For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace. | Ecclesiastes 3:1–8
When I was in architecture school, I had a teacher who was a classicist, which simply means that he believed that we should follow the rules of classical architecture in design. As a young student, I thought that this was basically a stylistic decision: he liked how older buildings looked better than he liked new ones. I didn’t agree with that at all, because I loved art and modern architecture was new and exciting.
I remember voicing my opinion to an older art student, who warned me: that teacher can be very persuasive when he starts talking about order and responsibility. I was not worried about being swayed. I knew what I liked.
As I took more classes from this particular professor, the more I began to see that his viewpoint was not a style. He was not a classicist simply because he liked doric columns and balustrades. He was a classicist because he saw it as the language of appropriateness.
When I say appropriateness, I mean that modern architecture is about making a statement (which is what I wanted to do). Classical architecture is about how all the parts of the building and town work together to tell a story. There is a proper decor to put on a sacred building that you would not put on a secular one. There are design elements that separate the public and private portions of the home. It would also be improper for you to build something extravagant if it was above your role in society. Classical architecture had a lot of rules, but they were rules that created a standard that everyone could follow and organize themselves around. It helped the built environment from becoming a disconnected set of buildings that were all playing by their own standards.
I am not trying to convince you to become a classicist, I never really become one myself. I do appreciate what it is trying to do. It assumes that there is a right way to respond to your neighbor and be part of the community and it sets up a visual language to express it. Instead of words and sentences, there are forms and order.
In a sense, prudence is a similar idea. Rather than believing that each one of us is ‘on our own’ to ‘create reality’ and ‘blaze our own trails,’ prudence assumes that there is a right way to live. There is an order to the universe and specific ways that we should act in various situations. This creates a language for us, not of words or forms, but of actions. Prudence tells us that there are proper times to hate and love and fight and be at peace, and it helps us to find them. While we all want to write our own language, prudence tells us that it already exists and we are either in line with it, or we are not.
For this reason, I like to use the word appropriateness. While prudence sounds better, appropriateness reminds us that there is a right response; an appropriate way to act. It also reminds us that we can be inappropriate; that it is very possible for us to do the wrong thing in any given situation.
The other reason that I like this idea of appropriateness, is because I think we all understand that what is right and fitting changes based on the situation. While language gives us rules it does not remove variance: a sonnet is different from a set of directions, both of which use the same words. Being appropriate gives us a set of tools, but assures us that we will use different ones to solve different problems. This does not make everything subjective (they operate from the same standard), but it does require flexibility (and wisdom and discernment).
For the last number of months, we have been going through the book of Proverbs. This book of wisdom is set up to give us the language; to help us to understand integrity, hard work, honesty, service, and how to have a relationship with money. It does not give these to you in some dead form to be applied without thought. Instead, Proverbs provides us with the language of life. If we are willing to learn it, and apply it appropriately, God promises us that it will go well for us.