Can Art and Art Schools Be Saved from the Pretentious and the Bureaucratic? - Paul Adams

The parody posted below of pretentious indie films, like all good parodies, calls for some more serious reflection on the state of affairs it mocks.  Here's another parody of the pretentious, in this case an art student using every contemporary cliche to explain what he is doing with his artistic efforts.

As my daughter, an art school graduate, pointed out in response, "The thing is, though, that you can't just present a piece for critique and be like, 'I just thought this would look cool...' So you have to pull something like this out of…."

She has a point.  Certainly you can be a great jazz pianist or painter or sculptor without being able to talk coherently about what you are doing.  They are different skills.  It is in the nature of art that it cannot be reduced without loss to some other form of expression, poetry to prose, Jane Austen's novels to analytical philosophy.  That was Tolstoy's point in seeing parable as the essence of art.  Good art, as opposed to kitsch, is true.  But it says what it says, shows what it shows, precisely as parable.  You can take much longer, as homilists necessarily do, to expound on a parable's 'meaning', but not without some loss.  Should the art student even be expected to jump through those hoops that reduce his work to cliché, even if it is better than that?  And my daughter is surely right to point out, as she goes on to do, that students in other fields in the humanities and social sciences are also given to pretentiousness. But students do vary enormously in their capacity to make a reasoned argument (not a strength of social workers, I'm afraid, who also claim "other strengths").  Of course, as the parody of indie films shows, the cliches can be in the art itself, not just the artist's explanation of it.

But there is something about the arts in modern times that makes them particularly hard to talk about.  Made harder still by what German writer Martin Mosebach calls the senile avantgardism of the last century that aims even in its aging practitioners to shock, épater les bourgeois, like permanent adolescents.  Here's what he says in his book on the destruction in Europe of liturgy, altars, sacred music, art, and architecture over the past 40 years, The Heresy of Formlessness:

The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms!" (pp.81-82).

Look at this piece of silliness recently installed at a prestigious women's college.  Note how the museum director defends or explains the sculpture not as good, true, or beautiful, but as "provoking dialogue" or "starting discussion."  On the flip side of that same coin, there is this deadening tendency to destroy art by bureaucratizing or deconstructing it, or bureaucratizing deconstruction: See this piece by one of my favorite essayists, Anthony Esolen, on the Common Core Curriculum and how it destroys literature and the capacity to appreciate it.

On the other hand, here is a piece (posted on this site January 21, 2014) by my friend, the artist Cornelius Sullivan, who is able both to write about and practice art.  He bemoans the lack of a department of sacred art in any Catholic university.  People have sent his essay to college presidents, provosts, and trustees (ours anyway).  After reading Esolen on what happens to art in the hands of educational bureaucrats, as well as Cornelius's own comments on the Reformation-like iconoclasm in Catholic colleges and the self-referential elitism of modern art, I wonder if Cornelius shouldn't be careful what he wishes for.  I am sure he would agree, we need not only departments of sacred art at our centers of Catholic learning and culture, but ones that reflect the understanding of and sensitivity to art, and sacred art in particular, that he offers here and that is in such short supply - according to the parody above - in the art schools and art students of our time.

Marriage Needs Help, Pt.2

"Catholics Awake!" cries Anthony Esolen, "Marriage Doesn't Just Happen!" Two exclamation marks in one title, not Esolen's style so a particular indicator of the urgency with which he views the situation.

He notices that in the generally Catholic college where he teaches - and as I confirm from teaching at a non-Catholic public and private universities - boys and girls don't hold hands.

Let that serve as shorthand for the absence of all those rites of attraction and conversation, flirting and courting, that used to be passed along from one youthful generation to the next, just as childhood games were once passed along, but are so no longer.  The boys and girls don’t hold hands. 

I am aware of the many attempts by responsible Catholic priests and laymen to win the souls of young people, to keep them in the Church, and indeed to make some of them into attractive ambassadors for the Church.  I approve of them heartily.  Yes, we need those frank discussions about contraception.  We need theological lectures to counter the regnant nihilism of the schools and the mass media.  But we need something else too, something more human and more fundamental.  We need desperately to reintroduce young men and young women to the delightfulness of the opposite sex.  Just as boys after fifteen years of being hustled from institutional pillar to institutional post no longer know how to make up their own games outdoors, just as girls after fifteen years of the same no longer know how to organize a dance or a social, so now our young people not only refrain from dating and courting—they do not know how to do it.  It isn’t happening.  Look at the hands. 

