A Reflection on the Human Spirit

Some years ago I wrote an autobiography, an act of pure hubris I admit but a very interesting exercise. In it I was talking about visiting the chapel of the monastery at Melk, Austria, one of the most breathtaking example of Rococo art and architecture there is anywhere. After I described that experience I wrote this meditation which I think is worth repeating here. I find it quite profound and powerful. Perhaps you will too.

This is perhaps a place for another meditative diversion. Back in the 1960s when I was living in Germany, during these years of 1964-65 that I'm describing and again in 1968-69, many American students of a liberal mindset objected mightily to the way the Europeans in previous centuries had spent such enormous amounts of money building extravagant churches, palaces, and other public buildings. I get that objection. The money spent on the gilding in the Melk monastery alone would have fed and housed a great many people for a very long time. I get that objection, but I don't share it. In the Bible, when the devil tempts Jesus to abuse his divine power by turning stones into bread only for his own use Jesus demurs, saying “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. Whether you, dear reader, embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition from which this line comes or not, I think you might concede that it speaks a profound human truth. Human life consists of more than the physical, the material. Human life involves the spiritual, however one understands the concept “spiritual.” You don't have to understand it in any religious sense to see that humans have an innate drive to express beauty, to express profound truth through art, to let their spirits soar in works of beauty that speak to the soul at a level beyond words. To strive toward something higher than mere physical existence, however that something is understood. Yes, buildings like Melk were intended in part to impress, to show off, to show how rich the people building them were; but they were intended for something greater and deeper than that too. They were intended to, and they do, express the soaring and the yearning of the human spirit. They express a faith in something beyond the mere human. They have the power to relieve and even to transform the mundane dreariness of the ordinary life of most people. If the human spirit ever stops soaring, stops creating, stops reaching beyond the ordinary and the material we will have lost a great deal of what it means to be human. Melk, Chartres, Notre Dame, Saint Peter’s, the churches of the Moscow Kremlin, and so many, many other great achievements of the human spirit are testaments to the greatness of humanity. They are expressions of hope and of faith. Human life would be impoverished without them and other great human cultural achievements from different cultures all over the world.