By Anthony Esolen.

I am a restorationist.

When Donatello committed himself to learning from ancient Greek and Roman statuary, he had to dig things up. More than a millennium of dilapidation and sediment had left much of ancient Rome buried under the dirt. Say the word "Renaissance," and your mind may turn toward the glory of Venice upon the waters, or Michelangelo dreaming under the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Palestrina directing the polyphony of his papal choir. It might do as well to think of bookworms like Poggio Bracciolini delving into the forgotten shelves of monastic libraries, to discover lost works from the ancient world. It might do best of all to think of Donatello with a shovel.

Man forgets. It is, in part, a mercy that he does so. Each generation enjoys, by forgetfulness, a certain liberty from the previous. We need not repeat the stupidities of our fathers. We can come up with stupidities of our own. We can also, now and then, come up with some new thing that refreshes life, something that makes hard work a little easier, or sheds a brighter light on the life of the mind and the soul.

As long as we do not fall for some foolish ideology that prizes newness for its own sake, we can strike forth with confidence, trusting that if an innovation doesn't work, we can toss it. The most important things in our lives are not new. Human nature, the natural world, and good and evil do not change. God does not change.

The greatness of the Renaissance came not from rejecting medieval ways, though there was some of that, but from remembering and restoring what had been read and thought and done before those ways. It was not a radical break from the past.

Spenser considered Chaucer his leading light in English poetry. Tasso, as did all the great Italian poets, looked to Dante. But everyone drank from the fountains of the ancient world, pagan or Christian. They went behind the schoolmen to recover Augustine and the other Christian fathers. They went behind the medieval romances to read Plutarch's biographies of the illustrious men of Greece and Rome. Their fascination with that ancient world, their gratitude, their emulation, was never merely antiquarian or role-playing. They wanted to learn.

The Renaissance would never have occurred if the poets, artists, composers, architects, theologians, and statesmen of the time had said, "What's past is past and gone, so it's time for new things, because, after all, we know better than did our ignorant and dismal forebears." There is, in human history, no cultural renaissance without restoration. It is the restoration, the recovery of things forgotten or lost, and then their instauration in a fresh time, that brings the bud to full flower.

Man forgets. Sometimes, when I'm watching a film from ninety years ago and I hear birdsong, I can say, "That's a cardinal," or, "That's a mockingbird." The birds don't forget. A hundred years from now, the cardinals will be singing the same songs. That is both their glory and their limitation. But man does forget. In recompense, he can do more than remember. He can do what birds cannot do. He can set about remembering. He can recollect, which is an act of deliberation. He can restore.

So I say that in the Church it is high time for restoration.

We can begin almost anywhere. I've long called for restoring the original texts of hymns, repairing the editorial vandalism. We might also restore whole genres of hymns on the Christian life, particularly those that have to do with the Church as militant: "Christian, Dost Thou See Them?" Or hymns that are refreshingly frank about the fact that the world will not satisfy us: "My Spirit Longs for Thee." Or that remind us of the moment of death: "Abide with Me."

Imagine paintings all in yellow and white. Wouldn't we sicken of them, fast?

Of course there's more. I am struck, when I look into the "Treasury of Prayers" at the back of the old Saint Joseph Missal, by the beautiful and powerful prayers no...