"The most magnificent edifices, most beautiful temples and monuments of worldly glory are repulsive to [the pious man] when they are built by the sweat and tears of suffering slaves, or erected through injustice and fraud” - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"The most magnificent edifices, most beautiful temples and monuments of worldly glory are repulsive to [the pious man] when they are built by the sweat and tears of suffering slaves, or erected through injustice and fraud” - Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972). Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, 26, 1951

When we stare at an edifice, do we think of its past? Not only a building, but also any 'edifice' may, I think, have some link to this thought. For example, we are an edifice. As a person, we are constructed out of natural materials, in an artificial manner, for us to live in. We stand up to shocks, require upkeep, have a vast and complicated system for ensuring energy flow, and so on. As a person, my 'edifice' is who I think I am, and who I appear to be. Don't we all put on a facade and appear to be something we are not, while what really holds up is our bones and core structures? When we take off a beautiful facade and find an ugly concrete wall behind it, then the edifice becomes less valuable to us. When we remove an ugly facade to find a beautiful hardwood floor, then the edifice is more valuable to us. The concrete and hardwood floors were always there, we just didn't notice them, because we were so intent on looking at the facade. Or, when we have a problem with the building, we can repair it in a quick and slapdash way, or we can do it properly - how much we want to do so is a matter of how long we expect to live there, to be the person we are, to find this or that room important to us. 

It remains to ask what impact the source of the edifice will have on the rest of its lifetime. If our self is built by suffering slaves, or fraud, and decide; what does that mean? I imagine that the suffering slaves are us, when we make ourselves up because we had to, or we were forced to. That is, that we had to turn out a certain way, think a certain way, believe a certain thing, because we were told to. It may not have made us happy, but it let us survive. It let us work, earn our keep - even though we had to. How much did we suffer through it? How much were we lied to? - This is perhaps a more dangerous question, because we can understand, but when we are deceived, we deceive ourselves, we lie to ourselves. 

We pretended that something didn't matter, or that we were OK, when we were not. 

Is a life like this repulsive, and if so, why? A life of forced labor, of deceit, of a person revealed to be unfree and unseeing? If we were happy, then maybe we would not mind living like this. If we knew the truth, then maybe we would find living like this, being this sort of person, to be acceptable. Were there no facades, then we could find beauty in that. Was everything a facade though, that we would find despicable, because we would have no idea what the real 'us' was, and that is a dangerous sort of life to live, because the whole edifice might come crashing down at any moment, and us none the wiser, until the very moment we were crushed. 

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