If modernity does not perceive the profound difference between these two masterful poets, it is not particularly surprising. Modernity does not perceive anything very profoundly, least of all those things that are truly profound. The cry of the De profundis cannot be heard by the moderns because in order to cry de profundis, one must first have some perception of the depth from which one is crying. Paradoxically, modernity cannot cry from out of the depths because it is out of its depth. It simply does not understand the deeper things.
This lack of insight on the part of the modern world, particularly within the context of a discussion of the importance of Dante, was expressed by Chesterton with his customary eloquence.
If we compare . . . the morality of the Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen’s Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the Inferno of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one—Hell.4
The irony, of course, is that modernity is left with hell because it has rejected Purgatory and heaven. And this takes us from Ibsen back to Milton. As a fanatical Puritan, Milton had rejected the medieval vision of heaven and Purgatory. Perhaps indeed he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell” precisely because he despised Dante’s vision of the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering. The Puritans condemned the Catholic veneration of the saints and rejected the very existence of Purgatory. Quite simply, heaven and Purgatory, as Dante envisioned them, were “off limits” to Milton. He could not write of saints, nor of repentant souls being cleansed of their sins. He was left with hell. Having rejected the vision of success (heaven) and the vision of improvement on the path to success (Purgatory), he is left only with the vision of failure (hell). What, ultimately, is Paradise Lost but a vision of failure?
Like Milton and Ibsen, the modern world is more at home in hell than in heaven. It is where it wants to be. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Dante’s Inferno is far more widely read than the Purgatorio or the Paradiso. For most moderns, even those who profess to teach literature at our centers of higher learning (so-called), Dante is often seen as “the poet of the Inferno”. Not only is this the only part of the Divine Comedy that is studied, it is generally considered to be far superior as literature to the other two books. The absurdity of such a position, literarily speaking, beggars belief. It beggars belief not so much because the Purgatorio and the Paradiso are better as literature (though it can certainly be argued convincingly that they are at least the Inferno’s equal) but because they are all part of the same book. Imagine the absurdity of suggesting that Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring was superior to The Two Towers or The Return of the King, so much so that it was considered unnecessary to read the whole of The Lord of the Rings. Imagine the absurdity of suggesting that the first book of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was superior to the second and third books and that, therefore, it was necessary to study only the first third of the novel. Imagine the suggestion that it is necessary to read only the first third of any book in order to understand it! Yet, astounding though it may seem, this is exactly the way in which the Divine Comedy is often studied.
The full extent of the absurdity is made apparent once we perceive the work as a whole and not as three distinct books. Taken as a whole, the Divine Comedy depicts the ascent of the spirit of assent, the soul’s slow but sure acceptance of the will of God. It begins, however, with the descent of the spirit of dissent, the soul’s obstinate rejection of the divine will. The deeper the dissent, the deeper the descent until, at last, we find ourselves with the traitors in the diabolic presence of Satan himself. The vision thus far is all negative, rooted in rejection of the will of God. It is, however, only the preamble, only the prelude or the prologue to the ascent and assent that follows. From now on, the soul ascends Mount Purgatory and from thence is lifted into the spheres of heaven itself and, finally, into the very presence of the beatific vision. Seen in this context, the descent into Hell is the diminuendo that accentuates the increasing power of the crescendo that follows it. Remove the crescendo, and the diminuendo is devoid of ultimate purpose.
Perhaps it takes a Catholic sensibility to understand fully the Divine Comedy, and this perhaps is the reason for modernity’s failure to comprehend this greatest of all poems. At any rate, it takes a great Catholic like Chesterton to elucidate fully the lucidity of Dante’s vision. Take, for instance, Chesterton’s comparison of Dante to Shakespeare.
Do we not know in our hearts that Shakespeare could have dealt with Dante’s Hell but hardly with Dante’s Heaven? In so far as it is possible to be greater than anything that is really great, the man who wrote of Romeo and Juliet might have made something even more poignant out of Paolo and Francesca. The man who uttered that pulverizing “He has no children”, over the butchery in the house of Macduff, might have picked out yet more awful and telling words for the father’s cry out of the Tower of Hunger. And when Dante is really dealing with the dance of the liberated virtues in the vasty heights of heaven, he is spacious. He is spacious when he talks of Liberty; he is spacious when he talks of Love. It is so in the famous words at the end about Love driving the sun and stars; it is the same in the far less famous and far finer passage, in which he hails the huge magnanimity of God in giving to the human spirit the one gift worth having; which is Liberty. Nobody but a fool will say that Shakespeare was a pessimist; but we may, in this limited sense, say that he was a pagan; in so far that he is at his greatest in describing great spirits in chains. In that sense, his most serious plays are an inferno. Anyhow, they are certainly not a Paradiso.5
Although I can’t concur with Chesterton’s conclusion that some of Shakespeare’s plays were an inferno, believing instead that they were in fact a purgatorio, his insistence on Dante’s superiority as a visionary of paradise is utterly valid. Nor can one argue with Chesterton’s ultimate appraisal of Dante’s munificent and magnificent accentuation of the positive: “Dante is drawn as a dark and bitter spirit; but in fact he wrote the only one of the great epics that really has a happy ending.” 6
The final word on Dante’s masterpiece belongs not to Eliot, nor to Chesterton, but to Chesterton’s great friend, Maurice Baring. A greatly underrated novelist and poet in his own right, Baring has captured better than anyone the love of liberty and the liberty of love at the heart-leaping core of the Divine Comedy, the assent’s ascent.
