The Commodiousness of that Frame

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 July 2014.

That move that the Oxford movement made back toward orthodoxy in religious matters did not seem to hinder them in being active participants in modernism. But they did not try to create religious art. Many, like Graham Greene, rejected that description.

T.S. Eliot

The word "art" comes from a root meaning "to fit together, to join." In that word, we hear the collective wisdom of the ages denoting art as something that attempts to make coherent the miscellanea of its raw materials. Churches are now, at the risk of sounding irreverent, mere ingredients of that miscellaneous mass. That statement seems to run afoul of something you warned against at an earlier point: "postmodernism triumphing over Catholicism."

I assert that Catholicism will continue to be the most comprehensive, most overarching frame.

"Catholic" means "universal" or "according to the whole." Unlike most insipid, ill-conceived Christian art and music, Catholicism comprehends everything, admits anything as datum, believes fully in the eschatological reality of God as "All in All." The bottom line is that I don't consider there to be a war between modernism/ postmodernism and Catholicism.

Rather, I believe that Catholicism itself opened the door to these developments.

The reason why 20th-century attempts at Catholic liturgical and ecclesial art did not "work" (and I'm not speaking of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Green, T.S. Eliot, et al) is because those "artists" latched onto the seeming content of those movements, without understanding that the breakthrough was a growing disinterest in content. The orthodox development to me is an acceptance of the fact of right relationship with God--not wanting that to be anything different, just contemplating things as they are (not unlike Paul's admonition in 1 Corinthians 7).

Realizing that the mind of God is contained in none of these accidents, contrivances, or novelties, but is instead something that comprehends them all--as in an outermost frame. It is the commodiousness of that frame that encouraged true artists, religious and secular alike, to go beyond the focus on content and toward a consideration of the frame in which content arises and becomes coherent.

In some ways, the artists who were able to make this leap were the ones who had the greater faith. Insipidity comes from an unwillingness to go into the desert--or the wasteland.