The Power of the Arts

So I can’t see if any of you are out there, but um I can hear you. Uh, and so thank you—thank you Father Spitzer, and thanks to the Napa Institute for hosting me.

I’m a person who spends most of his time sitting around the house just trying to think of a word that rhymes with orange, and so to be offered to address this august body is really a mistake—but an honor. So thank you for hosting me.

I’ve got some thoughts and reflections for you today, and even—I hope your lunch is digesting okay—because I’ve also got some homework for you tonight.

So in late March of 2018, early one morning, my wife told me that she was pregnant with our fifth child. He would be our third son, born in November of that year, and would be named after St. John Cassian.

That same day I sat down at my writing desk and composed the following short poem titled To an Unborn Child. Let’s see if this works… H— that’s… not—there we go. This is how it appeared in First Things magazine some years ago.

To an Unborn Child (Poem Reading)

Let me read this poem to you:

Storm clouds move in and darken all the house
The morning paper on the kitchen table dim
Where I’ve been reading some reporter’s grous
At things already bad now growing grim
Most of the prodigies agree with him

I rise to light a lamp and hear the thunder
And watch the first drops thuing on the lawn
Your mother joins me. Here we stand in wonder
Between the hour that marks your life’s first dawn
And that one still obscure we’re counting on.

Reflection on the Poem and the World in 2018

These lines reflect, as you might expect, quite faithfully my own position some six years ago.

I’m one of those increasingly rare people who continue to get news from an actual newspaper—or I did until I canceled my subscription sitting in the audience today—so that I can spread out the sections on the table. And then I like to glower over the catastrophes of the world while drinking my morning coffee.

It’s true that I sometimes used to run over the newspaper with the van a few times just to crush the left-wing bias out before it was fit for reading. But nonetheless, I do find that there’s no substitute for the experience of the densely packed columns running sheet after sheet—and of course handicapped, no matter how one reads the news, however, it’s all the same: things already bad now growing grim.

So ubiquitous is the sense that we’re entering ever more deeply into a long and even endless catastrophe that those who might claim otherwise are hard to find. To this or that report on the opinion page lamenting one thing or another, we can rightly answer: Most of the prodigies agree with him.

Yeats and The Second Coming

It was such shocked attention that another poet, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, tried to capture in his poem of just over a century ago now, most ominously titled The Second Coming.

Yeats’s poem’s opening lines are so quotable that many of you may know them already, even if you’ve never encountered the poem before. It’s truly a masterpiece in wonder before catastrophe.

Now let me read this poem for you:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Those opening lines are as applicable in our day as they were in Yeats’s. In fact, even more so. The falcon cannot hear the falconer surely is a prophecy of the CrowdStrike failure and Delta screwing my flights up last weekend.

On a much glummer note, the ceremony of innocence is drowned—but none of us expected it to be drowned at the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics.

When Yeats wrote this poem, communism was rising in Russia and Mussolini’s Italy was about to become fascist. A great war had just ended and a new one was just two decades away—but could already be seen slouching toward Paris.

Yeats, a born romantic, may sound like a prophet who would condemn the anarchy loosed upon the world—and to some extent he did. But Yeats also stood before it in fascination. He relished the violence of history, at least when it was at a distance. And hence the curious formulation that ends his poem.

Those last lines—by curious I mean almost incoherent—a rough beast, a figure of apocalypse and even Antichrist, is slouching, its hour come round at last, toward Bethlehem, the place of Christ’s birth, and now to be where it will be born.

So we might ask, Mr. Yeats, which is it? Has the beast arrived or hasn’t it? Is he here to bring the end of the world or not? Is he born or not?

Yeats holds us in between times, where we can see the storm on the horizon coming toward us, but where it’s still a distant vision of cloud, darkness, and lightning. We feel its presence, but it has not yet fully arrived to snuff out our delectation before its sublime display.

Dangerous Fascination

Yeats had many strengths as a poet. I don’t want to say anything against him unless the Irish Americans in the audience attack me afterwards. But some of his virtues as a poet went hand-in-hand with weaknesses as a human being—and I think here we find one.

The catastrophe coming he makes into a kind of religious sacrament. He savors the prospect of destruction—which may be awful, in fact, but as a poetic or imaginative possibility, a spectacle—it seems plain old fascinating to him.

In this, he’s much like the ideologies who were then rising up around him—ones that made religion a political vice, or made a religion of political violence. Whether it was the Marxists who thought that class conflict was the sole key to the meaning of history and so viewed every new dead body as just the brickwork of the road to progress, or the Nazis whose Germanic Romanticism, refined in the work of idealist philosophers like Hegel and Fichte, would make war itself to be a transcendent dramatic quest in which the noble triumph over the weak—thereby vindicated.

