The Making Of Flannery O’Connor, Ctd

In an essay about her prayer journals, published last year, Paul Elie focuses on the inspiration O’Connor found in the work of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain:

[Maritain’s] Art and Scholasticism offered an account of the nature of art—and of artistic inspiration—at once more sophisticated and more Catholic than any O’Connor had encountered. Drawing on Aquinas, Maritain—a French convert who was teaching at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton—makes the case that virtue, for the artist, consists in “the good of the thing made” more than in upright behavior or efforts at personal holiness. Art is “reason in making,” and good art is distinguished by “wholeness, harmony, and radiance.” The most direct way for the artist to live a good life is by making good art. To this task the artist must bring, not so much Christian principles, but the whole of his or her personality, including religious faith. A particular artist’s work begins with his or her distinct talents and preoccupations.

Yet much of the self must be left behind in the act of making. Virtue, for the artist, involves subordinating the good of the self to the good of the thing made; and to do this, the artist must cultivate “the habit of art”—by developing skills and work habits and purifying the source of inspiration. There is service in this, even holiness; at the same time, there is freedom for the artist to put some of those scruples about everyday life aside.

O’Connor read Maritain’s account of art in Iowa and embraced it enthusiastically. In the Prayer Journal, on April 14, 1947, she wrote: “I want to be the best artist I can possibly be, under God.” And that yearning was more than a desire for personal fulfillment. It carried obligations, because as she put it, “God has given me everything, all the tools, even instructions for their use, even a good brain to use them with, a creative brain to make them immediate for others.” It was a calling.

Previous Dish on O’Connor’s prayer journals here, here, and here.

How God Died

Morten Høi Jensen surveys a number of recent books on the origins of modern atheism, finding in Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origins of the Species the intriguing argument that atheism’s rise was due to “thinkers who wanted to realign the relationship between religion and society,” rather than outright claims that God did not exist:

One of the ironies of Spencer’s narrative, and what gives it a kind of provocative counterintuitiveness, is his insistence on the role of believers themselves in the undermining of their faith. When believers splintered into factions and began questioning each other’s authority, Spencer writes, “they also questioned the texts on which their interpretation was founded, and biblical criticism as an anti-Christian discipline was born.”

In other words, atheism, like a teenage boyfriend, was snuck in through the back door while devout parents were distractedly bickering over biblical interpretation. And once the initial transgression had occurred, religious authority’s undoing was irreversible. Slowly, historians, philosophers, and scientists began to vie with church authorities for the definitive account of human origin and destiny. Even the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), with its claim that, as Spencer puts it, “history was all humanity and accident and irony,” was considered by many to be a subversion of the notions of divine providence. There was no divine intervention in Gibbon’s history, just imperfect human agency.

Spencer finds a parallel argument in Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God:

The English literary theorist Terry Eagleton joins Spencer in seeing the history of atheism not strictly as a refutation of God but as a series of disagreements over moral and political authority. “The Enlightenment,” he writes early in Culture and the Death of God, “may have been troubled by the question of faith, but it was not especially anti-religious.” The philosophes of the Enlightenment viewed religion in practical, utilitarian terms; it was to be contested when it supported political autocracy but tolerated when it promoted civic virtue. Whatever their own hang-ups about religion, these largely bourgeois intellectuals looked kindly (and not a little condescendingly) on the lower classes clinging desperately to their pious ideology. What harm is a little superstition, the philosophes rationalized, if it guarantees social cohesion?

But Eagleton sees it as “imprudent for the rulers to worship Reason while the masses pay homage to the Virgin Mary,” and his book is partly a critique of those who would use religion as a rationale for an existing social order. Thus he examines the variously philosophical and political attempts to replace religious eschatology with what he calls counterfeit theology. “The history of the modern age,” he argues,

is among other things the search for a viceroy for God. Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.

Recent Dish on the origins of atheism here and here.

