Paradox I.

Edward Moore, S.T.L., PhD (c) 2014

No one is interested in beings who are perfectly happy.

~ Chateaubriand

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

~ Lord Byron

There is secular art, and there is religious art. In both, the most moving examples are those that depict extremes of suffering, of tragedy, even of death. Edgar All Poe remarked that there is no theme more fitting for poetry than the death of a beautiful woman. The tragic downfall of beauty is, indeed, the stuff of great poetry. Witness Milton's Paradise Lost, with the transformation of defiant, heroic Satan from a fearless (and many say sympathetic) general of a diabolical army into, finally -- a toad and a serpent. And in the works of Shakespeare, the self-destruction of Hamlet (which occurs long before the hit with the poisoned sword) and the cruelty suffered by doddering King Lear, from his own daughters, affects us far more profoundly than the (to me) largely obsolete comedies. In religious art, both literary and visual, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," by Jonathan Edwards, makes for provocative reading, regardless of one's faith or lack thereof. Gruenewald's painting of the Crucifixion, described by J-K Huysmans, in his novel La-Bas, as depicting a "God of the morgue," transfixes the eye of the modern observer in a way that the triumphant Adonis Christs of the late Middle Ages do not. And for a literary example from the relatively recent past, the twenty-first chapter of A Clockwork Orange, by the late Anthony Burgess, which provided a "happy ending" to the unrelieved violence and psychopathy of Alex, made the novel fall flat, and so was omitted from the first published editions, as well as from Kubrick's film.[1] Why the fascination with the unhappy ending, or at least with the imperfectly resolved ending?

(Matthias Gruenewald, The Crucifixion, 1525)

Aristotle, in his Poetics, explained that such works (he was writing specifically of tragedy) serve a cathartic role in our lives, permitting us to purge ourselves of our own violent or anti-social tendencies by watching them played out by others on the stage, in works so powerful it is easy to forget they are fiction. The famous -- or infamous -- sermon by Jonathan Edwards, however, was given in earnest, and caused such an outburst of negative reaction in his congregation that he was, eventually, sent off as a missionary to the Mohicans.[2] Religious art -- and I use that term very loosely, for the majority of religious art is intended to be instructional, certainly not 'art for art's sake' -- is not intended solely to purge us of sinful tendencies by depicting their horrific consequences (as in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, for example) but also to raise up the spiritual part of our intellect to spaces beyond the mundane, and unite us, in imagination, with certain aspects of divine reality that are not readily apparent in nature. Or, sometimes, to remind us that the erotic is never far from our thoughts, even at their most lofty.[3]

(Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere, 1445?)

In Christian history we find many equivocal attitudes towards art, ranging from ancient Iconoclasm (which sprang up once again among the more zealous of the so-called Reformers, and is by no means extinct today) to demands that a Christian art must depict only -- and with literal accuracy -- scenes taken directly from scripture (usually the New Testament). Allegory was sometimes frowned upon, in later times, but never banished entirely. Some of the more enlightened and humanistic Christians of recent times, like the Dominican friar Marie-Alain Couturier (1897-1954), did not even demand that a creator of Christian art be a Christian. He said that "all great art is spiritual since the genius of the artist lies in the depths, the secret inner being from whence faith also springs." An atheist in touch with both self and other (the latter meant in the expansive sense of all that one sees in the world: people, animals, trees and flowers, etc.) is more than capable of having a faith, albeit one that does not require a personal God -- nor even an impersonal, clockmaker God, as in Deism. Rather, the faith of the atheist is in the future, which is, as Keats said of joy, ever bidding us adieu.

This is not to say that the faith of the atheist is merely a faith in an eventual utter dissolution, in which the exhausted human mind may finally rest in oblivion. I believe that the future will someday arrive, as a new 'way of things,' so to speak ... And as Faulkner stated in his Nobel Prize speech, we human beings are not meant simply to endure -- for we all are capable of endurance, as anyone who has been sorely tried by sickness, addiction, loss of freedom, loss of love, knows all too well -- but we are meant to prevail. I am not sure over what, exactly. Perhaps over the limitations of our own intellect, morals, ethics ... the things we possess, partially tapped, that are capable of ushering in (metaphorically) the Kingdom of God, as Christ so often declared in the Gospels (see, for example, Luke 17:21: "behold, the kingdom of God is within you"). Faulkner called upon us not to chatter away pointlessly and heedlessly until the end of time, but to overcome the debilitating fear that makes us less than human -- indeed, the fear that makes us animalistic, the fear or anxiety discussed by Kierkegaard, which is purely subjective (not fear for the human race as a whole): the fear that our life amounts, in the end, to nothing.

Admittedly -- and it pains me to write this -- philosophy has little to offer as antidote to this existential despair. Jean-Paul Sartre had great difficulty founding an atheist existentialist ethic, although he did allude, in a footnote at the end of Part III of Being and Nothingness, to some sort of "radical conversion" that will bring about "deliverance and salvation," but he never discussed it. It is doubtful that he had Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" in mind, for we know he chose Marxist communism instead. Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, described philosophy as "the ongoing conversation of Western Civilization." But to what end? Somehow I am reminded here of Lord Dunsany's haunting vignette Charon, in which the last words of the last man to be rowed across Styx to the land of the dead are simply "I am the last." And then, Dunsany writes: "No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep."

Being-toward-death was one of Martin Heidegger's main themes, for he saw death as the most unique, personal potentiality of the human being, something no one else can suffer. The acceptance of death, argued Heidegger, frees us from its terror, relieves us of the anxiety attendant upon thoughts of our demise, and frees us up to become who and what we authentically are. I found this, upon my first reading of Heidegger (so many years ago), to be ridiculous (and still do); the fear of death is a product of our evolution, a guarantor of at least temporary survival in a hostile world. Being-for-others, as Christian existentialists and personalists both secular and religious, would have it, is certainly a more humane and, ultimately, a more dynamic and creative manner of engaging with the world. At the very least, it permits us to love. And we can only truly love that which always, however partially, eludes our grasp.

(Ingres, The Virgin Adoring the Host, 1862)

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all of these,

Because my love is come to me.

~ Christina Rossetti, A Birthday

Notes:

1. Examples may be multiplied, almost indefinitely. But to mention one more (one of my favorites): Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights -- What are we to make of those two bodies sharing a single soul, Heathcliff and Catherine?

2. While the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (preached July 8, 1741) was not directly responsible for his eventual banishment from his congregation, its nightmarish message surely set the tone for discontent. Barely six years later, after cohabitating with a slave-girl named "Venus," Edwards was finally sent off to the Mohicans, by the common consent of his flock.

3. See, for example, Fra Angelico's 'Noli Me Tangere' (1441), or the sublimely beautiful virgin Mary of Ingres. In the literary sphere, one will note the masturbation scene before a statue of the virgin in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.