Stephen wanted to comment on this article, which I linked here. So let’s discus it.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6228
My original email comments to the person that sent me this article are the first comment.
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Good essay. I agree with this sentiment.
“Religion aims at the perfection of the soul; art aims at the perfection of a work. We have no specifically Catholic art, Jones argued, any more than we have “a Catholic science of hydraulics, a Catholic vascular system, or a Catholic equilateral triangle.” W.H. Auden thought likewise: “There can no more be a ‘Christian’ art than there can be a Christian science or a Christian diet. There can only be a Christian spirit in which an artist, a scientist, works or does not work.””
However, I am also compelled to agree with Tolstoy’s apparently backward view about art because it seems to reflect truth better. 1) Truth IS ultimately spiritual. 2) Pleasure apart from this sacredness IS, in its essence, pagan. 3) Man IS deeply fallen.
Thus art should be subjected to deep personal scrutiny regarding its adherance to these truths. What is art that focuses on the glory of man, that removes the sacred symbolism from work, sexuality, and creation? Thus, in my opinion, good art should always be, in a word, moral.
Welsh Catholic poet David Jones did have…
…”it right when he suggested that “no integrated, widespread, religious art, properly so-called, can be looked for outside enormous changes in the character and orientation and nature of our civilization”—changes, I think, that would be deeply at odds with our commitment to liberal democracy. Jones agrees that it would be nice if “the best of man’s creative powers” were “at the direct service of the sanctuary.” But that can happen only “if the epoch itself is characterized by those qualities.””
Our culture cannot produce great art that is blatantly Christian in its message. Similarly, our culture cannot elect politicians that are blatanly Christian, although subtle Christian influences and lingo are still acceptable.
But we should still insist on calling things which exhibit moral purity, “good”, and things which obscure morality, “bad.” But this does not mean that every good thing must be blatantly Christian. Rather all goo things will aspire to moral excellance. A good business will be one that governs itself with moral excellence. Likewise for government. Good diet and good science are also bound by this rule. Over the years artists have left the rule of moral excellance in favor of humanistic relitivism. Without this “moral compass” beauty is seen as an end in of itself, separating it from the magnificince of God it was created to reflect. Thus…
“Considered as an end in itself, apart from God or being, beauty becomes a usurper, furnishing not a foretaste of beatitude but a humanly contrived substitute. “Art is dangerous,” as Iris Murdoch once put it, “chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it.”
This helps explain why Western thinking about art has tended to oscillate between adulation and deep suspicion. “Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man,” Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, and the battle runs deep.
When deploring the terrible state of the art world today—Tolstoy’s word perverted is not too strong—we often look back to the Renaissance as a golden age when art and religion were in harmony and all was right with the world. But for many traditional thinkers, the Renaissance was the start of the trouble. Thus Maritain charges that “the Renaissance was to drive the artist mad, and to make of him the most miserable of men . . . by revealing to him his own peculiar grandeur, and by letting loose on him the wild beast Beauty which Faith had kept enchanted and led after it, docile.””
There are many talented musicians recording evil songs. I’m sure there are some genuinely creative pornographers. Etc. Our culture has substituted creativity and talent for goodness. Good art should have both. But true goodness always reflects God. And while good art may not have to “be” Christian. I think good art, like good business, government, education, healthcare, and manual labor, will always “LOOK” Christian, to the observant eye. After all, what CAN be good that does not come from God?
I guess I’m pretty old fashioned in that way.