After many years of it sitting on one of my bookshelves, I finally decided to read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time. My only reason for this was my realization that I read almost exclusively works of fiction, and that it was my duty to branch out a little. Now, the book itself was somewhat enlightening and at times quite amusing, but it did not tell me that much that I did not already know. I must be careful here. Hawking mentions people, concepts, and theories that I had never heard of before, and there were some technical parts that I failed to understand even on a second or third reading. But despite that, I was stunned at how much I either already knew or almost intuitively understood. The reason for this is not that I am a trained scientist, since I have not taken a class in any science since high school, and nor is that I have a particularly sharp mind when it comes to math and science, since I sometimes struggle with fairly basic arithmetic. So I began to think about how it could possibly be the case that I understood so much of what Hawking was saying. I reached a tentative, and perhaps unsurprising, conclusion that it is because of how much high-level science trickles down to regular people through conversations, TV shows, news articles, and so on. Who today has not heard of black holes? I suspect most people can even say a thing or two about them, although it was only a few decades ago that the existence of black holes was even postulated. But consider how fewer and fewer people know why Easter is a holiday. I therefore reach the conclusion that, as a civilization, we are science oriented. We are scientifically minded. This is nothing new; many people have made this claim already. Even the non-scientists among us nevertheless think like scientists much of time. We prioritize rationality, we always look for proof, we only believe that which can be empirically verified, and we seek to manipulate nature in order for it to suit our desires.
Very different is the romantic mentality, which seeks not to understand and manipulate, but to appreciate and admire. The scientific mind seeks proof, the romantic mind seeks beauty. The scientific mind seeks to invent and improve, the romantic mind seeks to conform itself to reality.
The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is romantic in this sense. Whenever I listen to Vaughan Williams, which is almost daily, I am, if only for the briefest moment, transported as if in a dream to a better world, to a world which did in fact exist in the not-too-distant past, but which is now gone forever. When one listens to Vaughan Williams, one cannot, I am sure, fail to be moved very profoundly, and, I suspect, not be met with spontaneous visions, perhaps of a meadow, or a garden, or blissful scenes from better years. Try it yourself: listen to Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus and see if this does not happen to you. When I listen to this particular piece, I am not urged to do, build, improve, refine, test, advance, and develop. I merely (but it is no small thing!) bask in the potential glory of the world. I once read in a book about some aspect of economic history that the author claimed secretly to believe in the perfectibility of the human race, due in part to his childhood experiences of bliss. I cannot believe in this perfectibility. But I can believe in improvement, if only because I know things were once better.
We are living through a time of decay, where vileness is exalted among the children of men. Mass delusions and demonic ideologies are threatening to destroy whatever vestiges of God-honoring culture are left in our crumbling civilization. Science is making astonishing discoveries, but our ability to dream, to bask in beauty, and to cherish is disappearing. But it is precisely those abilities that make any sort of true Christianity possible. Christianity is not compatible with scientism, with a world that seeks always to break barriers and transgress order. Christianity is only possible if we first recognize what the world is and ought to be, and not what it can become by our science.