The Gargoyle and the Steeple

David Dark, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons:

[Malcolm] Muggeridge is contending that all human achievement, this side of the Second Coming, is laughable, and he does mean all — Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B Minor Mass, the work of Mother Theresa, whatever we can propose for the status of dignified and noble and true. [William F.] Buckley, as we might guess, is scandalized. How can this be?

Muggeridge: “Let’s think of the steeple and gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting, as it were, its own inadequacy — attempting something utterly impossible — to climb up to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurb behavior of men on earth, and these two things both built into this building to the glory of God.”

But what is he laughing at? Evil? Pomposity?

“He’s laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposteous gap — disparity — between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so till the end fo time you see.”

Till the end of time. This is where Buckley, like a great many of us, can hardly help but hesitate. But the alternative, a worldview that allows for some finalized perfectability of human nature in the here and now (the steeple without the gargoyle, Babel, what have you), has proven hopelessly off, even dangerous, and we all know it. What Muggeridge so profoundly understands and what Buckley has such trouble seeing… is that the state of affairs we’ve found ourselves in is really quite liberating. No one, as it turns out, has managed to plateau. No one has successfully dotted ever “i” and crossed every “t”. And there’s a glory in this imperfection. Mother Theresa knows she’s simply doing what she can, and this, according to Muggeridge, is precisely what makes her such a beautiful person.