The Moral Force of Beauty (Special CIRCE Edition)

Check out our post over at the CiRCE Institute website!

And while you're there, check out the rest of their site. Good stuff all around.

Built to Behold

What does the experience of sight tell us about pornography? And what does any of that have to do with Christian eschatology and moral vision?

Find out here. Prepare to have your nose...er, mind blown.

Dante approaches the Beatific Vision

Literature is Good for You

Simone Weil is one tough cookie. Her writings are both luminous and infuriating, enlightening and neurotic. But this isn’t about the relative merit of her work. Weil’s influence is assured, regardless of where one comes down on the clarity or helpfulness of her ideas about God, suffering, prayer, and salvation. Her unique vocabulary makes her difficult to understand, and I am not going to comment on the contentious possibilities of her work, though many readers across multiple denominational fences have found her to be inspiring. 

What I am interested in is Weil’s response to literature and what this can tell us about the inherent power of great  literature. What Weil can help us see is that the contemporary academic approach to literature censors some of the best things great literature can do for us. Weil--a mystic, a philosopher, a non-Marxist leftist, a klutz who tried to live out the Gospel--read literature like The Iliad or George Herbert’s poems and was lifted to a higher vision than the secular realm can account for. Literature at its best can have an intrinsic power that is now more or less denied in the secular academy. 

“Literature” is now a subject conditioned by academic speculation, controlled in classroom contexts, and burdened with au courant critical theory. At least that is what it has become for most people who encounter literature in the context of current academic study. Weil’s encounter with the power of literature helps us see that the boundaries between literature and theology is thin and permeable, and this is a good thing. Her reading of Greek classics and British poetry, for instance, flies in the face of most contemporary literature professors, yet Weil has far more academic and even leftist credentials in her little finger than an entire English department faculty will ever have. And she says that literature can show us something of God. 

Take, for example, the metaphysical poet George Herbert. Weil, who suffered from excruciating migraine headaches, learned to recite Herbert’s poem “Love” in order to concentrate and to lessen the pain. The internalizing of Herbert’s God-enraptured poetry helped ease Weil into Christian faith by helping her discover the palpable love of God, and this is a use of literature scorned by or ignored by nearly all modern academia. 

 

Another example. Weil also thought that The Iliad was suffused with a vision of life comporting with the deepest insights of the Christian vision of human boundedness. The epic showed that all human beings are subject to “force,” the violent necessities of passion, genetics, psychology, and culture. We are trapped but we know we want to be free. We hate violence, fear death, and just want to go home, yet when the blood lust of war strikes us, we want to kill and subjugate. Both sides--Greek and Trojan--and all warriors--major, minor, heroic or cowardly--are caught up beyond self-control, and Force rules all, making all turn temporarily into hateful monsters. When Force has run its course, for a while anyway, everyone returns to sanity and hates what he has become, but he will succumb again in short order until something breaks. Weil’s interesting take on the poem might or might not be true, but the point here is that she found Great Literature to be something more than a subject to write essays for in an English class. The Iliad offers one of the profoundest views ever composed in artistic form of human captivity and the hunger for freedom from necessity. Weil claims that literature at its best achieves an almost religious quality of revelation. 

Katherine T. Brueck, in her  The Redemption of Tragedy: the Literary Vision of Simone Weil, uses Weil’s ideas about literature to question recent academic trends that turn away from considering how and why literature can speak to us of pressing human realities. The qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty are laughed at in many (most?) colleges and universities, but Brueck deploys Weil's experiences  to challenge the hegemonic discourse (and grading practices) of institutionalized secular education. This so far is a minority opinion, but that doesn't matter. It is the truth. 

Enjoying a Rotten Future

Gattaca is beautiful and horrible

A favorite trope for sci-fi movies is the Dystopian future. Movies as various as The Matrix, Elysium, Surrogates, Brazil, and Metropolis ( and Blade Runner!) build their narratives on a future that turns out to be unpleasant. Scientists do not become saviors; technology does not free us to become even more human. Regardless of the variations among all these movies (near future, distant future, awful future, slightly less awful future), these films and many, many more, operate mostly on the level of entertainment.  

In other words, the dystopic vision of the future is not a serious extrapolation of current trends. Instead, the cityscape or the building interior or the laboratory or the robots or the genetic freaks serve primarily to move the action forward. In some cases, such as a serious film like Blade Runner, the dystopian city serves as a metaphor that reflects deeper issues beyond just the excitement of the surface narrative. But this is rare, and even here the imagined city is not supposed to be a literal future. In most cases, the awful futuristic landscape almost never really helps us think about the real dehumanization of technology or ideology. The visuals of a trashed out environment, or errant technology, or tyrannical government or technological control nearly always bends toward entertainment. 

