Restoring Participation (Williams's Grace and Necessity)

Participation in Western thought is usually a bad thing. Anthropologically, participation is the stuff of witch doctors and medicine men, the belief that one can be simultaneously oneself and inhabit the spirit or body of a crocodile or lion or river. Philosophically, it's a kind of group-think or convention that Socrates tried to break free from by asking what words meant. In the first sense participation is contrary to the integrity of the self; in the second sense it is the opposite of reflection, i.e., of philosophy.

In the latter half of his first essay in Grace & Necessity, Rowan Williams briefly discusses Jacques Maritain's use of participation in its theological sense of the "illuminating intellect."The idea seems to be an extension or implication of being made in the image of God. We are equipped with this illuminating intellect, which is "the reflection of God's formative mental activity within our own," a kind of "participatory awareness," below the surface of consciousness (preconscious, if anything; certainly not subconscious), "that resonates with the patterns of God's action in the created world."

What's this have to do with art?
The implication for art is, I think, clear enough. It suggests the artist attempts to listen to or perceive how, in Maritain's language, "things are not only what they are," how they "give more than they have." This presumes God's continuing activity in Creation to which our minds respond, and it explains in part why art always has a transgressive nature. Art in this sense reveals the "active intelligible life of the object" by denying its merely physical and perceptual boundaries, taking it up and rearranging, reorienting it to display it to us as a fresh thing (maybe even a thing always in need of freshening, thus of art).

This also clarifies how art is not, for Maritain, a product of the will or intention of the artist but still an act of intelligence. Art begins not with an idea, concept, or will but a sense, an intuition, or even perhaps a desire to know a thing intimately. It proceeds with an attention to the work itself (recall previous post) rather than to some purpose for the work, and so remains free, at least intrinsically, from moral judgments.

Williams shows that Maritain does at last recognize that art and morality begin to converge with respect to the world the work offers to us. We almost inevitably ask "whether a world laid before us by an artist is desirable for the kind of creatures we know ourselves to be." Theoretically, then, the work may be aesthetically beautiful but morally repulsive.

Or, more likely, morally problematic or stained. I think of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a stunning film that disturbs and horrifies without the sensationalism and pornographic violence usually associated with the genre. It raises tough questions about the reality of evil and our modern attempts to explain or counsel it away, and it is just painfully beautiful visually. But ultimately von Trier's world is characterized more by darkness than light, held in the grip of an evil that will not be repressed and that offers no solution save desperate tears. It's for this reason that I really don't recommend the film to people - it's too dark, too hopeless, and it wants to burden the viewer with its own despair. Pan's Labyrinth might fit this category for me, too.

One last thing about participation
Williams doesn't explain how participation in Maritain isn't the bad thing philosophy thinks it is, but we might turn to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite for help (sort of - it's a dense book, so whatever help it provides comes only after some serious work). In brief, Hart argues that the traditional understanding of the Trinity is of true difference, meaning God himself is a relation to himself. That is, there is no higher unity of the Trinity, which would make the persons of the Trinity lesser gods or mere aspects of God. In other words, in Christian theology, there is "difference at the origin," and difference does not collapse or resolve into some unity, nor does it represent some violence done to an originary unity but remains a harmony and a peace.

Basically, Hart refutes postmodernism's anxiety of participation by rejecting not only the modern thought it critiques but the heart of Western metaphysics itself, the theory of the One and the Many. The revelation of the Trinity, Hart argues, is that unity is itself diverse, contains differences that do not dissolve into one another. Creation is diverse, multiplex, abundant because it reflects, finitely, the infinite diversity and abundance of God's own nature.

Thus, if we sacrifice the concept of the autonomous self and the violence of either unity or division, participation becomes a joining in the dance, the invitation of love itself.

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.

An Occasional Poem: Cultivation

On the Books & Culture blog, Marcus Goodyear challenged us to write more poetry, suggesting a specific theme of cultivation. Here's my effort.

Garden

O how proud she was, my wife,

of the tiny salad she grew

in our friends’ backyard.

My two-year old, not inclined to greens,

pinched delicately one leaf burnishing purple

and remembered how he pulled it from dark earth,

then fed it through his lips and beamed.

“I eat it!” he declared in a way we should maybe use

of the body broken. 

                                          The leaves were bitter on the tongue

but  light and windy still

with the memory of fresh air.

We’re getting closer, we’re looking for,

the seeping Godness deep down things.

Deep down in things, bless it, that once were a gift

beyond price. We forget. 

                                                    We forget. Take and

                                                                                             Eat it!