Upon Reflection

For once we saw through a glass, darkly; but now, not at all.

✟

These insights will, perhaps, be least surprising to the bespectacled among us, for they alone have cultivated the habit of seeing the world through non-reflective glass. That is, they see through their glasses, rather than the mere reflections of their pupils; which, like most of the reflections of our pupils nowadays, would be entirely pointless.

But things were not always so. When glass was at its least reflective, it was, paradoxically, at its most reflective. I refer, of course, to stained glass windows. They do not show us our own reflections, as modern glass does. Rather, through them, we see the lives of the saints and the deeds of heroes. Through them, we see beyond ourselves to reality itself. This, perhaps, is what Wilde meant by “nature imitates art”; or, more precisely, we see in these windows the art than our nature is meant to imitate.

In this sense, I have always fancied that art is higher than nature, for in the art of the stained glass window, we see nature perfected; that is, we see the Perfect Man, and men more perfect than we. “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere,” (Chesterton). Or, “art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame,” (Chesterton). It is in the strict terseness of stained Gothic windows that their true beauty consists, just as in duty our true freedom subsists.

And it is in this sense that the eyes are said to be the windows of the soul, for windows must be seen through in order to be of any value. Incidentally, this is the meaning of that wonderful French phrase, “la vie en rose,” for to focus upon the grandeur depicted in these stained glass windows is to see what is really rosy and good in the world, to the exclusion of the bad. Thus, these windows are translucent where our modern mirrors are opaque: they show only what is good and block what is not. This is the exact opposite of modern glass, which shows us only ourselves — in short, all that is really wrong with the world.

Modern politics consist in the pure assertion of one’s own beliefs and preferences, rather than truly pursuing the highest human goods, such as truth, justice, and virtue, for which the politics of old always sought. That is, modern politics consists chiefly in puffed-up moralizing, which in fact only shows us our immorality. This, since it shows us only ourselves, and we are nothing if not immoral.

Since, according to Davila, the definition of modern is that which seeks to liberate us from the human condition, there is nothing more modern than mirrors, for mirrors show us only ourselves, and we have sought to liberate ourselves from the human condition. This, in short, is the problem of modern politics. It is a game of smoke and mirrors that purports to show us the higher plane of human existence, or utopia; this plane, however, is best visible in the pane of a stained glass window.