Anthony Esolen's Let Order Die

Excerpt from writer Anthony Esolen Let Order Die


When an ordinary person walks into a church whose most prominent features are the rivets in the joists overhead, whose Stations of the Cross are so small and so far away from the pews as to be specks, and whose sanctuary has been replaced by a clearing for getting to the back doors (I have seen many such churches), he’s apt to say, “I don’t like it, but maybe there’s something to it that I don’t understand.”

It doesn’t occur to him that anyone would want to build a church to stifle the sense of the holy. He can no more imagine that than he can imagine wishing that there were no God, and no meaning to human life.

When an ordinary person sees a lad and lass holding hands, it cheers him. He cannot imagine why anybody would not be cheered. When an ordinary person meets a young wife and her three children running and hollering across the playground, he smiles. He cannot imagine why anybody would wish there were fewer of those children, or none.

When an ordinary person sees someone saying grace at a restaurant, it embarrasses him, not because they’re saying grace, but because he forgot to. He cannot imagine anyone being offended by it. An ordinary person sees the cross of iron girders left in the destruction of the World Trade Center, and feels a shiver of awe. He cannot imagine why anyone would hate it, and want it destroyed.

The ordinary healthy person cannot imagine what it is to be sick. He cannot imagine wanting to destroy for the sake of destroying. He thinks he can reason with the destroyers.

Well, maybe so; it depends on the destroyer and the extent of the sickness. But ultimately that ordinary person will have to peer into the darkness, and admit that he is fighting against powers and principalities. “Evil be thou my good,” says Milton’s Satan. Let order die.

The entire essay at the Catholic thing.