It was claimed that the past would cease to matter amid the restless rush of progress. This has not happened. Instead, the wonders of technology and research have made the past more prominent than ever before. In light of all this, I want to ask a simple question: Is this recapitulation, this summing up of the entire past and all of mankind’s accomplishments, a sign of the End Times?
We live in a time when most if not all of mankind’s past accomplishments in art, literature, and thought are readily available, whether through print or digital technology. Historians and archeologists have delved into humanity’s past, and even the prehistoric and pre-human past, and brought forth amazing discoveries. The archeologists have reconstructed ancient cities and ancient languages, and the historians have thrown light onto perplexing areas of history. People in all areas of culture have worked painstakingly to preserve and conserve the heritage of civilization.
The Renaissance was the first era in Western history interested in the careful study and curating of the past, in the form of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Renaissance set the stage for all “scientific” curating and revival of past culture. The thinkers and scholars of the Renaissance (known as humanists) looked at the past and saw three parts: an antique “golden age,” a dull middle period in which the sterling accomplishments of the ancients went into eclipse, and a modern age in which those accomplishments were now being recovered. (For the record, I happen to feel that the 12th through the 14th centuries—the era of Dante, Aquinas, and St. Francis, among other luminaries—can for all intents and purposes be considered the Early Renaissance, so there is no danger of misapplying the loaded term “Dark Ages” or of an anti-medieval bias.)
The Renaissance humanists did painstaking work of transcribing, translating, and finding correct versions of ancient Greek and Roman literary classics, of reconstructing pure and uncorrupted versions of the ancient languages themselves, and of recovering the achievements of ancient art and architecture. This became a legacy for subsequent Western culture to draw upon. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the continued growth of the scientific study of the past through archeology, philology, anthropology, textual criticism, and many more fields of endeavor.
But even in earlier times we can see a movement toward the collecting together of all knowledge under one “roof.” The famous library of Alexandria was the first attempt to gather everything known under the sun in one place. It reflected the wider view of knowledge of the Greek mind, in contrast to the more local, or parochial, perspective of previous cultures. In the Middle Ages, men of learning strove to recover the knowledge lost in the dissolution of the empire; the result was the university, an institution devoted to disseminating universal learning. This spirit of encyclopedic knowledge is reflected in the great summae, or summaries of religious doctrine, such as that of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the Enlightenment, the striving for universal knowledge gave birth to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, an attempt to disseminate and democratize all knowledge (or at least knowledge as the secular philosophes saw it). The invention of the printing press in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg was certainly a milestone in communication, allowing the dissemination of knowledge with an ease and on a more massive scale then ever before achieved.
The development of electronic and digital technology in more recent times has aided in disseminating the knowledge of the past on a gigantic, nearly unfathomable scale (though we should bear in mind that the ancient library of Alexandria already had some 400,000 volumes). And one of the effects of this is to bring almost all of the past forward to the present. In short, the past is truly present to a greater degree today than in any previous time in our history.
Although prophets have often foretold that technology would destroy culture, that has not happened. True, technology has created a lot of distractions that tend to crowd out serious culture from our attention. But technology has also brought about a massive preservation and dissemination of the culture of the past that is nothing short of astonishing. Books have not disappeared; they exist in greater numbers than ever before. The problem is not a lack of culture but an indiscriminate overproduction. We are swimming in a deluge of print, art, music, and other media.
Again, it was claimed that the past would cease to matter amid the restless rush of progress. This has not happened. Instead, the wonders of technology and research have made the past more prominent than ever before. With a flick of the wrist, I can listen to presidential inauguration speeches going back 100 years, watch videos of New York City in 1905, or learn biblical Greek. If anything, the past seems to overshadow the present. So much is the past constantly bursting into the present, that sometimes the present seems to have little meaning but as a repository for the past.
In light of all this, I want to ask a simple question: Is this recapitulation, this summing up of the entire past and all of mankind’s accomplishments, a sign of the End Times?
In brief, I think the answer to the question is yes, though I have no inside information on the matter. But I want to pause a bit and flesh this topic out because it is one that I’m not aware of anyone discussing. Everybody acknowledges the fact that a mountain of knowledge and culture have been collected together and instantly available. Most people praise this fact as a marvel, extolling the virtues of the Web, the astonishing mass of information it has brought forth, and the copious fruits of historical scholarship. It is common to hear that it is wonderful beyond belief that we should be able instantly to access the complete works of Plato, the complete movies of Buster Keaton, or (fill in the blank). But nobody seems interested in the possible eschatological significance of all this.
