"Modernity may be but the enshrinement...of these habits of subtraction"

What a magnificent piece.  Don't miss the romp through the geniuses of the Middle Ages and late Renaissance--I was tempted to excerpt that as well, but one can only do so much:

Modernity may be but the enshrinement and institutionalization of these habits of subtraction. I find it hard to read much modern fiction, not because it is difficult -- it is sometimes obscure, but rarely difficult -- but because I miss the hundred things going on in a poem by Spenser, or in a novel by someone as late as Dickens. I look at a modern building -- I am thinking of the downtown of Stamford, Connecticut. The city has been invaded by the aliens of high finance, who have built huge steel and glass towers, dwarfing a local neo-Gothic Irish church. Where is the true humanity to be found? The church humbles, and exalts; the steel and glass towers rise up in pride, and humiliate. Perhaps that is what most modern architecture is meant to do: to revel in sheer institutional power, in bigness for its own sake, in vastness, in featurelessness, in utter detachment from such lowly things as people, and their loves, and their history; and yet what is it all but streamlined, mechanical, and subtractive? John Ruskin wrote that every corner of a Gothic cathedral is devoted to play. You can't turn anywhere without seeing a googly-eyed gargoyle, or a bunch of lemons, or a woman plying her wool, or a saint, or a sinner. When, in the history of the world, have unnamed artisans by the thousands been freer to sculpt or paint as their hearts and minds led them?

And then I turn to philosophy and theology. I think of a current philosophy professor at Princeton, who says that the only things that count, morally, are pleasure and pain, and that therefore all carnivores should be eliminated. That, besides being absurd and ungrateful and blind to sheer beauty, is rather like a bare brick wall, no complexity, no great craftsmanship, no imagination, no real encounter with the world, no wonder at the fundamental goodness of being. How barren, how simplistic, how jejune, how drab and gray and petty, compared with a single page of Thomas Aquinas, he who was interested in everything, visible and invisible! Our Christian heritage is astonishingly rich; and when we turn away from it, we get blank walls; we get people whose only adverb is only. Then I ask, "Why would anyone wish to subtract from the grandeur of man?" The answer is straightforward enough. When a member of the illuminati, of the ruling class, says, "Man is only an animal," or whatever else he uses for the predicate nominative, depending upon the fashions of the day, what he really means is that you and I are only animals, and that therefore he, as he is possessed of such great intelligence, may do with us as he pleases. Some people vote for higher taxes on everyone, because their own incomes derive from tax revenues; so too some people "vote" to demean and demote mankind, because their power and prestige derive from the demotion. They add -- for themselves -- by subtracting.