"At a certain stage in his evolution, man himself had been able to lay hold upon a higher order of things, which raised him above the level of the beasts that perish, and enabled him to see, at least in the distance, the shining towers of the City of God"
About this Quote
Noyes is selling transcendence with the confidence of a man who believes history has an upward slope. The sentence moves like a Victorian staircase: "at a certain stage" suggests progress as a natural sequence, evolution not just biological but moral. Then comes the clincher - "man himself had been able to lay hold upon a higher order of things" - a gripping metaphor that turns faith into an act of grasping, almost tactile, as if the spiritual world is there to be seized by the worthy.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to modern flattening. By drawing a hard line between "man" and "the beasts that perish", Noyes isn’t simply praising humanity; he’s trying to rescue it from reductionism, from the idea that we are only appetite, only survival, only matter. The phrase "see, at least in the distance" is doing a lot of work: it admits doubt, delay, and human limitation. We don’t live in the City of God; we glimpse it. That distance makes the vision feel earned rather than automatic, aspiration rather than possession.
Context matters: Noyes writes in an era where Darwin’s aftershocks are still cultural weather, where industrial modernity is accelerating, and where Christian poetry often functions as counter-programming to cynicism. The "shining towers" is deliberately medieval and luminous, an image of order and sanctuary against a world newly organized by machines, markets, and war. It works because it promises meaning without pretending we can fully reach it - a spiritual skyline that keeps the present from becoming the whole story.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to modern flattening. By drawing a hard line between "man" and "the beasts that perish", Noyes isn’t simply praising humanity; he’s trying to rescue it from reductionism, from the idea that we are only appetite, only survival, only matter. The phrase "see, at least in the distance" is doing a lot of work: it admits doubt, delay, and human limitation. We don’t live in the City of God; we glimpse it. That distance makes the vision feel earned rather than automatic, aspiration rather than possession.
Context matters: Noyes writes in an era where Darwin’s aftershocks are still cultural weather, where industrial modernity is accelerating, and where Christian poetry often functions as counter-programming to cynicism. The "shining towers" is deliberately medieval and luminous, an image of order and sanctuary against a world newly organized by machines, markets, and war. It works because it promises meaning without pretending we can fully reach it - a spiritual skyline that keeps the present from becoming the whole story.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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