Cultural Transparence: Meaning in a Postmodern Age
Cultural Transparence
The intense but narrow beam of liberal political principles cannot constitute the meaning of a civilization. There are simply too many questions left unaddressed. Despite the dramatic illumination cast by the recognition of the incomparable worth and depth of each individual, its authoritative truth cannot stand alone. Even for its recognition, we have seen, it depends on the acknowledgment of the larger mystery in which we participate. Somewhere that rich web of relationships must be explored.
Politics is a field in which too much is at stake to permit the unfettered explorations of the spirit. Instead, the free competition of ideas and symbols must take place in an arena in which the consequences do not place the very survival of order in jeopardy. There is no impermeable barrier between the worlds of culture and politics but there is a zone of separation. It is true that poets are an alternative legislature, but their writings do not immediately have the force of law. Lacking command of an army, their power must be derived directly from the spiritual truth of their appeal. The cultural free marketplace of ideas and symbols is the arena in which the quest for meaning is pursued most openly.
In many ways this is the culmination of the meditation we have been following. The test of what we have discovered about the sources of meaning is whether they can evoke an answering response in the public realm. Can they constitute the meaning of a civilization? This chapter is not an afterthought appended to round out the reflection on meaning with a cultural component. It should rather be read as arising from all that has preceded. The sense of the end of the modern experiment in creating a man-made world with its finite boundary of meaning and fulfillment forms the background. Within that context we have discovered the openness to transcendent mystery as the dynamic center of meaning in existence.
Neither our freedom nor the directions we pursue can be sustained without it. We are an unlimited aspiration drawn inescapably toward a reality beyond all that we can know. That is the mystery constituting the silent boundary of our lives. From time to time illuminative glimpses of its divinity are vouchsafed to us and we recognize ourselves in the historically transmitted traditions. Now we must ask, Can this tentative intimation of meaning expand into a publicly symbolized whole? Can postmodern civilization become transparent for the mystery that draws it beyond itself?
In an important sense the answer is that it already has, although that recognition has perhaps yet to be made. We often labor under the impression of the modern world as irrevocably fragmented. It appears to be a dizzying succession of cultural movements no one of which succeeds in imposing its form or identity for any continuing period of time. But that in itself is hardly sufficient reason to conclude that meaning has escaped us. The very vitality contained in the succession of creative efforts testifies to a faith in the goal that inspires them. It is only if we were tempted to give up the pursuit in despair that we would be entitled to conclude that the modern world constitutes nothing but a cultural wasteland. Ironically we may be closer to that moment of creative exhaustion today as a result of the cumulative sense of the end of the modern world. We are tempted to view its cultural and artistic disappointments in the same light: the death meaning includes the death of art.
That, however, would be an unjustified extrapolation. Nothing is more evident than that modern art, literature, and music has constituted an impressive world of meaning. The instability of forms that has marked cultural experiments do not signify a collapse of meaning. In some respects they can be regarded as denoting a fullness of meaning that cannot be contained-at least not within the available forms. The sheer restless fecundity of movements and artists in the past two hundred years attests to a civilizational vitality that cannot be gainsaid. Each of them has succeeded within their own parameters of creating or evoking a world of meaning.
One cannot think of a Joyce or an Eliot, a Mann or Mahler, a van Gogh or a Shostakovitch, and complain about the poor artistic heritage of the past one hundred years. The fact that none of them succeeded in imposing a stable form on the broader context does not imply that their efforts have failed to constitute a meaningful raid on the inarticulate mystery of existence. The transitory and provisional nature of their evocations does not necessarily denote futility; it can also represent a deeper realization of the ineffable mystery toward which they are directed. That is the turning point on which we are balanced as a civilization. On which side we fall will determine whether we will be able to find a means of publicly evoking the mystery of transcendent Being that constitutes meaning in existence.
Art as Openness to Being
Our lives are constituted by the tension drawing us toward the fullness that forms the horizon of our consciousness. The light of longing is what illumines the path before us, providing the whole vitality of interest and movement in our lives. It is an inescapably transcendent aspiration, for a succession of endlessly similar satisfactions would quickly exhaust their appeal. We have seen that it is the unlimited openness of our trajectory that underpins the character of our freedom. We are never what we are going to be and in that realization we are free. It is the same illumination that reveals the moral direction of our lives as we respond to the promptings of our hearts.
Occasionally and unmeritedly the horizon of mystery silently drawing us opens to reveal its loving depth and we are touched by grace. But we are not permitted to live permanently in that luminous presence. The door closes again and we must struggle to draw forth its implications for the moral and political principles by which we must live. A broader effort to constitute meaning requires us to search for the imaginative symbols and forms in which such eruptions can be given evocative permanence. That larger cultural enterprise is the collaborative effort of many human beings, not only the artistic elites. It is the fruit of the great continuing conversation between all of us that constitutes the world of cultural meaning.
Perhaps it is not surprising therefore to discover that it is not as drained of mystery and meaning as it is reputed to be. Our cultural self-understanding may not have the same substantive grasp on the symbols of spiritual illumination, it may no longer be a Christian civilization, but this does not mean that it is tone-deaf to the call of transcendent truth. Modern civilization is, as Flannery O’Connor said of the South, “Christ haunted.” The memory of the Christian movement toward transfiguration may be all that is left, but that is not yet the same as the forgetfulness of Being against which Heidegger struggled so much.
There is still recollection, and it can be stirred to life only because the embers of our own quest for transcendence remain a present reality. It is not a large distance toward the realization that the absence of transcendent symbols does not necessarily imply the disappearance of God. We recall that transcendent Being is what cannot be represented. The fullness for which we hunger is perhaps more intensely present in the absence than in all the apparently massive symbolizations of history. Within the meditative dynamics of the absence that is present we are perhaps not as far from the kingdom of God as we thought.
