Modernist Aesthetics Today (Williams's Grace & Necessity)

Aren't we post-modern?
What does modernist art theory have to offer Christian aesthetics today? That would seem to be Rowan Williams's question in his 2005 book Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, which I've started reading in preparation for the Conference on Christianity & Literature's "Hospitable Text" conference coming up on July 14-17. The book presents Williams's case for the relevance of the "neo-scholastic" Jacques Maritain to Christian thought and practice in the arts in the present.

Williams admits that a system-maker like Maritain presents "an unpromising beginning" to our postmodern sensitivities about ideology  and metaphysics. He counters not with a defense of Maritain but with the concrete, if anecdotal, evidence that artists he's shared his thoughts with have been largely sympathetic. This doesn't mean that there isn't an ideological critique to be made, but it does offer him some practical traction of not just theorizing but describing something that actual artists do.

He defines modernism (acceptably, I think) as "that approach to art that concentrates on the fabric, inner and outer, of the work made rather than any supposed external reference, representational or theoretical." This is really an apotheosis of art that takes Platonic idealism (the theory that art imitates an invisible, ideal reality) to an aesthetic extreme. On the one hand it's a powerful theory of art's independence from the particulars of context that might limit its cultural contributions to a specific historical moment. On the other hand it's the root of the formal criticism of theme, character, plot, meter, rhyme, etc., that drives so many students nuts.

"Post-"modernism, as far as the above, basically points out that art is entangled in its particular moments, cultures, power struggles, and even languages and discourses. To the extent that art reinscribes and reinforces class, gender, race, or other oppression, criticism has an ethical, social, and political purpose in demystifying and deconstructing it. Even when my students want to idealize art, they are still quite sensitive to issues of voice and identity that grow out of postmodern thinking.

The sin of the angels & other fallacies
Part of what Williams does in the first section of his first chapter, "Modernism and the Scholastic Revival," is to show that Maritain isn't a modernist in the purely formalist sense. Maritain does want to separate artistic production from the field of action in which one might level political and ethical critiques, but he also wants to avoid a Platonic idealism regarding art. The artwork is always, for Maritain, bound up in its particular moment - to think that the work links directly to an ideal reality is to commit the "sin of the angels."

Maritain also denies that art is about stimulating specific feelings - the fallacy of emotionalism, related to the affective fallacy - or about adequate expression or correspondence to the artist's "subjective integrity" - the fallacy of intellectualism. Nor, finally, is art about changing the world according to the artist's vision - the "magical fallacy."

Okay, so what is it? 
Art is about integrity to the specific material product. It is work because it requires shaping of some matter in a particular context, but it is art and not politics because its end is intrinsic to itself. Beauty itself seems to follow as a result or consequence rather than a goal. There's a radical emphasis on the work itself that, I think, might surprise many evangelicals:

Art is not about the will - though it unquestionably works on the will. In its actual execution, art does not require good dispositions of the will . . . , nor does it aim to produce good dispositions of the will or indeed any particular dispositions of the will. It does not aim at delight or the desire of the good. It seeks the good of this bit of work. And the artist as artist is not called on to love God or the world or humanity, but to love what he or she is doing.

Here's where the notion of common grace or general revelation may be useful, because Maritain's description of the artist's orientation to the work will be solipsistic or narcissistic unless we can appreciate (and love?) the goodness of Creation, that is, of the starting point, the stuff, of artistic production. Maritain considers art an intellectual praxis because the artist engages with the world, but in such a way that she suspends or displaces her will for the sake of her apperception. The artwork doesn't imitate the world but reshapes the particular data of the artist so as to reveal the world to us.

This means that art serves the purpose not of ornament or entertainment or even mere play but of supplementing, augmenting, amplifying the world. Its work is "rooted in the sense of an unfinishedness in 'ordinary' perception," a sense that our other modes of knowledge captured part but not all of our reality.

And so . . .
In my work with Relief I often see poetry and prose written to under Maritain's fallacies. Protestants, in particular, are idea oriented, concerned with right doctrine and belief, and so it makes sense that we would be tempted to write every story as a parable. But, at least in our common social and public lives, the depth of our thinking and the range of our emotions is distressingly shallow, and parables written to those realities are themselves often shallow - or just false.

Maybe Maritain is on to something. Maybe the artist serves God by serving the work first. We may have significant experiences or insights that are worth sharing, but it's rare that the authenticity of the experience can carry a whole poem, nor can a poorly-written poem do justice to the experience. But before we can even begin to appreciate this relationship between form and content, we actually need a cultural rediscovery of art. We tend to either reduce it to commercial entertainment or elevate it to an elite (read irrelevant) realm of struggling artists and wealthy buyers. We're happy, moreover, with our feel-good, consumable reality, guarded by the experts of science, economics, and politics (listen for the echo: Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry . . .).

What I take away from these initial thoughts on Maritain, then, is that we have to want more to get more, and we have to change our orientation from biding our time until we enter paradise to believing that the kingdom is here among us and available to us.