“A Love Supreme”

John Coltrane’s brilliant jazz album of that name was released fifty years ago this month. S. Brent Plate reflects on its spiritual qualities:

What is it about Coltrane, and in particular A Love Supreme, that gets some of us going spiritually? Coltrane was after truth, as one biographer put it, and not necessarily “pleasant listening.” I am attracted to this idea, that truth is difficult and can not easily be possessed. The corollary here is that there is no truth in Musak, and not much in the pop charts. In classical terms “truth” and “beauty” are not interchangeable.

Perhaps more importantly, truth is heard. It is an activity of the ears. And these are not necessarily the sounds of words being spoken, but a sensual experience that operate above and beyond the conceptual, intellectual realm. Truth is in the sensual arts, not rational philosophy.

True, Coltrane wrote some unapologetically religious words for the liner notes of A Love Supreme, giving “all praise to God,” and thanking God for his “spiritual awakening” of 1957 which, as we know from his biography, had also to do with his quitting heroin and alcohol. (Even so, the abuses had already been enough that he died of liver failure at age 40.) But who can resist putting the liner notes down quickly and sitting and listening: “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm,” making up the four parts of the musical journey.

Hisham Aidi, however, finds the album reflects an interest in Islam:

The conventional view is that by 1964, Coltrane had moved away from his Methodist upbringing, adopting a “pan-religious” outlook with a particular interest in Eastern mysticism. In spite of that, “A Love Supreme” is still described as laden with Biblical symbolism: the title “Psalm”, and the rising cadences, reminiscent of black preachers’ style, are offered as evidence that Coltrane was still rooted in Christianity. But ask one of the jazzmen or Muslim elders who knew Coltrane, and you get a different answer.

The saxophonist Yusef Lateef, who died at the age of 93 earlier this year, worked closely with Coltrane between 1963 and 1966. In his autobiography , “A Gentle Giant”, Lateef says: “The prayer that John wrote in ‘A Love Supreme’ repeats the phrase ‘All praise belongs to God no matter what’ several times. This phrase has the semantics of the al-Fatiha, which is the first chapter or sura of the Holy Quran. The Arabic transliteration is ‘al-Humdulilah…’ Since all faithful Muslims say the al-Fatiha five times a day or more, it is reasonable to assume that John heard this phrase from [his Muslim wife] Sister Naima many times.”

Lateef is referring to the poem Coltrane wrote and included in the liner notes of the album. Coltrane wrote: “No matter what … It is with God. He is gracious and merciful” and ends with “All praise to God…” What Lateef and others have noted is that “gracious and merciful” is a translation of “rahman raheem”, the opening lines of the Fatiha. Moreover, say the elders, when Coltrane begins chanting the album’s title for half a minute it sounds like a Sufi breathily repeating “Allah supreme”.

What Is Religious Faith?

In an interview, John Caputo – a philosopher whose work explores the connections between postmodernism and Christian theology – distinguishes it from mere “belief”:

Faith is a form of life and so it also has a specific form. I wouldn’t say that faith is more general; I would say it is deeper. It gets expressed in a specific form like liturgy. It is an exercise of the whole person: affective, bodily, performative. It is making the truth.

If we didn’t have the specific historical religious traditions, we would be much the poorer for it. Without Christianity, we wouldn’t have the memory of Jesus. We wouldn’t have the books of the New Testament. You need these concrete, historical traditions that are the bearers of ancient stories and are cut to fit to various cultures. But I don’t want to absolutize them or freeze-frame them. I don’t think of one religion being true at the expense of another in a zero-sum game. I am not saying that if you burrow deeply enough under each religious tradition, you will find they are all the same. They are quite different. They are as different as the cultures and the languages out of which they come. There is an irreducible multiplicity.

This is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity: you can’t boil everything down to one common thing. There are many ways of doing the truth. There can’t be one true religion any more than there can be one true language. The truth of religion is not the truth of a certain body of assertions. It is not about a core set of agreements. That’s not relativism, and it is not saying that there is nothing true in religion. It is saying that religious truth is not like the truth of mathematics. It is a different sort that is deeply woven together with a form of life.

A Short Story For Saturday

This weekend’s short story, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” is the last story in his imperishable collection, Dubliners. It takes place around this time of year, making it one of the truly great stories to read during the holidays. Here’s how it begins:

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat.

Read the rest here. Check out our previous SSFSs here.