It is not surprising that the concrete explorations of artists, writers, and musicians should bring the underlying depth of the modern world to light. There is a striking contrast between the impoverishment and deformation of spirit within the revolutionary ideological movements and the human openness and depth that still prevails within the world of creative imagination. It is no accident that so many of the dissidents of the twentieth century have come from the world of art. Their own work puts them in touch with the unfathomable mystery of existence, and the contrast with the hollow instrumentalization of ideology could not be greater. No great art can be in the service of ideology. It can be in the service of religion because religion is rooted in the same inexhaustible openness. The one-dimensional stridency of ideology, vainly masquerading as the fullness of reality, cannot withstand the probing of artistic openness. As soon as an artist puts himself at the service of a closed political system he has sold his soul. Almost by definition, the vocation of the artist calls him to resist all closure of the openness to the horizon of mystery.
To be true to itself art must be true to the full interplay of forces within experience. Any peremptory closing off of avenues of experience is an impoverishment of the work of art. What makes the work of creative artists and, by extension all of us who engage in the responsive unfolding of imagination, so important is that it is a primary vehicle for exploring the mystery of reality within which we find ourselves. Art, like life, is a response to the pulls that impinge upon us and by responding to art we enter more deeply into the reality that draws us. We are on the way toward revelation, that piercing of the veil of mystery in which we obtain a glimpse of the whole. It is not a process of reasoning, nor does it follow any predetermined pattern, but it does lead us toward a fuller understanding if we do not close ourselves off prematurely from the unfolding. We may not be able to explain what is going on in this concrete imaginative unfolding, but we can be sure that it draws us toward a fuller realization of the truth. The reason is that art, if it is faithful to itself, is a submission to the direction disclosed by reality itself.
Art is in the service of reality. It is a quest for truth, and what constitutes its beauty is that it makes the truth radiantly present in symbols, images, sounds, and embodiments. The greatness of art is precisely its unwavering fidelity to the truth disclosed by reality itself. It is through art that the truth of various positions are tested. They are brought into juxtaposition and we see what they are in the truth of “living life,” as Dostoevsky termed it. His understanding of the role of the artist is in many ways paradigmatic. For Dostoevsky, art was great when the artist had virtually disappeared behind his creation. The characters had acquired a reality of their own. It was their voice that was given expression and the directions the characters pursued flowed naturally from who they are, not from any preconceived convictions of the artist. By submitting so completely to the demands of verisimilitude the writer, Dostoevsky knew, ran the risk of losing control of his creation. It might point toward conclusions with which he disagreed. But the inestimable merit of this openness was that the truth that emerged from the juxtapositions had the status of independence. Having been tested in the crucible of life, it had the authority of reality itself.
Such a radically open exploration of the plural intimations of experience is fraught with risk. There is no guarantee that it will be brought to a successful or even an acceptable conclusion. What if the anarchic freedom of art points toward sadism? If the pleasure of torturing the innocent is proclaimed as the highest truth about man, what can we say in response? When we contemplate the many opportunities for shipwreck on this voyage we are impressed by its lonely uncertain character. All we can say is that we must enter on the exploration in the spirit of trust that seems to be present from the beginning. We must rely on the reality that draws us, and believe that the dimensions of its mystery will reveal themselves in order to us.
If we seem to be drawn toward what is unspeakably evil, then we must trust that the countervailing force of good will become even more manifest before us. In this sense it mirrors the odyssey of life. We can only engage in it if we are held fast by the confidence that if sin abounds grace abounds even more. There are many instances of artists who have perverted their gifts in order to advance their own megalo-maniacal pride. Prometheanism is not by any means absent from the world of art, as the architectural schemes for mile-high buildings and for totally planned environments powerfully attest. All we can say is that they quickly encounter the limits of reality itself. The salvation of art is that it can never depart from the parameters of reality with which it is irrevocably and concretely engaged.
Art Without Common Language
Perhaps the peculiar temptation to which art in the modern period is exposed arises from the unique position of the artist. Since the Renaissance artists have definitively shed their anonymity. Today they occupy positions of great social prominence and celebrity. They are exalted to a quasi-divine status because of what they do. No longer merely the servants of reality, they are also viewed as its creators. Men like Leonardo da Vinci were filled with the self-confidence that they possessed the means not only of imitating nature but of improving on it. It you look at his Madonna of the Rocks you will see what this means. No real-life Madonna ever had such translucent flesh and no stones ever contained such radiant depth.
That pattern of regarding artists not only as discoverers but as creators of meaning continues up to recent times. For many, art becomes a religion, and we hear sufficient discussion of the capacity of art to evoke a spiritual awakening. That whole pattern is of course no accident. The new centrality of art begins at precisely the time when the spiritual coherence of Western civilization is becoming dislodged. In a time of growing uncertainty art holds out the promise of an authoritative transparence.
All that has changed in the later phase of this process is that artists can no longer look toward an inherited supply of symbols rooted in a more-or-less continuing spiritual consensus. The fracturing of meaning has continued beyond the Renaissance and the Reformation, such that the modern secular world that began in the eighteenth century exists without any transcendent frame of reference. Chaos is intensified as we witness the rise of secular messiahs in the nineteenth century and the secular religious movements of the twentieth-century mass ideologies.
A limit is reached in Nietzsche’s verdict on the age as defined by the nihilistic death of God. The anarchy of public meaning, which is tantamount to its collapse, defines the new context for art in the modern world. It now must make its way in splendid isolation from any broader communal self-understanding. In contrast to the artistic explorers of the Renaissance, who, for all their divergences, could still rely on a considerable body of inherited spiritual themes and symbols, the artists of the past two hundred years have had to create without any publicly available points of reference. Not only do they work alone but their works must be able to stand alone within the world.
That is the formidable context for art and cultural meaning in the modern period. It goes a long way toward explaining the multiplicity of styles and proliferating forms. Every artist has to invent his or her own style because no common forms are available or none have succeeded in attaching themselves to an enduring public consensus. The last successful artistic style in Western civilization was the baroque. Its enduring impact is still evident in the widespread presence of baroque churches, music, and paintings throughout Europe and Latin America.
