I mean that there is something about the arts, as a discipline, that invites to the evaluation of its works a greater degree of relativity, or indeterminate rubric (which is why we find in that evaluation a greater degree of folly).
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The fault for such folly resides with individuals, though it is mitigated, I suppose, by a complexity that is particular to the arts.
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That the arts, among disciplines, are particularly vulnerable to folly can be explained by the extent to which they do not reward competence as consistently as do the fields of, say, medicine, or engineering, or jurisprudence, where to reward practitioners on the basis of anything other than competence (albeit a scrupulous kind, and not a wasted or unconscionable one) is to endanger the public in an observable or measurable way.
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And according also, I’d say, to some ever-accumulating hubris that seems to diffuse itself across the generations, inuring us to our own spiritual indigence.
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And no generation is better than any other, in terms of that folly; rather, each generation manifests its folly in different disciplines or endeavors (and within those endeavors in different ways), according to the landscape that the previous generation’s culture evolves into, or leaves for the next to inherit.
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For nothing is astounding when it comes to human folly.
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Or maybe it isn’t astounding at all, but is only a reaction to developments that have occurred across generations, a reaction that has been catalyzed in the social and technological realms where it is most visible, and that can be traced and explained and understood, even predicted in hindsight.
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I should say also that my assertion that Christian theology is “broader and deeper and richer than most people suppose” is only the beginning of my thoughts, with regard to the imaginative courage of artists, and their willingness or unwillingness to plunge into the moral abyss. What is moral in art is not that which is ‘good,’ but that which is true (regardless of whether a truth provides comfort to one’s ego). Not only that, but it is truth rendered with beauty, which is extremely difficult to do. The number of artists today who mistake self-indulgence for courage is astounding.
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I should say that when I use the phrase “convicted of the truth,” in reference to the faith of an artist who is portraying a Christian subject (or employing a Christian lens in the portrayal of any given subject), I do not mean that doubt has no place in the heart of that artist, nor that such a person accepts as literal those aspects of the faith that depend on a conception of metaphor to be rightly understood. On the contrary, a person of faith (be they an artist or no) does not increase in faith without first struggling with doubt, and without also engaging their reason as far as that reason can be extended, at all times. As for doubt, it does not necessarily go away over time. I am not certain it ever goes away entirely for anyone.
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Imagine you are an artist of great talent living under the Holy Roman Empire. Remunerative work is available to you if you are willing to take projects that the Church commissions. Your aesthetic or formal liberty (what some might refer to as duende, or ‘poetic license’) is constrained in most instances only by the site-specific measurements and the tenets of Christian theology, which are broader and deeper and richer than most people suppose. The artwork you produce will almost certainly be better if you are convicted of the truth to which your subject matter pertains. However, no one but you knows whether, or to what degree, you are convicted of it; whether you see the whole enterprise as an expression of truth, or as a ‘fairy tale,’ a fraudulence, or some other kind of error. Because no one but you is privy to the workings of your conscience.
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That may sound bad, but I don’t mean it in a necessarily bad way. All of us are corrupt to some extent, regardless of our intentions. And while a posture is a posture (and thus is related to the false, or the assumed), one can do worse than to pose oneself in an investiture of good (if you are willing to grant that the Christian message is good, which maybe you are not).
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Merton doesn’t describe what that particular configuration (of the ‘integrated’ artist) would’ve looked like, and I won’t attempt to describe it myself, based on what I imagine it to have been, because I’d feel then obliged to defend what I’d said with evidence and argument and so forth, the idea of which, in this case, wearies me, though I will say that if Merton was correct, and that (very generally) ‘the artist’ in the West was integrated with society during the Middle Ages, the reason for that integration arose from the fact that society-at-large and the artist shared something like an evangelical purpose, even if that purpose was not always genuinely held, but in some instances was a posture rather than a conviction, or could be found in a person or institution that in other ways was corrupt.
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I say “might have existed” because it seems to me that we do not know for certain, as much of the historical record from that era is unknown to us (which is one of the reasons, I think, that the Middle Ages are sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages). Perhaps I should say only that it is unknown to me, and leave it at that, as my knowledge of history isn’t thorough.
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I imagine, also, that when he mentioned the Middle Ages, he was thinking of the situation of the artist as it existed in Europe, Russia, and the Near East (as opposed to, say, the Americas and Africa), though this situation might have existed in a similar configuration in all parts of the globe, during that time period (and during others) for different reasons, however unlikely that might be.
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Now, there are parameters to Merton’s position that ought to be articulated. I imagine, for instance, that when he mentions the ‘artist’ of the Middle Ages, he has in mind the religious artists whose works can be found today in the collections of many museums in the West, though he does not elaborate his thought in this direction. (I am thinking mainly of Christian iconography, and the paintings of saints and angels, and so on, which many of us are familiar with, as they form in their ubiquity a sort of homogenous backdrop to much of art history).
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What interests me more is his suggestion that the role of the artist is not, by default, that of a rebel; and that there was a time (the Middle Ages at least) when this idea (that the artist is not necessarily unintegrated with society, or the so-called ‘mainstream,’ and might even work in harmony with it) was borne out.
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First of all, the statement has a predictive quality, in that the ‘conceivable’ situation that Merton imagines for the artist is distinguished from the actual situation that he implies the artist inhabits now. (That actual situation being the one we know and are familiar with, the one in which the artist is not ‘integrated’ with society, but is, by necessity, a rebel or contrarian or outsider. The truth of which seems to me so apparent that I feel no need to say more about it, at least not at this moment.)
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Let me grant that the statement is a generalization, and suffers from it accordingly, especially when removed from its context. But let me observe, also, that it opens conversation in all sorts of interesting directions, one of which I’d like to pursue.
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In his book of essays Raids on the Unspeakable, Thomas Merton makes the following statement: “It is conceivable that the artist might once again be completely integrated in society as he was in the Middle Ages.”
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I would not say that the canon represents all exceptional works, or even all persons who have produced, or have had the potential to produce, exceptional works, but I would say that all works that are ‘canonical’ are, more or less, exceptional.