Anthony Esolen, at Touchstone, after a brief discussion of epic religious movies, writes:
At all events, sentimentality -- which is but a parody of deep feeling -- is deadening. Nowadays, in mass entertainment, it comes in the really noxious form of easy, "sentimental" cynicism, when a banal remark with the form of a sniggering comback is supposed to elicit the cheap thrill of superiority, an easy confirmation of despair and meaninglessness, as of rich kids slumming in the precincts of hell. Yet I think there are connections to be drawn between that kind of sentimentality and the cloying, smothering sort that characterizes bad religous art, including the bad religious music we've discussed here before.
…
[Billy] Wilder is sharp, incisive, dogged; he wants the truth. But bad religious art, like bad art generally, flees from the truth. Wilder may not see what you'd like him to see, but he strives to see, and to show you what he sees. If he ever did a Biblical epic -- and I don't think he did -- it would be nothing but odd and angular theological reflection, the drama of sinful man encountering the Holy One of Israel. Bad religious art, like political correctness, falls back upon the vague, the automatic, the thoughtless, the manipulated and predictable response. It pastes a happy face upon the pew and calls it joy. Gather us in, the nice and the naughty.
This reminds me of what Robertson Davies said about Charles Dickens:
The vitality of Dickens’ work, I suggest, lay not in his indignation over long-dead abuses; there was plenty of indignation in Victorian England. It was in his extraordinary perception and illumination of the life that lay about him, inanimate as well as animate. He was not nearly so aroused about the incompetence and dishonesty of the hospital nurses of his time as he was fascinated by the incompetence and dishonesty of Sairey Gamp and her partner Betsey Prigg; he did not care so much about the grinding slowness of the Court of Chancery as he cared about Miss Flyte, whom it had driven mad, and the Jarndyce family, whom it impoverished. When he looked at the Lord Chancellor seated in his court, wigged and gowned and attended by all the splendor of precedent and ritual, he was not a lawyer who had reached the top of his profession, but Old Krook who sat in his nearby junkshop surrounded, like the Lord Chancellor, by the dusty evidence of ruined households and broken lives.
It is not originality that is the province of the true artist. Rather, it is what Davies calls intuition: a sense of the hidden possibilities of things (words, colors, sounds, materials) and, especially, human beings. Does God reveal Himself through his artists? I'm in no position to give a final answer on that one, but it certainly seems as if, from time to time, He finds someone with this intuitive sense (Dante, Bach, Tolkein) and gives to him a special gift.
Dear readers (all three of you), what do you think?
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3 comments:
Does God reveal himself via art? I think the Psalms answer that :).
But in all seriousness, if an artist's job is to present reality to us in a unique perspective, then art can't help but have an ontology. Maybe the artists tap into "general" as opposed to "specific" revelation.
You can't read the Bible, much of which is structured as narrative and poetry, and declare that we serve a God that is disinterested in aesthetics. In fact, I don't think you can look at nature and say that. So it wouldn't surprise me if God used artists.
A syllogism (I miss logic, apparently)
God is the consummate source of all goodness.
The consummate source of all goodness is expressed in beauty.
God is expressed in beauty.
It may be that all art somehow implies an “ontology,” but we are left with the fact that most of the greatest artists were probably dismal metaphysicians. So how did they access theis ontology?
Returning to the Robertson Davies lecture:
“I once got myself into some trouble by saying that authors are not, as a rule, highly intelligent. People attacked me and contradicted me because they were certain that anyone who can create plots and characters must be a person of powerful intelligence. But I defend myself by saying that I do not take intellectuality, as it commonly appears in society, with entire seriousness. The power to argue strongly and what I may call the puzzle-solving and examination-passing cast of mind are often the possession of people of arid and limited perception and uneducated heart. In art, and in science as well, it is the power to see what other people do not see, to jump to conclusions and to be right, to see through a brick wall, in short to be creative, that counts. Intuition is an abused word, but if we define it as the power to apprehend things without the intervention of a reasoning or logical process, we are talking about something which is not intelligence in the accepted sense of the word.”
My question was meant to be more along the lines of “Do we know anything about how religious intuition works?”
Michael Polanyi had some insights into the nature of this "religious intuition"--into the nature of intuition in general, I think. He developed a concept called "tacit knowledge," which really is nothing more (thank you Davies) than "the ability to see through a brick wall." Polanyi argued that all knowledge is structured in this way, that every discipline--from theoretical physics to carpentry to poetry, even something like simple facial recognition--requires a blend of conceptual and intuitive understanding, a subtle unity of disparate parts, a creative impulse that leaps ahead of reasoning.
I think the first stage in understanding "religious inution" is to recognize that (as Davies seems to grasp) a similar intution lies at the heart of every discipline. Perhaps we ought not feel surprise at the pathos and worship we experience before La Pieta (we decided that Michaelangelo was not a believer, correct?)--if Polanyi was right, all of us "know more than we can tell."
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