Culture and the Future of Belief
Hahm, Claire
' C h r i s t came swaddled w i t h darkness" CULTURE AND THE FUTURE OF BELIEF CLAIRE HAHN C ULTURE and belief, their interrelationship and i~erdependence, have been concerns engaging the...
...He lives behind the mound, rarely responding to her, his hat and arm sometimes visible to the audience...
...Their faith is coming closer to Niebuhr's definition of the term, "the concern for ultimate value" than to dependence on dogma...
...That's why the NAACP Emergency Relief Fund needs your help so badly...
...When he can't pick up any day labor, his $25-a-month veteran's disability pension has to feed all 11 of them...
...Here is an elegant statement of the Christian and Platonic solution for the 15 November 1974:164...
...The vision of the artist seldom brings comfort and it is a threat as well as a challenge...
...Is there another way for those of us who believe that Christ, the Word, came two thousand years ago...
...I trust so...
...That's where the NAACP Emergency Relief Fund comes in...
...So please send what you can...
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...Quite logically then, for the convert, a confession of his earlier sins will be a profession of faith as well...
...The only other character in the play is her husband, Willie...
...How then, and in what, does he continue to believe...
...G2, Box 121, Radio City Station, New York, N.Y...
...In "Crow's Theology," the egomaniacal Crow realizes God loves him because "God spoke Crow...
...mAllen Tate "It is a beautiful book . . . . Lynch at his very best...
...Mostly, we help families out with the $8 or $10 or $12 a month they need to get their full food-stamp allotment...
...It was like the first day of the world...
...The material of the countryside and mountains of New Hampshire were being celebrated before their eyes...
...Withdrawal into a private world is a possible response to the appalling diversity of attitudes towards God and man made visible in modern painting, sculpture, poetry, drama...
...Visual arts offer us no respite from that troubling vision of life so persistent as to be the very mote dancing in our eye...
...Lichtenstein's technique and control of his material are superb...
...You must learn to see again, a condition preliminary to conversion...
...It was the stance as long ago as Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" where the poet saw that the "Sea of Faith" no longer furled like a bright girdle around earth's shore...
...For these families, and thousands more in the rural South, there's only one alternative to literal, actual starvation: the Federal Food Stamp Program...
...She is still able, in the first act, to rummage in her black bag for her sole possessions--toothbrush, paste, spectacles, a parasol, a handkerchief...
...And what spoke that strange silence After his clamor of caws faded...
...I have maintained that in much of the fine literature, painting and sculpture of the modern world we can discern the features of a contemporary person who is both human and Divine...
...Eliot's exploration here of the dilemma of the sophisticated modem Christian is worth examing...
...But such experiences are rare...
...Thanks...
...Sometimes it's as little as $1 to buy a penniless couple $64 worth of food stamps...
...Crow himself, the non-hero of the sequence of poems, is a grotesque cartoon figure, black of soul and black of heart...
...Perhaps Samuel Beckett's drama is even bleaker than Hughes' poetry...
...With the sculptors, the people wandering on the lawn saw how beautiful these forms were that were being released from stone, metal, wood...
...There's Elma May Greer...
...Lawrence never gave tile One they sought a name...
...it is an admission, generally of guilt or ignorance or error...
...Plump, fiftyish Winnie is imbedded up to her waist in a mound of earth...
...Perhaps if we look steadily enough at this emerging face of contemporary man we can learn to love and compassionate his image and hear the Word spoken in time...
...But faith has never been able to demand total answers...
...Both faith and art nurture one another and both are impoverished when the relationship between the two is weak...
...It [Images o! Faith] is a remarkable book...
...But I was so stunned by an initial impact that Beckett's central metaphor escaped me...
...Just so...
...Rather than having their faith reinforced by contemporary art, Christians will find their doubts reflected in sometimes grotesque halls of mirrors...
...They will know that Rod McKuen doesn't write poetry...
...They will be challenged, confronted and affronted...
...by Piero Gheddo "Undoubtedly one of the most useful manuals on world poverty we have seen in a long t~me...
...Pop Art is the b~te noire to most of us...
...Refines our conceptions of faith and studies faith as a way of seeing and experiencing the world...
...The painter, the sculptor, the writer, contemplates and refuses to do violence to what he sees...
...The impulse to withdraw in contempt or despair from a culture inimical to him is probably the Christian's deepest temptation...
...They play life as if they were figures in a game of chess...
...Ironically, this world of secular rationalism cries out a phrase from the Gospel, "We would see a signP' Gerontion's suffering is precipitated by the very certainty of his belief...
...Warmly ~ecommended for church study and action groups...
