A Farewell (or A Eulogy)

Our culture is in the process of banishing two of the great handmaidens of civilization. I'm not thinking of truth and beauty, although the same could be truly said of them (and indeed they are the greatest, second only to the great triad of faith, hope, and love), but rather of another pair: nobility and wonder. In their place, we have chosen cynicism and flippancy - cheap and shriveled substitutes for the living glory we might have known.

When I use the word "nobility," I am not referring to aristocratic hierarchies or rich and landed persons, but to an "elevation of mind and exaltation of character," to high ideals and upright conduct. Nobility is what enables a person (and collectively, a society) to see innate worth rather than mere hedonistic or utilitarian value in every individual human being, to pursue true honor and seek after deeper meaning without forsaking dignity and courtesy, and to labor wholeheartedly for a cause because it is right and true and glorious and beautiful even if it has no earthly hope of success. It is a focus on deeper and higher things - an eternal perspective - that enables production rather than consumption and allows one to be content and at peace in any material circumstance. It is a quietness of the heart that leads to efficacious action rather than to indolence, because it is coupled with a great purpose: to know and will the good. In this quietness, filled and made great by the desire for the good, there is no room for petty complaints, for selfish worries, or for the trivial thoughts and actions that waste a life; there is no capacity for scoffing at or ridiculing anything that aspires to the good.

Wonder has no capacity for scoffing at all. Wonder looks at the world around her and delights in the beauty of it all, dances to its secret songs, falls back in awe at the marvels she beholds. She is like a child in her open curiosity and excitement, but with the maturity and wisdom to endure through great trials and see the glory behind this pain, the light beyond these dreary shadows. You might accuse of her of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses; she would retort that you must be looking at it through blackened ones. She asks why "the way things really are" must always be the way that holds the most hurt, that allows for the most sin, that conceals corruption and falsehood, when God is good and has made a good world. It is not that she ignores all that is bad and decaying and cruel - it is simply that these things fade away in the light of all the wondrous things she sees as well. Her eyes look into the eternal, and her heart is filled with a joy greater than all temporal ills, which no evil can destroy. While she may appear foolishly innocent and hopelessly naive, she has in reality found a solid rock beneath the shifting sands on which those around her have staked their souls, and she has seen the truth to which they have blinded their eyes. She sees the permanent unfading goodness against which the winds of trouble and sin beat in vain, and rejoices in that goodness rather than despairing at the winds.

How sharply nobility contrasts with the flippant and mocking attitude of our culture today! We would rather stand by and laugh (and what a deadened, joyless laughter it is, in the bitterness of our hearts) at the demise of our communities and families than hope and labor for their healing; we laugh too at those who do labor, and take pleasure in their failures, because then we can proudly proclaim how right we were about the fall of civilization. It is damning to say that we saw things fall apart and chose to do nothing, even if the fall were inevitable; but we see only how we might come out on the top of the pile at the end of that fall and then laugh in our self-assured complacency all the way to the bottom. Then, to make our consciences rest easy at the deceit, exploitation, filth, and pain that we rely upon to maintain our material comfort and fill our empty hearts, we make innocence a joke and ridicule those deluded enough to believe in beauty and to cling to truth. There is no quietness except the stillness of the morgue; no peace except the final rest of death.

And how complete is the separation between open-eyed, childlike wonder and our harsh, defensive cynicism! More than anything else, cynicism is the last defense of the terrified heart against despair: by assuming the worst in advance, with an attitude of knowing negativity, one can escape the pain of thwarted dreams and even take pride in one's ability to avoid the delusions of joy. After all, it is undeniable that things will go wrong in this life, and that people will disappoint us. Why should we trust anyone, when we have been hurt and seen other be hurt by betrayal of such trust? Why should we look for beauty in anything, when the startling filthy ugliness of sin has jumped out at us from so many seemingly beautiful people and places? How can we open our hearts again to beauty and light and truth when we have begun to doubt that they exist at all, when we have been crushed in the darkness and cruelty of this life? In our cynicism, we can feel that at least all this pain has made us wise enough to understand the darkness of the world. And we look down upon wonder and joy with cool and sneering disdain, because in the depths of our hearts we hate and despise them as cheats - even as we desperately crave what they pretend to give - but know how foolish it would be to reveal those true feelings. In wonder, every emotion is genuine and life, imbued with the light of truth, overflows with joy; in cynicism, no sincere feeling is revealed, and the heart, being covered with deceit, moulders in the dust of fear and the black rot of hate.

Nobility offers to take the pain and fight the evil, regardless of the consequences; its deepest desire is to do what is right, and not merely to do what is right but to pour itself out in the doing, and not solely to pour itself out in the doing, but to suffer all the pain of the doing in themselves. Nobility seeks to not to draw in, but to give out; not to obtain personal pleasure, but to do what is right that others might thus be uplifted:

"'If I were to be made a knight,' said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, 'I should insist on doing the vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.'
'That would be extremely presumptuous of you,' said Merlyn, 'and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.'
'I shouldn't mind.'
[...]
Merlyn wrung his hands. 'Well, anyway,' he said, 'suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?'
'I could ask,' said the Wart.
'You could ask,' repeated Merlyn.
He thrust the end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely." - T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Wonder sees the world and rejoices that it is. If we can mourn a loss or complain at the downward path some things are taking, we can with wonder celebrate those things that are not lost, and praise those things that rise upward. While we know that all is not well now, that there is pain and darkness and sin, we do not have to be absorbed by those negative things: we can wonder and delight in the things that are good in opposition to the evil and in the things that are good simply in being themselves:

"This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. [...] These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. [...] 
The wonder has a positive element of praise. [...] Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale." - G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy

We have dismissed King Arthur as a myth, turning him into a comic buffoon or an ignorant medieval warrior, so his nobility will not affront our flippancy. Chesterton we never knew - and what did he know about life, anyways, that deluded Christian author from a wealthy family in a privileged nation? God we have forgotten. And with Him we have forgotten how to conduct ourselves with the honor of a noble spirit and the joy of a wondering heart; we have forgotten how to be truly civilized, and so all things come apart.