“The final revolution cannot occur unless the Church becomes charged with the energies of the Holy Spirit. By her very nature, the Church cannot sanction any canonized social norm and this is why she acts with the greatest flexibility in regards to local circumstances. Yet, if the Word of God consoles, it also judges. This explains the certain detachment of the Church’s clairvoyant witness. She condemns all compromise and conformism, but her penetrating realism unmasks and confronts the demonic elements. The universal and most pertinent task before us is to place the goods of this earth at the disposal of all people, without depriving them of religious and political freedom. It is the problem of wealth and not really the poor who covet this wealth. In a technological and free market civilization, a poet, a thinker, a prophet — all of these are considered useless beings. Artists and disinterested intellectuals already constitute a new form of the proletariat. For sure, above all, by an obligatory international taxation, it is necessary to suppress material hunger. It is also necessary to consider those who hunger and who know that it is not by bread alone that mankind lives. It is most urgent to affirm the primacy of culture and the spirit of finesse. Modern society needs to protect poets and prophets, and while accepting demons out of respect for freedom, we ought equally to reserve a place for angels and saints who are just as real as other people and the demons. To doubt that we human beings might be capable of mastering not only the cosmos but ourselves, would be to renounce the dignity given to us as children of God. It is precisely to this world of ours, closed to everything but itself, that the assurance of faith is given in order to penetrate the walls and manifest the invisible presence of he Transcendent One, to raise the dead and move mountains, to cast the fire of hope for the salvation of all and to connect this world and its emptiness to the ‘Church, full of the Trinity.’”
–Paul Evdokimov, “Culture and Faith,” pages 195 – 215 in In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader. trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 207 – 8.
For sure!
Henry,
This quotre is excellent in so, so many ways. Every couple sentences are a gem and could be a subject for an entire post.
I’m so glad to be a new form of proletariat…
In a technological and free market civilization, a poet, a thinker, a prophet — all of these are considered useless beings. Artists and disinterested intellectuals already constitute a new form of the proletariat.
I can’t speak to the plight of ‘disinterested intellectuals’ (as St. Augustine said of centaurs, I would wait until one is found before passing judgment). But the idea that artists are somehow oppressed in “technological and free market civilization” is laughable. I know of no civilization that has had more poets, thinkers, and self-described prophets than does the modern West, in part because the wealth technological and free market civilization has provided has made it feasible for many more people to make a living by such occupations than in the past.
BA,
That is not the deeper point.
In our culture, poets, artists and thinkers are reduced to either entertainers, producers of the commodity of the book/artwork, or persons who offer distractions/respite from the ‘real world’ of commerce and technology.
In our culture, poets, artists and thinkers are reduced to either entertainers, producers of the commodity of the book/artwork, or persons who offer distractions/respite from the ‘real world’ of commerce and technology.
I’d say that this post indicates otherwise.
Yes. But this is a small counterculture in the much wider culture, eh?
Mark,
True, but when has this ever not been the case? It’s not as if most people in the middle ages spent their time reading St. Thomas Aquinas (most people couldn’t even read, and were probably more concerned with not starving to death). We tend to have an overly romantic view about culture in the past because only the best and highest works of any era tend to survive, but in reality Sturgeon’s law tends to be, in anything, overly optimistic.
BA
Right you are. And I have learned not to romanticaize the past
But I would just say that “commodity culture” has so pentrated all spects of our life that the small bands of ‘real’artists, thinkers and poets must be especially supported today, in the light of the technolical and commercial onslaught.
Mark
Paul Evdokimov, despite being Orthodox, has had a profound influence on the Catholic Church through his input in discussions at Vatican II. He’s also in the “school of thought” of Florensky and Bulgakov — although, of course, not always limited to the past in his own theological interaction. Not everything he said I agree with, but he was always interested in integrating the positives and even necessary criticisms of various theological, philosophical, and socio-economic traditions.
You can see it in this passage — and, despite what BA might think, you are right, our “culture” has turned wisdom (and the arts) into mere trinkets. Yes, a few can live in and flourish in this situation, but does that few make up for what happens on the whole? It’s like three card monty. The card shark will let a person or two win to make everyone watching thinking they can win as well.
Poetry, imo, is dead. Yes, students read poetry in English classes, as if they are doing autopsies. And one can point to a few movements in the earth as the gas shuffles the corpse around, but that’s about it. For the other arts, I think William Morris showed how detoriated modern aesthetics has become; his attempts to save it from the machine has ended in his own works being reproduced by that same machine. And the prophet will always be tossed aside for profit, once money is the ultimate truth.