising and going to our old picture window to “watch the first drops thudding on the lawn.”

Standing side by side, we look out in “wonder.” Wonder is that most marvelously ambivalent of words. Whether we look at the literal storm outside or glower over the blackening figurative storm clouds casting shadows over the pages of the newspaper, we may simply be struck in silence and in awe. We may be left standing in mute wonder before the unfolding of events, whether they are the ginned up Russian hysteria of 2018, the pandemic and the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” of 2020, the pandemic-related administrative tyrannies of 2021, the violent threats against women’s care centers or the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the terror in Israel in 2023, or the presidential absurdities and near-assassination of 2024.

Wonder before such events may be amazement and curiosity, but it may also be merely shocked attention.

It was such shocked attention that another poet, W.B. Yeats, tried to capture in his poem of just over a century ago, called most ominously, “The Second Coming.” Yeats’s poem’s opening lines are so quotable that most readers will know them even if they have never read the whole work. It is a masterpiece in wonder before catastrophe. It runs:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The opening lines are as applicable to our day as they were to Yeats’s, when the rise of communist and fascist regimes in Europe made the next great world war seem inevitable even when it was still nearly two decades away. Yeats, a born romantic, may sound like a prophet who would condemn the anarchy loosed upon the world, and in his private correspondence, he did. But, in his public persona, stood before it in fascination. He relished the violence of history, at least when it was at a distance, and hence the curious formulation that ends his poem. And by curious, I mean almost incoherent. A “rough beast,” a figure of apocalypse and even Anti-Christ, is slouching, “its hour come round at last” toward Bethlehem, the place of Christ’s birth, and now to be the place where the beast itself will be born. So, we might ask, what is it? Has the beast been born or hasn’t he? Is he already here to bring an end to the world or still on the way? Yeats holds us in between times, where we can see the storm on the horizon coming toward us, but where it is still a distant vision of cloud, darkness, and lightning. We feel its presence, but it has not yet fully arrived to snuff out our delectation before such a sublime display.

Yeats had many strengths as a poet, some of which went hand-in-hand with his weaknesses as a man, and here we find one. The catastrophe coming, he makes a spectacle out of it—worse, as some critics have argued, he makes a religious sacrament of political violence. He savors the prospect of destruction, which may be awful in fact, but as a poetic and imaginative spectacle, seems simply fascinating. In this, he was much like the ideologies rising up around him, ones that made a religion of political violence, whether it was the Marxists who thought class conflict the sole key to the meaning of history and so viewed every new dead body as the brickwork of the road to progress, or the Nazis, whose Germanic romanticism, refined in the work of idealist philosophers such as Hegel and Ficht, would make war itself the romantic, dramatic quest in which the noble triumph over the weak and thereby vindicate their own existences.

The fascination of bad news, the fascination of catastrophe becomes the telos, the purpose, the aim of his life, its occupation and its meaning. Yeats’s poem strains to preserve us within that fascination rather than to question it. He prolongs our enjoyment of the disaster.

But should we not question this ritualization of despair, this making of a struck fascination at the sublime misery of politics into a kind of religious contemplation? I tried to respond to Yeats’s poem in my own. Where Yeats places us between the beginning-of-the-end and the absolute end itself, to allow us to contemplate devastation from a distance and with the pleasure of awe, my little poem places my wife and me in the middle of a different kind of between-state. There is someone else present in this poem, mentioned initially only in the title, but then addressed directly in the final lines. The final lines read, again:

Your mother joins me. Here we stand, in wonder,
Between the hour that marks your life’s first dawn
And that one, still obscure, we’re counting on.

It is not a rough beast who is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The in-between-time during which the poem takes place is one far less sublime and violent but no less a cause of wonder. It is the time of slow growth, of pregnancy, as our John Cassian moves from the “first dawn” of his conception to that dawn “still obscure” but which “we’re counting on,” that is to say, the day of his birth. The life just dawning inside my wife is one to whom I can already speak, whom I can address as a “you,” and whose presence transforms the domestic scene of this poem and gives it a totally new orientation and significance.

This is the between-time of real life, one that stands in stark contrast to Yeats’s fantasy of suspended apocalypse. In Yeats’s poem, there is nothing to do but become rapt in fascination at the obscenity, the great world-turning violence on the horizon. In my poem, that view is the one offered us in the newspapers. We could indeed simply shake our head along with the reporter and other prodigies that things already bad will just get worse. We too could make not just a morning routine but a religious ritual of contemplating our doom and, therefore, of making an absolute of historical change and the political contests of our day. We could counter destruction with destruction, political ideology with ideology.

