Post 152.  

This week, I read the chapter, Beauty, in the 1952 edition of Brittanica’s Syntopicon, a collection designed by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago for a collection called “The Great Books of the Western World.” The idea of a syntopicon, or a collection of topics, is distinctive to Brittanica’s project, though consistent with the ideas of encyclopedias and dictionaries, and is similar with more modern keywords projects, such as books by Raymond Williams, Cary Nelson, Stephen Watt, Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd in disciplines like culture, higher education, and evolutionary biology. The syntopicon offers a broad introduction of 100 keywords that are central to Western thought, from the perspective of Western philosophy and literature. Any criticisms more recent scholars pose to eurocentric and androcentric scholarly writing will necessarily be relevant to the Syntopicon, and with that in mind, Syntopicon entries can provide a base understanding of one intellectual tradition’s established understanding of a keyword—in this case, beauty. 

            Beauty is discussed with two other keywords, truth and goodness, but where truth and goodness are most often argued as being objective, beauty is widely, though not univocally, regarded as subjective in the Western intellectual tradition. Some authors, such as William James, have argued for an objective understanding of beauty, while others, such as Immanuel Kant, suggest beauty is a subjective but universal concept. Truth, goodness and beauty together make up the essential transcendentals of the Western tradition. As such, truth, goodness and beauty transcend the material world—you cannot touch or smell or hear truth itself, goodness itself, or beauty itself, but you are able to use these transcendentals as standards by which to judge true things, good things, and beautiful things as true, good, or beautiful. Plato would suggest these are primary ideas that transcend material reality. This idea can be found throughout Western history.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Books.jpg

Post 151. 

This watch, I read the explanation of the Parable of the Sower in the gospel of Mark. In it, the Word is the seed, and we are the soil in which the seed lands. Satan, stealing hope and instigating despair, whispers to me that I am the rocky soil, and that in me the Word is received with joy, but with tribulation and hope for earthly riches my Faith withers and dies. Satan is the prince of lies. This lie works because, despite my growing closer to the Word in my suffering—in my professional failure as an academic, my financial fragility, my oft fruitless workdays, my lack of distinction, and lately in my shoulder pain—I persist in cultivating my marriage with the Lord. Even on days when passion is weak, I have meditated upon scripture, prayed for divine help, and lived as if Christ walks with me.

            Comparison is the thief of joy. It’s an old saying, I suppose, for a reason: It holds truth. Comparison plans a seed of envy, increasing expectation for earthly riches. My expectation of earthly riches does not come in the form of money—certainly capital would be welcomed if the Lord sent it my way—but in earthly riches. Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, was originally titled the Simpletons. In it, the poor, rural Jude Fawley teaches himself Latin and some Greek and works hard to gain admittance to Christminster College, dreaming of becoming a scholar, a Doctor of Divinity, and maybe even a bishop. Hardy, the realistic and insightful author, never portrays Jude as faultless—in fact, his faults provide the novel with much of its deepest insights. Often readers of Hardy come to this novel with preconceptions, especially having read Hardy’s previous novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where the pure and inherently noble Tess suffers misfortunes by an unjust society.

            In comparison, Jude is complicated. He misunderstands much of what he reads, is boastful and self-centered, is filled with self-pride and persistent melancholy that leads to worsening of his situation. But is this critique even fair? Does he really worsen his situation from a penniless, unwanted child through his study and hard work, even if he never gains admittance to Christminster, is terrible at relationships, and fails to reach the proverbial stars? One could argue that when you start in a ditch, even if you don’t fully drag yourself from it, you have made some headway in a life of imperfect effort.

            Some have suggested Jude is such a complex character—sometimes likeable but oft unpleasant—because Hardy modeled much of Jude on himself. Hardy was able to clutch the mirror of truth, holding it to himself and scrutinizing every defect and error while grasping only some of his virtues, and those with discernment into how even these are flawed. Many people who lack self-understanding, those today who are ignorant to original sin—at least their own—cannot empathize with Jude. When he, after pulling himself from being nobody, stands in a tavern reciting better than Christminster’s students, he exposes how the alma mater is nothing like the real mother Jude lived without. Hardy was right in changing the name of the novel from the Simpletons to Jude the Obscure, even if it places too much focus on one figure, Jude, and not enough to other interesting characters like Sue and Arabella. To call Jude, Sue, Arabella and the other simpletons, even in their most foolish, idiotic, and oafish instances, misses something important. We are these characters who scheme our successes, fail, hurt those we love most, compromise, and even in compromises fail, hate ourselves, and continue to push on, praying our efforts will one day be fruitful.

            Our efforts never bear fruit, particularly when we were born in a ditch and pull ourselves out. This is because there is an implicit Bible verse that unlocks the mystery of this novel, Ephesians 2:8-9. Paul admonishes Christians that grace is a gift from the Lord, and that we cannot boast about our works, because they cannot save us. Jude, however hard he works, will never overcome the fallen society into which he was born and brutally raised. It is deformed to instill the hope for a golden crown but offers the poor only tin. But never fear because consecrated to the Lord are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). The Christian who was, like Jude, born poor and worked fruitlessly accepts failure in the social world, because it is infused with diabolical iniquities and seemingly beautiful vices.

            Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, hope in that which is undying can replace our defiled hope in acknowledgement, appreciation, and eminence. Love can replace defiled love. Goodness can replace defiled goodness. Truth can replace defiled truth. Beauty can replace defiled beauty. 

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hardy_-_Jude_the_Obscure,_1896_(page_163_crop).jpg

Post 150. 

Within the Catholic intellectual tradition, Catholic music can be perceived as classist, which contrast with the motto of the current Church, “a church that is poor for the poor.” Pope Francis used this phrase in 2013, and this motto is embodied today in the work of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul with the poor and homeless, the Dismas Ministry in prisons, Pax Christi working to end nuclear proliferation, and many others. But this is not only a modern motto. The  Church founded the earliest hospitals in the 4th Century, the first schools in Europe in the 11th Century, and restricted the rights of slave owners through the Theodosian Code of 438, banning then widespread Roman practices of concubinage and rape, as well as protecting abandoned infants from this (https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Codex_Theod.htm). 

            On the musical arts side of this paradox, Pope Pius XII wrote extensively on sacred music, including rejecting the “outworn dictum ‘art for art’s sake’,” confessing that music is the servant to sacred liturgy, that Gregorian chant ought to be upheld, and that an artist’s freedom ought to be “ennobled and perfected” by divine law. In his encyclical Musicae-Sacrae, the Church is cautioned “to protect sacred music against anything that might lessen its dignity,” and “take the greatest care to prevent whatever might be unbecoming to sacred worship or anything that might distract the faithful in attendance from lifting their minds up to God” (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_25121955_musicae-sacrae.html). 

            It seems that today three figures are revered uppermost: St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), acknowledged as the master of plainchant and as a doctor of the church, Giovanni da Palestrina (1525-1594), endorsed as perfecting Catholic polyphony, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), conceivably the greatest genius of Catholic sacred music. Other Catholic composers, William Byrd, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, List, Dvořák, Edward Elgar, and Olivier Messiaen, are the significant figures in Western Music history. These figures can dominate discussions of Catholic music, and, as a result, dominate our understanding of Beauty. However, the Catholic musical tradition isn’t limited to classical music. Jazz artists Mary Lou Williams, Dave Brubeck, and Vince Guaraldi each composed poignant masses. Rather than offering a strong contrast with the classical mass tradition, these jazz masses are more high art than common.

            Today, Catholic music using more popular stylistic elements are portrayed as contentious, while Classical musical forms are endorsed. This seemingly contrarian viewpoint might best be summed up in a recent post on the well-known website, Catholic Answers, in which old-fashioned standards like On Eagle’s Wings are described as “cheesy.” The post then produces of list of songs, calling for the elimination of these popular Christian songs from mass, which may not be unfounded (beside the point I am making here), and finally advocates that Gregorian chant “be given pride of place in liturgical services” (https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/these-worship-songs-need-to-be-abolished). Whether or not one appreciates Gregorian chant, or Renaissance polyphony upon those plainchants, and I certainly do, this is not the common music of the poor, who the Church aims to be.

            This is more the music of monarchs, capitalists, bishops, and the cathedrals in urbane cities than the music of the poor who might attend the small parishes serving the rural and urban poor. And therein lies the paradox, a church that is poor for the poor cannot be the church of the that is perfect for the perfect alone; that is cultured for the cultured alone; that is intelligent for the intelligent alone; or that is elite for the elites alone. A church that is poor for the poor, the church of St. Francis of Assisi, St. John Bosco, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Katharine Drexel, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement, that fully serves the poorest of the poor by meeting them where they are, this church, must at times be poor in music.

Daniel J. Shevock

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mother_Teresa_by_Ariel_Quiroz_-_Portrait.jpg

Post 149. 

Beauty is imprinted on children as we first experience the world. An infant beholds the world in awe with untainted innocence. Children hold on to an enchanted environment through play, especially outdoors. Thinking back to my childhood, hours were engaged playacting with toys in the grass, watching the clouds form figures, or listening to birds, crickets, and the wind. I did not have an idyllic childhood, and basic needs were not always met, but innocent to the extensiveness of society’s depravity, I spent much of my time in oblivious awe. With age both innocence and awe degrade—the work of Satan in the world—and we gaze, feel, and listen deeply less to the beautiful things God has immersed us in, and attend more to the ugly.

            Gradually, children notice parents fighting and offensive language; schooldays filled with long hours indoors, testing regimes, discipline and failure; violence and drug addiction. Today children are distracted from awe by unwitting adults providing addictive technologies—the screen replaces the universe and the child’s senses are blunted. As these addicts age, they would prefer the simple numbness of videogames, social media, and artificial intelligence to experiences with other people or the natural world. People and nature are both complex, hazardous, and sometimes vicious. But they are also where living beauty is unearthed—in the thoughtful eye of a beloved, a song of waterfall deep in the wood, a hug, a pink sunset, or a discussion on a favorite old novel. All these things that bear awe in young children gradually vanish in the face of years spent living in the social world in which we find ourselves and later partake in. We learn to fear that which inspired awe and admire that which is simulated.

