[Greetings, friends, from Austin! As part of my book-writing process, at the end of the first draft, I like to zoom out and ask myself: what is this book really about?
Of course, I have a rough idea (and outline) when I start the process, but I often joke that I don’t really know what the book is about until I’ve gotten through the first draft. My rule when drafting is to let my curiosity guide my writing each day, which often ends up in obscure and random corners of the internet archives. So, the book has a way of taking on a spirit of its own and becoming something slightly different than I initially thought it would be.
When I get done with the first draft, I take a step back, rework the outline, do my best to write a back-of-the-book summary in light of everything dumped on the age, and then use that new outline and summary as something like a shining light I can hold against all of the content during the editing process. If the content doesn’t point back to the purpose and intention, it has to go… “kill your darlings,” is the rule I rely on at this stage (which usually means cutting and pasting into a new Word document that houses all of my orphan ideas, some of which I turn into these weekly essays).
I bring this up because it is the phase of the book-writing process I am in now—on the bridge between the first phase (free drafting) and the second phase (editing), where all the real work begins. This means I am now, as I sit here, attempting to refine and reorganize the outline, summarize what the book is about, and zone in on what it’s trying to accomplish.
As I reflect on these things, my thoughts keep walking me back to what this whole “This Way to the Stars” series and project was about in the first place: restoring our roots, recovering our chest, and returning to worthy things gone missing.
It is to that topic, and to the late Dr. Michael Sugrue (whose soul returned home this week and to whom I am deeply indebted), that we devote the remainder of today’s essay.]
We hear a lot about the meaning crisis and loneliness epidemic these days. Anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide rates are rising, and people are feeling disconnected from themselves, from each other, from their heritage, and from an optimistic view of the future.
Our age is one where the spirit of nihilism (nihil meaning “nothing” in Latin) reigns supreme, with large portions of society believing we came from nothing and end in nothing—with life having no purpose outside of keeping ourselves occupied until we dissolve into the abyss once more. It is a spirit that started severing us from the intellectual traditions and roots of our ancestors during the Enlightenment, when science, skepticism, and doubt began to slowly dismiss anything we could not prove with our senses.
We see this spirit captured by authors like Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche. The world, Camus thought, is absurd, because we have an innate desire to find meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God or meaning. And the best we who are like Sisyphus can do is pretend there is joy in pushing boulders hopelessly uphill forever. “We must,” Camus concludes in the Myth of Sisyphus, “imagine Sisyphus happy.” Nietzsche captured his diagnosis of modern man when he infamously proclaimed the Death of God.
What the Enlightenment (somewhat unintentionally) started with its radical skepticism, doubt, and distrust in everything our ancestors had to say, the rise and advent of new technologies that hijack our dopaminergic systems has accelerated. Since the days of Descartes (and perhaps before), there has been a slow severing and further alienation of man, separating him from his origins and ancestry—from himself. Each nudge away from ourselves slowly edged us out toward the precipice we now find ourselves quickly approaching. A current sweeps us in its direction, and we’ve frayed the strings that can pull us back. Our fall seems inevitable.
Or maybe we’re not in a mighty rushing current carrying us off into the abyss. Maybe, instead, we’re standing at a crossroads, and things can go one of two ways depending on our choices (individually and collectively): we continue down the path of assured destruction or find ways to heal a wounded world soul. We must “stand at the crossroads and look. Ask for the ancient paths: ‘Where is the good way?’ Then walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”1 Why? Because “[m]en in a desert must find water or die.”2
But where do we start to look? Well, suppose we accept the idea that many of the plagues of modern man have roots in the radical skepticism and doubt of the Enlightenment. In that case, we might start by looking at the period that immediately preceded it—the period of the Enlightenment, which, in many ways, separated us from the Medieval.
In a previous article (On the Discarded Image), I wrote how the world of the medieval poet, Dante Alighieri (1265 -1321), was different than ours. Where his was neatly ordered hierarchically (man at the bottom, God at the top, humans with a clear origin and end), ours is chaotically flat (everything is on an even field without superiority or preference given to anything). Where his came with a clear aim (up), ours leaves us alienated from the soul that calls us upward and without a sense of direction. Without direction, there can be no progress. Without progress, we regress. As the Ancient Book warned thousands of years ago: “Without a vision, the people perish.”3
In looking at Dante’s world, we get a glimpse at the mind of medieval man from the bookend on the right side of the bookshelf. We find still more clues at what we, as modern man, have been separated from if we pull from the bookend on the other side of the shelf. There we find Boethius (480 - 524).
