"Cultural" elite?
Apr. 21st, 2006 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI recently read an interesting but, to me, oddly extreme article by Frank Furedi: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF37.htm, in which he seemed to me to make rather too much of a number of hysterical reactions against "religion" - that is, of course, Christianity - by the usual suspects brigade. At this time of day, it should not be news that Polly Toynbee, who is sixty if she is a day, Philip Pullman, or even Muriel Gray - I am old enough to remember her before she became the voice of youth - holler and scream against Christianity; it would be far more astonishing that, having made not only their lives but their living out of this hatred, they should alter their views now. Besides, as GKC once said, "we find it tolerably easy to answer" them.
What stimulates me to write is one of those twinges of irritation one experiences when reading for the fiftieth time a description which is wrong at the most basic level. Furedi - himself not a Christian - calls, not these people, but the pool of more-or-less agnostic, more-or-less sceptical, PC types who may be assuemed to follow them to some degree, "the cultural elite". And having heard this association of culture - of all things! - with the PC brigade for the umpteenth-squinchieth time, I had to protest. They may be an elite; in fact, in some matters - from occupation of the mass media to control of education from the cradle to the PhD - they may have morphed from an elite to a vast and immobile mass, spread across these areas from their highest to their most humble place. But what the Devil do they have to do with "culture"?
Now, culture is something I revere. You will never hear me run it down as C.S.Lewis, suffering I suppose from the mixed populism and Calvinism of his Belfast background, did. The work of a musician, a poet, a scientist, or a philosopher, seems to me, in and of itself, more valuable than that of a road-sweeper or a secretary, independently of whether or not the secretary or the road-sweeper are closer to sanctity than the musician, poet, philosopher or scientist. Indeed, from what I know personally of philosophers and musicians, I would think it highly likely that the average secretary or manual worker would be a better human being. But the point is that what they make has a higher spiritual value; indeed, in the case of the greatest works of the intellect, their value is eternal. A road once swept will require being re-swept in a week. But the existence of Beethoven's symphonies does indeed change the world, for the better, and pretty much does that independently of Beethoven's own moral level.
But what do the PC crowd have to do with "culture"? Let us look at our culture, what it is. Our culture, our heritage, is made of works of art or of the intellect, which are beautiful and noble enough to be remembered. Now the curious fact is that, discounting the masterpieces composed before the rise of Christianity, which by their nature cannot be Christian, and the work of certain scientists, nine out of ten of the heights of culture just happen to be Christian. Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tiziano, Rembrandt, the builders of the cathedrals, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, Palestrina, Bach, Haendel, Beethoven, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - the line goes on and on.
It is more significant still - in fact, it is all but conclusive - that even those of the real giants whose Christianity was problematic or nonexistent, were actually more Christian in their work than in their stated public belief. Thomas Mann's DOKTOR FAUSTUS is not only impossible to distinguish from the work of the most devout of Christians, but it has a visible Catholic tinge, including a strong polemic against Lutheranism - the Devil uses Lutheran theory and language to subvert the protagonist. Verdi's REQUIEM is likewise indistinguishable from the most devout Christian work, and so is the REQUIEM of the Freemason Mozart. Wagner moved from the suicidal sensualism of TRISTRAM UND ISOLDE, to the dignified paganism of the Ring, to the strange, heretical near-Christianity of PARZIFAL, and Nietsche broke with him on that account.
In most of these works, especially the musical ones, it is possible to say that the traditions and precedents of the art itself imposed themselves to some extent on the artists. Western classical music had been born in the cathedrals, its first musical forms had been masses and psalms, and it is not unlikely that someone who, like Verdi, wanted to give a musical response to the idea of death, would instinctively cast that response in Christian terms. (His contemporary Brahms did not; but, with all due respect, Verdi's REQUIEM is a much greater work than Brahms' GERMAN REQUIEM.) That is certainly the case with someone like Vivaldi. A priest in orders, he used his job as music master to a female orphanage in the notoriously libertine and music-loving metropolis, Venice, to enjoy a love life that would make the whole Kennedy family jealous, at one time sharing his quarters with a mother and two daughters. Yet a good deal of his music is not only religious, but beautifully composed and genuinely devout in feeling. It is possible to argue that the great tradition in which he lived, which emanated from and was still largely based in, the Church, moulded his musical intellect even though it did not stand much of a chance with his sexual organs.
That, however, is not the case with Goethe. He had no duty to, indeed hardly any connection with, any Church; and he was a man of the Enlightenment through and through. His duty to past traditions was neither as clear nor as univocal as Vivaldi's. His greatest work, FAUST, was, like Beethoven's or Wagner's, cast in a wholly new and disproportionately enormous shape. And yet, except for the strange closing scene - which, with its suggestion of the soul perfecting itself after death, has more to do with the yet-to-be-invented theology of Mormonism than with Christianity - here is a titanic work of poetry where it would be hard to fault, from the Christian perspective, a single page. In some ways, such as finding magic always diabolical and dangerous to the soul, it is not just Christian but extremely hard-line. Neither Tolkien nor JKR, both avowed Christians, would have written:
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen/
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen/
Stünd ich, Natur, vor dir, ein Mann allein/
Da wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
"Could I but banish magic from my way,
Every last enchantment quite unsay,
And stand before you, Nature, just a man -
It would be worth it then to be a man!"
