StAR’s printed subtitle on every issue is “Reclaiming Culture.” Thank goodness it doesn’t read “Reclaiming Christian Culture.” I might never have considered opening the first issue—though I probably would have checked the table of contents, and then, having done that, I would have read it and eventually subscribed. But the insertion of the word “Christian” would have signaled something I wouldn’t have found inviting, not because I’m not Christian but because I am. I’m a bit wary of modern “Christian art”—especially films.
I found The Son of God an unappealing film for more reasons than one. And now, with Noah, Heaven is for Real, and God’s Not Dead all playing in my local stadium cinema at one time, I’ve been checking reviews primarily to see whether anyone has noticed. Sure enough, reviewers are talking about God and religion as a “hot themes” for movies.
Oh, dear. In fact, oh dear, oh dear. I’m so sorry to hear that—though I know that where a buck can be made, literally anything is exploitable. Indeed, the worst, most abominable kitsch is religious kitsch. And yet … I remember a young artistic colleague who was a lapsed Catholic. I asked how she lost her faith. She told me she spent a year in Mexico as an undergraduate and was appalled at the religious kitschiness of the Mexicans, particularly in their devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose image she found everywhere, and each one rendered gaudier (she said) than the last. Instantly I saw the flaw in her reasoning. The beauty of such simplicity of faith had escaped her entirely. While she made disdainful aesthetic judgments, she was blind to real beauty.
So, as we endure the banality of the current “hot theme” in films, we might consider this an occasion to discern where our faith is, what we really love and believe. Nothing so strips shallowness from authentic faith as popularity, fad and fashion and the triteness of sentimentality. The fad will pass soon enough, and we’ll be back to blood, gore, and raw sex as entertainment staples.
Personally, I find Commie and/or Nazi kitsch worse, a purely subjective reaction. Both of course subtly ape religious or pseudo-mystical models, in their appeal to the masses to displace God.
Your friend’s complaint is common among intellectuals; one might say it is practically their trademark. But on closer inspection, one will find that they have no taste, either, for Eastern icons, for even the most refined of the Baroque, for the Masses of Mozart or Beethoven. It is the scent of Faith that repels them, all said. They may even believe it when they lay it to a somewhat crude folk art context. Such is the power of self-delusion, as they attempt to launder themselves to become acceptable to reigning cultural and political guardians.
Yet God became man, a scandal to be sure. And the fact is, the vast majority of mankind will always lack sophistication in even the periods of highest culture. Sentimentality is a fact of life; great artists are wise enough to use it properly, not banish it. Appallingly, we are now seeing novels produced in America by talented writers fully swallowing Darwinistic determinism. And they are quite aesthetically sophisticated, and blessedly — if that is your criterion — unsentimental. The fittest do not survive, and that is only as it should be.
One of the hardest lessons to learn as an artist, particularly as an American that treasures liberty of expression, is that art — even fine art — is no more immune from falsity, even monstrosity, than any other human endeavor. Dante, who, loved and practiced the sweet new style in his youth, learned this the hard way. Read Commedia closely; the Francesca episode early sets the bar for what follows. It is also an integral opening of his own confession. As a late Catholic friend, a teacher and singer at Latin Masses in NYC, once said to us, of all the ways to God, the way of beauty is the rockiest.
Michael,
There are several sentences in your comment that bear quoting:
“It is the scent of Faith that repels them, all said.”
The Real Thing is terrifying, isn’t it?
also:
“…they attempt to launder themselves to become acceptable to reigning cultural and political guardians.”
That’s what’s wrong with modern fiction. It despises having a “point” (which is what gets “laundered” out) and it therefore becomes pointless–and therefore “acceptable.”
And another:
“…of all the ways to God, the way of beauty is the rockiest.”
To which I can only respond: Indeed!
Am currently reading a remarkable memoir of Pasternak by Alexander Gladkov, published in the early 60s in the UK. Dr. P’s thought of the day is that the serious danger to genuine art is not indifference & incomprehension, but bogus art (in his time & place “Soviet realism” . . . in ours perhaps the product of the “writers’ schools” & conferences). And he goes on that the triumph of the genuine over the bogus lies not just in “hard work” but in boldness of imagination.
So I guess Breadloaf (& its progeny), unlike Wonder Bread, ain’t gonna build strong bodies in 10 ways . . . . .
As a person who graduated from high school in 1970, I must admit this diagnosis by Dr. P, while it resonates with wisdom, yet strikes me funny . . . I suppose too much “do your thing” & “inner child” hangover applied to creativity in our own time & place (cf. “my child is an honors” student bumper stickers, currently burdening children of boomers) has long sent me in the opposite direction. I have always found those American writers who strongly emphasize writing as a craft to be learned and re-learned, or imbued with steady application of Protestant work ethic, vastly sounder and saner for many reasons. But ultimately, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Pasternak reminds us, can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again — much less the first time around. All you end up with, without more, is the deadness & even pointlessness you mention.
Of course, one fundamental issue is that we have lost God, as Solzhenitsyn emphasizes. So a lot of sweat & worry can yet result in nothing. Nevertheless, merely getting religion — even the true religion — is not going to transmit into any sort of genuinely Christian or Catholic art, either (the list of examples cut from this post, at this point, is long, no need to fan the internet flames).
I recently came across a devastating observation from Chesterton — the youth of his time, even if adopting Christianity, were yet stultified in their Christian growth because they had somehow lost the ability even to be good pagans. They did not even know, anymore by the 20s, what Aristotle, Plato & company knew.
Is this really just a condition of “modernity,” as is so often proposed? Or even of the so-called “Reformation” or the “Enlightenment?” I am not as sure as many others seem to be.
Your comments regarding writers conferences and such are reiterations, to a great extent, of some of my own remarks on this site a while back. I have learned to regard touted MFAs not as the credential publishers try to make them, but as warning signs that what lies between the pages is going to be themeless and labored technique, vacuity masked as “existential” and technicraft masked as “originality.”
I regret that I spent so many years–decades–under the assumption that other people’s opinions were the “correct” ones and my own were incorrect, simply by virtue of the personal possessive pronoun I attached to them. It was not until I began to write myself that I actually respected my own opinion.
We live in a time of pointlessness, relieved only by the comfort-blanket of humanistic love. It is all we have in a universe devoid of Logos. The attempt to make that humanistic love into a logos of sorts is what drives contemporary art. We live on Dover Beach. If critics want to call that “modernity,” okay.