...Christ came, indeed, as Eliot's poem says "swaddled in darkness," and as an infant "unable to speak a word...
...The childhood fantasies of make-believe become the supreme necessities of existence...
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...The poet is, of course, offering no philosophical answer to the problem he perceives...
...It is this simplicity of belief and unity of vision that one finds at first attractive in rereading the Confessions...
...Gerontion's vice is the capital sin of sloth, a sad reluctance to rouse oneself to perform the actions necessary for salvation...
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...One of the organizers of the exhibit said that the artists hoped many Is there really starvation in America...
...In the Latin of Cicero and Livy, con/essio signifies much the same thing as our English word "confession...
...they are caught in an interminable now...
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...They will not be seduced by the religious pornography of something like "The Exorcist," nor think that the academy award makes an entertainment like "The Sting" a great film (although they might be moved to consider the revival of Scott Joplin's music significant of cultural value...
...I take culture to be a manifestation of value...
...The work is indeed a catalogue of the saint's errors and sins...
...Eliot has observed, human beings cannot bear very much reality, we turn away in shock...
...It stares with awful representational directness at its subject...
...I will listen for the nuances of that Word as it is being shaped, not only by the Church, but also in contemporary art...
...In the Latin of the Vulgate con/essio also comes to mean a profession of belief in Christ_9 Thus Paul in his Epistle to the Romans says: "Si confitearis in ore tuG Dominum Iesum _9 . . salvus eris": "if with your lips you profess your belief in the Lord Jesus . . . you will be saved...
...They are on stage, waiting for their cue, endlessly repeating their lines...
...It follows then that their faith is dynamic, for as they posit ultimate value, they recognize that it has not as yet been realized...
...Occasionally, it's as much as $20, which can give each member of a family of 16 about 65r worth of food each day...
...Eliot sees modern man's rootlessness, his detachment from culture and belief as effecting spiritual paralysis...
...How can faith continue to find a cultural expression if the cultural consensus that once supported it has broken down...
...Prairie Messenger ISBN O-S8344-383-X Hardbound $4.95 CLASH OF TITANS Africa and US Foreign Policy by Edward W. Chester Full-scale assessment of U,S...
...ISBN 0-88344-757-6 Paperback $3.95 Politics and Society in the Third World by lean-Yves Calvez A study of societies in the process of development, particularly those factors "which can help or hinder the total human development within those societies...
...His characters move in a kind of frenetic alacrity in the service of the master puppeteer...
...In its widest sense it is the total ambiance of a civilization...
...Lichtenstein's comic strip figures isolate and heighten the banal in modern life...
...Beckett celebrates performance...
...When I first read Endgame I wondered that such desperate material should be called a "play...
...Look at Hughes' images and your eyeballs are seared...
...10019 Commonweal: 163 of these works would be "climbed upon by children...
...On the lawn of an old inn with Mount Washington as spectacular backdrop, a group of artists had assembled one of the largest outdoor exhibits of sculpture in the country...
...The editors focus the problem in the following paragraph: "Faith usually expresses itself in art - - in architecture, painting and music as well as in literature...
...Eliot's Gerontion is falling asleep, dying with the awful knowledge of his true condition burning in his mind...
...Eliot's old man is granted an intensely ironic perception of his situation...
...Ethical questions have rarely been asked by either the have or have not nations...
...Denis Goulet, a foremost authority in the development field, brings up these queStions and offers a challenge to live the answers...
...And, on the average, every dollar we get converts into $11 worth of food...
...Their values are relative only in terms of their certainty of a transcendent, existing value...
...Join Ray Wood's family for dinner...
...He is not restored to health but they are...
...She plays her role, even in the second act when only her head is above the mound, with as incredible 15 November 1974:162 an energy as Harem plays his with style...
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...as they intuit a perfection to be, their dissatisfaction with the temporal manifestations of the Church are not permanently alienating...
...Great artists such as Yeats and D.H...
...National Catholic Book Award 1970 "In an excellent book Father Lynch has gone beyond the secularization and anti-secularization polari t y . . , a work of maturity that employs a language with which we can describe our revolutionary society...
...he accepts responsibility...
...And when you're talking about more than 30,000 families helped, the cost mounts up...
...tion of the Ironic lmal0nation William F. Lynch, SJ...
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...it is rather a reflection of Augustine's view of man and his relationship to God...
...there can be no tbeonomous analysis of culture...
...Concerned Christians need not participate in the illness of modern man as artists depict him, but in care for such suffering those same Christians may be cured from their own kind of not necessarily l e s s virulent sickness...
