Art, Spirituality

The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.

The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.

Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.

Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.

Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.