Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck

This article is the first in a series of responses to Episode 2.1 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

Two months ago, I was almost beheaded in the mountains of Allegheny County. Now, in fairness to my would-be executioner, it was a stressful situation and I wasn’t entirely blameless. Road signs on the highway had just informed us that the right lane would be closed for work in a thousand feet, which was good news for me—I was in the left lane—and bad news for the guy on my right, the driver of a semi-truck transporting (and advertising) frozen poultry products. Presumably taking his cargo as a suggestion, the driver decided that it was time to play chicken: he shifted gears and attempted to speed past me, blowing by the posted forty mile an hour truck speed limit to reach a healthy seventy mph, which I matched. Our rivalry would come to a head on a bridge across the valley in front of us, where the lane closed.

Albert Bierstadt, Scene in the Tyrol

I was suddenly faced with a decision: do I hit the gas and betray the spirit of my 2016 Honda Civic—a car which my mother sold me on four years ago as a vehicle which would signal responsibility, safety, and prudence to my university colleagues and, she hastened to mention, perhaps even a future wife—or do I give way to the eighteen wheels of entropy on my right and be stuck behind him for the next several miles? I hit the brake and slowed down, just in time to narrowly escape the truck swerve into my lane and avoid the guillotine of his trailer, which was mere inches away from turning my sedan into a convertible. We safely began crossing the bridge.

As I stewed in my prudence (doing my best to not take the truck’s bright red declarations of “chicken” personally, safe in the sure knowledge that no date has ever been impressed with my responsible Honda), I looked to my left and saw, just for a moment, the Allegheny Valley open up into miles of lush, green, sun-bathed mountains. Trees as far as the eye can see dotted not only the smaller hills in the foreground but the two enormous mountains it stood between. It was beautiful. I can’t put it into words. But I knew, as this scene receded into my rearview, that what I had seen had been for me. (“For thus says the Lord, the creator of the heavens, who is God, the designer and maker of the earth, who established it, not creating it to be a waste, but designing it to be lived in:....I have not said to the descendants of Jacob, ‘look for me in an empty waste.’”)

I suspect I’m not alone in this sort of experience, that you’ve had a moment where you’ve caught a glimpse in nature of something so beautiful it’s wounding. And yet this beauty would not be unless you were there to see it. Even if one of the chicken cutlets being transported on that truck had resurrected and seen the same view of the mountains I saw, the beauty in the form of those mountains would have been completely unintelligible to that miraculous bird. Only human rationality, our capacity to be in relationship with the Logos, enables us to receive and understand the essence of nature, to respond to its be-ing we see unveiled before our eyes, and yet, even as it is revealed, it remains veiled—we understand immediately that it is not only incommensurable to whatever we are able to say about it but that its essence remains so much more than even what we’re able to see of it.

Knowing a thing truly cannot exhaust the truth of the thing itself, its mystery, the meaning of its being, which consists of and can only be responded to with love. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says in the Theo-Logic, “knowledge can be explained only by and for love...love is inseparable from truth” and “truth originates from love.” To see a thing well, to see it truly, is to wonder at it, to see that it is more than just a “mere fact,” but as something which, in the intelligibility of its appearance “gives the thing in itself its integrity and plenitude, its completed, meaningful essence, its radiant glory.” Truth and love’s connection is made manifest in the “particular attention” the seer gives the seen; if our sight corresponds to the reality of what we see—in other words, if we are actually taking the time to see the mountain as it is—“what was hidden is unveiled, and its possibilities are realized...but the idea was nonetheless signed and creatively stamped” by the seer, who calls the beloved seen into fullness of being through her loving gaze and attentiveness. To see a mountain well, to see it truly, is to see it how it actually is, with the eyes of love, and this brings that which you love more fully into being-what-it-is while also making you more fully who you are. In seeing a mountain’s beauty, you see not only the mountain itself but also that you are, in some way, made to love that mountain; no matter how much you look at it, you will never exhaust its beauty, as long as you look at it truly, with love.

What room is there for love in mountain modernity? Do the mountain moderns featured in the inaugural episode of Genealogies of Modernity believe that man is meant for the beauty of nature? Across the board, the answer is no. Petrarch concludes that it is absurd for human beings to spend so much time and energy climbing mountains but to not put even a fraction of that effort into what really matters, namely contemplating spiritual things. “How earnestly should we strive,” he concludes, “not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.” For Burckhardt, this makes Petrarch a less-accomplished modern. Though Burckhardt claims “the Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful,” Petrarch provides no account of “the view from the summit... not because the poet was insensible to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression was too overwhelming.” It is not until the sixteenth century, Burckhardt continues, that we see “fully painted in words the splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian sunset.” The measure of man’s relationship with beauty for Burckhardt is his ability to not be overwhelmed by it, to keep his head enough to put it into words. William Wordsworth argues that only a privileged, enlightened few have the requisite knowledge to appreciate natural beauty and are thus the first to climb mountains for aesthetic pleasure, in contrast to the uneducated poor, who have no use for such things. (Ironically, Petrarch critiques the ignorant, the poor in wisdom, precisely for climbing mountains only for the view when they should instead be contemplating spiritual heights—Petrarch would see Wordsworth as regressing to an old vice, not trailblazing a new aesthetic experience.) Even Leslie Stephens, who rightly points to the love of the natural beauty of mountains as bound up with some essential and noble part of human nature ultimately praises natural beauty by contrasting it unfavorably with the ugliness of human techne—the “detestable parallelograms” of English farming or the homogenized chessboard fields of the Mississippi Valley, which he claims “has given me occasional nightmares”—and all of which he believes will breed horrific overpopulation.

In all these cases, man and nature’s beauty are purely extrinsic from one another: man must either ignore beauty, or put it into words, or earn his access to it through education and status, or take great care not to touch it with his polluting stewardship or filthy progeny. Man and nature do not call each other into deeper being. Beyond a reaction of “gosh, wow,” nothing changes in the human heart when it encounters beauty. Certainly there is no sense that beauty is a common good, and that seeing beautiful things is not just a capacity of human nature but a necessity for its flourishing. For each of these figures, the notion of building a church overlooking an Alpine valley would be a distraction, either from what’s going on in the church (as in Petrarch’s view) or from the importance of one’s own gratification in capturing an aesthetic experience (as with Wordsworth and Burkhardt) or from nature itself, which I must attempt to experience while minimizing my own place in it as much as possible (as in Stephens’ estimation). Nature, man, and God are so separate for these mountain moderns, and this is the true radicality of their difference from the past. There is no room for the love of mountains here, no room for us to be made more perfect by that love, no room for the Logos whose glory yet shines forth, unveiling yet veiled, in the overflowing and gratuitous beauty of the creation he made for us to see—and love.

But whatever walls we try to build around it, no matter what we do to try and control it or reduce it to a comfort or turn it into a status symbol, beauty is relentless. It is coming for us. It will find us when we least expect it, when we pump the brakes, let go of our right-lane rivalries, look up from our lives, and see it, love it, are hurt by it, and lose our heads because of it.

John-Paul Heil is a Core Fellow at Mount St. Mary's University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago. His writing has appeared in TIME Magazine, Smithsonian, The Week, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the books editor for Dappled Things.