This stable form was briefly succeeded by a movement known as neoclassicism which harkened back to the models of the Renaissance and the classical world. That was already a largely imitative form that quickly wore itself out in slavish exaggeration. The enduring neoclassical monuments, evident in L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., or Jefferson’s architectural achievements, derive their power from the classical resonances they contain. Only in the hands of a truly exceptional artist, such as Mozart, do they transcend the limitations of the form to include the deepest human explorations. As a formal approach the neoclassical movement could not be sustained in the hands of lesser artists and, in the final analysis, that is the true test of stylistic strength.
The pattern of artistic development in the modern era is already established. Great works continue to be produced by truly exceptional artists, but the formal means at their disposal must be left behind as the transitory shell of their achievements. Without formal continuity or stability, the modern era is marked by the distinctive illuminations of genius while an endless stream of mediocrities must be quickly forgotten. Greatness remains, but the average sinks to a new level of vacuity. This has much to do with the ugliness and tastelessness of the modern world, for the average person can have no stable conception of good form. Standards become the exclusive preserve of connoisseurs. Creatively it is only a great artist who is capable of rising to the challenge that defines the artistic context of the present. He or she must be capable of evoking an artistic meaning that transcends the formal means at their disposal. Their creation must be capable of enduring when their style has become obsolete.
Romantic Return to Experience
The search for a new artistic language in a world whose traditional symbols have become opaque was explicitly declared as the project of the romantics. That was the first occasion when the modern context of the artistic quest for meaning became self-conscious. The romantics occupy a position of prominence, not necessarily because of their achievements, but because of their perception of the challenge. It had now fallen to the artist to render the transcendent mystery of existence, restoring the transparence that had been lost when the inherited Christian forms had ceased to function.
Romanticism is defined by its understanding that meaning can only be constituted by its tension toward transcendent being. Confined to a mundane rationality and a finite range of fulfillments, human life loses its significance. If religion can no longer provide the overarching meaning, there must be a replacement. Without that movement toward a fullness of reality beyond all that this world contains everything within this life is drained of meaning too. The romantics experienced the modern problematic with an intensity that has not been surpassed. That is why, although romanticism has been followed by many successor movements, it is the one that provides the arch of self-understanding within which they have unfolded. Art as the means of making contact with the mysterious beyond of all meaning is the preeminent romantic quest.
“Religions pass, but God remains,” was a remark of Victor Hugo much favored by van Gogh. It expresses the faith that sustained the romantic quest when religion had failed them for, in an important sense, they had not failed religion. Rather, they saw themselves as keeping the faith alive when its institutional carriers had lost their inner life. Their faith had become detached from the revelatory traditions and now sought to clothe itself in more perspicuous forms. No hostility toward the Church or medieval Christianity was implied. On the contrary, they often harbored deep admiration for the historical traditions, but they also recognized the undeniable gap that distanced them from their predecessors.
The symbols no longer or at least no longer immediately invited the opening toward transcendence that the romantics knew within their own hearts. To them had fallen the task of imaginatively unfolding the intimations of transcendence preserved nowhere else but within them. Like the remnant of Israel, they awaited a new rebirth of the spirit. What they least suspected was that the deepening of experience in which they engaged would eventually lead them back to the historically differentiated symbols as their most transparent account. Despairing of the traditional carriers, they discovered they had themselves become the historical medium.
This pattern is evident in the interiorization of experience that is at the core of the romantic project. Instead of looking toward the biblical or historical exemplars of spiritual experience, the romantics shifted their attention to the inner illumination itself. Symbolic and external trappings slipped away as they focused on unmediated experiences. Romantics seek not to present us with the heroic witnesses to truth but with truth itself. We are all to become direct participants in the luminous unfolding. It is art that now opens the door of encounter with transcendent Being. Requiring neither theological nor symbolic elaboration, the experience is presented with the full force of its immediacy. No one can be skeptical of its reality nor doubtful about its impact. By presenting the irresistible truth of experience the romantics were confident that they had themselves led the way toward a great spiritual awakening. No one could gainsay the overwhelming power of unmediated mystery itself.
That direct presentation of transcendent mystery was perhaps best accomplished in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Their most striking quality is the sense of limitless sacred space they convey. Most of his scenes are outdoor in fields, on mountains, by the sea, but none of them invites the casual disportment of a picnic. Right away we are given the sense that we are in the presence of a mystery, a holiness that calls for the appropriate reverence. Friedrich’s goal, which he shared with other romantics, is to evoke an immediate response of awe before the setting itself. There are no overtly supernatural events. Occasionally churches or crucifixes project from the landscape but they are firmly tied to this world. Transcendence is conveyed directly by the awe-inspiring abyss of space unfolded before us. Air and light are the primary carriers of mystery.
All of this is brought together most famously in a painting entitled A Monk by the Shore of the Sea. Most of the picture consists of a vast expanse of sky; below, there is a narrow band of ocean and a similarly limited stretch of shore. Standing alone on the shore is the tiny figure distinguishable in his Capuchin habit. Nothing else exists; even a couple of far-off boats that were originally included by the artist were painted out in the final revision. The effect is powerful, for the viewer participates in the same numinous experience of the monk. There can be no mistake about the abyss of mystery before us.
The same intention that we should come away changed particularly underlies romantic poetry, but it is in the emotional directness of music that the project reaches its summit. Poetry and music are quintessentially romantic because of the immediacy of experience they convey. The primacy of experiential exploration is perhaps best revealed in Beethoven, whose music depicts heroic or pastoral events, but is much more concerned to convey them directly. Sacred music in the hands of Beethoven is no longer primarily about the sacred texts and rites it is designed to accompany. Now it has become a medium for exploring the inner spiritual struggles of the composer, his doubts and convictions, his suffering and redemption. This does not necessarily imply a downgrading of the central Christian events; rather, it is a new and more personal avenue into their meaning through the path of human experience. The height of Beethoven’s art is surely the late string quartets in which he reveals the inner struggle of his soul most completely. There is especially the exploration of suffering in his last quartet, Opus 135, with its agonized question, Must it be so? and then finally the transformative grace of acceptance, It must be so. The compression of the mystery of existence, its raw penetration, could not proceed much further.
