"...'The Bizarros' sing 'Ugliness Am Beauty'.." (Alan Moore, TOP TEN)
The name Tyson certainly does seem ill-omened. While I keep my doubts about Michael's conviction for rape - a woman of eighteen accepts an invitation to the private quarters of a well-known boxer at one in the morning and maybe expects to be playing checkers? - nobody can deny his remaining record as a thug on and off the ring. And it seems that another character with a similar name has taken a similar attitude to public polemic. This very public fool imagines, following the older idiot Richard Dawkins that bad manners and a bad attitude are winning tactics. Well, I hope that the previous sentence has shown that neither of them is an exclusive licensee in such things, and, what is more, that such things prove little. Believe me, I could insult Tyson and Dawkins imaginatively enough to make many of you snigger, and ferociously enough to make it hard tor either of them to answer in kind. Where invective is concerned, I am the thousand-pound gorilla. Then what? I may prove that I can insult them more imaginatively than they can insult me; but where does that get anyone?
Now, if you want evidence of anything, try and do something that enlarges and enriches human life. Can you? And if you can, where is the evidence? Before you open your mouths, prove yourself able to write a Missa Sollemnis, or even a Stille Nacht. The truth is that the superiority of Christianity in the field of aesthetic and cultural experience is so immense that the ugliness of Tyson's and Dawkins' aggression comes to feel, not so much like an individual defect, as like an innate necessity of their position; as if atheism were doomed to be the Unlovely Party. The sheer disconnect between any piece of atheistic prose (excluding Nietzsche, who was a case apart) and the simple experience - not even of Chartres Cathedral, or of the Divine Comedy, or of Bach's Mass in B - but of an ordinary gang of carolers singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" is so colossal as to make it certain that, as long as any men retain an instinct for beauty, Christianity will prevail.
Understand, I do not in the least concede to Dawkins or Tyson in any other field. When I call them fools and idiots, I mean exactly what I say; I mean that their teaching is stupid as well as rude, their doctrines brainless as well as well brutish. I am willing to assert the superiority of Catholic Christianity as a philosophy and at the highest levels of thought, in any field. But as the Apostle said, we live among a cloud of witnesses: and the first, strongest, most immediate, and one of the most abiding, is the sheer beauty that we Christians have created.
Now, if you want evidence of anything, try and do something that enlarges and enriches human life. Can you? And if you can, where is the evidence? Before you open your mouths, prove yourself able to write a Missa Sollemnis, or even a Stille Nacht. The truth is that the superiority of Christianity in the field of aesthetic and cultural experience is so immense that the ugliness of Tyson's and Dawkins' aggression comes to feel, not so much like an individual defect, as like an innate necessity of their position; as if atheism were doomed to be the Unlovely Party. The sheer disconnect between any piece of atheistic prose (excluding Nietzsche, who was a case apart) and the simple experience - not even of Chartres Cathedral, or of the Divine Comedy, or of Bach's Mass in B - but of an ordinary gang of carolers singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" is so colossal as to make it certain that, as long as any men retain an instinct for beauty, Christianity will prevail.
Understand, I do not in the least concede to Dawkins or Tyson in any other field. When I call them fools and idiots, I mean exactly what I say; I mean that their teaching is stupid as well as rude, their doctrines brainless as well as well brutish. I am willing to assert the superiority of Catholic Christianity as a philosophy and at the highest levels of thought, in any field. But as the Apostle said, we live among a cloud of witnesses: and the first, strongest, most immediate, and one of the most abiding, is the sheer beauty that we Christians have created.