Epiphanies are rare, thank goodness.

At least, they are for me, and I’m very glad of that. If I were one of those people who seem to live in a continual epiphanic state, I would worry about my health. Although our souls are formed in the divine image of God, our bodies—and therefore our sensations—are totally physical bits, very much the ordinary earth-stuff. Being suddenly filled with a bright light is much more likely to portend a retinal detachment than a celestial visit. But, barring stroke, or some sudden spasm amongst the synapses, it may be a real (metaphysical) epiphany. I suppose one way to know is to check and see how the experience left you.

Epiphany can channel sudden, often personal, insight, bringing some truth home with a thunderclap when no degree of exterior verbal persuasion would have had any sort of effect at all. Once, I suddenly discovered—quite literally in a flash—that all I’d been saying about someone in criticism (which I had believed to be merely “analytical”) was actually true of me. This kind of sudden awareness, though it can be painful sometimes, is a grace.

So this is what happened today—but a little context, first: I know we must always listen to anyone’s words with only one ear; the other ear should listen to the speaker himself—especially if that speaker would claim to be unbiased, for such a claim already reveals at least self-deception. To believe in that modernist myth of “atonality,” born of the desire for techno-mechanistic human perfectibility in order to dispense with God (who is alone objective truth), is to invite deception of ourselves as well as others. Come to think of it, however, isn’t that exactly what the modernist twentieth century was most noted for? Another thing, much less historically noticeable but a direct parallel nonetheless, might be the now-permanent estrangement between art and the public. Contemporary students are often surprised to learn that up until the twentieth century, poets actually made a living writing poetry. They did not live that now-caricatured life of elegantly impoverished dependence on government handouts (called “grants”) claiming to be misunderstood. Before the twentieth century, people actually read poetry without being forced by college syllabi; they even bought it. Of course, that was before atonal… Etc. Sorry. Forests often distract from the tree at hand.

So, all the foregoing explains why I was surprised today when a writer fell from a pedestal I’d put him on. The experience was quite a nasty one, really, rather like a shock. The surprise was not that he fell, however, but that I’d put him there. I read a passage and heard the sound of a pedestal cracking in that acid-silky tone of concealed envy, a passive-aggressive moral prissiness that was the more destructive for its denial of itself, its “atonal” presumption of disinterestedness. But as bad as it was, it was not the writer’s fall that constituted the epiphanic moment, but the pedestal; i.e., I do not fault the writer for his fall, but myself for the pedestal.

We should never do that (become tone-deaf) to anyone—least of all, perhaps, those whom we most want to trust, those in whom we most want to “believe.” It’s so unjust. But it’s an odd human perversity: we are skeptical; we disbelieve, suspect, doubt, the words of the only One who is worthy of our trust and put faith instead in the words of clay-footed mortals—whose claim to be atonal should be the very trumpet of deception. The divinization of humanity failed. You’d think we might have noticed after the bloodiest, most patently evil century of human history.