We begin to see why this work remains a monument of the human spirit.. The great risk of the romantic emphasis on experience is that it might lose all reference to the reality beyond experience. In searching for the experience of God, they might come to believe only in the God of their experience. The temptation to idolize the experience itself is, of course, a long-standing danger of the mystical path. Eventually the obsession with experience does become the rock on which their project founders, but it would be grossly unfair to lay the blame at the feet of the great romantic pioneers. It is enough to note the ambivalence within their constructions.
The problem is well illustrated in an important neglected oratorio of Franz Schubert. His Lazarus took up the gospel story of Christ’s raising of Lazarus, except that Schubert’s account ends with the death of Lazarus, not with his resurrection. Many interpreters have taken this change to indicate Schubert’s loss of faith in resurrection or an afterlife, and have argued that it was a re-eduction of the gospel story to his own romantic preoccupation with the finality of death. But a more careful reading of the libretto and the music suggests the superficiality of this view. Schubert was not drawn toward the idea of Lazarus’s resurrection because it would have constituted no more than a prolongation of this earthly life. His interest centered on the movement toward a higher life for which death itself was the door. That is the message of Christ, that Lazarus has already risen to the higher life in which he is one with God. His physical resurrection would only have been an obstacle to his final end. Admittedly, the double meaning of life is already present in the gospel story, but Schubert has separated them for the sake of preserving the higher. It testifies to the single-minded focus on the experience of transcendence that he was willing to surrender the symbol of life for the sake of reaching its reality.
In many respects this constitutes the limit of exploration. Once the experiences have been so deeply mined nothing further can be said, or at least there can be no further development in the direction of unfolding them more completely. The extent of the romantic achievement is one of the principal reasons why the romantics retain their perennial appeal and inspire periodic renewals all the way up to the present. Romanticism is the overriding arch of cultural movements for the past two hundred years. We cannot go any deeper into the experiences they brought to light; we can only repeat them without extending them. They are at the limits of the illumination vouchsafed to human beings. Of course, we have lost much of the naiveté of the early romantics, their blissful confidence in a dawning new age or their optimism about the power of art itself. But we cannot penetrate beyond the mystery of the all in which we find ourselves or reach higher than the miracle of love that draws us toward a higher life within. The romantic durability is drawn from the strength of experience itself.
Submission to Order
Yet the formidable spiritual opening of the romantics did not preclude the tendency to push its limits to the breaking point. The history of art in the postromantic era is largely the history of the disintegration of their evocations. In this sense they continue to dominate, to provide the overarching meaning, only now it is in the mode of fragmentation. The direction pursued by succeeding cultural movements may seem remote from the search for transcendent depth of romanticism but they would be inconceivable without that background. They are still in search of the same goal of contact with the unlimited, which they suspect lies just over the horizon depicted by the romantics. In this sense the rejection of romanticism is itself a romantic inspiration. The seeds were already present within the restless dynamic of the romantic era itself, the thrusting toward a mystery without limit. Combined with the free-floating quality of their inquiry, which occurred outside of all received interpretations and disciplines, it was perhaps inevitable that the authority of the romantics themselves would be challenged by the new pioneers of the spirit. The only constant remained the primacy of cultural leadership retained by the artist.
In music we can literally hear the disintegration of the romantic ethos. Perhaps it is because romantic influence proved so durable in that medium or because it particularly lends itself to the romantic quest. The break is exemplified in the career of Arnold Schoenberg whose Transfigured Night, a quintessentially romantic subject of a moonlight conversation between two deeply troubled lovers, pushes the harmonic possibilities to their limits. We recognize the overripe quality of late romanticism in this music and sense the extent to which the very lushness borders on a decadent indulgence for its own sake. Now the richness of possibilities for elaboration have become an obstacle rather than an avenue toward communication.
The limits of reconciling dissonance have been reached in this overdeveloped language which luxuriates virtually under its own impetus. It is with a certain sense of relief that we witness the turn away from this dead end toward a more spiritually austere musical form. This is precisely what Schoenberg and his Viennese colleagues attempted with the much maligned twelve-tone or serial music. In place of use of the single tone or key dominance of previous music, they sought to explore the possibilities of each tone serially within a piece of music. The achievements of their approach were perhaps modest, although not negligible, but their example was profoundly influential. They showed that romanticism did not have to end in dissolute self-absorption. It could be saved through the discipline of submitting more rigorously to the demands of reality itself.
A similar search for discipline, structure, order is at work in other styles as well. The romantic absorption with experience is tempted to luxuriate in the experience as an end in itself. As a mystical way it is beset by the perennial danger of falling in love with the experience of God rather than with the God of experience. What could be more attractive than to remain on the mountain with the transfigured Lord? We are all inclined to build tabernacles of escape there. But then the meaning of the episodic nature of our access to transcendent mystery begins to disclose itself. Without the necessity of returning to the routine of everyday experience, we would eventually lose our hold on the reality that held us.
By seeking to retain the experience, we are left only with our inner feelings, while the reality slips through our grasp. It is only if we are compelled to maintain our steadfast attention on the reality of transcendent Being, even when its experience is absent, that we can be sure of reaching its reality and not merely our experience of it. That is the hard lesson of romanticism, and it is one that has been explored concretely over the past century as artists have sought to work their way back to it. The starting point has been the recognition that the romantic aspiration for transcendent illuminations has overlooked the access provided by more immediate experiences of reality.
