The catholicity of art

In Jamie Smith’s latest monthly newsletter—to which I recommend you subscribe—he has a reflection on the relationship between art and faith. In particular he has a bone to pick with those well-meaning Christian writers and artists whose approach to art is (in my words) variations on, or elevated versions of, the God’s Not Dead approach. They are “BCFC”: religious art by Christians and for Christians. The result is parochial, hokey, dull, blinkered, constricted, in a word, un-catholic. Go big or go home: don’t retreat to nostalgia or to enclaves of the sub-sub-sub-group; make art for the world. It’s God’s world, after all.

With all of this, given a certain interpretation, I think we should all agree—even if we allow, as Paul Griffiths rightly reminds us, that we ought not thereby to denigrate kitsch or its audience, though we don’t mistake it for high art. But there’s also an interpretation of this approach, and perhaps an intended meaning behind it, that I want to place a question mark next to.

Here’s the way of speaking I’m wondering about: Avoiding, rejecting, or downgrading art made for “the enclave,” for “the sub-culture,” for the collective, for the “us” by contradistinction to the “them.” Such art, on Smith’s view, doesn’t have the kosmos as its subject or audience. It’s concerned only with our little corner of it. And invariably those limits restrict to the point of strangulation. They lead to myopia of the worst and most boring kind.

It’s clear who and what Smith has in mind. But I don’t think his description quite matches his object. What he’s so repulsed by is nostalgia, sectarianism, rigidity, kitsch; art that is ornamental or didactic or self-validating (or all of the above). Hallmark art. Shallow and faux inspirational “content” that fails to live up to the venerable name of art. “Art,” therefore, whose meaning and purpose are written in shining neon letters on the first page, forestalling and alleviating the challenge—the adventure—of endless and untamed interpretation.

To that I say: Amen!

But is that best described as “sub-cultural” art by and for “the enclave”? I don’t think so. Why not? Because some of the best art we have, past and present, was and is made by and for the enclave. In fact, that’s what makes the most beautiful or moving art so endlessly compelling. Better, it’s what makes it so catholic: its very particularity. The universality of a great work of art is directly, not inversely, related to its specificity, its granularity of detail. And often as not, that granularity is a function of the artist’s parochial upbringing, identity, formation, and even initial audience. It’s only once that audience expands—in the lifetime of the artist or across the generations—that it becomes clear, perhaps even to the artist and his or her sub-group, that other people are interested in this odd little corner of the world. Sometimes such artists and groups are at a loss for words why anyone else would take an interest in them!

This goes for more recent artistic endeavors (just think of the spiritual, musical, literary, and artistic contributions of African Americans, for example, or of Catholic or Jewish American immigrants) as well as long-established canonical works. Contemporary people don’t in general care about long-dead Greeks and their wars, or about the petty rivalries of fourteenth century Italy, or about medieval Japanese ladies-in-waiting. But they (we) keep reading them, and inadvertently learning about all the background details necessary to understand them, because we believe, or we have come to see, that they continue to have something to say to us—different though we may be from them.

My only point is that the criterion of “not by and for an enclave; having the whole world as an imagined audience” does not well fit these, or plenty of other, examples of lasting, “catholic” art. The proper catholicity is located in the artifact’s mysterious capacity to speak to the world, not in its maker’s worldliness, whether real or aspirational. There is no question that Christians in American today do appear to lack that catholicity; that that lack is a feature, not a bug; that it hampers serious Christian art from getting off the ground or being appreciated by fellow Christians, much less “the world”; and that it is well worth rooting out the causes, whatever they may be.

But in a sense, I want to go further and suggest that the problem is we aren’t enclaved enough. That is to say, our sub-culture isn’t some magnificent thing worth limning in everlasting vernacular lines. It’s largely defensive in posture, lacking the courage of its convictions. It’s squirmy and unsure of itself, anxious of others’ judgments. Grand sub-cultural art is born not of insecurity but of the crystal clarity bestowed by a firm identity, deeply held beliefs, and an integrated dense network of fellow members of the selfsame community. For whatever reason (and we could enumerate many reasons), Christians in America do not fit this description. Their anxiety is revealed most pitiably in the shrill spreadsheet-hollowness of their proselytizing efforts, not to mention the pure commercial parasitism of their aesthetic products.

If I were formulating a critique of the state of “faith and art” in the contemporary American scene, that’s where I’d begin.

Questions for Jake Meador after reading his lovely new book

Jake Meador is one of my favorite writers to read today on the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. (Am I contractually obligated to call him a "young" writer? What are the rules here when you're not sure whether you're older than the young writer in question?) We've yet to meet, but he's been gracious to me over the past few years, posting and soliciting essays I've written for Mere Orthodoxy, which he edits.

I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.

But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.

1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.

2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?

3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?

4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?

5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?

6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.

7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.

8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)

9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?

That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.

The liturgical/praying animal in Paradise Lost

In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton has the angel Raphael recount to Adam the six days of creation, and this is what he says concerning humanity:

There wanted yet the master-work, the end
Of all yet done—a creature who, not prone
And brute as other creatures, but endued
With sanctity of reason, might erect
His stature, and upright with front serene
Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven,
But grateful to acknowledge whence his good
Descends; thither with heart, and voice, and eyes
Directed in devotion, to adore
And worship God Supreme, who made him chief
Of all his works.

What is striking about this account is the way in which the rationality ascribed to humanity, unique among all creatures, is specified and given content. Initially it seems quite in line with classical accounts: humans are distinct by virtue of their reason. But what sort of reason, and to what end?

According to Milton, men and women are rational inasmuch as, and so that, they "correspond with Heaven," thanking God for his manifold gifts and worshiping him as the source of all, including their own, being and goodness. Which is to say, human rationality is at once the condition and the means of prayer, which is reason's telos. What sets apart human beings from other animals is that they use words to talk to and about God in thanks and praise. As Robert Jenson has it, human beings are "praying animals." Or in Jamie Smith's words, homo sapiens is homo liturgicus.

Rationality, for Milton, as for Jenson and Smith, isn't the cold logic of unbiased inquiry or instrumental reason. It is the devotion of a heart on fire for the Creator, manifested in the speech of adoration and love, awe and thanksgiving. Rationality is correspondence with heaven.