Sharpening the Clichés

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

Our project is more overtly religious than, say, The Great Gatsby, Don Quixote, or A Good Man is Hard to Find, potentially as overtly religious as  Greene's The Power and the Glory or Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and less overtly religious than Everyman.  I don't think we're burying Catholic things, but we are resisting two-dimensionality.

My hope is that the project will draw people closer to God.

I think the question of how overtly Catholic the project works across a spectrum; it's not binary. It might depend on the audience, too. Max's brother complimented us after the show, saying that it took guts to make such overtly Catholic art.  He's an atheist, but he thought the Catholic approach was punk. My aunt, on the other hand, who is a lifelong Catholic, barely caught on to any of the Catholic themes in the performance.

J.R.R. Tolkein

When I think about Greene and Chesterton, I think of the context that created them. They were living in an age when the Anglican church was splitting in two directions: one toward modernism, reducing Christianity to a philosophy and an assertion of Britishness; and the other toward the Oxford Movement, reclaiming the Catholic elements the Church of England had tried to obliterate and pushing toward Christian orthodoxy. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and T.S. Eliot were informed by this tension.

They saw the looming threat of modernism and the ageless beauty of orthodox Christianity and fled to the latter while, for the most part, creating work rooted in the aesthetics of the former. Tolkien tried to root his aesthetic in ancient England, but that wouldn't have happened without modernism's influence. Chesterton's writing style leans toward the Victorian, but I see a lot of modernism in his use of absurdity in The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Man Who Was Thursday.  Even Orwell, who was not religious, went halfway, cataloging the latent horrors of modernism. But England was an old country; even "modern" London was built during America's colonial days.

These writers saw a grand old country on the brink of collapse.

Consequently, they felt assured in the "master craftsmen" who revitalized the Church of England with an infusion of medieval Catholicism, both of the philosophical and architectural sorts. But in their own art, they broke a lot of new ground; I would call it art rather than craft.  I do think they found very innovative ways to sharpen the clichés of the ways people think about faith and the modes writers use to spur such thought. It seems paradoxical that the architecture of sacred buildings moved toward medieval craftsmanship while Catholic and High Anglican artists managed a number of innovations as writers. Eliot especially is generally considered the greatest poet of modernism.

In an ideal world, I'd like to pull off Chesterton's whimsy, Graham Greene's sense of the modern spiritual desert, and Eliot's ability to create thoroughly Christian art using the language of his age.