They retain, in other words, the core romantic faith that reality discloses itself to us even as they seek a more reliable means of illumination. Typical of this reaction is the movement known as realism. Instead of constructing a painting or writing a novel around the epiphany of meaning, such artists deliberately eschew moments of significance. They avoid privileged events and perspectives in favor of casual cross sections of life. It is another form of the romantic faith which now pins its hope on the typical, the ordinary, and the uncontrived. There, the expectation is, truth is to be found. Artists like Manet and Courbet and writers like Zola or Dickens went to considerable trouble to avoid the sense of deliberate construction behind their work. It was a snapshot of reality, albeit a carefully designed nondesign of the world. For all the inner conflicts within this conception, they very often succeeded in disclosing the transcendent mystery of the ordinary in ways that the high-minded romantics could never conceive. This is particularly true of the unforgettable dignity revealed in the life and work of the humblest classes of society who had never before enjoyed a role in the history of art.
A similar faith in the capacity of the immediate dimensions of experience to lead us toward mystery is present even in movements so apparently absorbed with the surface. Impressionism is often disdained as such a superficial phenomenon, a reputation not helped by the enormous appeal it continues to exercise on the public imagination. It is easy to dismiss Monet’s waterlilies, or Renoir’s parasolled women, or Debussy’s pianistic images, or Ravel’s exoticism as spiritually trivial. They seem to be so immersed in the surface that no question of depth can arise. But the durability of their appeal belies the charge of sheer superficiality. They are certainly not glib. Granted they are concerned with the impressions, the appearances of things, but they present us not merely with an outer shell bereft of mystery. Rather, it is a surface shimmering with beauty, radiant in its own light. We notice that the tone of their works is indeed reverential. Appearance is being treated as a reality in its own right, one that if we can listen to or see it will reveal its own beauty to us. Illumination has been brought to or from the surface. Which is which is no longer of great matter.
The lightness of the approach has of course its own limitations. There are dimensions of experience that cannot be contained within the sunny appearance of things however radiant they may be. Inevitably impressionism is followed by more robust artistic forms that search more profoundly the inner reaches of the human spirit as it strains toward the starry heaven. This recalls the work of van Gogh who marks the breaking of the impressionist mold under the impulse of an expressionistic quest. Musically he is paralleled by the great symphonists, Mahler and Shostakovich, who harken back to the romantic beginning as an overt continuation of that conception.
Art is once again explicitly the means of exploring the most profound struggles of existence, especially of life and death. Mahler reaches up through the harrowing neuroses of his own soul toward the transfiguration for which he longs. He knows the dangers of the quest and has shed all of the naivete of the earlier romantics. This is evident in the extent to which he subjects his own aspirations to sardonic self-mockery. It is painful to overhear his bitter self-doubt but that is also the crucible in which his faith is tried. When the illumination does eventually break through the dark storm clouds, it is received all the more warmly as the grace of bliss. Shostakovitch is a parallel figure, enduring the more prolonged strain of the Stalinist era and without receiving the same transcendent alleviations of his burden. Yet Shostakovitch shows perhaps even more clearly that a human being can still find his way toward the inner dignity that constitutes the whole nobility of existence. All the filth is washed away in that more restrained attainment of serenity.
Naturally, not all twentieth-century artists can measure up to such giants of the human spirit. Many do not engage the most serious questions of existence, its ultimate source and meaning, at all. They immerse themselves in the vividly exciting play of art itself and from their uninhibited inventiveness we get such movements as dada, pop art, performance art, surrealism, and a host of other vastly entertaining episodes. But even within that dizzying profusion of novelties and banalities, the largest talents cannot avoid saying something significant. One thinks of Picasso’s concentration on the human figure, especially the female, with its powerful evocation of suffering and destruction. The pathos of the women in Picasso’s own life is inescapably exposed, as was the generic suffering of humanity in his most powerful work, Guernica.
The undoubted power of his technique is confined to the immediate presentation of experience; however, it does not unfold into a deeper meditation on the meaning of the whole. That deeper meditative quest is carried on by a series of artists who have never enjoyed the same public impact. The real successors of the romantics in twentieth-century art are the abstract painters, Malevich, Mondrian, Pollock, and Rothko, who deliberately remove the figurative connection in order to get in touch with the spiritual depth underpinning it all.
The musical equivalent of Picasso is perhaps Stravinsky, a man whose own explorations of the limits of the permissible made him a leading figure of the musical avant-garde. His Rite of Spring ballet sent shock waves through the musical world as a powerful return to the most primitive natural impulses. What is curious about Stravinsky is that, like Picasso, he gained an early reputation as a breaker of the molds but his career can best be understood as a search for return to the traditional forms. Just as Picasso rarely strays far from the classical preoccupation with the human figure as his subject, Stravinsky deliberately set out to find the classical musical form that would stabilize the restless spiritual quest of romanticism. He is a leader, with men like Hindemith and Prokofiev, of the return to neoclassical and neobaroque disciplines of music. In their work we begin to see the romantic arc coming full circle.
The romantic project is beginning to be rethought from its very inception. Gone is the confidence that we can dispense with the outmoded vessels of meaning that have become opaque and set out on the vast cosmic ocean in search of the meaning whose longing serves as our guide. We are now more conscious of our frailty as single human beings. Accumulated failures, disappointments, and disasters have taken their toll on our initial self-certainty. Now we are more inclined to believe that access to the mystery that surrounds our vulnerable existence can perhaps more securely be found within the traditions that have sustained human life over history. It is an eminently conservative direction in twentieth-century art but not a conservative escape or reaction. Pastiche and imitation are avoided by the conviction that the contemporary evocation of meaning must be within a form that resonates with the world in which we live. It must be a contemporary classical form, not a neoclassical copy.
The extraordinary aspect of this artistic turn is that the search for appropriate forms of meaning, perhaps a more self-conscious concern in music than in the other arts, is not ultimately about forms at all. Form cannot be separated from meaning, and the traditional forms are integrally tied to the meanings they express. The quest for traditional forms, for a contemporary re-evocation, cannot be separated from a deeper consideration of the traditional truths they have held. The search for a formal language is inseparable from the search for spiritual meaning. The romantics were mistaken in their conception that the experience of transcendence could be had apart from the revelatory symbols through which it had been expressed.
