I am back from a trip with my wife to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. We went to see two things. The first was to attend mass at the St. Lawrence Basilica in Asheville, NC. We did this Saturday night, and we did a tour of the church after the mass. The church was designed by one of the architects of the Biltmore, Rafael Guastavino, who is entombed in the Basilica.
The Biltmore Estate was a very different experience. As my wife put it, "You want to feel something here, but you can't." The reason you can't feel the same things at the Biltmore is because it may be impressive aesthetically it lacks any sense of the divine presence of Christ that you feel in the basilica. This lead to a discussion about personal indulgence.
The Biltmore is essentially a palace for self-centered hedonism. George Vanderbilt completed the estate in 1895, and the upkeep of the place depleted much of his inheritance. It is a product of the Gilded Age.
George Vanderbilt was a man of great taste and little else. He accomplished nothing except to build a tourist attraction to his own gratification. I can enjoy the home and gardens, but I marvel at how anyone could spend so much on himself and his family. Even today's billionaires do not build monuments like this, and their wealth eclipses anything Vanderbilt possessed.
So, I spent my weekend in a church and a gaudy American palace. The only place I want to revisit is the church. As for the Biltmore, the most beautiful part was outside the house in the gardens and the trees. The takeaway is that true beauty is found in God's house.
The thing I have been turning over in my head has to do with the concept of beauty. Atheists will tell you that evolution is what has produced our aesthetic sensibility. Catholics would disagree. The Catholics would tell you that our concepts of beauty are influenced by God. The true, the good, and the beautiful are inherently tied to God and cannot exist apart from Him. They are essentially facets of His greatness.
Nihilism is a rejection of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Nihilism maintains that there are no objective standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. This rejection is embodied in nihilistic art which is chaotic, disordered, repugnant, vile, and shocking.
I imagine Hell as being utter nihilism. The irony of nihilism is that it still reflects the Divine if only in a Bizarro Superman way.
Bizarro is simply a disordered reflection of Superman. Similarly, nihilism is a disordered reflection of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Nihilists attempt to deny God but only as a means of negation. Bizarro is what happens as one moves away from God, but we can never really get there. The only way to negate God entirely is to cease existence.
The reason the Biltmore is a step down from the church is because it was a step down from the glory of God to the glory of humanity. All of our endeavors are like this. We either reflect God, or we merely turn and reflect ourselves. We are either becoming saints or becoming monsters.
My own writing has been of the nihilistic variety. My fictional alter ego, Charles Noir, is pure nihilism in writing. The purpose of every story I ever wrote under that name was to disturb and nauseate the reader with a nightmare world of nihilistic horror. True horror is a world without God.
People don't see or recognize the godlessness in the culture all around them. I see it constantly. Everything from the nauseating to the banal is a rejection of God. I also see my hand in producing some of that garbage. It is my personal belief that God allowed me to sojourn in the palace of atheistic nihilism for a season to drink my fill of that filth, so I could turn away from it now much as St. Paul or St. Augustine turned from their errors but were made stronger in the process. God wastes nothing, and my decade of decadence will be turned to good.
The only thing nihilism can do is shock. This is all it can do. An artist will craft something ugly such as submerging a crucifix in urine or fashioning something disgusting from human excrement. The shock is a blow to our sensibilities. In time, those sensibilities are deadened. This is the extinguishing of the divine within us. People lose their consciences, their sense of beauty, and their ability to discern what is true from false. This is what sin is. It is the corruption of the good things within us. It is the tragedy of the Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
It doesn't take much to see that the Gollum and Bizarro are essentially the same character. The Gollum is every single one of us to a lesser or greater degree. The Gollum is what we all are under the corruption of sin. This corruption extends to all things as we become monsters in our lives and vocations.
Atheists wonder how I could turn back to God, but it should be obvious. I don't want the nightmare anymore. I could only see dimly then what I see clearly now, but the world is a very ugly place when you get rid of God. So, atheists try to sneak God back in such as in Alain de Botton's recent work, Religion for Atheists. It may surprise many of my readers, but I know atheists who attend church weekly. I could never understand this considering it akin to a E.coli food poisoning survivor going to Jack in the Box. But the hunger and desire for God remains no matter what. Every atheist is like this. Even Richard Dawkins pulls the same trick as he attempts to blow the dust off of pantheism and bring it back as "sexed up atheism." What a silly fool.
I have to go to bed now, so I can wake up and return to the grind. I will write more on this in the future. Stay tuned. . .
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