The immense importance of sin and redemption, the terror of damnation, the deceptive dangers of earthly love, in the episode of Gretchen, are all out of the dourest Christian moral teaching. Likewise the hollowness of earthly glory, even of the splendours and glories of heathen Greece (with a vision of Byron, the untimely product of Classical passions and modern magic, dashing himself against the world and destroying himself); likewise the dark vision of empires established by force and upon sand, with which the mortal course of Faust ends. But perhaps the most intimately and terrifyingly Christian picture in the whole majestic poem is - where one might expect it - in Goethe's magnificently imagined scene of the seduction of Faust.
Faust, a learned lecturer in a German university (and what could be more German?), is bored, restless. He decides to make use of his sleeplessness to translate the most philosophical of the four Gospels, John. At the same time, he welcomes into his study a stray dog, without realizing that this insinuating and apparently friendly creature is in reality the enemy of all enemies - the Devil himself. So as Faust opens the Scriptures, the dog starts giving all sorts of signs of displeasure, barking and growling. Faust is distracted. He tries to stick to his job - but comes a cropper at once. "It says here: in the beginning was the Word. But I cannot value the Word so much as that!"
BOOM! Faust is undone. By such small steps do we decide to damn our souls. He is no longer trying to translate the Holy Book; instead, he is trying to force his own meaning upon it. He tries "thought" and "will" and eventually settles on "Deed": "In the beginning was the Deed" - radically reworking the Gospel and diminishing the meaning of the Second Person of the Trinity. No wonder that the Devil himself appears to him almost immediately; he has called the Devil into his home, by doing force to the sacred text. He dies only half understanding the sin he has committed - both that opening one, and all the sins of violence and oppression that populated the poem thanks to his adoration of "the Deed" - and it takes that other purely Christian notion, Divine Grace only partially, if at all, motivated by Deeds, to rip his soul from Mephistopheles at last.
This is our heritage. This is our culture. Need I say that the average PC modern is not apt to connect? They will wander through it for hours like tourists in a museum, and totally miss the point. They will sit through a performance of the whole of FAUST, or Verdi's REQUIEM, and fail to catch the secret. It will never occur to them where the fury comes from with which Dickens describes the death of the crossings-sweeper Jo in tones that call on Heaven and earth to crack for the atrocity; or why, in the noblest ode in praise of mankind ever uttered or conceived, Beethoven calls on every man who ever tasted Joy in his or her life to fall on their knees before the Father who dwells above the canopy of stars. This class has totally separated itself from the best that our "Culture" has to offer, and to call it a "cultural" elite is therefore almost perverse.
What stimulates me to write is one of those twinges of irritation one experiences when reading for the fiftieth time a description which is wrong at the most basic level. Furedi - himself not a Christian - calls, not these people, but the pool of more-or-less agnostic, more-or-less sceptical, PC types who may be assuemed to follow them to some degree, "the cultural elite". And having heard this association of culture - of all things! - with the PC brigade for the umpteenth-squinchieth time, I had to protest. They may be an elite; in fact, in some matters - from occupation of the mass media to control of education from the cradle to the PhD - they may have morphed from an elite to a vast and immobile mass, spread across these areas from their highest to their most humble place. But what the Devil do they have to do with "culture"?
Now, culture is something I revere. You will never hear me run it down as C.S.Lewis, suffering I suppose from the mixed populism and Calvinism of his Belfast background, did. The work of a musician, a poet, a scientist, or a philosopher, seems to me, in and of itself, more valuable than that of a road-sweeper or a secretary, independently of whether or not the secretary or the road-sweeper are closer to sanctity than the musician, poet, philosopher or scientist. Indeed, from what I know personally of philosophers and musicians, I would think it highly likely that the average secretary or manual worker would be a better human being. But the point is that what they make has a higher spiritual value; indeed, in the case of the greatest works of the intellect, their value is eternal. A road once swept will require being re-swept in a week. But the existence of Beethoven's symphonies does indeed change the world, for the better, and pretty much does that independently of Beethoven's own moral level.
But what do the PC crowd have to do with "culture"? Let us look at our culture, what it is. Our culture, our heritage, is made of works of art or of the intellect, which are beautiful and noble enough to be remembered. Now the curious fact is that, discounting the masterpieces composed before the rise of Christianity, which by their nature cannot be Christian, and the work of certain scientists, nine out of ten of the heights of culture just happen to be Christian. Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Tiziano, Rembrandt, the builders of the cathedrals, Shakespeare, Milton, Christopher Wren, Palestrina, Bach, Haendel, Beethoven, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - the line goes on and on.