This is curious. It is something like most horror film. Terror induced by faux supernatural phenomena is purely for fun. Most people who watch movies about demons care nothing about reflecting on genuine supernatural realities. In such film, the intrusion of the demonic results in a simulation of terror that is supposed to be enjoyed for the duration of the viewing. In real life, if one were to encounter a genuinely demonic entity, the resulting terror would probably paralyze you. The buzz that comes from watching simulated demonic possession is understood by the viewer to be an aesthetic experience only. 

So too, the picture of a future that has gone horribly wrong serves little purpose other than a narrative jolt, just for the fun of it. Watching either version of Total Recall results in a mild buzz of enjoyment for a couple of hours. The futuristic images do not provoke any serious reflection on a potentially trashy future. So here is the irony: we are entertained by images of a depressing future. Rather than being depressed, we enjoy the temporarily giddy feeling of an awful future coming our way because we know the images are not serious. We see a vision of human debilitation, and we say, "that was so cool." 

What happens if we want to tell or see a serious, provocative, reflection-inducing narrative of a genuinely dystopian future? We are mostly out of luck, it seems. Only rarely in film do we encounter a story of a plausible future that we do not want. One example is Gattaca. This film portrays a future in which enhanced genetic engineering is plausibly portrayed. The resulting two-tiered society--those who can afford genetic medicine and those who cannot--is convincing, giving rise to a feeling of despair about real life and perhaps prompting one to think a little more about the ethics of genetic experimentation.  The movie is aesthetically compelling, but the movie is more than "just" entertainment, unlike, say, Elysium, which on the surface seems to be saying something serious about immigration and health care, but which in fact is totally bogus. Elysium uses a veneer of current event anxieties to tell what is really an action film story. Gattaca moves beyond the level of mere entertainment, and the dystopian trope becomes a vehicle for further reflection, even though we are entertained while watching the movie. 

Watching sci-fi films is theologically interesting because it says something about our spiritual dislocation. We enjoy simulations of horrible living conditions. We do not enjoy actual horrible living conditions. For a few hours we escape from our lives by imagining a future that would be too horrible to actually live in but which we "enjoy" living in through the surrogacy of actors--people who are not who they are.

Pretend slum from Elysium is fun to watch

Real slum from Africa is not fun to watch

Impossible Art

A mighty narrative problem: how do you tell the story of unfallen humanity?

By the nature of our sin distorted vision, we cannot imagine aright what it is like to be unfallen. We can try, of course, and some utopian literature, such as More’s Utopia or Voltaire’s El Dorado or Lewis’ Perelandra, get at it with varying degrees of success. The unavoidable problem, though, is that, according to the various mainstream Christian theologies, human beings now live with distorted imaginations, bent wills, errant loves, and muddied intellects. We cannot literally imagine Eden since our imaginations can see only through a glass darkly. But we urgently feel the need to imagine the unimaginable.

An example: it is nearly impossible for an adult to imagine the naked body of a member of the opposite sex in a purely unfallen way. Too many immediate distortions of our being get in the way from perfect control of the will. No matter how hard we might try artistically, we cannot imagine a naked man or woman with total purity. It is out of our control, due to sin (Sin, not sins). Yet we feel the pull toward purity, so various artistic attempts throughout time try to render this dignity of unfallen human nature in its primal beauty, but we never quite get it. Greek Classical statuary, for instance, idealizes human form beyond mere prurience. William Blake’s strange, beautiful forms also re-conceptualize the human body as sublimely beautiful.

Blake's Perfection of Form

And John Milton tried. Boy, did he try.

He tried to imagine the unfallen condition, a part of which would be lack of shame since nothing shameful has yet occurred, and not just with nekkid bods. He tried hard to configure a sense of unfallen sublimity through language, image, metaphor, syntax, allusion, and plot. And with some success, at least as near as one can in our fragmented, alienated condition. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, we see Adam and Eve resting and eating--without gluttony, without waste, in perfect harmony of appetite and love (and vegan!):

Under a tuft of shade that on a green

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side

They sat them down, and after no more toil

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell,

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours:

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;

Compliant nature feeds them. The couple harvest their meal from willing plants. The creek water is just right. Milton probably did not think they actually talked in Miltonic  verse, but the use of elaborate, ballet-like syntax points to perfect equipoise.

