Anudder thing

I'm not presenting these thoughts as anything groundbreaking. They serve mostly as mental placeholders in case I want to return to a train of thought down the road. That's also the main reason I don't publicize this arena much.

To continue. I think it was in Weaver's Visions of Order that he observes that good rhetoric can really only show up in a culture in which nearly everybody holds the same beliefs. Dialectic, that is, argumentation from first principles, is necessary when you are arguing with a philosophical opponent. Rhetoric, however, depends upon prior agreement on first principles. The orator appeals to commonly held standards to make his point. This allows him much greater latitude in his use of language--he can rely on metaphors, reductios, comparisons, and, especially, the power of connotations and allusions to influence his audience in subtle and subconscious ways.

The ability to use these mysterious powers of language is critical for poetry, drama, and fiction as well as rhetoric: in fact, we are probably better off seeing each branch of literature as a member of the larger category of rhetoric. It follows from this that literature is not really possible except where there is a common worldview. (Imagine the trouble Dante would have had with the Commedia if, first, he had to establish the existence of God, then lay the groundwork for his cosmology, then explain the particular import of each figure--he would be writing dialectics, not poetry, and very boring it would all be.)

It was just such a common worldview that was lost in the twentieth century, and the sense of alienation and utter emptiness that followed is responsible for all the fragmentation and despair of modern literature. Artists felt, rightly, that enduring communication was a basic impossibility in their new and broken world. It was a curious problem, therefore, that faced the few Christian artists of the twentieth century: how does one write for an audience that no longer holds to a Christian cosmology? Flannery O'Connor had one answer, though certainly not the only one: to write larger than life, to draw pictures of the truth that shock and horrify in order to gain attention. (Actually I'm still trying to puzzle out what I think of her solution.)

Now to take a slight turn. Protestants get a bad rap, especially from Catholics, for their (supposed) inability to turn out good art. The gist of the criticism seems to be that Protestantism gives an essentially rationalist and materialist account of creation, reducing the supernatural to a bare-bones mechanism for linking up God and Man in strictly soteriological terms. Robbed of a sense of the pervasive presence of God in the world, the created and the concrete can sustain no analogies to the Divine. Therefore metaphor and symbol are impossible, and no created thing can be, or represent, anything beyond its strictly denoted natural properties. Furthermore, Protestant theology elevates Word, which is intellectual, over Image, which is physical and concrete. Thus Protestants have no basis for a visual and physical perceptions of the world. There occurred, in short, what twentieth century writers remark almost incessantly upon, the "dissociation of sensibility"; an antithesis between intellect and emotions, soul and body, image and word, body and intellect, faith and reason, science and art, truth and beauty, goodness and desirability, ad infinitum. The single literary form Protestantism can claim credit for is the allegory, a poor attempt to bridge the chasm between spiritual truths and the natural world, which by its stiff parallelism only further emphasizes the basic incompatibility of the two.

Hopefully it goes without saying that this is a gross caricature. It has much more affinity with Francis Bacon than John Calvin, and even if Bacon considered himself a Protestant, this kind of naturalism has no place in genuine Protestant theology. Moreover, the record will not bear out the Catholic charge of a poor artistic record. I do not think I am alone in reckoning Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Austen, or Bach, or Handel, or Rembrandt as among the great artists of Christendom.

But the charge does begin to hold water in the English-speaking world by the 19th century or so, especially in America. It is a melancholy truth that theology in America has never been very rich (although piety certainly has), tending rather toward the rationalist, naturalist, subjective, sectarian, and pietist. A sorry record indeed. What art has arisen actually does tend toward this dissociation of sensibility. We define good art by its ability to replicate the world with precise, photographic realism (naturalism), or else by how well it conveys a "good moral" (art being nothing more than a vehicle to carry "spiritual" things, which are what really matter). Perhaps it was a curious synthesis of these two strains that emerged, philosophically in the pantheism of the Transcendentalists, or artistically in the paintings of the Hudson River School, which depicted sublime scenes of nature radiating unearthly light--also suspiciously pantheistic, and after all simply a less commercialized version of Thomas Kinkade.


...more later, if I don't lose my train of thought