In our swamp of miserable statistics, let me introduce another that is often overlooked.  In 1960—back when Wally Cleaver was wearing a jacket and tie to join other boys and girls at a party, for playing records and eating ice cream and dancing—in that already souring time, almost three out of four Americans aged 24 were married (72%).  Now that number is less than one in ten (9%)!  That is not a good thing.  First, it is evidence of deep and widespread loneliness.  We are not talking about people who are dating during all those years; they aren’t.  Some of them are bed-hopping; some are shacking up; some are simply alone.  That pretty much accounts for them all.  Three options, all bad. 

Second, it delays, perhaps derails for good, the time when young people will set down roots and integrate themselves into the great passage of the generations.  In a culture where marriage is really treasured, that time is the supreme aim of most people’s lives.  It is when the couple will plant orchards whose fruit they themselves will not enjoy—while tasting the fruit that has been made available to them by their parents and grandparents.  The married couple, open to bearing and raising children, assume wholly new relations to the world around them.  They need not rely upon the ministrations of a secular and soul-withering state.  They themselves make a society within the larger society. 

Third, it implies a divorce of love from the crazy vigor and cheerfulness of youth.  And this is what I specifically want to stress.  Young people should be oriented toward love; that is natural.  Grace perfects nature; but that means there has to be a nature to perfect.  But where, now, is the natural expression of this search for love?  There aren’t any boys climbing the mountains to pick edelweiss for their sweethearts.  There aren’t any sweethearts.  There aren’t any boys singing “Annie Laurie,” nor any Annies for them to sing to.  A whole mode of being has been lost, a mode of being that in every culture but our own produces a wealth of beauty, and sweeps young people along with its strong tide, into marriage and a world of families.

Esolen, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, relates the problem to the damage we as irresponsible parents who over-schedule our children and leave them to the soul-destroying world of television, video games, and endless distractions, does not mince words:

What do we do about it?  Well, what would we do if we found a land of pallid, feeble, depressed children, kept withindoors all their lives, and so burdened with drudgery and the inanity of electronic gadgetry that they couldn’t climb a tree or fish in a pond or climb a mountain?  We wouldn’t give them lectures on the wonder of the simple joys.  We wouldn’t have them read articles proving the superiority of a way of life they cannot imagine.  We wouldn’t focus on the intellect at all!  For the problem is bigger than that, or more fundamental.  We would get them outdoors, right away.  It isn’t enough that no one prevent them from going outdoors, just as it isn’t enough right now that no one prevents our young people from holding hands, delighting in the company of the opposite sex, courting, and marrying.  They’re lost.  They hardly know where to begin.

It's as well he does not resort to satire, sarcasm, or irony as he does in the book.  When he tried that on Fox and Friends recently, the interviewers missed the irony entirely and, clearly flummoxed, cut short the interview after two and a half minutes. That itself is a sad commentary on our dying culture.  Satire depends on shared values.



Look what happens when adults, even in Catholic schools, colleges, and parishes, neglect their responsibility, hitherto a key task of all cultures, to steer their young toward marriage!

And, let’s be honest, among all sane people, one generation assumes some responsibility to ready the next generation for marriage.  They sponsor dances.  Where are the dances, the concerts, in our parishes?  Dancing, I know, is another one of those games that used to be passed along by the young to the young, but that’s long ceased to be the case.  Now all we’re left with are the epileptic jerks of disconnected “partners” on a strobe-lit stage, all conversation made impossible by noise from hell, or the embarrassing slow-dancing, which you can hardly engage in with somebody you are only beginning to get to know.

Esolen's point is that it is irresponsible to "let our youth muddle and meander; to suppose that marriage will eventually 'happen.'" (Esolen is a witty and articulate traditionalist in literary matters, especially scriptural and liturgical translation.  Here he properly uses the dying semi-colon.)

 For my whole life, the ecclesially minded have asked, “What can we do to keep our youth in the Church?”  And their attempts haven’t worked, because they have viewed young people as consumers of a churchly product, rather than as boys and girls, young men and young women, with obvious natures and needs.

We handled these things better and more naturally in the past, as Mormons, I understand, still do.  The answers Esolen proposes are "sweet and simple and ordinary things."

Ethics, Expertise, and the Virtues

A danger of Anthony Esolen's argument in the previous post is that it can be taken to warrant a kind of populist dismissal of authority and excellence.  This is not what Esolen argues, but it is a prevalent trend in modern conservatism, a response to the overwhelming dominance of liberalism in the academy and media.  Because our institutional elites have become so culturally and ethically corrupt and nihilistic, themselves trashing the very idea of standards of excellence, the "populist temptation" - that of throwing out the idea of elites altogether - is particularly strong.