(Eve to Adam:)

“O thou for whom

And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh,

And without whom am to no end, my Guide

And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. “

She could have just said, “Yes, dear.” But the copiousness of rhetoric is both elegant and playful, a suitable literary ploy for showing (lost) human perfection.

The issue here is to use the resources of language and theology and history (the Classical tradition) to exemplify something noble, something beautiful, something beyond our ken--our pre-fall love and concordance between male and female.

But not just this.  Milton tries to capture how the circumambient realm of nature is oriented toward the king and queen of creation. Animals goof off for husband and wife in an Edenic, prelapsarian icanhazcheeseburger way. How does one imagine original innocence? Milton has the animals playing with one another instead of fleeing, competing with, or killing each other. Now, this might not literally have been the case, but my point is that we,  on the other side of the break, alienated from nature as well as from God and each other, create metaphors of harmony, unity, peace, joy, and love through such means as extrapolating from how our cats and dogs and parrots play with us. This unity among animals for the service of joy is one way to imagine the now unimaginable.

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League,

Alone as they. About them frisking playd

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den;

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd

His Lithe Proboscis . . .

Of course Milton fails, because we can no  longer see what we no longer are. All art must fail. But we can reach for it. We are driven to use art to regain something of what was lost. We earnestly imagine men and women loving each other with perfect equity and without lust. We imagine a fructifying nature where we belong, with no mosquitoes or indigestion. We can imagine playing with cats and dogs and elephants in an equilibrium of rightly measured honor (e.g., Narnia), whereas now we are often merely pathetic in our attempts to put clothing on our animals and in talking to them like children, treating real live humans around us with lesser dignity.

All art fails. All art must fail. This is part of the sadness of great beauty made by humans. And yet the failure of beautiful art can serve as a sign of redemption. We can imagine elephants being silly to entertain their beloved human companions in paradise and this imagined friendship, sometimes intermittently embodied in life today, gives us a picture of what we were, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Adam and Eve laugh at his lithe proboscis. He laughs with them.

(I have been waiting forever to use the word “circumambient.”)

Christmas Trees (and the beauty of God)

We shall behold him....

"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." Ps. 29:2b

A standard Hebrew word for "beauty" is "noam," which means "pleasing or delightful to the senses." It is the word David uses in Psalm 27:4 when he said that part of his great desire was to "behold the beauty of the Lord." It is a bold statement, not just in what it's asking but also in what it's implying, i.e., God's beauty is a sensory experience (and not just a mental abstraction). However, David did not use "noam" here in Psalm 29:2. He uses "hadarah" instead, which includes the idea of "noam" but carries it further. "Hadarah" means "ornamentation" or "decoration," and could be associated with one's apparel ("adornment"). It is similar to the Greek word "κοσμος" in that they both mean "order," a specific kind of order: an arranging or arrangement of beauties ("noam") that accentuates and maximizes their overall beauty.

The beauty of holiness.

Think of it like a Christmas tree, which we decorate ("hadarah") with beautiful things ("noam") in order to make an even more beautiful thing, a summation of beautiful parts. I can think of other examples, like jewelry, which is the taking of separate, individual jewels ("noam") and arranging them in a particular sequence ("hadarah") to create an even greater beauty. Another good example, as I mentioned earlier, would be clothing. The "beauty of holiness" is sometimes translated the "attire of holiness," a less poetic but not unfair reading. Individual pieces of clothing may be beautiful ("noam") with their own colors and patterns, but style (and occasionally fashion) comes from arranging ("hadarah") these pieces together into a single, stylish ensemble.

There are more examples I could give: a stained-glass window, the human body, and even the Bible itself are all examples of separate, individual beauties ("noam") brought together to make a beautiful arrangement ("hadarah"). The overall point, however, can be summarized in three startling thoughts: (1) God's beauty is for the senses; (2) beauty belongs to order, and the greater the order the greater the beauty; and (3) holiness is a kind of beauty, a "hadarah" beauty, an arranging of single beauties into a magnificent whole. Perhaps it is the greatest beauty of all, since it is the beauty that belongs to God, a beauty that our sense are capable of beholding and desire to behold.

Beauty in Music

http://www.covenantseminary.edu/resources/
(update, Aug 2013:  go to this link and do a search for John Hodges' name - there is a more recent set of lectures for Covenant Seminary as well on music and metaphor)

This is a link to a lecture John Hodges gave in 1996, on Beauty in music. Having recently endured a rock 'n roll worship service led by college students, I turn in gratitude to something that gives me relief from the amplified subjectivist piety I was subjected to. The service might have been meaningful in some way to the students, but it was not by any measure of reality a beautiful service of worship.