The existence of the strong—the fascination of bad news, the fascination of catastrophe—becomes the telos, the purpose, the aim of Yeats’s life. And this poem shows it. His poem strains to preserve us within that fascination at doom rather than to question it. He prolongs, or even makes possible, our enjoyment of disaster.

But should we not question this ritualization of despair—this making of a struck fascination at the sublime misery of politics into a kind of religious contemplation?

A Poetic Response: Wonder Over Doom

In my own poem, I tried to respond to Yeats. Where Yeats places us between the beginning of the end—the rough beast—and the absolute end itself, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, to allow us to contemplate this devastation from a distance and with a certain perverse pleasure and awe, my little poem places my wife and me in the middle of a different kind of between-state.

There is someone else present in this poem, mentioned initially only in the title and then addressed directly in those final lines. Those final lines read again:

“Your mother joins me.
Here we stand in wonder
Between the hour that marks your life’s first dawn
And that one still obscure we’re counting on.”

It is not a rough beast—though that beach would be good too—but it is not a rough beast who is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

The in-between time during which the poem takes place is far less sublime, far less violent, but it is no less a cause of wonder. It’s the time of slow growth, of pregnancy, as our son John Cassian moves from the first dawn of his conception to that dawn still obscure, but which we’re counting on—that is to say, the day of his birth.

The life just dawning inside my wife is one to whom I can already speak, whom I can address as a “you,” and whose presence transforms the domestic scene of this poem—from an angry, pained man staring over the newspaper with his coffee—and gives it a totally new orientation, a new significance.

This is the between-time of real life—one that stands in stark contrast to Yeats’s fantasy of apocalypse.

A Contrast of Political Visions

In Yeats’s poem, there’s nothing to do but to become wrapped in fascination at the obscenity—the great world-turning violence on the horizon. In my little poem, in contrast, the view is that of the one offered us in the newspapers. We could indeed simply shake our head along with the reporter and other prodigies—that things are already bad, will only get worse.

We too could make not just a morning routine, but even a religious ritual of contemplating our doom, and therefore of making an absolute of historical change and of politics in our day. We could counter destruction with destruction, political ideology with ideology.

But the realization of the life inside a mother’s womb—our realization as people living in the world—is the realization that we are not mere spectators on despair, but persons responsible to those lives still to be born, to prepare a world for them.

You might say the romantic apocalypse of Yeats is a politics for people with nothing to do but watch. But all true politics begins with children. It’s the realization that what we do with our lives, how we respond to the wonder provoked by the world at its best and at its worst, is not a decision simply up to us and unaccountable to anyone else.

It is, rather, a decision we make in the context of the lives that we help bring into the world, over which we have custody, for which we have love, and whose lives will extend far beyond our own and so orient us beyond the spectacle of the present and guide our actions into the making of a future.

My little poem was offered as a corrective to Yeats’s. It rebukes his romantic fascination with destruction and violence—including that more mundane version of it that we experience despairing over the newspapers, or more commonly these days, what the kids call “doomscrolling” on their phones.

It calls us to a different kind of action—an action of begetting a better sort of world worthy of the children we bring into it. It suggests we do so not in the mode of rapt revolutionary violence, but by cultivating the lives we have been given: by way of wonder, by way of faithful counting on the slow growth by which all good things move from their first vulnerable and minute potential toward actuality, life, flourishing.

It might be tempting to say that the poem calls us merely from one kind of politics to another—from irresponsible violence to responsible action—and I think that it does do that. But I do not think that that’s all that the poem suggests.

Let me call your attention once more to that central word in the poem that rhymes with “thunder”: wonder. You won’t believe how long it took me to come up with that one. Thanks. I think my wife helped me, actually.

Wonder as the Beginning and End of Philosophy

Aristotle tells us at the beginning of the Metaphysics that all philosophy begins in wonder. By this, the ancient philosopher means that we have a built-in desire for truth. We want to know the truth because the truth is good.

Philosophy begins in the longing—the panting, empty desire—for the good of truth, and the truth that is goodness itself. Aristotle and all the great philosophers tell us something more: not only do we begin with wonder, a longing for truth and goodness, but we end in wonder, too.

The properly human life, he argues in the Ethics, is a contemplative kind of life.

But what is contemplation?

It is that condition where the mind, having found itself in the presence of truth, chooses to stay there. The mind rests in truth as its good. The mind no longer thinks about truth the way a child puzzles through a math problem to find the factors of 36 or how many times 36 goes into 4,500—which is 125 times, by the way. It stands before truth. It rests in truth.