In this post at the Public Discourse poet and essayist Mark Signorelli poses the question like this:

Surely, though, it ought not to take much reflection to recognize how far the rampant egalitarianism of our age is implicated in the corrosion of standards throughout our society—in learning and the arts, in manners and in civil discourse. The refusal to admit any criteria of excellence has simply become a basic fact of our profoundly nihilistic culture, and one of the most obvious causes of its unrivaled degradation. No longer are we willing to recognize, for instance, that Bach was a musician vastly superior to any rock star, or that an education rooted in the reading of Shakespeare and Plato can impart far greater wisdom to a young mind than one rooted in the reading of faddish bestsellers. If conservatism, as a body of thought, has no remedy for such a stark illness, it is hard to see how it can possibly claim our allegiance, or even our interest, any longer. 

How can we subject our present institutional leadership to the kind of harsh criticism it so richly deserves, while retaining our principled belief in the necessity of standards of precedence in our institutional life? 

To answer this question, Signorelli draws on Alasdair MacIntyre's work on the virtues and social practices.  (See especially MacIntyre's After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.)

READ THE WHOLE OF SIGNORELLI'S ESSAY HERE.

Anthony Esolen on Expertise and Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2012

Expertise and Ethics

by Anthony Esolen

From Crisis Magazine

One of the more puzzling things about contemporary arguments regarding what things a good or free society ought to allow and what things it ought to forbid is our turn toward the “expert,” the ethicist, the person who has made a professional career of teasing out deductions from moral premises. But what really qualifies such a person to be regarded as a beacon of wisdom? Aristotle famously said that the best way to learn about justice would be to observe a just man. The dictum is not tautological. In the life of a Mother Teresa, for example, we may learn literally countless—that is, not reducible to numbers—lessons in love and magnanimity, whence we may confirm true principles already held, and reveal others whose existence we had not suspected. We would be confronting the just life not as an academic exercise, but as an intensely personal challenge.

....
Who are these medical ethicists who recently have concluded, with wonderful logic, that parents have a right to murder their infant children—and who call it, with telling duplicity, “after-birth abortion?”  We would not turn to Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner for a definition of decency; why should we turn to these people to advise us on which children we may kill and when? Are they crooked? Why should we follow the crooked, when we want to walk straight? 


READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE

Why the Trinity Matters - Anthony Esolen

An interesting take on monotheism and how without the Trinity it tends to impersonality and abstraction.  These reflections bear directly on the question raised by Gary Gutting (see my post below) about whether God matters.  They point to the tendency of non-Trinitarian monotheism to lose the personhood of God and, at best,  degenerate into mild ethical systems.  The alternative to the three-person God of Christianity, Esolen suggests, is not a one-person God but an abstraction.

THURSDAY, 29 MARCH 2012

The Modern Amputation

By Anthony Esolen

A few years ago my family and I attended a Trinity Sunday Mass at a parish that isn’t our own. On the way over, we bet on whether at least one of the four hymns sung would have anything to do with the Trinity. My wife, who pegged the odds at precisely zero, turned out to be correct.

          I expected that the priest would say something about the Trinity during his homily. He did, but I wish he hadn’t. All he said was that the Trinity was something that we could never understand – which is true enough, but not at all helpful. He did mention that the Trinity had something to do with love. In general, he left the congregation with the impression that the Trinity was one of those odd holdover doctrines that we believe, but aren’t really central to our worship.
          How far, how terribly far, from the great prayer of Dante in the Paradiso: 

       O Light that dwell within Thyself alone,
             who alone know Thyself, are known, and smile
             with Love upon the Knowing and the Known!

