Cathedrals are impractical. They lack the functional flexibility of a store front sanctuary or a “multipurpose worship complex.” They aren’t built with a view towards pragmatism, but rather with a view towards permanence.

Primitivism seeks the infantile; it eschews growth, maturity, development. It prizes the Cornerstone but forgets that it is meant to be built upon. But a cathedral erected on the cornerstone is as natural as sumptuous fruit proceeding from a living root.

A desire for such lasting, tangible expressions of beauty is in keeping with a far older principle than primitivists would have us unearth. Ironically, their ressourcement project is too concerned with recent ideas.They fail to appreciate and appropriate the Hebrew Scriptures.

Moses—a true renaissance man—was convinced that a proper aesthetic sensibility was foundational to long term effectiveness.

Moreover, it was precisely on the basis of a certain aesthetic that he grounded his appeal for faithful perpetuity.

“Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it” (Ps. 90:17).

Modern Protestantism is largely enamored with the trite, the temporal, the trendy because it fails to recognize the radiance of the pillar of fire, or the brilliance which marks the fringes of the cloud over her head.

Her ministers are garbed in ripped up jeans and overwashed t-shirts. There is about them no semblance of Aaron’s mitre or dazzling breastplate.

“That’s Old Testament” says the primitivists, only fanatics go back that far.”

Modern Protestantism is aesthetically utilitarian and liturgically Marcionite.

But perhaps our greatest failure is that we are not even good pragmatists. We have yet to understand that the ancient preoccupation with the Beauty of God and His shining reflection in the world actually works.

So in a strange twist I’m suggesting that we take up a view that would satisfy both pragmatists and romanticists alike—let the Beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; let us revel in it, let our works reflect it, and let those works be established, world without end. Amen