Here is the Vormusik of

Here is the Vormusik of THAT post. Enjoy. Think. Comment. Harangue. If I am feeling up to it I might post on the harpsichord versus the piano tonight (inspired by Steven Riddle), although I am suffering the residual effects of a cold compounded by being at the SF Symphony's Black and White Ball until 2 am on Saturday (What a show! We saw Pete Escovedo, Buck Owens, Debbie Harry (with her stellar jazz band), Morris Day and the Time, india.arie (yawn - reminds me of Tracy Chapman, but even more boring), and Chubby Checker), as well as continued after effects from the surgery (getting annoying). So I might wait until later in the week.

As to up and coming events: Melanie has something to go to on Monday, so I will not be at the bullfight Monday, so I might go Friday, in which case you will get a bullfight report over the weekend. We will see.

So without further ado...

126 measures of an E flat Major chord!

This is Vormusik to CO in E Maj. Something to think about and to chew on for a few days. This, like the other posts on art, music, theology, etc. should be seen as a rough draft manuscript handed to friends. I am doing this to get feedback so that when I put these things into my work on the Theology of Art they will be better. So, please read and be brutal.

This Vormusik is related to an email argument between a couple of good friends of mine, an argument that I have for the most part been reading and have yet to jump in. Their argument began at a baseball game when the topic of learning American history came up. Fr. N (names abridged to protect the innocent, but I will say that Fr. N is a bright, orthodox Franciscan priest who has many years of teaching under his belt) apparently said that learning American history was important formationally, as it helped build good participants in a pluralistic democracy. Mr. C (a Medievalist and professor of philosophy and history) countered that it is good to learn American history because learning is good – period, and there is no need to worry about the formative aspects. At least this is my understanding of the original conversation. It has grown into a debate over the good of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Fr. N has been taking the side that the pursuit of knowledge is good insofar as it draws us closer to holiness. That it is more important to pursue holiness, and if knowledge aids that, then so be it, but if it hinders that, then it is an obstacle. Mr. C says, "look, before you can say you are a holy man, you must say that you are a man. Education makes us a more complete man." Fair enough.

Cardinal Newman has been batted around, along with Genesis. It is a bit like a tennis match:

Serve. Genesis shows the terrible consequences of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Return. That knowledge was experiential, meaning that for them to "know" good and evil meant participation in good and evil. A better example of the liberal arts in Genesis is Adam naming everything, in which this pure learning is an explicit good!

Out! Luv-fifteen.
Server approaches the chair. "What do you mean, out?!?"
No, wait. This is not a match with John McEnroe. It has been remarkable civil, which is exactly what I would expect from these two (well, actually three, as two of us have been cc:ed on these, and Mr. M has actually jumped in the fray a bit).

The resolution to this is fairly simple, and ties into the arts in general (particularly when we are looking at the moral effect of a piece of art). Both sides are right. Learning the liberal arts is a good and cannot be anything but formative. If learning does not advance us towards holiness, then we are not learning enough. There cannot be any dark knowledge (the only thing that can count as dark knowledge is experiential – so that we may say that someone has evil knowledge, meaning experience in doing evil deeds) any more than darkness can be said to exist (rather we can only say that light is lacking).

This distinction is, of course, important in refuting the heresy of Gnosticism. God is not the author of evil. If it is created, it is good. When we participate in pure, liberal knowledge, we are participating in God’s creation, and that is about as good as it gets.

Take the example of a nuclear scientist who develops weapons. It is not that he is wrong for learning the relationship between matter and energy, but that he is wrong in not learning his moral theology and in using this knowledge of God’s Creation for the sake of developing weaponry that he knows is used for immoral purposes (hence an experiential knowledge). If we are to cast our scientist as Adam, he is naming the animals, playing a part in creation itself when he studies the mysteries of subatomic particles. He is falling into sin when he knows, in the Biblical sense, how to use this power to threaten the world with the Hell of weapons of mass destruction.

If someone is gaining knowledge and not moving towards holiness, then the sin lies not in the gaining of knowledge, but in the neglect of studying that which is proper to man. We could even look at it as a matter of proportion. Someone who limits their studies to what they perceive as materially useful is not wrong to study those things, rather, he is wrong in giving them undue attention at the expense of that which will make him a whole man. I think of the poor lads and lassies in school who study "business administration" or other such nonsense. We wonder why they think us funny for objecting that the businesses they administer hire slave labor in China. What else can we expect? Their learning is deficient. They are incomplete in their intellects.

Similarly, when we are looking at a piece of art or music we must recognize that, insofar as it is beautiful it is good. Insofar as it is true, it is good. Insofar as it is, it is beautiful, good, and true. For bad art to exist, it must be deficient in something. We cannot say, for instance, that a Thomas Kincade painting is bad because it contains ugliness. Instead we have to show where it lacks proportion, integrity, and clarity (this is an easy example, since all of Mr. Kincade’s work lacks proportion, integrity and clarity – right now I am only sketching rough ideas. When we get to the actual series of CO in E Maj. posts, we will look at concrete examples. The benefit of Mr. Kincade is that I only need to point to his website. Anything we find there will fit the description of an art so degenerated as to almost completely lack beauty, truth, and good. Likewise in music we have Kenny G, who we can pick out of a pile of CDs, randomly pick a track and listen with confidence to utterly horrid music).

Now we have the tricky subject of art dealing with the human condition with all of its crustiness, all of its faults, all of its torments, trials, traumas, death and decay. Is an artist to ignore those, preferring to portray idealized situations and settings? Certainly not, as that approach fails to address the real affairs of real people. Instead the artist’s mission is to draw the viewer into the morass and reveal the good and beautiful hidden in there. To try to ignore the gritiness of the world is to sugarcoat, to offer an escape that does not exist. It is an act of salesmanship, rather than art, and it is, diabolically, a salesmanship of fraud. This is the crux of Carbon Monoxide culture. Why Carbon Monoxide? Why not cyanide?

Ah, this, my dear reader, is only the Vormusik. You are overly anxious to see the Rhinemaidens!

Posted by erik at June 2, 2003 4:29 PM | TrackBack