Living in a Rome ruled by the Goths, Boethius preserved and translated the Ancient Greek texts into language the medievals could understand. In his place and time, he kept alive the philosophies of old and blended the best of what it had to offer with Biblical thought. In Boethius, the currents of Athens and Jerusalem came together. And when he, like Socrates, was thrown in prison and sentenced to execution for daring to defend truth and justice, that wisdom would be woven into his medieval bestseller, The Consolation of Philosophy.
In it, Boethius imagines Lady Philosophy coming to his jail cell and consoling him with a combination of the best ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the early church fathers. Despite the chaotic (and often unfair) world he lived in, the inner world of Boethius was richly populated with beauty and offered strength even in the face of the gruesome reality of his impending execution.
Unlike modern man, Boethius was not alienated from his physical and intellectual heritage; he was steeped in it. He made references and wrote in meters that joined his work with the poets and philosophers preceding him by centuries. Through the chaos of his external world, he remained firm and rooted—confident that his life was in the hands of a just and all-wise Ancient of Days.
Now, think of modern man. All of the same chaos in the outer world and none of the inner sturdiness to anchor themselves in. Modern education has (for the most part) failed to assist in his establishing a relationship with the hard-won wisdom of his ancestors that sits in those ancient books. Instead of putting him in touch with enduring things of ultimate value, it has taught him to be economically productive and chase after transient things of limited value.
All we need to know about the internal state of modern man is seen in the trends of our art and architecture. We live in a cosmos of beauty begat by Beauty but we no longer see it. If we did, we would work to reflect it in our art like the ancients and medievals did with their cathedrals and sculptures. Instead, we get streets and skyscrapers of steel and glass, separating us from the earth and each other. We watch people scurry off to work so we can create more structures of steel and glass. Alienated people building alienated cities. If our taste in art is now minimalism and blandness, perhaps that is because we have removed all traces of the magic that moved our ancestors and inspired them to reflect reality through heaven’s eyes in their art. If our art is empty, that is because we have emptied ourselves; it is simply an external representation of our inner alienation.
Plato insisted that the city was like the man—that is, the city was simply a projection of what was happening inside man on a larger scale. The city a macro version of man; man, a micro version of the city. Back in the days of the medievals like Boethius and Dante, whom we’re tempted to say lived in the dark ages, their monumental and beautiful buildings reflected the richly populated world they carried inside them. They were deeply connected to a heritage with symbols and meaning. Their roots gave them wings to soar upward.
But we’ve been severed from those roots by ourselves. We moved away from looking toward our ancestors and their works for wisdom and instead focused on pursuing “knowledge” as revealed to us by science. We learned to favor the new insights of science over the things that have been true forever. We put ourselves in this spiritual desert. This is why “[t]he task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”4
Yet it’s not just the task of the modern educator; it is also the task of the contemporary individual to take ownership of the restoration of our world. I am not saying we need to revive all parts of the past and discard all parts of the present; I am simply saying we must work to resurrect the worthy things of the past and turn back from the unworthy ways of modernity. It is a long and arduous project requiring much endurance and humble discernment.
But it is, in my view, the only way to claw ourselves out of our current crisis.
How, you might ask, are we to begin? It’s a good question and one I wrestle with on almost a daily basis. For now, I’ll offer three from the perspective of how things now appear to me: (1) reinsert yourself into a community—a small group, a gym, a book club—and contribute to the process of repairing our relationships with our fellow man, (2) read, study, and discuss the classics that your ancestors often knew by heart and reconnect with the wisdom of your heritage, and (3) pour yourself into something (a work of art, a business, education, politics) that can be your vehicle for bringing beauty and light into a world constantly threatened by a darkness that denies.
Jeremiah 6:16.
C.S. Lewis, The Necessity of Chivalry.
Proverbs 29:18.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 13-14.