Dear Reader,

These lines were written under the conviction that beauty is not a human invention but a reflection of the One who made all things “very good,” and that the face of Christ is the true Image of the invisible God. The Cross stands as both the measure of love and the judgment of every lesser standard.

Where, then, are the artists in the line of Michelangelo—those who still love to paint, to draw, and to sculpt the sacred? Where are the hands that once labored for years over a single ceiling or a single figure because they believed the visible could bear witness to the Word made flesh? The ideologies named in the poem did more than prefer new styles. They taught many to distrust proportion, skill, and the long attention that once let sacred images speak of Christ. In doing so they turned from the very gifts by which the Church has, for centuries, sought to make the invisible visible.

If this poem calls to mind any work that still points beyond itself to Christ, or any face that refuses to be reduced to theory, then it has served its small purpose. The true Image remains. He is not waiting for our permission.

—The Poet

They came with manifestos, sharp as knives,
Progress’s prophets, liberalism’s scribes,
And Marx’s heirs who measured every line
By class and creed instead of the divine.

They called the marble cold, the oil too bright,
The sonnet’s form a cage that blocked the light.
True proportion was a bourgeois lie,
And harmony a tool to pacify.

They smashed the icons, stripped the altar bare,
Declared the painted Word a snare,
And taught that flesh made God was mythic claim—
Too particular, too bound by name.
The face of Christ became a problem:
Too human, too untheorized, too solemn.

They prized the broken, elevated pain,
Declared the beautiful a tool of gain.
A body that once bore the weight of sin
And rose was now a symbol to begin
Again in pure abstraction—form erased
Lest anyone should meet a living face.

Yet in the quiet rooms the old works stayed,
Unmoved by theory, still by light arrayed.
The hand that carved the thorn-crowned brow
Still speaks what every manifesto disavows.
The eye that sought proportion, line, and grace
Finds in the Cross the measure of true space.

They tried to bury truth beneath the new,
But beauty answers only what is true.
The Word made flesh does not require their vote.
He stands where every theory falls remote—
The Image of the Father, once despised,
Still drawing every eye that looks and sees.