It is crucial that we understand why Jesus commanded His disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Baptism initiates us into the Christian life, by incorporating us into the Church, the Body of Christ. But that cannot be, unless we are also welcomed into the life of the Trinity. If we believe that we have been made in the image and likeness of God, and that we find our human fulfillment in that supra-human power and wisdom and love, then to mistake that we are meant for the Trinity is to mistake how we are meant for God, and that, as Christians must hold, is to mistake what we are as human beings. The danger of monotheism without the Trinity is that it will eventually shade away into the abstract and impersonal. Judaism is the obvious exception to this rule – an exception, however, clinched by the intense personalism of the revelation of God in the Old Testament. Even the sacred name given to Moses, “I am Who am,” which rightly appears to be the name beyond names that such philosophers as Aristotle and Plotinus were searching for, may also be taken to mean, “I am with you always” – in other words, “I am that personal God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who have adopted you as my own people.”   But those forms of Judaism that efface the chosenness of Israel eventually lose the personhood of God and degenerate into mild ethical systems; as neo-Platonism loses the personhood of the mind by attempting to attain union with the impersonal One; as Islam loses the personhood of Allah, and confuses God with fate or with bald unreasoning power.          The Holy Trinity by Antonio de Pereda, c. 1650 Our own secular monotheism without the Trinity has its source, and its sad end, in an amputated anthropology. We bow down in worship of liberty, which for us means non-interference, doing as we please, like miniature Allahs, with a vast legal tangle to keep one Allah from stubbing his feet against the solitary dreams of the Allah next door. Thus do we misunderstand both God and man. We mistake the individual for the person, and we mistake the collective for the community. We would do neither, if we kept the Trinity firmly in mind. The essential mistake of liberalism – of whichever political flavor  – is the refusal to admit that an “individual” is an abstraction. We are persons, and personhood implies relationship. We are born into a web of relations that not only form us but exert just claims upon us: I am a son, brother, husband, father, student, teacher, friend, citizen. The liberal sees the relations as essentially restrictive; but they are so in the sense that having legs is restrictive. My bones delimit me, but they allow me to walk across the room. Having one mother and one father is delimiting also; but by them I came into the world, and learn what it is to love – which is to say, to be truly human. I am to honor my mother and my father, to love my home and my neighbor. Moral laws are not No Trespassing signs erected arbitrarily by a Great Forbidder. They are personal and loving guides, revealing to us where joy is to be found – joy proper to persons. The inability to distinguish between the individual and the person is reflected in an inability to distinguish between a collective and a communion. The Trinity is not a collective. In fact, it is just because of the persons that the Trinity cannot conceivably be a collective. For a collective is an abstraction. It implies no personal affection, no special duty or love owed to this person rather than that; it cherishes no traditions handed down from one generation to the next; it is, like the individual, strangely ahistorical and incorporeal. It operates not from deeds of love and wisdom undertaken by one person for another person, but rather by procedures, like the levers and pulleys of a great machine. In education fit for a collective, the “right” objects of study are determined by the “right” educrats and are decreed universally, without regard to distinctions between country and city, or one way of life and another. Such education will typically coexist with forms of libertinism. The amputated person is “free” from interference by those to whom he should be most intimately bound; free, then, to be corralled into that desiccated community, the collective, which must be established if for no other reason than to contain the libertine disorder. When we see families and neighbors united in prayer to the source of all personhood, we are witnessing something that the would-be directors of the collective, who grant us an enslaving license and call it liberty, despise. Perhaps they understand the Trinity – its promise to us, and its threat to them – better than they know. Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved March 29, 2012 from The Catholic Thing and reposted with permission.

Culture and the Sexual Revolution

A Tale of Two Concerts By Anthony Esolen    WEDNESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2012 Last summer, at the insistence of a good Catholic friend, my daughter and I drove to a small village in Cape Breton, to attend a Celtic music festival.          Don’t imagine glitter. The festival was held in a big green field behind a Catholic church. There were benches, but most people had brought lawn chairs or towels, or were standing, about 4,000 in all, quite a crowd for a place far in the countryside. All kinds of people were there, old and young, men and women, kids running around, carpenters, fishermen, farmers, local musicians and step-dancers, and at least one professor – me. Everyone eagerly waited for the star performers. They had arrived overnight, driving 800 miles from a previous engagement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a van big enough to transport the band, equipment, and four children.