...And what loved the shot-peUets That dribbled from those strungup mummifying crows...
...T h i s movement is popping up all over the world, even in Europe...
...It would be faith's greatest betrayal to turn away in fear claiming, "I do not know the man...
...Perhaps it is the only answer for some...
...Blind Harem and his servant, Cloy, (the pun is incredible) are engaged in a game...
...But, as one of my graduate students wrote, "Reading Crow is like being knocked from one's horse on the road to Damascus: there is a show of light, but more, it elicits change...
...The man of faith lives in a secular world...
...Such Christians are not afraid of doubt or change because, although the Word was spoken into the world at one particular moment in time, its meaning is revealed in process, and their questions are part of that process...
...How do you get to the selling office when you're blind, or crippled, or can't scrape up the carfare...
...Certainly most thinking Christians have been pressured into a sophistication which is less a simplistic trust in the institutional Church "It" than a longing for the Kairos of the Church "She," that loving Mother who gives form to their deepest spiritual needs...
...More particularly, and in the narrow sense in which I wish to use it, the culture of a civilization can be most clearly assessed through its human achievement in art...
...He stares relentlessly at the human condition and its radical limitations...
...Jeremiads may be all I'll hear...
...Hughes is ultimately a religious poet ceaselessly trying to define the nature of man and his relationship with God...
...In his latest volume, Crow, he is concerned with survival as the only absolute verity man can know...
...It would be superficial of me to think that I have answered those initial questions of the relation between faith and culture...
...Turning in the rejection of despair, Arnold's persona says "Ah, love, let us be true/To one another...
...Indeed all human activity serves this purpose only: to bring man to God...
...Little boys challenged each other to jump from the heights of a marble mound, day-dreamed in the curve of a granite slab...
...Eliot's canon, "Gerontion...
...No one complained about what it all meant...
...Gerontion's "house" is decayed...
...But we can't do it without your dollars...
...As I believe this, I believe that the Word of God is being gradually illuminated, that this Word will never be completed until the end of time...
...What spoke the silence of lead...
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...Try budgeting Berlean Fairley's $60 a month to cover lights, gas, food and shoes for four growing kids...
...But what Loved the stones and spoke stone...
...Inevitably then, in such a world, faith and culture are heterogeneous...
...What I have done is to assert, not logically but analogically, my trust that good art offers us, in Maritain's words, "a supra-rational intuition of the latent perfection of things...
...Rootlessness, material culture, trade, the images of the poem suggest, have taken possession of the house in which humanity is forced to live...
...Winnie steadfastly resists despair...
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...Wherever we turn in modern literature and painting, we find little consolation and much ugliness...
...But how do you buy food stamps when you have no cash...
...As persona in the poem, Gerontion is an old man living in a state of spiritual death-in-life...
...But Beckett does not allow them to fall into the apathetic sleep of Gerontion...
...We are hard-pressed to find something pretty to hang over the piano...
...This is not an empty playing on words...
...television has in Latin America...
...He knows man demands a miracle and that the one which has given to him, "The word within a word, unable to speak a word,/ Swaddled with darkness," man insistently rejects...
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...Since her husband died, she's been trying to support eight children on $84 a month from welfare...
...And there would be more of it except for the NAACP Emergency Relief Fund...
...But if it had its inception in an uncritical acceptance of the vulgar, with someone like Roy Lichtenstein Pop Art becomes an experimental formal statement as well as an ironic comment on our present society...
...As Gerontion listens he contemplates all the points at which the passionate past bears no relation to the arid present...
...Liguonan ISBN 0-88344-522-0 .~lerdbound $4.95 Commonweal: 161 IMAGES OF FAITH: An Expiora...
...Yet, in his service, the other characters in the novel recover their human capacity for affection and devotion...
...A searing challenge to age old tenets of t h e West...
...but it is also a profession of his faith...
...These Christians do not so much look for support from their culture as they experience the need to interact with and help form the culture of their time...
...10545 A NEW MORAL ORDER Development Ethics.and Liberation Theology by Denis Goulet The traditional economic approach to "'aid to the developing nations" has shown itself bankrupt...
...A boy reads to him, evidently heroic tales from history...
...What Hughes touches in the darkness as he gropes to feel for the face of God and man is shocking...
...There sure is...
...But Pop Art is not abstract...
...And this was exactly what was happening...
...They are great vaudeville performers...
...However, I assume that the most recent of newspaper headlines will give supporting evidence to my contention that the condition of the society in which we live is one of radical dissolution and uncontrollable variety...
...One small girl hugged a huge clown emerging, as the sculptor chipped, from the stump of an elm...
