Portrait of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Carbon Pencil on paper
By: William A. Nathans
Below is a quote from the review of My Battle Against Hitler by George Weigel, from the online journal First Things (which I received on the Hildebrang Project Facebook page):
"Here was a Hildebrand I’d never met before: a crisp, feisty writer, who wore his emotions on his literary sleeve as he fought against the emerging Hitler regime and the Catholic intellectuals who were seduced by it."-------------------------------------------------------------------
I keep saying (or thinking) that my trip to Steubenville, with all the obstacles I faced (here is an account of my trip to an email list), keeps unfolding in interesting, useful and encouraging ways as time goes by.
First, of course, is the invitation requesting my participation in the conference.
Then, I paid $30 for the book My Battle Against Hitler (it's an investment, I kept saying), which allowed me to participate in the online conference (which I've commented on here), and which allowed me to be a member of the Hildebrand Project, and also to make contact with a variety of people involved with the book, including book publishing.
Then, at some point in my presentation, or at least during the question and answer period, I made the connection between the nefarious world of the Nazis, intent on destroying the Judeo-Christian West, and our current Western-civilization-hating post-modern world. Here is my full presentation. Below, I've highlighted the parts where I say that we have been through this before.
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And it was while I was doing the Trillium piece that many things came together.As I presented my ideas at the conference, I also said:
Art needs to be local. We need to “see” what we’re representing. That art needs to have an aesthetic dimension - it has to be beautiful. And that there is a spiritual dimension to art, not always, not aggressively, but still subtly and present.
I realized that modern artists were discarding these elements, and creating works that people couldn’t identify with. That their purpose was not to create works with beauty, rooted in reality and with a transcendent element, but to recreate their own godless transcendence, their own reality, and they discarded beauty as something frivolous which distracted from their own serious messages (usually of doom and gloom). The less talented of them went on with post-modernism, which was a distorted assemblage of objects to produce their “ironic” commentary on the world around them.
And multicultural artists were throwing away the reality that surrounds us, in Canada, and were bringing their own reality for their far-away lands, imbued with a strange and alien aesthetics.
When I put these two together, multiculturalism and modernism/post-modernism, I realized what was at stake here was the art I know, which I have studied and participated in from a very young age ever since my fateful journey to that most beautiful city. It was Western art that was at stake, made vulnerable by these aggressive elements which were not at all shy about demanding what they wanted: “Hey, hey, Ho ho, Western Culture’s Gotta go.”
I didn’t clearly articulate this then, but soon after, I started a blog called Camera Lucida working on the words “Chamber of Light” where I (rather immodestly!) could shed some light on the world around me. And a few years later, after many postings, altercations with readers, and a maturity of my thoughts, I started my blog (about a year and a half ago) my blog Reclaiming Beauty.
I started the blog on January 1, 2013 (a new blog for a new year), and on February 5, 2013 I wrote at Camera Lucida:I have started a new project. It is bigger than a website.And on September 29, 2013, I posted at my Reclaiming Beauty blog my proposal for a book, but with a bigger vision of starting a Beauty Movement:
I hope to reclaim beauty from the avant-garde, nihilistic environment that surrounds us. Rather than fight it, I thought I would start a site that would ba study of beauty, a critique our our current beautiless, or anti-beauty, environment, as well as a place to give and receive practical guides and accounts on how to acquire and reclaim the beautiful. I hope to have a list of regular contributors to the site, who will eventually become a part of a bigger movement.My book Reclaiming Beauty aims to document the contribution that beauty has made toward our Western civilization, from the earliest records of God’s love of beauty, to a young child who sees beauty almost as soon as he is born. Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured because of beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by artists and other intellectual leaders.With Reclaiming Beauty, I aim to present my ideas, observations and analyses on beauty, and to provide a guide for recommendations on how to remove oneself from the nefarious influences of our beauty-rejecting world. This way, we can build a parallel world which will eventually form a growing movement of beauty-reclaiming individuals, who can start to shape a world where beauty is not minimized and rejected.
Reclaiming Beauty will show that the abandonment of beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually society. Modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.
But, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. Still, beauty is the business of the knowledgeable. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. That is the task of the experts.
Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured because of beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by artists and other intellectual leaders.
Reclaiming Beauty will show that the abandonment of beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually society. Modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.-------------------------------------------------------------------
We need to continue with the battle that Hildebrand thought he had completed. We need more Hildebrands. Each one of us needs to draw out that heroism, bravery, and innocence for such a cause.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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