Catholic Church'ing?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Dorothy Day

Okay, here goes. Just about everything is in agreement with what you've said. But before I started typing everything out like I said I would, lots of things started coming to mind. I knew I just needed to just get it all down.

I'm actually starting (mostly) with the first "Haunted by God" illuminated letter.

I want to first address the question of communicating as widely as possible. This is something I may have worried about earlier, but I've come around. I have a somewhat obvious realization about the four of us (and actually the 6 of us if we open it up to Father and Max): we are all Roman Catholics--post-Vatican II ones--and a fairly representative ideological slice at that. Due to this, our communications are a participation in the Body of Christ, the Church.

Inasmuch as God does not desire "that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9), all people participate in this reality. Furthermore, due to the fact the Spirit "blows where it wills" (John 3:8) and that Jesus has "other sheep that do not belong to this fold" (John 10:6), we must think of the reality of the Church in the widest sense, indeed--as with all things Catholic--"according to the whole." So I agree with you when you quote Dorothy Day's words: "Many who serve Him officially have never known who He was, and many who do not even know His name, will hear on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy." St. Augustine says something similar in his City of God.

That said, I don't think it is presumptuous to assume that we have a privileged position due to our closeness to the Church and the Sacraments instituted by Christ. Christ seems to be speaking directly to us as Catholics when he says, "Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more" (Luke 12:48).

If you more or less agree with what I've written here, I'm going on to the similarly banal, obvious point that we, as Catholics, should do everything we can to stick together as the Body of Christ. Lots about that in the daily readings in recent days, perhaps most clearly in St. Paul's beautiful exhortation in Ephesians 4:1-6:

Unity in the Body. 

I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace:
one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

And I'm not good at this. I am a big burner of bridges and have a polemical side to my personality. Of course, plenty of our saints have suffered from this as well, and God has used it to build the Church. As I've said before, we're always building one of three buildings: the Church, the Pyramids, or the Tower of Babel. All too often, I've been building the latter two: pressing others into service and/or collaborating with others, both for prideful reasons. As we know from these stories and from our own personal experiences, both lead to scattering of minds, confusion of tongues, cacophony: the opposite of the unity proper to the Body of Christ.

So, long story short, I agree that we should keep cc'ing (Catholic Church'ing?).

The Eternal Return of Arthur White

The following is an excerpt of a 14 December 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.



More thoughts after a prolonged absence:

I want to be creative when it comes to the first incarnation of the Arthur White Concert for Iceland material. Of course, he did burst onto the scene already with the May 30th show.

I recently heard an interview with some entrepreneur saying that you want to look around for whatever resources are close at hand. What skills can the members of your various circles bring to the table. Ideally, you're not launching something that requires casting around for strangers who have the necessary expertise.

One thing that has popped into my mind recently is Arthur White, the ballet. My wife is looking for opportunities to choreograph some modern. I'm not sure that the mostly 4/4 time signature will be all that interesting. And then, we are friends with the owners of that ballet studio. It could start with just one song.

The point is that I want to really get creative, thinking inside the box, that is the resources that are closest at hand, and eschewing those that are beyond our scope: The words of Psalm 131:1-2:

I do not busy myself with great matters, with things too sublime for me. Rather, I have stilled my soul, hushed it like a weaned child. Like a weaned child on its mother's lap, so is my soul within me.

Could it be done in the style of a children's book? A program or press packet for a show that never occurs? A coffee table book?

This hits on what is at once a Christian and existential principle. On the Christian side, there is the affirmation, purification, and elevation of the raw materials of humanity. God does not seek another vehicle for his splendor, a new creation. He limits himself: "Him whom the heavens cannot contain the womb of one woman bore" (St. Augustine).

Similarly, there is Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return:

There is a lake which one day refused to flow away, and threw up a dam at the place where it had hitherto discharged: since then this lake has always risen higher and higher.

This is probably not the best quote, but the concept is summed up in countless other places, both by Nietzsche and others like Kierkegaard and Camus: the idea that the main source of our unhappiness is a constant flowing out toward some reality other than the present one. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus went as far as to call this tendency suicidal: the mental act of leaping from life into some other imagined world.

So the bottom line in the Return of Arthur White (dare I say the eternal return of Arthur White?) is an utter renunciation of all things beyond its scope and an total affirmation of all things within its scope. I realize, of course, that both Nietzsche and Camus saw God and Heaven as the main problematic horizons to which humanity flowed. I revise that idea without any difficulty in that God is immanent, that it is a false idea of God to place him on the horizon of our lives. Instead, our "search" for God must follow the very formula laid out by these atheistic philosophers, namely, we find him only in the moment and not in any idols, aspirations, or imagined accomplishments looming in the distance. Those horizons can be anything from waiting for the weekend, or the next performance, or Summer Break, or retirement, or Heaven. In a certain sense, Heaven is now--or never.

Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) grasped this idea when he wrote on the "duration" of Purgatory:

The transforming "moment" of this encounter cannot be quantified by the measurements of earthly time. It is, indeed, not eternal but a transition, and yet trying to qualify it as of "short" or "long" duration on the basis of temporal measurements derived from physics would be naive and unproductive. The "temporal measure" of this encounter lies in the unsoundable depths of existence, in a passing-over where we are burned ere we are transformed. To measure such Existenzzeit, such an "existential time," in terms of the time of this world would be to ignore the specificity of the human spirit in its simultaneous relationship with, and differentation from, the world. 

Encounter with the Lord is this transformation....

Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, p. 230-231

Womb-like Place

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

He isn't Tommy

"Womb-like place" makes sense.

I would bet that Arthur would pick up on his mother's issues as a teenager but like you said be fed by the charity. Kids trust their moms, and young Arthur wouldn't cause her much grief--she'd probably be affirmed in her works by the fact that her young son loves the Lord so much.

