Already in Baudelaire’s day—the industrial revolution was well under way—the balance between the ephemeral and eternal had tilted sharply toward the ephemeral, so much so that the idea of the eternal had become all but meaningless, and with it the idea that the task of art was to transform the ephemerally modern into the eternally beautiful. Slowly but surely, art became incapable of idealizing human beings, their majesty suggesting the immutable, their gravity the seriousness with which they took life. Today, modernity—the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent—has become the very substance of art, destabilizing it. It becomes harder and harder to take it seriously, to find the majesty in it. Without a sense of the eternal, there is no way it can avoid