Scrap metal sells for $23.8 million.

Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty.

We have rejected both, and necessarily so, because the two are inseparable. When the Greeks first began to see the beauty in the world, they were making a powerful statement. They appreciated and loved the human form, poetic meter, musical scales, mathematics, etc.

They found an order in the universe, a reasonable understructure, that gave men hope. As Edith Hamilton correctly pointed out, we have only to look at the mythology the Greeks produced to understand just how radical their way of thinking was.

Man, they discovered, is the measure of all things, in that he is a representation of this great universe that was created for him and his sake. He is ordered, rational, beautiful, an object of love. The Greeks perceived beauty and found a way to God (an incomplete one, naturally, which was made whole by Revelation; the Greeks moved way from a terrible world where hideous and malevolent gods demanded human sacrifice for fair weather and good crops; Christ gave us a world wherea Loving God was willing to be sacrificed for our sake).

"To the people who told these stories all the universe was alive with the same kind of life they knew in themselves. They were individual persons, so they personified everything which had the obvious marks of life, everything which moved and changed...[W]hen they told of the coming of love and light the early storytellers were setting the scene for the appearance of mankind..."

We have begun to love the world's ugliness. Is that progress?