Texan Puddleglum

Reactionary Action

Up until the time of the Romantics, no one ever suggested that literature and the arts were a worthy goal to pursue for their own sake. The idea of beauty as its own end really only came into the public square in the nineteenth century. Before that artistic revolution, beauty was decorative. Beauty was ornamental and secondary and a lovely afterthought. Beauty had always a means to an end.

Since the Romantic period, however, people have fallen in love with beauty. Art for art’s sake has become a worthy endeavor and, as such, we’ve all become a bit obsessed with it, haven’t we? Is this a bad thing? Yeah, probably. C.S. Lewis cautions us, “By valuing too highly a real, but subordinate good, we have come near to losing that good itself.” We can dislocate things and overemphasize what should be secondary (like beauty and excellence and diligent art).

But the problem today is that many Christians have swung too far the other way. In an attempt to put beauty back in its place, in an effort to subordinate beauty to its original role, we have over-reacted. Christians have been so keen to keep God’s glory and mission the main thing, that they have under valued beauty. And because of the florid language that so often clothes good literature, Christians can sometimes dismiss it all as mere verbal swagger. And we do so to our own injury, I think.

Pretty Talk

There is beauty in literature. People can string lovely, heartbreaking words together in sentences that shake the soul and widen the eyes. Consider this excerpt from Lewis’ That Hideous Strength:

“But it did not matter: for all the fragments — needle-pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx-eyed thoughts — went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry. The doubling, splitting, and recombining of thoughts which now went on in them would have been unendurable for one whom that art had not already instructed in the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled vision. For Ransom, whose study had been for many years in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech. All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning. For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them . . .”

We would be hard-pressed to find an excerpt of equal transcendence in modern literature, especially in the Church today. Such beauty adds depth to the soul and mind and we have much need for depth today. Flannery O’Connor lamented our evangelical aesthetic poverty:

“Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is.”[1]

Beauty Via Sweat

And writing is difficult. It is extremely hard to make something beautiful out of words. And in hard work (whether done by a Christian or an atheist), we see the image of God. We see in it the faculties with which God gifted humanity: creativity, industry, cultivation. We create only because God creates. And good literature, like all good work, is an example of disciplined excellence. Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madam Bovary, is an example of artistic striving.

“Flaubert was always adamantly opposed to illustrations for his literary works. This apparent contradiction can be explained by his concept of pure art and his association of art with style, from which it follows that one art cannot be translated into another. For Flaubert, writing was a long, sometimes agonizingly slow, quest for perfection in style. His correspondence is filled with descriptions of his efforts to polish his prose, to eliminate repetition or assonance, to find le mot juste [the right word].”[2]

Beautiful literature is a reflection of hard work and diligent practice. Excellence in one’s work is a birthmark of Protestantism (though by no means restricted only to that sect). Doing one’s best, pursuing beauty and honorably discharging one’s duties are all valid ways in which one may honor God. Literature can be an expression of that goal.

I repeat, writing is difficult. Perhaps a qualification is necessary. Writing well is difficult. Thomas Wolfe, in his classic novel You Can’t Go Home, describes his main character, George Webber, deep in the process of writing:

“Already his next novel was begun and was beginning to take shape within him. He would soon have to get it out of him. He dreaded the prospect of buckling down in earnest to write it, for he knew the agony of it. It was like demoniacal possession, driving him with an alien force much greater than his own. While the fury of creation was upon him, it meant sixty cigarettes a day, twenty cups of coffee, meals snatched anyhow and anywhere and at whatever time of day or night he happened to remember he was hungry.”

Any dedicated writer is familiar with that struggle to create excellence (minus the cigarettes, perhaps). So, should a Christian writer be any less dedicated to producing good art? If a Christian writes with the end of glorifying God in all his effort, his art should be the best possible art that he can accomplish. It may not be the most “spiritual” or “religious” art he could make, but it should be beautiful.

Bring It Back

“Artists are called and gifted- personally, by name- to write, paint, sing, play, and dance to the glory of God.”[3]But the Church sometimes can have trouble finding the value in beauty. It’s not functional enough or it’s just too subjective to be “true”. We make up our own reasons to dismiss it. But as a result, many artists in God’s kingdom generally get shuffled into to the corner while the rest of us glorify God by working “real jobs”. We devalue those people and their gifts and we grind all their beauty into a sad pile of irrelevance. To quote Aristotle, “It ain’t oughta be like dat.”[4]

The skillful writing of good fiction and good poetry is rare. When it is done to the glory of God (whether it is overtly Christian in theme or not), we should acknowledge the art, praising the Creator for the work of the sub-creator (to borrow a term from Tolkien).

Beauty is not the main thing. But neither is it unwanted, like a Cubs fan in Busch Stadium. I long for the day when we can return to a robust and balanced appreciation for beauty. And one of the paths to that end is to crack open a good book and taste all the beauty.

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