Would this not be very boring, we ask? And indeed, Augustine—St. Augustine’s parishioners—asked him just that question. The Church teaches us: by no means. For truth is a gift that keeps on giving. Truth continuously feeds us.

That perpetual nourishment of contemplation, in other words, crowns the good of truth with the splendor of beauty.

To contemplate the eternal beauty of the Divine Light—of God Himself, who is truth itself—is the purpose, the final cause, the whole reason for living of every human being who has ever been born into this world.

And if you don’t believe me—and here I fulfill Father Spitzer’s prophecy—believe Thomas Aquinas.

This realization about the human person—that we were made, that we were born to contemplate the Divine Beauty—ought not just to be one fact among others that we nod about with approval before we go back to our doomscrolling, or our work at the office, or any of a million other actions and distractions that can easily fill up our day.

The Light in Which We Dwell

This realization ought to transform those days. It ought to summon us to a wholly new way of living—a different kind of politics than the kind we might find fascinating in the newspapers. It ought to, to put the matter bluntly and briefly, it ought to call us beyond politics to a fuller and richer conception of things.

It ought to call us to live in the world, to work and act in the world, with the promised contemplative vision of eternity always before our vision—serving as a guide to how we move through the drama of our lives.

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote that anyone who denies the reality of beauty can no longer pray, and soon will no longer be able to love. He goes still farther:

Those who deny the reality of beauty will soon also lose the capacity to see truth for what it is, to love the good for itself, and even to trust the light of being that shines out from things and excites us to wonder—and grounds us in the world.

Too often, von Balthasar suggests, we treat beauty as a mere ornament or luxury, whereas in fact, beauty is the disclosure of the final answer to why we’re here, why we are alive. Beauty is the splendor of God’s creative truth and is the light in which we are called to dwell.

To deny the reality of beauty is therefore to deny that our lives have an order and a goodness to them.

It is to deny that we are made finally to dwell in the light of God who made us. To affirm its reality, however, is to open ourselves to what God has shown and known since we were first dwelling in our own mothers’ wombs.

But how are we to respond to this realization that we are born to contemplate the beauty of God? The German philosopher Josef Pieper helps provide an answer. Pieper’s best known for his little book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, which was written in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Culture Begins in Worship

Pieper objected to this state of things. In making his argument, he observed that cult—religion—is the basis of culture. That is to say, our religious worship is the foundation upon which and out of which the whole edifice of culture necessarily is constructed and out of which it grows, arises.

Culture, the whole way of life of a people, is based on what that people loves with the absolute love of religious worship. If our end is the everlasting contemplation of the Divine Light, the Splendor of Truth, our beginning is to be found in recognizing as much. Out of that recognition, culture arises.

He wrote it at a moment, in other words, where work and politics seemed to consume everything, with no remainder left for thought and poetry—or beauty—much less the act of contemplation.

But how can this be? I think we can answer in the following way: if our destiny is the contemplation of God, our lives in this world must naturally be oriented towards that end and ordered by it. The way of life we live begets culture, insofar as we cultivate ourselves by the way we live. The cultivated terrain around us is culture. Out of our way of life, the broad edifice of culture emerges.

So a good culture is a kind of worldly school for life beyond this world. It is a temporal school in preparation for eternity.

The obsession with catastrophe, the reduction of our attention to the ideological conflagrations of politics, constitutes therefore an anti-cult. It negates the eternal by pretending nothing matters but the storm clouds here below.

The Five Arts as Pathways to Contemplation

A true culture, in contrast, we may know by its practice of what I call the five arts, each of which is a worldly anticipation of that final art—the fifth and crowning one—the practice of contemplation that is our destiny in heaven.

Those arts may be described as follows—you see them on the screen:

The Useful Arts: Doing, Working, Making

So much of human life consists of doing and making. St. John Henry Newman once quipped, “Life is for action.” And St. John Paul II notes in Laborem Exercens: “Work is for the good of man.”

Doing, working, and making all must be performed. But the human dimension of these activities is in our knowing we can do them—doing them in a knowing fashion. This is itself a kind of contemplation. It is a part of the work we do, not outside of it.

And so every human activity, when properly, artfully performed, has a contemplative dimension.

When, for instance, we build the house, at the conclusion of that building we stand back and look.

I don’t want to prolong my comments too much, but I’ve been rereading the Little House book series with my kids lately. And there’s something that Laura Ingalls Wilder does in all those books that I find absolutely gorgeous and instructive.

