The Malibu Conference: Inspiration vs. Transformation Encountering the Arts

(The following lecture was given January 6, 2024 in the Serra Center, Malibu, CA as part of the Media Apostles Retreat for entertainment industry leaders)

Abstract

Do we make meaning, or discover it? While the past 250 years of intellectual history leans toward the former, the possibility of affirming the latter gives us pause since we are also haunted by the thought of missing out on the meaning of the world. At the same time, we have no doubt that artists bring meaningful stuff into being.

Understanding symbolism is central to the human intellect's discovery of meaning. We will explore how symbols are different from signs, whether they are in some way necessarily religious, and what role they play in the formation of culture.

The sacramental quality of creation that is native to the Judeo-Christian worldview is a heritage that's easily lost: it takes a robust combination of honesty and virtue to behold things as windows to God, which brings us to consider if and how their meaningfulness ought influence people and society at large.

Introduction

Catholic liturgy is the only art form where the symbols fully become the things they symbolize. It sets the unattainable ideal for dramatic art, indeed for all true art, which is art that aspires to be incarnational. What does that word mean? It refers to that central mystery of Christian faith which we describe as God becoming man in Jesus: the eternal becoming temporal, the spiritual becoming material, the transcendent becoming immanent.

That doesn't mean art can't achieve that in at least some way; but there's a risk embedded in the artistic endeavor, a tension between idolatry and mute servitude that we must ride: someone made the golden calf—and yet God still calls us to cooperate in His act of creation!

In this sense, all true artistic collaboration is already sacramental, because creation is already proclaiming God's presence, a collaboration that reminds one of the generative unity of matrimony that's rightfully called "procreation."

Art, then, is an icon: it doesn’t capture God, but makes a window through which he might be noticed; propaganda (or even well-intended advertising), by contrast, is idolatry in action: it pretends to hold the absolute in a box, putting an abrupt end to all searching and striving. Art and beauty always push past propaganda which is why the ideologues hate the beautiful—it can't be controlled.

Signs vs. Symbols

Signs are things that point to something else. Some are natural, others man-made: smoke means fire, stop signs mean hit the brakes.

But there a subset of signs that are special—they're called symbols: they don't just point to another thing; they have multiple dimensions of meaning, namely, they also point to a higher order of thing, the realm of persons (which happens to be the spiritual realm) When we call something meaningful in this personal sense, it presupposes a person that means. Two examples:

• In saying: "when you showed up for my piano recital, it meant a lot" what's being communicated is strictly personal stuff: kindness, mutual support, loyalty...
• Smoke is a sign of fire, but on its own it doesn't symbolize anything; however a photographer for Time Magazine capturing the post 9-11 smoke over Manhattan elevates it to the level of symbol: the viewer intuitively knows the photo means more that what's shown: national insecurity, terrorism, the end of an era, etc., which can only be there because there's a person meaning it.

Symbolic meaning is elicited by the experience of beauty—the astounding order of creation in an individual or collectively—which triggers wonder: we look up at the starry sky, or a sunset find ourselves asking: “where'd it all come from?” or “what does it all mean?” Those are questions meant for persons. The experience of beauty has long been recognized as "ecstatic" which means "to stand outside of" - and indeed, it does bring us to forget ourselves for at least a moment.

• All art is symbolic because its meant to evoke wonder through its beauty (indeed, there are some worthy art forms that portray evil or ugliness, but in an ordered way—but that's a whole other discussion).

The experience of love is also symbolic because it is so much more than the instincts of self or species preservation. Philosopher Gabriel Marcel rightly put it: "to say 'I love you' means: 'you shall not die.'" That's spot on, when you think about it: there's a yearning for the eternal embedded in any real, personal love.

The Culture detour

What's culture? A few definitions:

• A process in which soul and character are formed through experiences of transcendence and the virtues. -Eric Voegelin
• That through which man becomes more man - the specifically human mode of existence. -Karol Wojtyla
• A deliberate effort to bring human life into relation with divine reality and into subordination to divine power. -Christopher Dawson
• An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols. -Clifford Geertz

The above definitions point to a symbolic, personal, and ultimately spiritual reality.