But the realization of the life inside a mother’s womb, our realization as people living in this world, is the realization that we are not mere spectators of despair, but persons responsible to those lives still to be born to prepare a world for them. You might say, the romantic apocalypse of Yeats is a politics for people with nothing to do but watch. But all true politics begins with children. It is the realization that what we do with our lives, how we respond to the wonder provoked by the world at its best and at its worst, is not a decision simply up to us and unaccountable to anyone else. It is rather a decision we make in the context of the lives that we help bring into the world, over which we have custody, for which we have love, and whose lives will extend far beyond our own and so orient us beyond the spectacle of the present and guide our actions into the making of a future.

My little poem was intended as a corrective of Yeats’s. It rebukes his romantic fascination with destruction and violence, including that more mundane version of it that we experience despairing over the newspapers or, more commonly these days, “doom-scrolling” on our phones. It calls us to a different kind of action, an action of begetting a better sort of world, worthy of the children we bring into it. It suggests we do so, not in the mode of rapt revolutionary violence, but by cultivating the lives we have been given, by way of wonder, by way of a faithful “counting on” the slow growth by which all good things move from their first, vulnerable and minute potential, toward actuality and flourishing.

It might be tempting to say that the poem calls us merely from one kind of politics to another, from irresponsible violence to responsible action, and I think that it does do that. But I do not think that is the most apt way to describe what this poem suggests. Let me call your attention once more to that central word in the poem that rhymes with “thunder”—the word “wonder.” Aristotle tells us at the beginning of the Metaphysics that all philosophy begins in wonder. By this, the ancient philosopher means that we have a built-in desire for truth. We want to know the truth, because the truth is good. Philosophy begins in the longing, panting, empty desire for the good of truth and the truth that is good. Aristotle and all the great philosophers tell us something more. Not only do we begin with wonder, a longing for truth and goodness, but we end there too. The properly human life, he will argue in his Ethics, is a contemplative life. What is contemplation? It is that condition where the mind, having found itself in the presence of truth, chooses to stay there. The mind rests in truth as its good. The mind no longer thinks about the truth the way a child puzzles through a math problem to find the factors of 36 or how many times 36 goes into 4500 (which is 125 times, for the curious). It stands before truth, it rests in it.

Would this not be very boring, we may ask? And the ancients, indeed the Church, teaches us by no means. For truth is a gift that keeps on giving; truth continuously feeds us; that perpetual nourishment of contemplation, in other words, crowns the good of truth with the splendor of beauty. To contemplate the eternal beauty of the divine light of God himself, who is truth itself, is the purpose, the final cause, the whole reason for living of every human being who has ever been born into this world. As Thomas Aquinas teaches us, nothing can be our end, our purpose, but this.

This realization about the human person, that we were made, that we were born, to contemplate the divine beauty, ought not just to be one fact among others that we nod about with approval before we get back to our doom-scrolling, or our work at the office, or any of a million other actions and distractions that can so easily fill up our day. This realization ought to transform our days. It ought to summon us to a wholly new way of living, a different kind of politics than the kind we might find fascinating us in the newspapers. It ought—to put the matter bluntly and briefly—to call us beyond politics to a fuller and richer conception of things. It ought to call us to live in the world, to work and act in the world, with the promised contemplative vision of eternity always before us and serving as a guide to how we move through the drama of our lives.

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote that anyone who denies the reality of beauty “can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.” He goes farther. Those who deny the reality of beauty will soon also lose the capacity to see truth for what it is, to love the good for itself, and even to trust the light of being that shines out from all things and excites us to wonder and grounds us in the world. Too often, he suggests, we treat beauty as a mere ornament or luxury whereas, in fact, beauty is the disclosure of the final answer to why we are here, why we are alive. Beauty is the splendor of God’s creative truth and is the light in which we are called to dwell. To deny the reality of beauty is therefore to deny that our lives have an order and goodness to them—a genuine shape and purpose. It is to deny that we are made, finally, to dwell in the light of the God who made us. To affirm its reality, however, is to open ourselves to what God has known since we were first dwelling in our mother’s womb: that we are called to love and to abide in God’s love.

