The Devil We are Possessed By

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 12 August 2015.

Flannery O'Connor

Look to this Flannery O'Connor quote as to how to be a religious artist in the modern and postmodern age:

The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common--a distrust of the abstract, a respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together. But I don't believe we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one. (Spiritual Writings)

I would say this is more than a modest achievement now (maybe it was more modest in her day). The vast majority of us don't believe that our world is possessed by a demon at all. Most people think that history is headed in a progressive direction analogous to evolution (as in "my views on the topic have evolved"). Thus, the weak-ass atheists we've seen crop up in recent decades. That's why I find the existentialists so refreshing: they realize that the death of God means anguish. This naive crop is like a throwback to the Enlightenment, coasting on the fumes of Judeo-Christian morality and gloating like they've staked out something new.

I think the polarization that we experience right now in our society is one of the aspects of the devil that possesses us. As long as our resistance against him is divided, he will never be recognized for what he is. I should state outright that I personally believe this is an actual, ancient demon that we're up against. And I think that art is uniquely equipped to help us glimpse his face. What St. John of the Cross said about spiritual visions is doubly true of reason, argumentation, and rhetoric: all of these happen in an arena among which the devil can "insinuate himself."

For some reason, artists and poets are able to intuit spiritual realities that would otherwise require passing through the dark nights of the soul to apprehend.