In a post early last month, I got in question-posing mode, as I mentioned in a more recent post.
The question was this:
why does it seem that fewer people than ever are interested in what St. Paul exhorts us to do in his letter to the church at Philippi, which, sharp cat that he was, knew applied to us as well as those addressees?
You know, this:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
I’m spitballing here, but I think fear may be a factor. Let me unpack.
Any and each of us, especially in this present moment of accelerated information flow, form our notions of what is right and true from incomplete inputs. We come to our conclusions on the run and hand off the work of making sure we’re being thorough to others who are as busy - and as fallen - as ourselves. When they are proven to come up short as champions of what we hold - or know we ought to hold - dear, we stick with them anyway, because the threats to what is dear seem so great that we conclude that this is no time to abandon those champions.
We’re afraid to explore options other than digging in our heels.
But you can’t embrace the pure and lovely with dug-in heels.
And then we lose sight of even the ability to recognize the pure, lovely, right, etc.
Were we to recognize it, would we be willing to make the tradeoff necessary to embrace it?
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.
That’s a level of vulnerability that most of us are inclined to take a pass on.
But why is that? Why does the silly armor of our pride have greater appeal than unsullied goodness?
I’ve been thinking that maybe part of our problem is that we can no longer bring ourselves to consider that “noble,” “right,” “pure,” “lovely” and “admirable” might be objective terms. We’re inclined to take a stance along the lines of, “You have your standards for each of those concepts, and so do I,” whereas, if Paul had been presented with that argument, I’ll venture that he’d have responded, “Quit being disingenuous. You know precisely what those terms mean.” And he’d be on solid ground, having been tapped for his life’s work by the Lord of all creation. Dude went blind for several days after having been driven to his knees by his recruitment experience.
But the matter of immaterial verities is worthy of discussion. By what mechanism do we behold one thing and conclude, “This is pure,” and behold another and say, “This is befouled as all get out”?
Since I wrote that post, I’ve read a powerful little book called Beauty in the Light of the Redemption by Dietrich von Hildebrand, a German Roman Catholic philosopher whose life spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first eight decades of the twentieth.
His central question is particularly aimed at Christians: What role is beauty to play in our lives, given the unsurpassable bliss of salvation? Is beauty superfluous once someone is reconciled to God?
In the course of exploring this question, he posits two kinds of beauty.
The first is the beauty of a perfect circle, as opposed to a jagged geometric shape, or notes that harmonize as a pleasing chord, rather than dissonantly, or the lines of a pretty or handsome face.
The second, he says, is “an immeasurably higher one. It demands not only the coordination of many more factors, but qualitatively, it is something entirely new.”
As examples, he cites The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Experience of this type of beauty, he says, serves as “a pedestal, a mirror for something much higher.”
In the presence of this kind of beauty, when we experience it aright, we get ourselves out of the way. We couldn’t possibly commodify it, or demand to be entertained by it, to regard it as just another track on our playlists.
Von Hildebrand touches on a notion that goes back at least as far as Plato: beauty as a fundamental good, and, quite distinct from that, the forms beauty takes in the physical world.
Plato said that acknowledgement of beauty in a physical object or scene was essentially recognition of this a priori condition of the way the universe is constructed.
In The Republic, his conversants, Socrates and Glaucon, feel that musical harmony is such an important matter that they discuss what kinds of scales ought, and ought not, to be taught to the young people of the ideal State they’re constructing. (I personally find their conclusion that kids ought to be kept away from the Ionian (major, do-re-mi) and Lydian (major with a raised fourth) scales and only exposed to the Dorian and Phrygian scales, which are both minor, odd, but then again, I’m running it through a modern filter. I also had to keep that in mind when I encountered Richard M. Weaver’s tirade against jazz in his 1948 work Ideas Have Consequences.)
That Plato would consider musical harmony to be as important as other things participants in his dialogues discuss, such as justice or courage, ought to make us consider the place we’ve assigned in our lives to that to which our ancestors ascribed the status of the sacred.
Last April, I wrote a piece for Ordinary Times entitled “Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher,” in which I discussed my reasons for choosing the textbook I have for that course, and a telling reaction I had to it some years ago:
For a textbook, I use Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947 – 1977 by James Miller. In the early years of Rolling Stone magazine, Miller wrote record reviews, and he edited the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll in 1976. He went on to write for myriad other publications on a broad array of subjects, and did some teaching. In the 1990s, he realized his take on the subject of rock history had undergone some changes, which prompted him to write Flowers.
It’s not the kind of book most rock-history teachers would use as a text. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. Each chapter is a vignette about a specific instance that is fraught with implications about the subject at hand. There’s one about the circumstances under which Little Richard recorded “Tutti Fruiti” at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans in 1955, one about Brian Epstein wandering into the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1961 and seeing The Beatles, and so on. He also only takes it through 1977, as he feels that everything that’s come along in rock since then is a derivation of some sort of what developed before then.
One semester about fifteen years ago, two ladies sat in the back of the classroom every week. I assume them to have been friends outside of class. They did pretty well on tests and papers. On the last night of class, one of them raised her hand and said, “We’ve read Miller’s book, and we’ve concluded that he doesn’t like rock and roll,” which led to an interesting discussion about whether one has to like something to become a historian of it.
And a passage in Miller’s epilogue may lend credence to their viewpoint:
Eschewing the balmy “moon-June” lyrics of an earlier era, rock and roll had introduced a refreshing realism about sexuality into popular music; it had reinforced the rhythmic complexities first made widely popular through earlier vogues for ragtime, jazz, swing and boogie-woogie; however imperfectly, it had consummated the marriage between black and white in America . . . On the course of accomplishing all this, rock and roll had produced some music of stirring beauty.
But it had also produced artifacts of stunning ugliness. Punk rock had been a quintessence. Since then, most popular rock and roll acts have been musically crude or gleefully obscene or just plain silly . . .
He wrote that in the early 1990s. What has come down the pike since only bolsters his case.
I’d venture to say that if anybody could present the world with a work of artistic creation that was universally recognized as tapping into von Hildebrand’s “something much higher,” he or she would have to be divinely inspired to do so. That is how unfamiliar we are with how to handle the elements from which beautiful things are fashioned. And such an act would be nothing short of a ministry, a testament to eternal things on which we ought to think.