            A word I seldom write or speak, but which seems fitting in the context of awe is sublime. Simply stated in my understanding of it, the sublime refers to those great beautiful things that are both attractive and frightening. An example that was used when I first heard the term was the Grand Canyon, which I visited nearly a decade ago. Standing near the ledge—even if you’re ten feet from the ledge—a fear inserts itself your gut as you look at the vastness of God’s creation, knowing your own smallness. You are aware that a wind gust, if it had a fraction of the power of this canyon, could fling you to your death, not dissimilar to the fear of the bully that schoolchildren realize after being flung into a locker, choked, and given a bloody lip for the first time or, to use a contemporary example, finding lies mixed with half-truths about you on classmates’ social media account receiving hundreds of likes. Here you are, tiny and powerless to do anything to stop your defenselessness. While there is no beauty in school bullying—an essential part of school which drives us away from awe—the sublime is both attractive and frightening. We want to behold with all our senses the breeze, the birdsong, the rock, the space of the canyon. We search for the river at the center and for animals in the distance. We move our attention from the vast to the minuscule and back again. When I visited the canyon, this experience is disturbed by my wife admonishing me to back away from the ledge, perhaps not grasping I left ten feet between me and it. She is having the same experience further back.

            As people age, maybe we are less likely to spend hours in awe than in fear. The recipe of the sublime goes sour when we mix in too much fear. We fail to rise to the Beauty we might know.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicken%27s_works_(1890)_(14779159911).jpg

Post 148. 

This morning, I read St. Oscar Romero’s reflection from December 31, 1977 (published in The Violence of Love, Orbis Books), in which the good bishop explains why the Church resists torture and other abuses. He writes, “The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God,” and later in the same contemplation, “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image.” 

            The question, Why Beauty, has a relative, Why Beauty Matters. For St. Oscar, Beauty exists for God’s purpose. In the 19th Century Romantic aestheticists argued effectively that art is for art’s sake—that is, Beauty is for Beauty. Immanuel Kant had previous argued for the intrinsic value of human beings because every person would want to be understood as intrinsically valuable—this is the categorical imperative, which is his extension of the golden rule. But what does this mean for art? Non-human beings (animals/plants) and objects exist not because they are intrinsically valuable, but because they have a purpose—they are of use value.

            This dichotomy, picked up by the Romantics, extended intrinsic value to certain arts, especially those found in museums, opera houses, and concert halls frequented by the nobility, aristocracy, and wealthy capitalists. These high arts become intrinsically valuable. The contradiction becomes obvious when we ponder that the same persons that in the 19th Century employed child labor and fought workplace safety laws, were aggressively negating the intrinsic value of other human persons, the working poor, while disseminating the intrinsic value of Beauty. This type of aesthetic theory found voice in 20th Century Music Education through the philosopher Bennett Reimer, who trained numerous music teachers and professors to begin from the position that music has intrinsic value, and insisted we teach music for music’s sake, rather than for any extrinsic ends, be those ends political, spiritual, economic, or social. 

            In response to the aesthetic movement, specific to Music Education, praxial philosophers such as David Elliott, Christopher Small, and Thomas Regelski dominated scholarly writing beginning in the 1990s. Praxialists argue that music is not a thing at all, but an action which people do. They reject the intrinsic/extrinsic dualism, and open space for today’s scholarship, which includes much that is political, spiritual, economic, and social. Both aesthetic and praxial music educators and scholars remain active today. 

            I was trained to be a music teacher in the 1990s, when the aesthetics/praxialist conversation was at its most heated, and earned my Ph.D. in 2015, firmly placing my scholarship in the praxial faction, which allowed me to research music improvisation and ecological literacy—topics which would be understood as extrinsic to music itself from the aesthetic perspective. More recently, my understanding of ecology has led me to my current enquiry into Beauty, an idea that tends to find greater expression in aesthetic theory than praxial. A synthesis is needed.

            The Christian perspective is something quite different than most conceptions of the aesthetic or the praxial. As St. Oscar revealed “There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image,” and if there is no dichotomy then intrinsic value does not lie there and not here—in art and not factory workers; in a sonata and not in a country hit; in the mental image of beauty and not in this mere performance, here. The aesthetic position as it has been argued in Music Education scholarship is vacuous because God says each person—the disabled, the homeless, the illegal alien, the trans, the cashier, as well as the business owner, the monastic, and the internationally recognized scholar--is the image of God. There is no dichotomy to be found because God, who is trinity—perfect relationship—has not chosen to dichotomize reality into those of his creation having intrinsic value and those having mere use value. Rather, ever creature of God has intrinsic value as well as use value, when we choose to put ourselves to the use of others in Christian love. The most beautiful lives have been the lives of saints—though often not lives filled with wealth, length, or lack of suffering. People are unfulfilled when we are not of use to our friends, family, neighbors, communities, and humanity—but we are unhappy when treated as less-than others of God’s creation and not given the time to explore with our bodies, minds and souls the beautiful things at within our grasp, whether in silence and solitude or together with others.

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beatificacion_Monse%C3%B1or_Romero_(17984373076).jpg