It’s a bit of a grim thought, death. Yet sometimes one cannot help but to ponder it, and ponder it in the strangest of circumstances. My circumstance was on a train, sitting quietly with friends as the sound of Italian chittered by our ears and cigarette smoke lingered by our noses. I was afraid of death, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to return to where I had just been—Assisi.
Saint Francis is by far my favorite saint, and so the opportunity to see his home, to pray at his tomb, and to share, in some small part, in the grace he received from God at that great place, was the pinnacle of this past summer. As I rode the train back to Siena, where I was staying, I worried that I might pass from this life before sharing in that holiness again and feared that I would never again see the beauty that is the Basilica di San Francesco.
Why not? The thought piqued my mind. Why would I not be able to see beautiful structures again after death? Will there not be a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, in a state of perfection? Must the beautiful places of this earth necessarily pass away?
The Bible tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. For different saints and philosophers, this has meant a number of different things. For J.R.R. Tolkien, Catholic author extraordinaire, it meant that we, like our Father, are creators: “We make still by the law in which we’re made,” he writes in the poem “Mythopoeia.” He also states that this is not a gift which has been lost of us by the Fall: “The right has not decayed.” This means that now, in our fallen state, not only can we make, we are still made to make.
Further, we are made to make in the same law, the same fashion, in which we were first made. Look again to the Bible, when God makes man, He looks back upon creation and finds it “very good.” This is the way in which we are made; it naturally follows that this is the method in which we are intended to make ourselves.
Of course, we fall short of this standard. Man is no longer in perfect grace, and so his ability to make things “very good” is impaired. Because of this, we make some terrible things, not only aesthetically but morally. As humans, we are responsible for the great horrors of nuclear and biological weaponry, for the creation of prisons and death camps, and for pervasively brutish and ugly arts and edifices. (This is not meant to equivocate morality and aesthetics, just to recognize that failure in both stems from the same place.) We create these because we have a capacity to create, but do so vilely in the same manner we use all other God-given gifts vilely.
Those objects and places of hideousness are not all that are made by the hand of man: we do, of course, create objects and places of great beauty, life, and holiness, one example being the Basilica di San Francesco. These creations, though not quite “very good” due to our own limitations as fallen human creatures, do share deeply in that form of beauty which is God’s creation. By sharing in that beauty these works of art demonstrate their fundamental purpose of expressing the beauty of God’s creation through the imperfect skills of man’s creation. In that way, they are made in the law in which we are made and are therefore good.
Perhaps I am wrong, but when I think of the old world passing away and a new one taking its place, I am not imagining the complete rejection of every aspect of creation, but merely the stripping away of that which is evil and the exalting of that which is good. Unless one is to claim that all human creations are intrinsically evil, it appears to me that at least some of our artifacts will remain to be exalted in the new earth.
Allow me one final argument in attempt to convince you of the permanence and perfection of beautiful human artifacts in the new creation: we have, by the grace of Scripture, received an image of One already sharing in perfected being, namely the Risen Christ. That image includes the very wounds made in that body by human beings, a fact we know thanks to Saint Thomas. If these wounds, a human creation which brought about so sublime a beauty with so evil an act, can be present, why cannot the Basilica di San Francesco be present in the new earth?
And so I will not fear failing to see all that is beautiful during this life; I have hope that I shall do so in the next, and shall witness it in its true perfection.
Evan Holguin is a junior in the Program of Liberal Studies. His preceding article is meant to be a statement of musing and hope, not a declaration or explanation of Catholic doctrine. If you have any questions, comments, counterarguments, or musings of your own, you can contact him at eholguin@nd.edu.
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