As she watches Pa build, say, their log cabin in Kansas—she watches him hammering the wooden nails, assembling shingles for the roof, assembling the door and finally fitting it on the hinges—at every stage in her observation, there will be, as it were, a pause.

And then she’ll say: That was the door. (Whoops!) That was the door. That was the roof. That was the house. As if the little girl watching her father work is recognizing, on behalf of him: Ah, this—this is good. It’s good that these things should exist.

She’s contemplating the thing that her dad has made. Work in this sense humanizes us.

The Fine Arts: Making Spirit Visible

The German philosopher Friedrich Schiller made a powerful argument at the end of the 18th century: human beings are sunk in the senses, but they have an impulse towards form, spirit, rationality, and morality.

To begin the movement from sensuousness to intellect, we need a place that serves as a kind of bridge. Schiller’s answer was that the Fine Arts are just that bridge.

We look at a painting, we hear a poem, we listen to a story—all the while using in our imaginations. All this is of the body, it’s of the senses, and yet what those things do is give us an incarnate, material form of the stuff of the spirit.

We imagine, for instance, Achilles fighting Hector at Troy. But then we’re led to contemplate: What does it mean to be Achilles? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to live and die in anger—or with honor?

The Fine Arts give us the invisible spirit visible and incarnate. This is why all education begins with stories.

In the Fine Arts, we also learn to make the stuff that we savor and contemplate. It’s in this respect a transition from doing and making to the next mode of contemplation.

The Liberal Arts: Knowledge for Its Own Sake

Since Plato, the liberal arts have been defined as those disciplines of mind where we abstract from the mere material conditions of things and seek universal, intellectual knowledge.

We see this in the study of history and literature—but especially those more purified disciplines of mathematics, physics, philosophy. There, we contemplate the laws of number, changeable being, and even being itself.

Such studies are often said to be knowledge for their own sake. That phrase indicates that we contemplate the truth without subjecting it immediately to use. That’s why it’s liberal—it frees us from necessity.

And yet such arts are not useless. To the contrary—they are an anticipation of and a preparation for the true freedom found only in heaven.

The Sacred Arts: Worship as Contemplation

Fourth, the sacred arts: liturgical, sacramental, and imperfect contemplation. The highest form of contemplation available to us in this life is that of the sacred arts, by which I mean all that is associated with the knowledge of God, but especially with the sacred liturgy where we worship Him.

As Pope Benedict XVI writes in The Spirit of the Liturgy, the proper understanding of the Mass is our participation here in the world of what the whole cosmos is already and always doing—circling about the Divine Essence, contemplating God.

Liturgy is, he says, the image of the world—of the full reality of all creation looking upon in adoration the Divine Essence.

It comprehends a kind of work, a kind of art, a kind of liberal art—as we pray, sing, and contemplate God’s Word. But above all, it’s our foretaste of our entrance into heaven.

Living the Arts of Culture and Contemplation

We are human, but we seek ever to become more fully human. This is the work and purpose of culture.

So I say to all of you: as you consider these four temporal arts, contemplate the servile arts—the work you do, the work of your hands and of your minds—and make sure that it contains within it a moment of contemplation, where you stand back in awe and say, I did that.

Contemplate the Fine Arts. You don’t have to be a lazy professional poet to do the Fine Arts. At some point, you need to make a rhyme up to make your kids laugh—or to write out a few verses to make a proposal to a woman who will soon become your bride. You have to learn to speak these fine ways just for beauty’s sake, so that the stuff of the material world is elevated—is made, if not holy, at least radiant with beauty.

Contemplate the liberal arts. Refine your minds and learn truth for its own sake—not just for what you can get out of it.

And of course, keep at the heart of your life the liturgical arts. While the rough-and-tumble of political argument has its inevitable and substantial place in human life, it can only barize those who exclude from their life the slow cultivation of these four arts.

So place at the center of your lives the liturgical arts—all those works by which we prepare ourselves, even now, for eternity.

But from that center, let us also cause to grow those other arts—those arts of culture and contemplation—to make our daily work itself more humanizing, to allow for the free play of the mind in the fine arts and the liberal arts, where we feel most intimately our spiritual nature stretching their wings, developing their powers, and rising toward the end to which God alone has called us.

A Culture that Welcomes Life

It’s only in such a context—in such an effort to live within and develop the life of culture—that one may hear the good news of an expected child, and rather than mulling in dismay the bad news in the papers, rise to light a lamp.

A man may join his wife where she stands at the living room window and begin to wonder how to make the world a more fitting place for that child—for all those children—children already with us, but as yet unborn.

Thank you.