Richly and Radiantly Signed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 17 August 2014.

"Holmes reichenbach" by Sidney Paget (1860-1908) - Strand Magazine. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Yeah, I just read McLuhan's bit about Sherlock Holmes up here. I appreciate your unique ways of connecting the dots. I think dialectic is a critical feature of this project, definitely in the Socratic sense, and possibly at times in the Hegelian and early-Nietzschean sense.

Okay, this doesn't respond to everything you talked about in your two emails, but here goes.

I draw a clear line from Nietzsche's "Socratic man" to McLuhan's Sherlock Holmes. Nietzsche traces the death of culture (and a persistent, centuries-long death--originating at the end of the 6th century B.C.) to the one-two punch dealt out by Socrates and Euripides. Sherlock Holmes can be seen as Socrates/Euripides/Plato taken through to their logical conclusion. When you banish art and the irrational/artistic/mystic means of "understanding" the world, culture (and inevitably even philosophy and religion) dries up and dies. What's left, centuries later, is Sherlock Holmes--a shriveled Socrates, so to speak. Like Holmes, Socrates had so little interest in or patience for literature ("Nil" as Doyle puts it). Socrates only appreciated Aesop and Euripides--nothing ineffable like Aeschylus, thank you very much. Plato burned all his own tragedic writings in order to be his disciple. According to Nietzsche, this was the beginning of the end for the greatest culture to ever grace the face of the earth. And every subsequent culture, holding up this degenerate moment as their gold standard, has likewise bumped up against this ceiling.

In a Christian sphere, this degenerate state has looked like brittle moralistic religion. What's left to the ordinary Christian but the nuptual embrace--the one place they can experience the ineffable, that chaotic, drunken substratum. Then your orthodox Christian buckles in to his apologetics and rote prayers, and hands out fliers for Fireproof ("Fireproof your marriage!"), because he's constantly battling an addiction to pornography. And the answer to all this is, at best, "accountability," as in an "accountability partner" or "Promise Keepers." As Nietzsche points out, "the god" (or daemon) who guided Socrates only spoke to prohibit him from doing things, never to inspire. Is that what modern orthodox Christianity worships, a God of negative moral precepts?

Yes, part of this issue comes from the fact that the Internet has made certain sins so readily accessible, but as McLuhan points out (I think in Mechanical Brides but I can't find it), what the machine serves up is merely a projection of our desires. So what is our spiritual state such that this is what we see when we gaze into the electric pool? Acknowledging Hubert van Zeller's image that morality and orthodoxy are the "cooler embers" that shore up the inner mounting fire of mystic union, is there not another sense in which mysticism is the constitutive element, the substratum, the protective hedge? As I mentioned in an earlier post:

Like a classical garden, this predominating aspect of Arthur is the moss-covered fountain of Pan, through which water from the wilderness is brought in to irrigate the well trimmed rows and patterns of the garden.

Without this influence (literally, flowing in) of untamed wilderness and creativity, the ordered, well-trimmed rows dry out and die--in fact, they fall out of existence entirely.

Both impulses are necessary to art, but the Dionysian is the more constitutive of the two.

This is (again) why I balk at the idea of a morality play as our approach to the project. To me, a religion that demands that even art serve the end of "moral education" is a degenerate religion, a religion in decline. Because Christianity is not, first and foremost, a moralistic religion. Christianity is the scandal of St. Francis of Assisi stripping naked and walking out of town. Christianity is that experience of freedom, of being unmoored, of ecstatic embrace.  Is God the ground of being or not? The artist and mystic aim to find out. It has nothing to do with skepticism; on the contrary, stepping out onto the waters--as opposed to onto solid ground--involves greater risk, and as such requires the greater faith. The ideal Christian artist is, for the most part, naked when he leaves town. There is definitely something in his heart that differentiates his self-exile from that of the atheistic artist. But I doubt this something is in the realm of a moralistic scaffolding that he sets up prior to commencing his labors.

I suppose this is not unlike a Thoreauvian sentiment:

I wanted...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it was sublime, to know it by experience.

A Christian artist probably has a lot of faith that what he finds will be sublime, but he lets go of that presumption due to his overflowing optimism and his hunch that the ineffable gets skittish around such foregone conclusions.

Contrast this with the brittle optimism that preemptively lowers the deus ex machina onto the stage as a kind of idolatry, a savior god of our own making:

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.

They have mouths but do not speak;
they have eyes but do not see;

They have ears but do not hear;
nor is there breath in their mouths.

Their makers will become like them,
and anyone who trusts in them. (Ps. 135:15-18)

I love this from McLuhan ("Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press"):

The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge signatures of existence. 

As Christians, we know who has "richly and radiantly signed" existence! But even though we "know" that, we can't go ahead and sign His signature. Such is the high and uncompromising calling of the ideal Christian artist.