How are we to respond to this realization that we were born to contemplate the beauty of God? The German philosopher Josef Pieper helps provide an answer. Pieper is best known for his little book, Leisure the Basis of Culture, which was written in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a moment, in other words, where work and politics seemed to consume everything with no remainder left for thoughts of beauty much less the act of contemplation. Pieper objected to this state of things. In making his argument, he observed that cult was the basis of culture, that is to say, religious worship is the foundation upon which the whole edifice of culture is necessarily constructed. Culture, the whole way of life of a people, is based on what that people loves with the absolute love that is religious worship. If our end is the everlasting contemplation of the divine light, the splendor of truth, our beginning is to be found in recognizing as much. Out of that recognition, wrote Pieper, culture arises. But how can this be?

I think we can answer it in the following way. If our destiny is the contemplation of God, our lives in this world must naturally be oriented toward that end and ordered by it. The way of life we live begets culture; insofar as we cultivate our selves by the way we live, so does the terrain of culture itself emerge. A good culture is, therefore, a kind of worldly school for life beyond this world, a temporal school in preparation for eternity.

The obsession with catastrophe, the reduction of our attention to the ideological conflagrations of politics, constitutes a kind of anti-culture. It negates the eternal by pretending nothing matters but the storm clouds here below. A true culture, in contrast, we may know by its practice of four arts, each of which is a worldly anticipation of a fifth and final art, the practice of contemplation that is our destiny. Those arts may be described as follows.

The Useful Arts/Doing: So much of human life consists of doing. Saint John Henry Newman once quipped, “Life is for action.” As Saint John Paul II notes in Laborem Exercens, work is for the good of man. Doing, working, and making all must be performed, but the human dimension of these activities is in our knowing that we do them. We may build a house and stand back and admire the work we have done. This is itself a kind of contemplation; it is part of the work we do, not outside of it, and so every human activity, when properly performed, already has a contemplative dimension, a foretaste of what is to come. Work in this sense humanizes.

The Fine Arts: The German philosopher Friedrich Schiller made a powerful argument at the end of the eighteenth century. Human beings are sunk in the senses but have an impulse toward form, spirit, rationality, and morality. To begin the movement from sensuousness to intellect, we need a place that serves as a kind of bridge between. His answer was that the fine arts are just such a bridge. We look at a painting, we hear a poem, we listen to a story, all the while using our imaginations. All this is of the body, of the senses. And yet, what these things do is give us in incarnate, material form the stuff of the spirit. We imagine Achilles fighting Hector at Troy. Then we contemplate: What does it mean to be Achilles? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to live and die in anger or with honor? The fine arts give us the invisible spirit visible and incarnate. This is why all education begins with stories. In the fine arts, we also learn to make the stuff that we savor. It is in this respect a transition from doing and making to the next mode of contemplation.

The Liberal Arts: Since Plato, the liberal arts have been defined by those disciplines of mind, where we abstract from the material conditions of things and seek universal, intellectual knowledge. We see this in the study of history and literature, but especially in the more purified disciplines of mathematics, physics, and philosophy. There, we contemplate the laws of number, changeable being, and being itself. Such studies are often said to be knowledge “for its own sake.” That phrase indicates that we contemplate the truth without subjecting it immediately to use. That is why it is liberal: it is free from necessity. And yet such arts are also an anticipation for the life of true freedom found only in heaven.

The Sacred Arts of Liturgy: The highest form of contemplation available to us in this life is that of the sacred arts, by which I mean all that is associated with the knowledge of God, but especially the sacred liturgy. As Pope Benedict XVI argues in The Spirit of the Liturgy, the proper understanding of the Mass is our participation here in the world of what the whole cosmos is doing: circling about the divine essence and contemplating God. Liturgy is, he says, the image in the world of the full reality of all creation looking upon, in adoration, the divine essence. It comprehends a kind of work, a kind of fine and liberal art, as we pray, sing, and contemplate God’s word. But, above all, it is our foretaste of an entrance into heaven.

We are human, but we seek ever to become more fully human. This is the work and purpose of culture. While the rough-and-tumble of political argument has its inevitable and substantial place in human life, it can only barbarize those who exclude from their lives the slow cultivation of the four arts. It is not merely nice but necessary, therefore, to place at the center of our lives the liturgical arts, all those works by which we prepare ourselves even now for eternity. From that center, we much cultivate and “grow” those other arts of contemplation: to make our daily work itself more humanizing; to allow for the free play of the mind in the fine art and the liberal arts where we feel most intimately our spiritual natures stretching their wings, developing their powers, and rising toward the end to which God alone has called us.

It is in such a context, in such an effort to live within and develop the life of culture, that one may hear the good news of an expected child and, rather than mulling in dismay the bad news in the papers, rise to light a lamp. A man may join his wife where she stands by the living room window and begin to wonder how to make the world a more fitting place for that child, for all those children, already with us but as yet unborn.