A Revelation More Complete

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 July 2014.

Joseph Campbell

I was reading over Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces today and it surprised me how much it resonated with what you had said about our story needing to be comic. Modern man, according to Campbell, seems to have much greater difficulty accessing the "deeper truth" of comedy, having largely jettisoned (suppressed?) the idea of a "happily ever after":

Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within...the realistic, intimate, and variously interesting tragedy of democracy, where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.

...too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after cannot be taken seriously; it belongs the never-never land of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into night--which sober, modern Occidental judgment is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.

This modern miasma explains our preference for bleak, unremitting tragedy on the one hand and shallow, insipid comedy on the other. Our lack of faith is evidenced by our need to steer all our plots toward unconvincingly happy or irredeemably tragic endings. If God doesn't exist and a full, beautiful, comic revelation is not possible, then these are the two options available to us. I would go as far to say that, having largely killed a living God from our collective consciousness, even our religious utterances ring in one of those two ways.

I like what you said about "flipping the script." In some ways, that puts the denouement for this plot in God's hands. To tell you the truth, most of the things that you and I have come up with for an ending have felt like committing suicide. Deus ex Machina is only a problem when it's us who are the ones pulling the strings, trying to save ourselves. Flipping the script means bringing God these sundry elements of disintegration, asking Him for the redemption only He can give, for the comedy that only He can imagine. Because, though this whole story is just a story, I have a lot of true-to-life, life-or-death, salvation-or-damnation questions at stake. Maybe what makes a postmodern work of literature religious is that it takes that attitude of prayer, that offering of a broken self, that lifting of these discordant elements to God in prayer.

I think I read something by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa where he explains the idea of prayer by likening it to how we talk to ourselves when we are alone.

And in modern/postmodern times, this conversation is usually cacophonous; that's just the nature of the modern world and the modern mind as a product of that world. Prayer is when we take that same internal dialogue and instead dialogue with God.

Postmodern works will, by their very nature, have a cacophonous, circular, self-referential, uncertain quality. But religious artists will bring God into the midst of that cacophony or, perhaps, more appropriately, raise it up in prayer. No pat tragic/comic solutions should be our standard inside this aesthetic: nothing unearned or preemptive, the literary equivalent of suicide. Letting God have the last word. The atheistic postmodern standard seems to be no easy answers, but how many of those artists actually commit suicide in either the comic or tragic way? What other choice do they have?

After all, the satisfying resolution should still at least be entertained as a possibility, right? Committing suicide--comically or tragically--is for people who believe God is dead. Shouldn't the truly religious writer be more able to fully plumb the postmodern depths?

I guess what I'm saying is that postmodernism isn't a new thing.

And that--once all its internal inconsistencies have been ironed out--it is not anything Catholicism can't comprehend within its all-comprehending schema. In fact, I'd say that Catholicism set the stage for this in the same way that it set the stage for modern science, the university, and so many other "progressive" developments. That many of its proponents style themselves as antagonistic to belief systems that posit truth claims is irrelevant. But perhaps we get some chastening out of the deal: we are so much more that a set of truth claims to be believed.

Thus, the John Henry Cardinal Newman prayer: "in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him...He knows what He is about." Postmodernism is about perplexity. Our job is not to pave over perplexity out of preemption or a false sense of piety, but to let our perplexity serve him.