Equally erroneous has been the opposite tendency to assume that the development of artistic language alone, whether articulated as realism, impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, or whatever, would miraculously yield up the deeper meaning of it all. Language ultimately cannot be separated from the reality it is intended to express, no more than experience can be isolated from either of them. They form a complex of reality-experience-language, and it is those who take the interrelationship seriously who enjoy the best chance of making sense. The romantic beginning that began by dispensing with outmoded tradition now was compelled to return to a deeper examination of those same traditions.
Rediscovery of Tradition
In many respects this is the untold side of the twentieth-century story. We are inclined to regard ourselves as an era precariously set adrift from all steadfast principles and traditions. But the wasteland is not all. While we may lack the spontaneous access to powerfully unreflective truths, that does not mean that we lack the reflective capacity to undertake a deliberate sifting of the remnants of tradition we can recover. This is the hidden side of our time which is full of significance for the future. Although it is little known or appreciated, we live in a period of momentous traditional rediscovery. The fact that it is the work of explicitly historical research, that it seems to be motivated by an admiration for a vanished past, does not mitigate the undoubted appeal and eventually authority that such work of recovery exercises on us.
We have a deeper understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds, together with the other great spiritual traditions of mankind, than at any other time in human history. Besides experiencing the scientific explosion, we are also living in the midst of an explosion of historical knowledge. The agnostic Stravinsky has expressed best the deep intuition that guides and sustains the work of historical recovery: “The more one distances oneself from the canons of the Christian Church, the further one distances oneself from the truth. These canons are as true for musical composition as they are for the life of an individual.”
What remains is to find the means of making the profound intimations that come to us from the past as well as from our own inner longing transparent for contemporary civilization. That is the challenge that defines the moment in which we live. Within the fragmentation of the modern world we have failed to construct our own meaning, and we are inclined to reexamine more respectfully the fragments of meaning we are left. Can the dried bones be made to live again? The question cannot be answered because it is not yet resolved. All we can do is point to the signs that indicate the direction of the struggle.
The most significant such indication is the growing awareness that we cannot dispense even with the fragmentary and opaque elements of the traditions that come down to us. Even great artists are not great enough to construct everything anew and in every generation. They may enlarge and enrich a language, but they must begin with what is given to them, not seek to wholly invent their own. Looking back over the modern period we begin to recognize that even its vaunted assertion of independence from all traditional sources of meaning was an illusion. How could it define itself except in relation to the tradition from which it sought to sever itself? The more we reflect on it, the clearer it becomes that we are not simply unencumbered choosers of traditions, for who we are has already been shaped by the traditions that have more or less chosen us.
We do not simply hold onto traditions, they also hold onto us. Intimations of the revival of traditional forms are, of course, not the same as their revival. We still have a considerable distance to go in the recovery of the symbols whose very opaqueness had been responsible in considerable measure for the lonely odyssey of self-creation that is the modern world. All we have is a new humility before the mysterious depth of traditional meaning. The remark of Stravinsky points toward the truth of Christianity, but it is not yet an embrace of it. This we might characterize as the first stage of the revival process. It begins with respect for the traditional depths viewed from the outside.
There is enough of a disposition toward them to move toward utilizing the forms of expression bequeathed by them. It is not yet an entry into the substance of their meaning itself. That is the crucial second stage toward which the formal attractiveness prompts us, prepares us, and even draws us part of the way. The aesthetic can be the first step toward the spiritual reality it embodies. It is in the nature of things that there cannot be an impermeable barrier between the symbol and the symbolized. The whole point of the symbol is indeed to disclose the reality. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that a movement that begins merely with the aesthetic embrace of traditional spiritual forms ends up realizing an existential participation in them as well.
The continuum between beauty and truth is, as the philosophers knew, seamless. To interpose an obstacle between them introduces a note of inauthenticity that threatens the integrity of the artistic enterprise. We cannot acknowledge the aesthetic truth of the spiritual movement without acknowledging its authoritative force in our own lives. Further, we are required to place ourselves under the guidance of the traditional sources of the meaning that discloses itself to us. That is the decisive turning point. It is no longer for us to make the traditions live again; rather, it is to allow them to work their enlivening effect within our lives.
The resonances that still come to us, the intimations that disclose the transcendent mystery guarding our existence, can scarcely be known apart from the remnants of tradition still present within us. We realize that the exploration of mystery, far from being possible by dint of our own creative efforts, would not even have a beginning without the fragmentary presence of traditional forms. It is not that the traditional sources of meaning have died so much as we have failed to awaken to them. Despite all its best efforts the modern world that sought to live outside of traditions now discovers that it has never really escaped their embrace. Without traditional forms there would simply be no meaning.
One of the risks of the artistic life is that it can lead to just such a deepening of the life of the artist. Accounts of religious conversion are in fact common among twentieth-century writers and artists. But it is the musicians who most dramatically embody the shift because their work directly serves the spiritual cult itself. One of the astonishing recent developments has been the enormous popularity and success of explicitly liturgical works performed in the concert hall. This does not mean that they could not be performed in churches, but indicates that they have found a wider transparence that renders them accessible even in the nonliturgical setting. The pioneer of this kind of music is undoubtedly Olivier Messiaen, whose output is largely centered on a meditative unfolding of Catholic mystical theology. But more recently a new generation of composers led by Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener, and others have exploded on the public scene with works that are grounded in the musical traditions of their respective faiths. This is music that is different from the preceding exploration of the established musical forms. It is not a mere borrowing of spiritual elements in the service of music. This is the real thing. Whatever the final judgment of artistic-merits, there can be no doubt that this is music that is seriously and unreservedly in the service of spiritual meaning.