It is more significant still - in fact, it is all but conclusive - that even those of the real giants whose Christianity was problematic or nonexistent, were actually more Christian in their work than in their stated public belief. Thomas Mann's DOKTOR FAUSTUS is not only impossible to distinguish from the work of the most devout of Christians, but it has a visible Catholic tinge, including a strong polemic against Lutheranism - the Devil uses Lutheran theory and language to subvert the protagonist. Verdi's REQUIEM is likewise indistinguishable from the most devout Christian work, and so is the REQUIEM of the Freemason Mozart. Wagner moved from the suicidal sensualism of TRISTRAM UND ISOLDE, to the dignified paganism of the Ring, to the strange, heretical near-Christianity of PARZIFAL, and Nietsche broke with him on that account.
In most of these works, especially the musical ones, it is possible to say that the traditions and precedents of the art itself imposed themselves to some extent on the artists. Western classical music had been born in the cathedrals, its first musical forms had been masses and psalms, and it is not unlikely that someone who, like Verdi, wanted to give a musical response to the idea of death, would instinctively cast that response in Christian terms. (His contemporary Brahms did not; but, with all due respect, Verdi's REQUIEM is a much greater work than Brahms' GERMAN REQUIEM.) That is certainly the case with someone like Vivaldi. A priest in orders, he used his job as music master to a female orphanage in the notoriously libertine and music-loving metropolis, Venice, to enjoy a love life that would make the whole Kennedy family jealous, at one time sharing his quarters with a mother and two daughters. Yet a good deal of his music is not only religious, but beautifully composed and genuinely devout in feeling. It is possible to argue that the great tradition in which he lived, which emanated from and was still largely based in, the Church, moulded his musical intellect even though it did not stand much of a chance with his sexual organs.
That, however, is not the case with Goethe. He had no duty to, indeed hardly any connection with, any Church; and he was a man of the Enlightenment through and through. His duty to past traditions was neither as clear nor as univocal as Vivaldi's. His greatest work, FAUST, was, like Beethoven's or Wagner's, cast in a wholly new and disproportionately enormous shape. And yet, except for the strange closing scene - which, with its suggestion of the soul perfecting itself after death, has more to do with the yet-to-be-invented theology of Mormonism than with Christianity - here is a titanic work of poetry where it would be hard to fault, from the Christian perspective, a single page. In some ways, such as finding magic always diabolical and dangerous to the soul, it is not just Christian but extremely hard-line. Neither Tolkien nor JKR, both avowed Christians, would have written:
Könnt ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen/
Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen/
Stünd ich, Natur, vor dir, ein Mann allein/
Da wär's der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.
"Could I but banish magic from my way,
Every last enchantment quite unsay,
And stand before you, Nature, just a man -
It would be worth it then to be a man!"
The immense importance of sin and redemption, the terror of damnation, the deceptive dangers of earthly love, in the episode of Gretchen, are all out of the dourest Christian moral teaching. Likewise the hollowness of earthly glory, even of the splendours and glories of heathen Greece (with a vision of Byron, the untimely product of Classical passions and modern magic, dashing himself against the world and destroying himself); likewise the dark vision of empires established by force and upon sand, with which the mortal course of Faust ends. But perhaps the most intimately and terrifyingly Christian picture in the whole majestic poem is - where one might expect it - in Goethe's magnificently imagined scene of the seduction of Faust.
Faust, a learned lecturer in a German university (and what could be more German?), is bored, restless. He decides to make use of his sleeplessness to translate the most philosophical of the four Gospels, John. At the same time, he welcomes into his study a stray dog, without realizing that this insinuating and apparently friendly creature is in reality the enemy of all enemies - the Devil himself. So as Faust opens the Scriptures, the dog starts giving all sorts of signs of displeasure, barking and growling. Faust is distracted. He tries to stick to his job - but comes a cropper at once. "It says here: in the beginning was the Word. But I cannot value the Word so much as that!"
BOOM! Faust is undone. By such small steps do we decide to damn our souls. He is no longer trying to translate the Holy Book; instead, he is trying to force his own meaning upon it. He tries "thought" and "will" and eventually settles on "Deed": "In the beginning was the Deed" - radically reworking the Gospel and diminishing the meaning of the Second Person of the Trinity. No wonder that the Devil himself appears to him almost immediately; he has called the Devil into his home, by doing force to the sacred text. He dies only half understanding the sin he has committed - both that opening one, and all the sins of violence and oppression that populated the poem thanks to his adoration of "the Deed" - and it takes that other purely Christian notion, Divine Grace only partially, if at all, motivated by Deeds, to rip his soul from Mephistopheles at last.
This is our heritage. This is our culture. Need I say that the average PC modern is not apt to connect? They will wander through it for hours like tourists in a museum, and totally miss the point. They will sit through a performance of the whole of FAUST, or Verdi's REQUIEM, and fail to catch the secret. It will never occur to them where the fury comes from with which Dickens describes the death of the crossings-sweeper Jo in tones that call on Heaven and earth to crack for the atrocity; or why, in the noblest ode in praise of mankind ever uttered or conceived, Beethoven calls on every man who ever tasted Joy in his or her life to fall on their knees before the Father who dwells above the canopy of stars. This class has totally separated itself from the best that our "Culture" has to offer, and to call it a "cultural" elite is therefore almost perverse.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-04-22 08:16 am (UTC)Probably there would be better examples, but I don't know them.