Culture presupposes religion, because the latter is profoundly symbolic—its cadre of gestures, rites, and sacred stories all point to the dimension of persons/spirit and the ultimate purpose of the people, and so the meaningful arrangement of society will leverage those same symbols. Every human society has a set of nationally acknowledged symbolizations that become institutions, which are endowed with an implicit or explicit religious character (cf. the coronation ceremony for British monarchs, the Greek temple design of all Washington monuments...). It's not by accident that in every ancient civilization, religion and government were joined at the hip.

But—we may object—didn't atheist Soviet Russia have a culture? Yes—it simply “religified” its artifacts and representatives: that's why the body of Vladimir Lenin is in a temple, kept incorrupt by continually soaking it in glycerol. But it fell, because everyone got tired of upholding the lies. That bring us to our next strident assertion: secularism cannot produce real art. “Is great art possible without a religious society to produce it?” posed to [famous agnostic orchestral conductor] John Eliot Gardiner: “no”

• Every western nation surrounds it's symbols with a religious aura: there's a reason why all the monuments in DC look like the Pantheon.
• Even sub-cultures, which feeds off of an "over-culture", have their “religified” symbols: skateboarders of the 80's started out as school dropouts who wanted to skate all day, didn't have money so went to goodwill and got size XXL, drab color clothes, accidentally creating a look by which anyone now can literally “buy” into the values of a culturally liberated, anti-authoritarian existence.

But a culture's ultimate longevity, its “sticking-around” power, depends upon how real its religious core is, and that brings us to our next point, because it crucially determines how good its art is.

Since real art is necessarily symbolic, it's both a cultural product and in turn, producer. Its creative power lies in that it answers to the values that its immediate culture rests upon, meaning it cannot be coerced, but is necessarily free: it's not beholden to the human institutions (propaganda).

A culture's (or art's) greatness or poverty will be measured by: the ability of its underlying religious symbols to symbolize adequately the human condition.

• “Adequately” because nature is something given; we're not free to invent our humanity - if we do, we'll be called out or eventually ignored;
• Art must spring from within a culture to be a producer of culture, but it will only last if it honors human nature's call to fulfillment, something the Judeo-Christian tradition calls this eternal life.
• This “honoring” happens, always symbolically, by asking existential questions, critiquing society's inauthenticity, embracing the full gamut of human complexity, longing and suffering, and by shedding light on our spiritual experiences.
• If you've noticed, these conditions are the very opposite of the suffocating “control” that every tyranny requires.
• There can be good human experiences shorn from their natural stem and grafted onto an ideological weed, like the glorified worker of the Marxist proletariat, but at what price?
• Poor art doesn't only come from political tyranny, but from incomplete experiences, and therefore incomplete symbolizations of truth and beauty that in turn give rise to defective cultural institutions. In the ancient port city of Corinth, the temple of Aphrodite was a place of sacred prostitution: what better way to pay homage to the goddess of love? Except for one small detail: in that temple there were real people receiving real abuse. But do we really think everyone was ready to abandon that practice just because a certain Paul of Tarsus came and said stop it? It escalated into a battle no longer against flesh and blood, but against the very powers of darkness. That's how quickly defective symbols turn into idols, obscuring the greater reality they should point to instead of being transparent to it.

But if you are in touch with the grandeur of the human person, you'll forgive my boldness for simply saying the more Catholic you are, the better your grip will be. And while there's many reasons for this, I'll limit myself to saying it's because the Church alone embraces all the tensions of human existence foregoing the shortcut of oversimplification: we're fully body and spirit at the same time because physical, limited things really do communicate the eternal and transcendent. There's a structure we have to learn, not invent. The fact that God became man doesn't allow us to forget it. And now we have to consider the implications...

Authentic Symbolization is Sacramental

“When art deeply resonates with you, you engage with it on multiple levels: visually, emotionally and intellectually. This interaction initiates a dialogue with the artist's intentions and opens doors to entirely new worlds gaining new insights. The more layers we unravel through our engagement, the greater the opportunity to merge with the artist's vision and tap into the transformative potential of the artwork.”

Once in a while a work of art - musical, visual, literary, or even a natural object or event - will give an insight into the ultimate structure of reality: it in some way makes a greater reality present. It can be, as we said above, a wonder-provoking experience. This is the experience of inspiration: the ability to see in a way I couldn't before.

The Catholic tradition has a name for those phenomena that make the greater reality (God) uniquely present: sacraments. Now before you blurt out the number 7, I want to point out that those physical things (bread, wine, water, oil) take their place among all creatures that, each in some way, can become "spiritually transparent": windows to God, and his mysterious structuring the universe. That is why all things in the world have not just a symbolic but indeed a sacramental value; I say "potentially" because sometimes they have to be brought to maturity before that sacramental value can shine.

• I'll get eyes raised from young people when I say “a thing has reached maturity only when it becomes a sacrament, and that includes you.” They're not used to hearing this word used in the wide sense! But they deeply appreciate it, and our culture is long overdue to hear it.
• It's precisely what JPII did when he composed TOB: my own body with all my attraction to beauty and the desire to be loved really do tell me both about God and what I'm made for, instead of seeing those experiences as blind instincts to repress in order to fulfill someone's expectations of propriety.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this finality in his poem: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The point being: you let the sacramental shine forth - but that does not mean art has to be made “religious,”because in a certain sense, it's too late: all creation is already “religious.” To the surprise of many, I—a priest—dislike Christian music. Why? Because the lot of it feels forced, or as some would put it, dishonest. The drama of making art is that even God's stuff, when handled poorly, can be lowered to the level of propaganda. Therefore to all Christian artists I say: don't tell me I should give my life to Jesus: show me how it's the only real life to live, how it makes sense of my pain. To the one who achieves that nexus, that balance, the beholders of your art will be urged to be more human. Indeed, the behavior of the consumers of art is often an all-too-accurate thermometer of how rooted it is in the truth of what we're made for.

• When you come into contact with art that seems to have the ability to focus a sacramental light into a laser point, the resulting experience of beauty is breathtaking...it's the moment "God walks through the room - where craft ends and spirit begins."
• Beauty is, you guessed it, also sacramental, and the artist recognizes it as on loan, meaning: it already has a structure and a source; the artist borrows beauty, gets to reshape it, but not coerce it. I’m sharing in God's own delight in creating—that's a canon that I have to be faithful to.
• So what are the rules of the sacramental universe? Here's a few off the top of my head:
• grace over karma;
• icons over idols;
• love is stronger than death;
• tensions between body and spirit, freedom and nature, person and society are honored, not dissolved, rendering these tensions fruitful .

Transformative Power of the Sacramental

"Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou were with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things!" -Augustine, Confessions, b.X, ch. XXVII

So why is it that famously cultured people, who are always surrounded by beautiful art, remain manifestly not-beautiful people? Literary critic George Steiner confesses, “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." There's a subtle danger lurking in the arts: the naïve belief that they will make me a good person.  

• Augustine analyzes it further (Confessions III, 2) the moral worth of the emotions felt by those who go to the theater in order to “experience” vicariously the suffering portrayed by tragic actors. He says that such merely æsthetic enjoyment is a counterfeit and, hence, morally dangerous because it can give us the illusion of having gained wisdom through participation in suffering, whereas in actual fact we have only had our superficial emotions titillated. In the end, we are worse off spiritually for having seen the play. Not only do we remain as ignorant as before concerning the real nature of human tragedy, but, in addition, we have grown in arrogance as a result, thinking ourselves wiser than before.
• "If sacramental experiences of beauty, truth and goodness do not grant us a sense of the divine source, then perhaps we will find ourselves enlightened, cultured, and sophisticated while remaining deaf to the anonymous person screaming in the street. And if that is the case, then God help us...because we have forgotten what it is all for."
• Pope Benedict had a piercing insight into what a parable does, and doesn't do: "it demands the collaboration of the learner, for not only is something brought close to him, but he himself must enter into the movement of the parable and journey along with it. At this point we begin to see why parables can cause problems: people are sometimes unable to discover the dynamic and let themselves be guided by it. Especially in the case of parables that affect and transform their personal lives, people can be unwilling to be drawn into the required movement… the mystery of the Cross is inscribed right at the heart of the parables." (from: Jesus of Nazareth part I).

So how do we get that sense, and what must we do with it? Because the bottom line is, the experience of inspiration does not include transformation. The latter demands conscious cooperation of the will to enact the truth just seen.

One Solution: Contemplation & Reflection

A couple of Dubliners—Paul and his wife Ali—visited Ethiopia in the early 80’s, and were taken by the tangible solidarity in some village, where each child was taken care of by every neighbor, as if they were their own kids. There weren't any street names in that village—just a happy chaos. Paul recognized the ironic contrast to his much wealthier native Dublin, where street names not only told you whether one was Catholic or protestant, but also separated the high income people from the blue collar folks. And just like that, a little Ethiopian town took on a sacramental quality, not because it was the ideal society, because it wasn't—but it became an unlikely symbol for the New Jerusalem, heaven: because there won't be any street names up there either! You see the role of contemplation and reflection here?

• If Paul hadn't seen the village for what it was instead of what he hoped to find, he wouldn't have noticed the street nuance; when you hear the term asceticism, what comes to mind? Its purpose is not to deny randomly my desires, but it's an ancient Christian practice by which I train myself to contemplate, i.e. to see what's really there, instead of what I expect, hope, or fear to see. That takes an act of courage. No, it takes the virtue of courage.
• In the Eastern church, they make icons. You don't look at an icon - the icon looks at you, and draws you into itself, but you have to be in the disposition to let it happen.
• We instinctively seek to impose meaning by getting my hands on inert matter and molding it into something useful to leave my mark on the world; but the sacramental paradigm would have me discovering my place in the meaningful drama of reception that I find myself in the middle of!
• Regarding memory, if he didn't at some point sit down and reflect upon what that experience meant, allowing it to speak to him, indeed, to become revelation (has anyone ever done this better than Our Lady?), he would never have seen the connection which so deeply touched his personal life and talents that it ended up touching the hearts of millions more, which you'll see why in a moment. The ancient Christian examen prayer does nothing more than reflect upon what stuff in my life might be meaningful in a way I had not suspected.

Two virtues: contemplating and remembering what the Lord has done, are staples of Christian existence; docility to what's real and reflection upon the multiple dimensions of meaning that the divine Artist has personally woven into the world around me. Is it any wonder the overwhelming majority of the world's artistic patrimony springs from a Christian civilization?

When in February 2002 the time came for Paul to sacramentally “catechize” a sizable crowd of 83 million viewers, he took a symbol all were already familiar with, invoked the Holy Spirit, and by introducing the symbol of “streets” the result was a sublime moment that spoke to a nation of something they weren’t expecting to hear about: heaven…

Turns out Paul, aka Bono of U2, couldn’t have known how 15 years down the road his symbolizing that humble village experience into lyrics would mean more than he ever imagined; they’d just as well been written for the moment: resonating hope to a nation recently laid low by tragedy, scraping for unity, gathered at the Super Bowl…

An icon, like the prophetic word, holds a tension within itself: it taps into an inexhaustible spring, but, like a parent, it demands obedience, and the flexibility to recognize that the communicator’s original formulation was an imprecise stab at the truth it’s pointing to. Basically, if you stay in your lane, the song will sing you as its adequate instrument—then God walks in the room. Which probably accounts for the spur of the moment change of the last phrase of the song from the singular to plural: “...it’s all we can do.” Who says “Our Father” then gets into heaven alone anyway?

All true art prophetic and iconic; U2 accidentally proved that sacramentality is a thing, as their “secular” song didn’t behave in a natural way. It’s like it became new again. Is that what Palm 40 is getting at in singing the  “new song”? It sounds like beauty ever ancient, ever new. Sounds like gospel proclaimed through the centuries. Sounds like the Mass.

Conclusion

These virtues must open one up to the response of love, letting beauty call us out of ourselves and not bask in the adulation of an adoring crowd that is stimulated by our art. No - we have to close the deal and walk with others till they "achieve their full stature in Christ," which is why charity is the paramount, ultimate virtue of the Christian - artist or no; true love knows how to be tough and tell the other what she may not want to hear, but must. There's where the heart of a mere artist gives way to that of the apostle.

Questions for Discussion

• The experience of beauty is usually described as "inspiring", "edifying", or "wonderful": should that experience somehow "rub off" on me -the beholder- and make me beautiful too? What would it take for this to actually happen? Why isn't it automatic, and even difficult?
• Name a symbolic thing in your life (a gift from a friend, ancestral artifact, song, relationship...) that has molded your existence in an important way. Why did it influence your life the way it did?
• What virtues must the artist possess to execute his/her craft well? What really makes one a "good artist"?