That, it turns out, is the secret of its appeal. A work of such unprepossessing character as Part’s Passion of Our Lord According to St. John derives most of its effect from the unwavering faith with which it is sung. The music itself is minimal, consisting only of variations on short sung phrases, thus virtually requiring the weight to be placed on the spiritual meaning itself. Something similar is the case with Gorecki’s enormously popular Third Symphony, subtitled a Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The long first movement consists of a disarmingly simple canon that is nevertheless varied profoundly to maintain our interest in the long meditative arc it unfolds. That leads us into the sorrowful songs themselves, which include a prayer scribbled on a Gestapo prison cell wall, a lamentation of Mary at the foot of the Cross, and a traditional Polish song about the loss of a child. It is music that probes the limit of human suffering but without a hint of protest at the injustice of the fate endured. What makes it a work of powerful spirituality is that the suffering, which is real, has been utterly transfigured through its redemptive surrender to God. It is faith in the divine mystery beyond it all that renders what would otherwise be a mere complaint into a work of transcendent serenity. Its resonance goes directly to the human heart.
As with a work like Tavener’s Protecting Veil, which powerfully evokes the protection of Mary by means of a cello voice and a string orchestra, it is difficult not to conclude that something new is in evidence here. The supposedly opaque traditions, previously perceived as the major obstacle to the transparence of meaning, now turn out to possess a depth beyond our imagination. By yielding to their promptings, by entering into the order they constitute, they disclose their riches to us. What could be no more than an object of admiration when viewed from the outside turns out to contain the fullness of reality once we yield to its existential force. By thinking we could make the elements of traditions serve our construction of meaning we had lost the only meaning available to us. But now the great discovery has been made that the opening of publicly authoritative meaning is possible once we submit to its ordering influence in our lives.
The modern conceit had been that we could find our own way back to the illuminative center of meaning. We already possessed sufficient light of our own to reveal the path before us. The outmoded remnants of traditions could safely be discarded in the face of this limitless self-confidence. But then we discovered that without a point of reference in the givenness of the world that we could not even take the first steps anywhere. Having become independent of all received sources of meaning we now were blown about without either an anchor or a compass to fix our position. We had peeled away the last layer of the onion only to discover our hands were empty.
The illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception. Thinking we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see. Now we discover that we are creatures of time and space in which the limits of our vision is what has historically been transmitted to us. There is no going back to a beginning before the beginning nor forward to an end that is outside of the whole. Even the effort to attune our existence in relation to transcendent Being cannot dispense with the recognition that revelation occurs within a historically unfolded tradition.
This is what makes the artistic exploration of meaning the most open medium of inquiry. It is tied to the concrete experience of reality, moving outward from the dimensions that immediately impinge upon us. Almost by its very nature art responds to the concretely symbolic pulls that tug upon us. This is why even for professed atheists art still resonates with transcendent mystery. Something similar occurs in the concrete struggle to build social and political meaning. It is a matter of indifference where we begin so long as we do begin. By entering on the first steps the dynamic of disclosure takes over and expanses of meaning are discovered that at the beginning were barely suspected. But in each case we must entrust ourselves to the remnants of meaning that remain. We cannot begin with the Cartesian elimination of all traditional sources because we will then only be left locked within the loneliness of the ego. That has been the cruel illusion from which the modern world is only now beginning to recover.
We recognize that our existence is guarded by the mystery of transcendent Being which is the source of all vitality and meaning. And we have overcome the illusion that the miraculous horizon could be reached through our own efforts. Instead, we must place ourselves under its revelatory promptings, recognizing that this is the way of all human history and finding within the unsuspected depths of tradition the resources we so sorely lacked within ourselves. In this way the transcendent source of meaning is restored to modern civilization in a fully self-conscious way. Our errors have taught us that the transcendent horizon cannot be constructed through our own paltry efforts nor can it be reduced to some mundane dimension of our social or political world. It is what guards the meaning of existence precisely because it transcends all existence. We cannot penetrate beyond that mystery, nor can we dispense with the halting historical process by which the mystery reveals itself to us.
Only the traditions, albeit in fragmentary form, contain the true resonance of transcendent revelation. There is no other knowledge outside of them. By taking up the invitation they gently extend to us we begin to discover the only route toward transcendent illumination that is possible for human beings. We accept the status we have been assigned in the order of the whole. Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participation in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the surpassing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.
Bibliographic Note
As is evident, this book is more in the mode of a meditation than in that of a scholarly treatise. Its principal intent is to follow out the lines of reflection that discernably emerge from the chaos of our world. Scholarship is undoubtedly one of the tools that serve that purpose, but it is not the primary mode by which the transparence of existence can be apprehended and communicated. Indeed, one of the implications of the preceding essay is that scholarship itself rests on a set of presuppositions that are far from self-subsistent. We tend to overlook the contextual dependence of the world of learning precisely because it is a world constituted by a common set of assumptions. This is of course why the different fields of knowledge often find one another incomprehensible: they may not share the same starting points. There is a need therefore for scholars to periodically step back from their disciplines, in order to attempt a freestanding formulation of their insights for the edification of that most elusive of all prey, the well-disposed general reader. Such has been my goal.
Having now completed the effort, fairness also obliges me and the interest of readers compels me to include something by way of recognition of the scholarly debts that underlie it. A meditation may stand or fall on its own merits, but no one arrives at its elaboration without the illumination extended by a great many others. Curious readers too will naturally want to know what an author has read, both from a general interest in understanding the arguments better and a more specific interest in pursuing it further on their own. Accordingly, I am happy to append this bibliographic note by which the sympathetic might be further guided and the suspicious more fully confirmed. I make no claim to the originality of the reflections I have pursued, not only because of the manifest limits of my own abilities, but more essentially because originality is not a particularly prized value in the search for truth.