Scaling the circles of the Paradiso, we are conscious the whole time of an ascent not only in the quality of the substance but in that of the form. It is a long perpetual crescendo, increasing in beauty until the final consummation in the very last line. Somebody once defined an artist . . . as a man who knew how to finish things. If this definition is true—and I think it is—then Dante was the greatest artist who ever lived. His final canto is the best, and it depends on and completes the beginning.7
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SHAKESPEARE
Good Will for All Men
AS AN ENGLISHMAN, I must confess an element of pride (in the nontheological sense!) at the very mention of the name of William Shakespeare. The knowledge that my country has spawned, nurtured and nourished such a genius is certainly a cause for joy. It is, however, a little presumptuous to feel proud about something for which one deserves no credit. One might as well feel proud or superior because one is the offspring of rich parents. The baby, fresh from the womb of a wealthy mother, has clearly not merited the silver spoon that he has inherited any more than the newborn babe of penurious parents deserves censure for the plastic spoon with which it is fed. Clearly, therefore, we Englishmen have not merited the honor of calling William Shakespeare our fellow countryman. Nonetheless, he is our fellow countryman, and we have the right—nay, the duty—to feel grateful for this fortuitous gift. It is, inde
ed, the sort of fortuitousness that breeds fortitude. After all, if we can call Shakespeare our countryman, shouldn’t it inspire us to emulate his example, however imperfectly?
Shakespeare is, however, not merely or only an Englishman. He is no more merely English than Dante is merely Italian, Cervantes merely Spanish or Dostoyevsky merely Russian. He was, and they were, spawned, nurtured and nourished by something greater than their respective nationalities. They were all children of Christendom, inheritors of the seed of Christ. They were cultivated by the grace of God Himself and grew to creative fruition in the profound culture of the Church. As such, they are catholic and Catholic. Their appeal is universal. They speak nothing less than the language of Truth. They speak to Everyman in a powerful language that Everyman understands. Thus Shakespeare the Englishman is also Shakespeare for Everyman, regardless of Everyman’s nationality. Shakespeare is for sharing!
There is, however, a problem that comes with this liberality. There is the danger—nay, the inevitability—that the Shakespearean pearls will be cast before swine. So be it. The swine will not be harmed by it. It might even do them some good! Even relativists may come through relatively unharmed! They might even find themselves relatively cured of their relativism. Perhaps, however, this is merely wishful thinking. There are none so blind, as the saying goes . . . I suspect, in fact, that the only people more blind than those who will not see are those who see only what they want to see!
I am reminded—if I might be permitted a brief peripatetic aside—of the exchange between Chesterton, the prophet of absolute or gospel truth, and Holbrook Jackson, a preacher of relative or secularist opinion:
Jackson: A lie is that which you do not believe.
Chesterton: This is a lie: so perhaps you don’t believe it.
Jackson: As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it.
Chesterton: No: It is time to build another idea on it. You are always rejecting: and you build nothing.
Jackson: Truth and falsehood in the abstract do not exist.
Chesterton: Then nothing else does.
Jackson: Truth is one’s own conception of things.
Chesterton: The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.
Jackson: Negations without affirmations are worthless.
Chesterton: And impossible.
Jackson: No opinion matters finally: except your own.
Chesterton: Said the man who thought he was a rabbit.
Chesterton, the absolutist, is absolutely right; Jackson, the relativist, is more than relatively wrong.
What, however, has this to do with Shakespeare? I will answer, if I may, with a further peripatetic aside, this time in the form of a cautionary tale.
I was born with the proverbial plastic spoon in my mouth and endured the worst of educations in an east London comprehensive school (which shall remain nameless). This citadel of secularism was full of the sort of relativist and “multicultural” nonsense that, with reference and deference to the dialogue quoted above, could be called almost “Jacksonian” in its inanity. Now, this school had, as its motto, emblazoned above the assembly hall, the Shakespearean epithet “This above all: To thine own self be true.” As a youth, steeped in an unconscious agnosticism and entirely ignorant of Christian orthodoxy, I took this motto very seriously. It became, in fact, and in the absence of a creed, my own personal motto. I even claimed, somewhat whimsically and a trifle unjustly, that it was the only useful thing I ever learned at school.
Why, one wonders, did such a school choose such a motto? The answer, of course, is that it is safe. It cannot offend anyone, regardless of his faith or lack thereof. It smacks of relativism. It reminds us of Jackson’s trite trifles, posing as philosophy. Truth is one’s own conception of things . . . No opinion matters finally: except your own. . . It is a short step from these self-centered notions of truth to the Shakespearean version of the same: This above all: To thine own self be true. Can this not be paraphrased or interpreted as “Be true to thine own selfishness”; or “Be true to thyself, to hell with the rest”; or, more blasphemously, “I am the way and the truth (not anyone else, including God)”?
