by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

“We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

During the opening years of the 20^th century, G.K. Chesterton predicted rough waters ahead for Western civilization. “People do not know what they are doing,” he writes, “because people do not know what they are undoing.”[1] For numerous and complex reasons, a kind of religion fatigue had fallen upon Europe, and an age was dawning in which people no longer looked to Christianity as an authority. Instead, they looked to Science. Religion had been put into the box of private opinion, perhaps as a means to control it, perhaps as a means to stop the numerous religious wars that had been destabilizing culture for centuries. Regardless of the reasons, and these as complex as human nature, a divide as wide and deep as that within Christendom itself began to develop in the culture at large. The largest of these was between the so-called impartial deliverances of science and the dogmas of religion, between Reason and Faith. A mechanistic view of the universe began to take hold of the human imagination, causing it to atrophy, while a “reductive, essentially skeptical” approach to knowledge seeped into every human endeavor outside of science, including religion.[2] “If it cannot be weighed and measured,” the new scientific authorities proclaimed, “it is not really there.”[3] New technologies improved the surface of our lives, but we were forgetting who we were. In the midst of this, Darwin’s theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest offered the basis of an alternative myth that aligned well with the fierce competition of the new industrial cities. Man was in a struggle to survive in a universe that could not care less if he did just as he struggled to make a living under a factory owner that hardly knew his name. In the end, Chesterton noted that in our busy age of Science, we had forgotten man’s essence. “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego,” he writes, “the self is more distant than any star.”[4] The fragmenting effect that all of this had on the human psyche cannot be underestimated, and we live with its effects today as we witness the destruction of some of society’s most vital and steadying institutions and ideals, like marriage and the sanctity of human life. We no longer have an integrated understanding of these, for we no longer value the imaginative faculty that could help us comprehend their essence. For the first time in history, we doubt even the existence of essences that are grounded in an immutable metaphysical reality. Instead, we shape and mold these crucial institutions to suit the moment, never asking why they were there in the first place.

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