What matters is not from whence an idea comes but whither it leads us. Does it bring us a step closer to a fuller appreciation of the reality in which we find ourselves? Toward a more adequate attunement to the order of Being? At the end of the day truth stands in judgment over authority, and whatever merit the latter possesses is entirely derivative from that subordination. Like the scribe of the New Testament, we are charged with searching through treasures old and new in order to bring forth what is of value (Mt 13:52).
Among such contemporary treasures in the meditative recovery of meaning, few figure more prominently than Eric Voegelin. As a member of the European emigre constellation who arrived in America as a result of the Nazi upheaval, Voegelin, together with Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and others, brought about a rediscovery of the greatness of classical political philosophy as well as renewed respect for the revealed traditions. Voegelin stands out from their broader efforts at the recovery of premodern sources of wisdom by virtue of his penetration of the experiential roots. His is a unique enterprise that finds its closest parallel among the novelists and artists who put us directly in touch with the sources of ideas in life itself. His great work, Order and History in five volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, Plato and Aristotle, The Ecumenic Age, and In Search of Order (Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1985), provides the most perceptive account of the experiential movements by which the ordering symbols of human history have emerged. Together with the other volumes of his Collected Works (all in publication from the University of Missouri Press [now also including Order and History]) it is by far the best education in the meditative and revelatory dynamics from which all meaning arises.
Other more recent approaches to the same problematic of the prearticulate sources of order within human experience include Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989) and a more popular version in The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992). The much larger literature on the crisis of meaning in the modern era includes particularly Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1953), Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (Vintage, 1968), Henri de Lubac’s Drama of Atheist Humanism (New American Library, 1950), and Albert Camus’s The Rebel (Vintage, 1956), as well as Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1952). They are all in one way or another classic midcentury statements concerning the bankruptcy of modernity in light of the totalitarian convulsion, and they are completed by the final demolition of communist legitimacy accomplished by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (3 vols.; 1974-1978).
Since then we have a more pervasive body of writing that exemplifies as much as it observes the collapse of all possible sources of meaning in the contemporary world. It is a mode of reflection perhaps best represented by Jacques Derrida in such works as Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Vintage, 1973), and—with a more American flavor—by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). I have sought to avoid emphasizing the obviously “deconstructionist” tenor of their reflections, in order to draw attention to the deeper quest for construction by which alone interest in the project of deconstruction can be sustained. Among the more interesting exemplars of a thoroughly contemporary mode of reflection that goes beyond such self-imposed inhibitions I would mention Vaclav Havel, especially essays like “The Power of the Powerless” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (Vintage, 1992) and Letters to Olga (Knopf, 1988). My own examination of such matters are contained in After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
Any attempt to grapple adequately with the crisis of meaning that has spawned the postmodern age must reach out toward the great thinkers of the modern era who struggled mightily with its ramifications. For this reason my text is sprinkled with references to Nietzsche, especially his Will to Power (Vintage, 1967) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin, 1967). Equally we must refer to the only figure from whom Nietzsche admitted he had anything to learn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose searing exploration of the crisis of faith at the heart of the modern world is unrivaled. In contrast to Nietzsche, however, Dostoevsky sought to find his way back to Christ, most especially in the portrayal of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” within The Brothers Karamazov. A parallel exploration is conducted slightly earlier by Søren Kierkegaard, any of whose works yield fruitful insight into what it means to communicate faith in a faithless world. In a still unrecognized way, Martin Heidegger is a curious heir to these great nineteenth-century explorers. It comes out best in his two volumes simply called Nietzsche (Harper San Francisco, 1979-1984). I am presently at work on a larger study of such pioneers whose struggles are capable of yielding a fuller account of the transparence of the modern world.
The whole impact of this deepest reconsideration of the modern world is to send us further back to the great and classic sources. We are directed to a rereading of classical philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, in recognition that the philosophical mode of reflection is entirely their discovery and finds its preeminent expression in their hands. Equally, we are driven deeper into the word of revelation, the Scriptures that have been handed down, as well as the historical turning points of their absorption. Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas are surely such moments when all of the strands of the Western tradition, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian, are brought into conversation. Today we are at such a point of mutual engagement of the great spiritual traditions that now definitively includes the non-Western experiences. It is no accident that the most perceptive voices of the day are supremely conscious of the global reach of the conversation. Among such mediators I would certainly number Pope John Paul II, whose intellectual range is most fully evident in his last three encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, and Fides et Ratio.
Having drunk deeply of the great spiritual traditions and their philosophical expositions, we cannot overlook the necessity of authoritative political forms for our world. The liberal consensual language of individual rights may be at the core of such constructions but their implementation requires a fuller explication of the sources and significance. A reconsideration of the liberal political tradition is an integral component of the broader reconsideration of the modern world. The classic liberal sources include among others the works of John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, as well as the American Framers. In the contemporary setting the conversation is carried on most interestingly by the transition from John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) to his more recent Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993). Those who are interested in my more extended study of such matters may consult The Growth of the Liberal Soul (University of Missouri Press, 1997).
Whether the search for meaning follows the narrower parameters of political order or ranges through the depths of metaphysics, an irreducible dimension is constituted by the unmediated experiences of art. Some of the discussion in the text is derived from the particular strand of modern painting delineated by Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (Thames and Hudson, 1975). On the spiritual in modern art, see Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Shambala, 1988). For an approach to literary texts with wider implications for the philosophy of art, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is to be highly recommended. Among writers, Walker Percy is surely of particular interest, not least of all for his short book of hilarious quirky meditations entitled Lost in the Cosmos (Washington Square, 1984). It is only one of the many instances of a genre I have had before me as an unattainable model for my own efforts. Short direct books that contain more than their simplicity belies include not only G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy but also C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man and E. F. Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed, to name but the most obvious candidates. Together with the preceding suggestions for further reading they constitute the royal road toward a wisdom to which I can only point.
This excerpt is from Guarded by Mystery: Meaning in a Postmodern Age (Catholic University of America Press, 1999); also see “The Politics of Liberty: Meaning in a Postmodern Age.”
Related Posts