Incidentally, how could Lena make Will vow to make Arthur a star on her deathbed?

Because she can't stand to see Arthur suffer and without realizing it puts her family's security ahead of her relationship with God. Her relationship is in so many ways about protecting the family. That's the issue that has to be worked off in Purgatory. And the oddest thing about Arthur in the family's eyes is that family doesn't seem like that big of a deal to him. That's partially because his eyes are on God, not his home, and partially because he loves everybody--even people who abuse him. Somehow this self-made immigrant family had a kid with seemingly no survival instincts at all! He's intensely generous but not philanthropic because worldly wealth is worthless to him, and he loves everyone but can barely communicate with anyone without music because his vision of reality is so different than everyone else's--there's very little common ground.

Still, he isn't Tommy or a high functioning autistic. He's a mystic.

I never made the connection between Augustine and Kierkegaard, but it makes a ton of sense. I'm not sure if the world we're creating has any of those noble Romans in it! But I do see how lots of people I would characterize as living in the moral are probably closet aesthetes. I've probably just let too many of my Catholic educational experiences harden my appreciation for the moral.

I think the most important thing we can do in Catholic education is lead kids to the Eucharist, but instead we work like crazy to mandate good behavior. The result seems to be a lot of kids who don't get caught doing bad things frequently and don't have much interest in a personal relationship with Christ. Parents want us to help raise good kids, but are terrified that we'll raise Jesus freaks. People fear the scandalous side of Christ. But I think there might be some adventure in following the scandalous Christ that would appeal to the aesthete.

"Catapulted" into the Religious Sphere

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

As for messages getting buried: That was one of the issues that I thought would get handled by taking the emphasis off mimesis and taking a diegetical approach--or at least more diegetical. We can talk about the story just like we do in our emails and, by extension, the blog. I was actually of the opinion we should go totally diegesis in our podcast. I think it lends itself to our strengths of telling not showing and it is a classical, Platonic solution to the problem of having the opposite of our desired, edifying effect on our audience.

Where is Jimi Hendrix located?

In deference to St. Augustine, I'm going to disagree that the ethical sphere is absurd and banal (I'm of the opinion that Kierkegaard got his ideas for the spheres of existence from Augustine's City of God). Augustine just betrays too much admiration for the highly ethical Romans he uses as examples of how close some pagans came to the kingdom. I would say that most churchgoers are actually in the aesthetic realm trying to work around or bargain with the ethical when absolutely necessary. The ethical realm is characterized by a willingness to die rather than to sin. I think ethical is rightly considered the realm from which one is "catapulted" into the religious sphere.

So where are Jimi and Arthur and prostitutes and Carlton Farthington located? It might be difficult to locate. But modern artists and would-be mystics might consider the ethical sphere impossible to stomach without the more complete revelation of the religious. They are different than the aesthetic types who just want to burn their eyes out on Netflix every weekend and buy a cottage someday.

For this reason, I also think Arthur would have picked up on the unnaturalness in Lena's charitable activities. The Sweet World is way bigger than that. It wouldn't feel as natural as breathing to him, but it might have been a womb-like place where he found some nourishment.

A False Vision of God

The following is excerpted from the June 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Saint Augustine in his Study by Botticelli

I like that last part about the "blade of grass." 

That's C.S. Lewis artistically rendering the Augustinian doctrine of evil not having being in the usual sense. Elsewhere, Lewis describes the damned soul as being "nearly nothing." Heaven is literally experiencing the Source of Being in the fullest possible way. So it would be a superabundant, unexcelled experience of being. Hell, since it is the experience of being cut off from the Source of Being, must be as close to nonexistence as is possible for created beings with immortal souls.

The fact that Lena made Will pledge to make Arthur famous on her deathbed makes it a no-brainer that she's going to Purgatory at best. 

Saints don't say those sorts of things!

Will:

True. 

I think what makes Lena seem saintly to a modern audience is that she's always doing good things. But, then again, she's an old-world Catholic. She might have more fear of God than an all-consuming love of Him. 

She might think that she's protecting the family from its wealth through her acts of charity. That fear would be consistent with a false vision of God as a scale measurer, a pretty common misconception. Still, I think she genuinely loves the poor and sees Christ in them, although not perfectly or mystically. Perhaps she does it because of her own childhood poverty. So this loving the person of Christ in the poor keeps her from going to Hell, while her bargaining and manipulating is what needs to be burnt off on Purgatory. 

Although the family doesn't really need Arthur to become a star for financial reasons, maybe she also wants to protect Arthur from the bullies or wants him to show the world. 

Or maybe she has been partially converted to the gospel of the American Dream as preached by Stan.

A Frame Without Content

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 March 2014.

One other thought about Farthington: he corresponds to Augustine's definition of evil not being anything. Rather, evil is lack, is absence, is privation (even my use of the word "is" loses the sense of evil's non-existence).

Evil is real, but it doesn't exist, because God never created it, and this universe is only made up of good things created by God.  The only reason we can fall at all is because we were, unlike God, created ex nihilo.  Evil, then, is a turning away from the Source of Being and back toward our origin (although I wish I could omit the word "origin" because, again, we didn't exist; our origin is God).

So Farthington is just a frame without content.

He borrows content.  He borrows existence.  He lives parasitically or not at all.  C.S. Lewis describes Hell as the state of being "next to nothing."  Once the thing he feasts on is gone, he seizes on something else.  How many people get coaxed into this sort of borderline non-existence in our day and age?

McLuhan says that the proscenium arch makes us want to be an actor.

I wonder, though, if it ends up turning us into just another arch radiating out from the proscenium, just another iteration leading our eyes back to the few remaining actors on stage who themselves appear progressively more distant and diminished in stature.