In the beginning, God spoke His own point of view into creation, and called it Light. Then God spoke his own nature into existence: Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. Then God gave His light to men and women, and that’s why we all originally share God’s point of view towards the lovely and the unlovely, towards righteousness and unrighteousness, and towards the rational and the irrational.

But Light also creates Darkness: one cannot exist without the other. And they are in perpetual conflict: one cannot exist with the other. They are like the opposite poles of a magnet

Maintaining anything in existence requires effort: this effort is God’s Will. The effort is like that required to keep the opposite poles of a magnet apart, or like the wick of the candle, or the energy of the sun.

It is God’s Will alone that maintains the existence of Light, Beauty, Goodness and Truth against the weight of their opposites, but the light given to each of us has no such support. Our individual lights are like seeds, and we along with the culture in which we exist are the soil.

Our individual light can fail in different ways, and the ways in which it fails define the various spiritual pathologies: gluttony, wickedness, pride, and their permutations. Those in turn add their pollution to the cultural soil. The growing conditions for our seeds of light become more and more difficult, and the pathologies more and more commonplace.

And as it fades from populations of individuals, it fades from cultures. Thus, in the West, we found first the yielding of beauty to ugliness in so-called Modern and Postmodern Art, then the yielding of righteousness to unrighteousness in so-called Moral Relativism, and we are now experiencing the yielding of rationality to irrationality in various grievance movements: call it Truth Subjectivism.

Men and women without light themselves cannot provide it to their culture.

I wish there were good news.