What does all this mean? Does it mean, horror of horrors, that Shakespeare was a protosecularist or a protorelativist? Certainly many secularist critics would have us believe so. They are, however, wrong. Shakespeare was possibly, perhaps probably, a Catholic. He was certainly a believing and profoundly orthodox Christian whose plays were full of profoundly Christocentric perceptions of life.
Yet, if this is so, where does it leave our cautionary tale? How do we explain the apparent secularism of the Shakespearean epithet quoted above? The answer, of course, is that the words are not Shakespeare’s at all; or rather, they are words that Shakespeare placed into the mouth of someone else. They were uttered by a character in one of his plays and, as such, represent the beliefs of the character, not necessarily the beliefs of the poet who enabled him to speak. The character in question is Polonius, the well-meaning, bungling and ultimately shallow adviser to King Claudius in Hamlet. The words are spoken as part of Polonius’ famous advice to his son, Laertes, a monologue that can be seen as a secularist discourse, more sublime in expression than Jackson’s platitudes but ultimately almost as banal. Shakespeare paints Polonius as a meddling and blundering buffoon, as facile and impotent in life as he is fatuous in philosophy. In short, Polonius looks as silly in the hands of Shakespeare as does Jackson in the hands of Chesterton. In both cases, the folly of falsehood is exposed by a master of truth.
In the words of the Bard himself, life in the fallen world might continue to be a comedy of errors, but all’s well that ends well!
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MODERN ART
Friend or Foe?
IS MODERN ART MERELY A LOAD of old rubbish—or, rather, a load of old new rubbish? Certainly much that passes as “art” in our muddled modern world is not worthy of the name. Take, for instance, the garbage posing as art during an exhibition of the shortlisted “artists” for the 2004 Beck’s Futures Prize at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Among the finalists for the £20,000 prize was a British “artist” who had produced a video of two Cilla Black impersonators singing the star’s first big hit, Anyone Who Had a Heart. Another finalist, who described himself as an avid train spotter, had produced a twenty-seven-minute video of a freight train. The winner, however, was a Brazilian “artist” who specialized in making sculptures of animals by scraping fluff from new carpets.
Meanwhile, in Cardiff, the Artes Mundi prize, worth £40,000, was won by a Chinese “artist” who had gathered dust from the ruins of the World Trade Center and had scattered it on the floor before tracing a short verse about dust in the dust. Works of “art” honored with major prizes in previous years include piles of bricks, soiled nappies (or soiled diapers for our American readers), an unmade bed decorated with debris such as condoms, dead animals, “sculptures” made by urinating in snow, and the work of an “artist” who specialized in sewing things to the soles of his feet. Et cetera ad nauseam.
The exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) opened a few hours before the millionaire collector and patron of modern “art”, Charles Saatchi, threw a celebrity-thronged party at his private gallery to launch a new exhibition, titled New Blood, which also professed to champion the avant-garde. The exhibition was greeted with howls of derision by Saatchi’s rivals at the ICA. “We’re showing the new blood. Saatchi’s got old blood”, sneered a spokesman for the ICA. Philip Dodd, the ICA’s director, added that “the nicest thing to say about Charles is that several artists in his show were in our Beck’s exhibition a year ago.” In dismissing his rival, Dodd had also unwittingly dismissed himself, and the so-called “art” he promotes, to the dustbin of history. As his comments make abundantly clear, this sort of self-styled modern “art” is not about quality but novelty. It’s not about how good it is but how new it is. This ye
ar’s artists are better than last year’s artists purely because they are this year’s artists. Last year’s artists are already passe. It is, therefore, easy to dismiss this sort of “art” as nothing but dust and fluff that will be blown away by the winds of fashion. After all, as C. S. Lewis quipped, fashions are always coming and going . . . but mostly going.
So much for fashion and the false “art” it promotes. What about real modern art? What about art that is truly modern and truly art? Is such art a friend or foe of the Faith? Should Christians be suspicious of such art? Should we trust it?
Such questions cannot be answered—and should not even be asked—until we have asked and answered the more fundamental and radical question What is modern art? And, as is so often the case, it is best to begin by asking what a thing is not before we proceed to a discussion of what it is.
The first thing to be understood is that modern art is not particularly “modern”. In the same way that modern history begins several centuries ago, modern art is already many centuries old. It is, in fact, impossible to point definitively to a particular moment when art became modern. The departure from iconography was “modern”; the science of perspective was “modern”. Giotto was “modern” in the fourteenth century; Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were “modern” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If “modern” means up-to-date or innovative within the context of one’s own time, these artists qualify in every respect as “modern”. Paradoxically, they are permanently modern, in the sense that the freshness of their vision is perennial. Their art is fresh because it is incorruptible. One can hardly say the same of soiled nappies, condom-strewn beds or carpet fluff. In this sense, Giotto, Leonardo and Raphael have far more claim to being modern than have the nameless and soon-to-be-forgotten “artists” of today. And, of course, they have a far better claim to being artists.
Literary Giants Literary Catholics Page 39