Saint Joseph’s Oratory towers over all Montréal. I had the luck to visit it again last summer with a friend that rarely visits the city, and it is a beautiful sight. From a distance, it doesn’t feel that big, but when you get up close and comfortable, you realize how humbling the structure is.

The tower, however, must be cursed cursed, because every time I visit it with someone, they ask how they made it. It’s like clockwork. The tower’s curse injects a degree of curiosity into men that otherwise never ponder architecture. Beautiful monuments built in cities are easy to forget because the concrete spires and the brutalist rectangles pile around and conceal them from view, but the Oratory is placed on a hill for everyone to see, creating that opportunity for curiosity which other buildings can’t provide anymore.

I didn’t have a solid answer for my friend, but I did tell him that dedication and a desire for more is half of the battle when it comes to making great things. He pressed me for more, and I told him that this is an Oratory inspired by Saint André Bessette, a man of God; generally, when someone does something in the name of God, they go farther than they would have if they only had a secular interest. This is why some of life’s best things were done in the name of God.

He was confused by my answer because he expected me to tell him about construction, maybe the kind of concrete they used, or some long-forgotten arcane knowledge of architecture, but was quick to tell me that God had nothing to do with it.

This is what you lost: God

Every time something great contrasts against something bad, whether it’s architecture, or art, or sometimes even people, it mostly resolves to a comparison of something inspired by God to something inspired by whatever else. We have the capacity to build faster, better, and larger than ever before, and yet we end up with tofu dreg architecture built by woefully underpaid labour that last a couple years and look like Legos. All of it drape a dark shadow over the rock solid monuments that, even though built centuries ago, will stand for centuries more, and look great. The building that’ll collapse into parts within the next decades was built godlessly, and the Christian basilica will stand for the next five centuries.

It extends further than architecture. The contemporary godlessness extends to all cardinal directions. Some of us have fond memories of large families, multi-generational houses, and a family business passed down to new generations. Today, these memories will only be found in picture books (hopefully digitized for the future!) and old movies (hopefully watched by the future!) and never formed again. Having children, which used to be a familial decision, is now an economic decision. The wallet, the stock market, and oil prices decide the birth of new souls. What used to be an ultimately Godly matter is no longer.

Art, too, suffers from godlessness. A practically divine institution has now been reduced to nothing more than a slowly disappearing career choice. It becomes more and more meaningless as art is increasingly described as a production, or a task, both things that we aim to optimize and streamline and expedite and quicken. Contemporary art is fast to forget, and replaced with whatever else is newer and even more contemporary. Contrariwise, art produced for God is immemorial, never forgotten; even when done for a pagan god, it remains loved and appreciated to this day through religious revivals and study.

What all those great things—architecture, art, and human connection—have lost, the one thing it all suffers from more than anything else, is the loss of God. God, whatever it may be to you, provides a timeless, immaterial, and transcendent direction to everything. It coerces you to seek greatness, to seek sacrifice and the pushing of boundaries. What once was great is no longer because without God, we can set the bar infinitely low. The Godly, divine criterion no longer applying, we can instead subject what we do and create to the human, un-divine criterion, which is subjective and self-generated.

Morality and law

Contemporary godlessness also extends into morality, and it is when morality is infected with godlessness that Law is birthed. The irreligious combats a useless fight when elucidating “subjective” morality. Morality is a set of laws we consider universal and above secular law, which is subjective and mutable. What we find inexorable and applying to all situations, regardless of what others may think, is morality. Everything else, we call law.

Law and morality, however, must be enforced. Law and morality are the societal equivalent to the thought experiment of “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. If there is nothing enforcing law or morality, then it doesn’t exist. Now, the law of the state is enforced by the police; the law of friends is enforced by the social cohesion of friends; the law of lovers is enforced by mutual trust and accountability; the law of the public—conduct around the presence of others—is enforced through shame and the fear of reprehension.

