What is it that makes life worth living when the temporal aspects of life are taken care of? That is the realm of culture and the spirit. It has to do with the development of our minds, our moral growth, and our sense of belonging to a community.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” —Winston Churchill

The above quotation from the great statesman struck me recently, just after having read forecasts that a new Age of Imagination is on the horizon. Churchill’s words—spoken at an address at Harvard University in 1943—imply a contrast between the empires of the past, which were built on physical power and military conquest, and the “empires of the future,” which will be the fruit of imagination and intellect. One writer has commented that Churchill’s statement “holds tremendous significance as it encourages us to shift our focus from traditional notions of empire-building to the exploration and cultivation of our intellectual faculties.”

We stand at the summit of a great mountain of culture and civilization. The works of man in the past thousand-plus years have been tremendous, and scholarship and preservation have made them available, in such a way that the past and the present seem increasingly to coexist. And what now? What is left to do? Burrow ever more deeply into the past, finding more nooks and crannies and insights, uncovering hidden gems of art and thought and moral example?

I believe the answer is yes. Former ages were the time of cultural production, and now is the time for the great cultural harvest—the recapitulation of the entire past in anticipation of eternity.

Human lives throughout history have been devoted in large part to the practical business of sustaining life: heredity, material acquisition and economic growth, securing a stable political order, and in general providing for ourselves and the next generations. In more recent times, our society has been possessed by a go-getting spirit of materialism, success, and status. In his book Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet contrasted society’s need for lower-order satisfaction of material needs with the higher, spiritual needs that all human beings crave. Nisbet argued that in times when the satisfaction of basic, biological needs is most pressing, the higher needs are scarcely felt. All of that changes when those basic needs are met. Then the void at the center of the person is felt, and we start to yearn for the higher things.

What is it that makes life worth living when the temporal aspects of life are taken care of? That is the realm of culture and the spirit. It has to do with the development of our minds, our moral growth, and our sense of belonging to a community. As St. Paul urged, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

One of the passages in St. Paul’s letters that I find most evocative also comes from Romans. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning with labor pains together until now.” Creation is groaning because it is waiting for “the redemption of our bodies,” the defeat of evil in all its forms and the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. The term “culture” has come into the language in the past few centuries to denote all mankind’s positive works in the realms of art, thought, and religion. We enjoy, today, a more comprehensive consciousness of cultural history that people in any previous era. As well, cultural works of every kind are at our fingertips as never before in history (in another place, I argued that this “harvest” of culture is a sign that we are entering the final age of the world).

The essayist, as a man or woman of letters, can assist in the project of cultural revival by bringing works of the culture of the past back in the light. An academic scholar specializes in a particular area of knowledge; the lay essayist is, in the words of Joseph Epstein, an intellectual butterfly, flitting from flower to flower in the world of culture. Such omnivorousness doesn’t necessarily equal superficiality, or breadth without depth. In the right hands, it can serve to make different areas culture available to readers who are themselves intelligent laymen.

The life of the essayist is a rich if not always a simple one. Every month I devote a portion of resources for the purchase of cultural media—books, art, sheet and recorded music, video material. The idea is both to enrich my collection and to provide fodder to new explorations and writing. It is a rich life of culture, to be sure, but it is easy to drown in all the richness. Order and method are necessary, and a strict budgeting of time and money is just as important as openness to inspiration from all sides. Out of the seemingly endless (but actually finite) stream of culture, the essayist can fish out gems that might otherwise remain submerged and hold them up to the light.

It is the revival and in-depth appreciation of the past, I believe, that will allow us to escape the decadence of the present. For those who feel alienated from the present, it provides a way to live ironically within that present, connected to the past, and in imaginative expectation of God’s future. I speculate that it is part of God’s plan, assuming that there is an eschatological goal to which God is leading us. For we hold that our final goal is (in part) a contemplative vision, and this can be fostered through a pursuit of culture in the here and now.

But was Churchill right that traditional empires will be a thing of the past? Analyzing the geopolitical situation is outside of my métier. But if we know our eschatology, we know that the world situation is fated to escalate to a giant clash between good and evil, light and dark, humanity and inhumanity, or the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Antichrist. This battle can just as well take place on the level of ideas and worldviews as on literal battlefields. Think of the Psalms: they so often speak of God training for battle and winning the victory. For the psalmist this undoubtedly meant literal battles and victories that shed blood; but is the meaning of those psalms exhausted by the literal meaning? Certainly not. Clashes can be moral or cultural: between vulgarity and refinement, demagogy and nuanced thinking, or banality and beauty. Our enemies can be ideological adversaries, not rival kings. Perhaps that is part of what Churchill was getting at in his fascinating prediction.

We who are believers know how things will turn out: the light will overcome the darkness, and the new creation will spring up over the ruins of the old. But in the meantime, it’s crucial to declare our allegiance to goodness and light. And culture, the imagination, and the intellect are important instruments at our disposal. By arming ourselves with the knowledge of the riches of the past, we can expand our minds and build “empires” of culture and ideas, art and imagination—things that will not only see us into the future age but will go to make up the civilization of that future age, an age that will belong totally to God and in which we will share in that divine life.

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The featured image is a self-portrait (1894) by Władysław Podkowiński, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.