Now, I want to specify that there is a way of understanding the “end times” that is different from the popular sense that associates it solely with images of disaster and destruction. I hold that the New Testament preaches a gradual transformation of reality in the light of Christ; while a moral catastrophe (involving the temporary triumph of a spirit of antichrist) might be part of this, it will be but a prelude to the return of the Divine Logos, a purifying judgment and, in the words of Josef Pieper, the “transposition of time into eternity.” All this is to say that my sense of the “end” of all things is that of a goal or fulfillment rather than a termination. We do not know at present what the final end will be like, but we have Christ’s promise that the good wine will be saved for last. In other words, the “new heavens and new earth” will be greater and more glorious than we can imagine at present with our limited perspective. Eschatology can of course be looked at from any number of perspectives: moral, scientific, metaphysical, etc. Here I am trying to look at eschatology from a cultural point of view.
I am talking about our tendency, through technology and scholarship, to gather all knowledge and cultural achievement together and make the past manifest in the present. What does this mean? Merely that culture is in a sense timeless and eternal? Or something more? We believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition hold that history is going somewhere, that it is not merely an endless cycle. What role does culture play in this journey?
We should bear in mind that any thinking about eschatology has to be speculative, consisting of asking questions instead of arriving at definitive answers.
In the book of Revelation we read of a great Harvest wherein humanity is judged. Just like moral actions, we can think of culture as forming a harvest too, wherein the bad falls into oblivion and the good endures. We have an enormous harvest of culture from the past 2000-plus years of Western civilization, and the harvest now seems to be slowing down. But from it we may draw a banquet that could last to eternity.
And make no mistake, there will be culture in the Future Life: a culture that will be the sum total of all the best of past culture illuminated by new insights of the Beatific Vision. And the individual connoisseurship that is a feature of culture here and now (particularly in our fragmented times) will be joined to a true communion of souls in culture.
There is a certain advantage in the postmodern attitude when it comes to culture. With metanarratives questioned—including the triumph of progressive styles in the arts—we can be free to construct our own bodies of art and culture that reflect our ideals. The result is an ultramodern attitude, one that through a fixation on the transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty transcends the sterile “culture wars.” We shall arrive at a view that values, cherishes, appreciates, and preserves the past for what it is instead of seeing the past as something to be transcended and overcome.
In the meantime, we live in an environment in which all of human experience has been collated, cataloged, labeled, analyzed, and dissected, or is in the process of being so. Maybe this situation has a bright side. Are we living off our past cultural capital? Why not capitalize on this as well? That we have an immense back catalog of Western (and yes, non-Western) culture—art, literature, philosophy—to explore is undeniable; the immense creativity of the West in the past 500 years has ensured this. But now it’s time to slow down and reflect. Looking at the culture of the past with fresh eyes will yield a kaleidoscope of discovery and insight. As certain past periods recede from view, details get lost or forgotten. We can bring them back into focus through study and discussion. Witness the immense work done in such fields as biblical studies and intellectual and artistic history, in which scholars have retrieved fresh perspectives on past eras, exploding misconceptions and arriving at a truer view of the past. In the arts and philosophy and culture generally, it appears that innovation and novelty are used up; all that is left is consolidation. So let us consolidate; that in itself is a great project. It could simply be the case that culture has reached its endpoint—understood, again, not as destruction but fullness and completion.
Perhaps culture has a natural terminus or limitation, a plateau or leveling off—a point at which it stops developing, so that we can take stock of and appreciate the riches that exist. After all, we cannot in our lives possibly take in all the books that have been written, all the paintings that have been created, all the songs that have been sung.
The danger, when everything ever created is simultaneously present, is that nothing seems to have any particular significance. But, to draw a biblical analogy, perhaps things seemed this way in the first century, when Christ came in the midst of a great fullness of civilization. Perhaps then culture seemed overcomplex and confused. And in the midst of confusion light appeared. Ultimately, from the Christian perspective, only Christ can make sense of and provide coherence to culture.
Perhaps, in the context of culture, we will awaken one day to discover that God’s eternity has begun, the endless life in which new discoveries and wonders will unfold forever.
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The featured image, uploaded by Jar.ciurus, is a photograph of Collegium Novum of the Jagiellonian University in Kracow, Poland. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Poland license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