...But he is a lost prophet who can neither bear witness to his generation nor stir himself to fight annihilation with personal action...
...Like Hughes he is concerned with man's survival but the key to Beckett is his care for the way man survives...
...I am convinced that nothing which merits the title "art" can be pornographic and I would go further and say that neither can it be secular...
...What he draws for us is the face of our time...
...It really isn't much--but to the people who get it, it's the difference between life and death...
...It is an affront to our taste and sensibility, the antithesis of fine art...
...They seemed to exist too...
...If it can't, what effect will this have on the quality of our belief...
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...Sen, a noted Indian expert on agriculture, shows how the new "miracle seeds" can double the yield of wheat and rice in most of the undeveloped nations...
...The resident sculptors also held classes and their students welded metal, chipped away at elm, pine, or granite...
...In his terrible prescience the old man watches images of a disintegrating society whirling to cataclysm...
...Gerontion" is Eliot's image of the refusal of the Christian to bear witness in his time...
...Thomas Merton found his center of gravity in a Cistercian monastery and from this still center he was able to bear witness...
...Doctor Cahill, a leader in tropical medicine, presents essays from men of different backgrounds and specialties urging a policy that would make the U.S., not the policeman of the world, but l~man to the ailing of this world...
...And, as they respect the artist's attempt to give form to his value, they will be slow to reject the unfamiliar...
...In our time the ground of culture is not formal religion, nor has it been since the Medieval age...
...Apathy and paralysis of the will before the overwhelming fragmentation of culture and belief is the theme of one of the finest poems in T.S...
...Lucid, sensible and always interesting...
...He sees the Christian community conducting rituals, holding rites and ceremonials of communion having no connection with sacrament...
...He knows that Christ has come but is unable, unwilling to translate his knowledge into saving action...
...C h r i s t came swaddled w i t h darkness" CULTURE AND THE FUTURE OF BELIEF CLAIRE HAHN C ULTURE and belief, their interrelationship and i~erdependence, have been concerns engaging the periphery of my attention for many years, and since this Commonweal assignment, the immediate foreground for at least two months...
...With this analysis of hope as the very center of man Father Lynch would help us to free ourselves from the entrapment of hopelessness...
...His characters have no past or future...
...He is also a theologian...
...For Augustine, God brings man to Himself through his blindness and folly...
...In the Con/essions of St...
...To come to terms with these questions necessitates definitions and assumptions which may seem very much like presumptions because space demands ellipsis...
...15 November 1974:160 their doctrines were widely divergent, yet each tracked with passionate intensity the imagines Dei through the world of persons and things...
...For now, what he says about our culture is an indictment...
...Contemporary art has few oases but I discovered one this summer at the White Mountain Arts Festival in Jefferson, New Hampshire...
...Father Lynch's discussion of wishing is a particularly valuable contribution . . . . This is a very good book...
...Harem (let)'s world has indeed become a stage and he must play out his role until the show is over...
...When the subject matter loses its immediacy, critics will be free to concentrate on his technique...
...Augustine the two meanings of the word coalesce...
...He is peevish and repulsive in the form his illness has taken...
...They will, in other words, be alert to discern the creative work from the cheaply synthetic exploitation...
...It can be argued that the flowering of the arts associated with religious faith depends on a strong cultural consensus and a sense of shared belief within the institutional Church and that, now that this consensus has been broken down, those who look to art, music and literature for cultural symbols that will reinforce their faith will find only sterility, amateurism, pop-art and nostalgia...
...They touched the textures and found them a delight...
...I am, of course, taking it for granted that these concerned persons will have the taste to distinguish between junk and art...
...Often, because, as T.S...
...Beckett's drama resists explication or reduction to theme...
...Through volunteers working out of local NAACP branches, we provide the c a s h - - a n d sometimes the c a r f a r e - - t h a t makes food stamps available to the Greers and Woods and Fairleys...
...But the timid Christian who refuses to look when an artist bears witness to his vision sees at best through a myopic lens...
...In Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream, the Bruno of the title is a dying old man...
...BOOKS CHRISTIAN CLASSICS LONELINESS & SELF-INDULGENCE GEORGE W, SHEA CONFESSIONS, by Saint Augustine o/ Hippo, Fourth Century...
...Gerontion then asks the most complex of Christian @ At your local bookstore or write: ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, N.Y...
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...Beckett's Happy Days also deals with human beings as actors trapped as they have been cast...
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...relations with African nations, Chester is the first to have drawn on the State Department's official correspondence relating to that continent...
...One of the most powerful voices in English poetry today is that of Ted Hughes...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 6
