A Note on the Name

Posted by Bryce

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not a blog about actual spelunking. It is, however, a blog about metaphorical spelunking, which will (we hope) prove to be nearly as exciting.

A cave it was in which the first extant instances of human artistic creation were exhibited. The giant gap between man and the lower animals was made manifest in art, “the signature of man.”

A cave it was which Socrates employed in his famous allegory concerning ignorance, knowledge, and the levels of reality. We are born in chains, he said, inhabiting a dark cave from which only a very few will ever escape. Those who escape will be the true philosophers, who are able to break free from their chains through dialectic, to look beyond the shadows and listen beyond the echoes so as to perceive the reality above the cave.

A cave it was in which Aeneas felt the delights of love and the temptation to abandon his solemn destiny. Reminded of his duty by a messenger from the gods, pious Aeneas forsook Dido and led his companions to the Italian peninsula, fulfilling his destiny as the great ancestor of the Romans.

A cave it was, functioning as a stable, in which God became a baby in a supreme act of divine humility. It is a paradox which boggles even the most acute of human minds. He would return to the cave some years later, this time bloody and lifeless. He would leave the cave in glory.

The cave, it is clear, has become a symbol with numerous resonances in our Western heritage. It is a haven for artistic expression, a starting point for philosophical enquiry, an expression of the tension between desire and duty, a site for divine birth, burial, and resurrection. But these resonances are waning in Western consciousness. There is little regard these days for the savoring of art, the dialectic of philosophy, the realization of duty, or the marvels of religion. Our awareness of the world has become flat with the ascendency of materialism, hedonism, utilitarianism, scientism, and the rest. The age of chivalry is gone. The world has become disenchanted.

The great Don Quixote of La Mancha defied the dawning age of disenchantment. He refused to see the windmills merely as windmills, the inns merely as inns, the sheep merely as sheep. He saw giants and castles and heroic soldiers in combat. His descent into the Cave of Montesinos represents a valiant quest for romance, beauty, and truth in its highest form.

We join Don Quixote in that quest. It is in this sense, primarily, that we may be called “quixotic.” To be sure, we do not aspire to see castles where there are only inns. We suspect, however, that some of the things ordinarily taken these days to be but ramshackle inns will turn out to be majestic castles in the end.