The Problem of Old Age: Is it Maturity or Decadence?

By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

People nowadays are ashamed of old age. This sentiment is so deeply rooted that anything even remotely associated with it is disliked.

To the degree they can, people go so far as to avoid appearing mature. Everyone wants to look young. Quite a few try to look like teenagers.

There is nothing exaggerated about these affirmations. All one has to do is look around or even at oneself.

For example, women’s makeup often represents an effort not only to reduce their age, but to imitate -- to the degree the implacable rigor of nature permits -- a youthful, almost adolescent appearance. This is further accentuated by colors, types of clothing, attitudes, gestures, language, topics of conversation, laughter, and so many other things that further such youthful impressions.

While men did not use makeup in times past (save on their mustaches and foreheads), they are increasingly abandoning the clothing typical of maturity: the well-cut lines, discreet colors and sober appearance. These give way to the sporty look with its bright colors, and informal lines.

This can especially be seen at the beaches, where it is not unusual to see grave professors, renowned politicians and serious bankers dressed just like their grandchildren. They will be half-barefoot with wind-blown hair. They will be wearing canary yellow T-shirts and skimpy sky blue shorts putting on display hairy torsos, arms and legs. They will have a roguish smile on their old lips and maintain with great effort a false brightness in their tired eyes. There is an incredible overall effort to hide an age that pertinaciously shows, affirms and proclaims itself through all the pores in their bodies.

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Winston Churchill at the age of thirty four

Why all this effort to hide age? It is because the pagan man of our days lives for pleasure and the age par excellence for pleasure is youth. They do not understand that youth, as a certain author wrote, was not made for pleasure but for heroism.

There is another reason. While old age can represent a plenitude of the soul, it undeniably represents a decadence of the body. Since contemporary man is materialistic, he closes his eyes to everything spiritual. Thus, old age clearly has to horrify him.

However, this need not be the case. If a man throughout his life knows how to grow not only in experience, but in penetration of spirit, good sense, spiritual strength, or wisdom, his soul will acquire in old age a splendor and nobility that will shine through his face and be the true beauty of his lost years. His physique may bring to mind approaching death but in compensation his soul will have flashes of immortality.

A memorable example of this is Winston Churchill to whose intelligence, sparkling with lucidity, and to whose iron will, a great nation confided the most difficult of tasks, which is to resurrect a decadent empire.

An older Winston Churchill

In our first picture, he is thirty-four. He is unquestionably a striking, intelligent young man with a future. However, his gaze does not have the depth; his bearing does not have the certainty; and his countenance does not have the Herculean force that can be seen in our second photograph of Churchill.

His youth with all its freshness has certainly gone. However, the soul grew while age implacably marked the body. And that soul all by itself served as the column on which a whole empire rested.

This example represents -- even if only in the mere natural order -- the glory and beauty of growing old. How much more decisive these commentaries would be if we should wish to consider the supernatural side of this matter!