Thoughts of Others

Why not Thoughts of Me, you ask? Because Me doesn't feel very thoughtful at the moment. Also because Me should be eating lunch and practicing. But if you want to read something thoughtful, check out Custardly's reflections on the virtue of tolerance and the Retired Superhero's perspective on suffering in stories.

And just for good measure . . . take a look at "Modern Culture and Christian Renewal", an essay by a Dominican priest republished in the most recent issue of Image. Written about 40 years ago, it sounds as thought it could have been written yesterday, and I'm tempted to quote about half the essay. I'll limit myself to 2--no, make that 3--of my favorite paragraphs.

Among other things, Father Vann offers insights into how the creation of art is an essential part of man's nature and of his role in caring for creation:

To [man's] ontological status as midpoint between the worlds of matter and of spirit there corresponds a mediating function: to incarnate—to give material expression to—spiritual reality and to spiritualize or humanize material reality. It is not only animals, it is nature as a whole that has to be domesticated. Ars perfecit naturam.

Working these transformations requires reflection, stillness, receptivity. The world today is shadowed by political fears and troubles and by economic anxieties and stresses that tend to blind us to the deeper psychological crises through which mankind is passing. And perhaps the greatest of those crises can be expressed by saying that generally speaking the human psyche is forgetting to contemplate. Man must be contemplative before he can hope with success to be active; he must receive and assimilate reality before attempting to give it out again. The artists, of course, know this, the poets and painters and sculptors and musicians: the beauty they create is a beauty they have first received.

Later, he gives a clear and cogent explanation of the deep theological problems with the way many Christians approach art. (Now that I think of it, some of this probably ties in with the Superhero's thoughts. But I'll leave the connection-making to y'all, since it's almost time for my next class.)

Again and again a great book or film or painting will be denounced as immoral while the mawkish, the moronic, the aesthetically meretricious will be extolled because its message is regarded as edifying or at least safe. In the end those who are docile to this sort of guidance acquire an affinity not with what is good and real but what is bad and false, not with genuineness and integrity but with the debased and ignoble. And the element of falsity in particular needs to be stressed . . . the sentimentalized picture of religion in general is a distortion and falsification of the very stuff of religion. Grace builds on and in nature; it is no service to religion, and no part of prudence, to turn potentially mature human beings into morons, and we cannot claim to serve and worship truth if we acquiesce in or encourage the distortion or falsification of truth.