With the above explained, then how does morality get enforced, if it isn’t law? If morality is enforced by the police, then it is no longer morality, but simply the law of the state. If morality is enforced by your friends, then it is no longer morality, but simply conduct that your friends find (in)acceptable; law of friends. If morality is enforced by your lover, then it is no longer morality, but accountability and responsibility towards one another; law of lovers. Assigning a material, changing “enforcer” of your morality transforms your morality into subjective law, nothing else greater.

For morality to be morality, it needs an enforcer greater than anything else. It needs to be above the state, it needs to be above your friends, it needs to be above your lover, it needs to be above the public, and obviously, it must also be above you. It must transcend everything else in the world so that it remains constantly and unchangeably true, or else it is simply law, not morality. The only provider of something greater than anything else, the constant and immutable source of unchangeable truths, is God. God transformed His law into morality. “Subjective” morality is simply law and always will be.

Civilization

I do not feel pressed to see the disappearance of religion. Not only because I am Christian, but because the last two thousand years of human civilization, our greatest and best, have been built by religion and on the values that we are losing. Were it not for the impetus of God and pleasing Him, we would have had a quarter or less of the beautiful things we see today. If it wasn’t for the work of greatly religious men, we wouldn’t have had universities, hospitals, or much of the institutes of arts and high culture that today remain very respectable organizations contributing to our human heritage; we wouldn’t have either the scientific discoveries that furthered our secular understanding of the universe.

It is funny to see religion work so arduously for thousands of years, then seeing its discoveries reoriented and repossessed as tokens against religion. The Age of Enlightenment was the consequence of religion working its ass off for centuries, the culmination of a progressing curriculum furthered by highly religious teachers and doctors of the Church. At the end of it all, only when the Church has finally generated something so great for the purpose of reaching towards and pleasing God, that people recognized it and used it to off the Church, to step aside it.

They take the progress the Church has achieved, and declare it as not only their own, but also as the result of abandoning the Church. “Look at how faster and greater our world has gotten since we began opposing the Church!” is a sorry lie told by so-called thinkers who are not ready to admit that their two thousand years of progress was directed by the Church. The only reason why they’ve gotten this far and obtained a good base for further human developments is because of the Church. This truth is so uncomfortable that it is never taught, to the detriment of intellectual honesty worldwide.

The final revolution

Losing God allows you to partake in the final revolution of your life, which is the seeking of God. Life does not want you to have God. It wants you to reject it, to abandon it, and to argue against its existence. It will shove into your gullet the dagger of empiricism and rationality, pierce your stomach with the humanism of liberalism, and infatuate your brain with distracting desires. It wants you to seek fulfillment and the completion of your life in anything but God. If you pay attention, you will notice it everywhere, and it will become horrible to you, as it became horrible to me.

The world stands against the Church. This may sound funny because Christianity is the world’s largest religion, but I am not talking of the vantage point of acceptance. Yes, the world has tolerated the brand of the Church, and has allowed the Church some control over its affairs, but that was a concession done because of the sudden and undefeatable growth spurt. In truth, the world has always despised the Church and sought to “free” itself from it. It is an active, consistent, never-ending effort. The Church will make two steps forward, but the world will take a step back.

It hates its rules, the values it preaches, and the tolerance it imposes. It dislikes how the Church teaches that the human being is prone to evil, and what it does is mostly evil, instead of blindly stating that everyone and everything we do is good. It finds the concept of a cosmic justice and of a morality disgusting. It detests preservation and humility, and would rather destroy and expand and take everything. That is the world. A bad, uncaring place. It is made better by God, however.

When you’ve lost God, you must regain Him. You must go back to the Church. You must run back to the Church. You will find everything great again. You will find a new source of life. You have felt something was missing, and you will find it again. There’s nowhere else to look into but the church instituted by Jesus Christ. Architecture, art, the family, law, everything makes sense again and becomes good again under Jesus Christ. It is how you can become good too. It is the final revolution.