q. i. f?

There are two things with which we [as Americans and as American Catholics] have a hard time: relationships, and seeing the whole thing. We’re very good at individual choices, which often separate us, and we’re very good at specializations, which also separate us. If there are lacunae in the culture that is ours, which we all have to love, it’s a lack of appreciation for relationships that you can’t un-choose and that are constitutive of your identity, and also this ability to see the whole thing, to see it as global, to get outside the national parameters that define how we look at everything, including the church.

I’m not somebody who believes that you simply dissolve Picasso or Manet or Rembrandt or Leonardo entirely, so that they become kind of a function of grain prices or stock exchange — they are what they are — but it is very important to understand the kind of humus, as it were, the kind of, the bed, the soil bed from which produce these, these, this particular work and that particular visual language. Equally — equally — it is impossible to do history, especially history of the twentieth and twenty-first century — but I don’t know, any history since the printed image or maybe any history since bibles began to be illuminated — without seeing images as as important, instrinsically, as text — images are text, text is images, you know.

It is not the purpose of cathedrals simply to make people feel small . . . but rather to help people understand that they are located within the vast orderly architecture of creation. We are indeed small, but a small part of something glorious, in which we can participate, find our place, find our purpose. Cathedrals are celebrations of all that God has made, and they embody in their stone and glass the history of God’s dealings with his world and people made in his image.

— Alan Jacobs, from his response in the current First Things to Alain de Botton’s “A Religion for Atheists”.

Jacobs’ answer is problematic, I think, on the whole. He demonstrates well enough the deep inadequacy of de Botton’s notions both of religion & history (not diminishing, though, his insights about basic human needs and the recurring conflicts of secularism). But Jacobs, in this reply to de Botton, is like de Botton in missing the essential counterpoint, the volatility at the heart of Christian religion, that undoes cathedrals as surely as it gives rise to them:

Baltimore-area architects Brennan+Company point today to a video item looking at the exterior of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty Presbyterian Church: two short films, with sort of excitable camera-work and a soundtrack of some music plus a lot of automotive traffic noise. It’s easy to get absorbed in, if (as I do) you like vivid urban scenery & sunlight on building-surfaces & so on.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing — say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason.