Catholic Art That Doesn't Suck (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2012.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I totally agree with your feelings about the project. I have remarked to Sarah that something is providential about us meeting and things clicking so well. There's something here that seems sacramental, an outward sign of an inward grace. I'm pretty much sure of it, even if the project itself goes down in flames!

I also am intrigued about the possibility for postmodern Catholic art. I have a near total revulsion to Christian music. About the last Catholic thing I like is Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I do have thoughts about reconciling the complexity and I think you're hitting on it somewhat. Will is the one pushing the trashy, by-any-means-necessary approach--very much how some of Marvin Gaye's handlers were pushing him.

But, as in Marvin Gaye's situation, one of two things happened:

1. He wrote the desired style of song or album but somehow infused all the sex/disco/partying with transcendence/profundity or
2. He refused and wrote transcendent/profound music

Marvin Gaye

So, even the "woman" in the more sexy songs becomes like Petrarch's Laura or Dante's Beatrice, even rising to the level of a Song of Songs or the lover described at the beginning of St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul.  That is straight-up Catholic: bloody, sensual, sexual--in a word, incarnational. You won't find this on Christian radio.

I like the morality play idea, but I also think that these things play out more like an Aristotelian tragedy, with a hero--not a sinner--being the one who gets crushed. Maybe the sinner gets crushed too for good measure, but not in a way that is merely "edifying" for the observer.

Of course, the Christian world view brings a different dimension to this reality that Greeks first intuited. But the Greeks were more willing to let it be an ineffable, horror-inspiring experience, eschewing the pat "moral of the story" or last-minute deus ex machina in favor of speechless awe in the face of an inscrutable universe.

I think Catholics and Christians need to let God be ineffable and irreducible if we are to rise above the insipidity and irrelevance we've fallen into.  I can point to Catholic elements in just about all of the songs, mostly alloyed with the mundane and profane.  But, as a Catholic, I tend to be more okay with that than non-Catholic Christians, probably because we tend to be more in touch with the utter scandal of the Incarnation.

What I'm saying here may be heresy and I will recant it if shown the error of my ways. But I do think this is getting to the heart of what it would take to make Catholic music in the postmodern age.