The stars were Natalie MacMaster, who some believe to be the finest Celtic fiddler in the world, and her husband Donnell Leahy, also a phenomenal musician, with their accompanists and their children – and their faith, their traditions, and their devotion to the land where they were born.  For it was a homecoming. When they greeted the crowd, they remembered with love the good priest who married them in that same church, whose body now lay in the cemetery beside the field. I sat beside Natalie’s brother, Kevin, who regaled me with family lore, of MacMasters and Leahys, most of whom do other things besides playing music to put bread on the table, but who get together as families on an evening to play Celtic music, long into the night. It seems that the children take up one instrument or another. There were children – the sweetest thing of all. After Natalie and Donnell made the hills sing with music, they retreated, and, one after another, their children and their cousins came out, step dancing. They would call out a name, and a child would appear – first three teenage girls, almost young women, then five boys in a row, then a scattering of boys and girls down to the youngest, a little girl who had to be held by both hands as she toddled on stage and did a step or two.  Each child danced a little differently, one or two of the boys making the crowd laugh with boy-antics, and as each came forth, from tallest to smallest, the people applauded and whistled, louder and louder, until with that last baby girl there was nothing but delight and merriment. The girls wore skirts, the boys wore white shirts and black ties; and they all looked like cousins. They shared the same blood, the same home, the same history, the same faith. Every element in the scene was in its place. There was the land, to which Natalie and Donnell are still devoted. There were the neighbors, the other families whose histories accompanied their own family history for generations.  There was the church, to whom everyone belonged – or should have belonged; and the memories of people no longer with them, memories ready to be stirred by a glance towards the churchyard near. There was the warm faith of the great musicians, and the vault of the sky above, deepening into a sapphire blue in the twilight of a northern summer evening.          Donnell Leahy and Natalie MacMaster  What I beheld that night was culture, in its full and true sense. I don’t know how long it will last, even in that backwoods village in Nova Scotia. Even there, the agents of anticulture have been doing their work – television penetrates, and schools operate under government-mandated curricula.  Even there, men and women are forgetting to marry, and are raising such few children as are born, outside of the haven of wedded love. People in charge of tourism in Cape Breton have touted the old Celtic music, and there’s a school or two where you can learn it, and even some of the old language. I’m told that there are more speakers of Gaelic in that part of the world than there are in Scotland itself.  And yet, a school here and a program there do not a culture make. Everything at that concert, those things and they alone make for a culture. And only in a field of faith, where even hearty merriment is duly ordered to our worship of God, and giving Him thanks. And everything present there, as I considered the matter later, the sexual revolution would destroy: family, community, traditions, faith. For it would drive men and women apart. It would kill children in the womb. It would take away most of the cousins.  It would sow transience and infidelity at the heart of the nearest human relations and found marriage upon the sands of appetite. It would first turn the human heart away from God, and toward the flesh; and then it would harden the heart against even the goodness and holiness of the human body. What would it put in that concert’s place? The halftime show at the Super Bowl perhaps. It is almost absurd to complain when the show features a moment of shocking vulgarity. For years, the show has been vulgar from start to finish.   It is vulgar in its noise, garish lights, prinked up entertainers, and massive celebration of egotism. There is nothing sweet, nothing meek, nothing gentle, nothing to move the heart, nothing to open the mind; no quiet show of talent, no spirit of giving, no humility, no memory, no honor, no devotion, no kindness – not even the merry earthiness of a bawdy joke. It is all crass, harsh, and bitter.  That is where we have come. The decadent inhabitants of the great city of Rome became people who enjoyed the blood of gladiatorial combats. We have become the sorts of people who enjoy, if that’s the right word, the incessant howl of selfishness. How can it be otherwise, when we have degraded love itself, in the most intimate embrace of man and woman? Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College.  © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Retrieved February 15, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Unless you become like little children - Against sacrificing children

Saints of the Child Jesus

By Anthony Esolen

WEDNESDAY, 01 FEBRUARY 2012

Everywhere outside of Christianity, wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar, the child is automatically the first to be sacrificed. Only for Christians is the adult the imperfect child. Everywhere else the child is the imperfect adult, and falls subject to our lust for domination.

It is easy to see why. Men who do not know the true God, or who turn away from Him, do not therefore cease to worship. For God Himself, as Augustine says, gives us the delight in praising Him: He has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. 

We turn then to the false gods, and since no man bows down before what he believes is beneath him, we inevitably turn towards what is in our eyes great, powerful, even ruthless. Men summon demons not because they find their company agreeable. They summon them, Chesterton noted, because they believe the demons have no nonsense about them. They get things done.

What use, then, can we have for the helpless child? We have, from Carthage, no delightful amulets portraying the god Moloch in an attitude of joy, for having received from the people his quota of children. Moloch wants the child-flesh, roasted or broiled, but not the children. 

Even the Greek gods, those glorious forms of male and female beauty, do not condescend to take note of children, at least until the boys are old enough to compete in the games at Olympia or Delphi. “Children are our greatest resource,” goes the ghastly and insincere saying, as if they were minerals to be mined and put to use.

Many among us are ready to deny children their full humanity, on the grounds that they can’t do anything. And because we worship the demonic getting-things-done, instead of the almighty God who chose to dwell among us as a weakling babe, we are now reverting to the weary old pagan wisdom. 

Precisely because the child is weak, we allow it to be vulnerable to our designs. It is not yet one of us, and so we can exert upon it our sovereign power, to mold it as we will.

True, we don’t inhale the narcotics and beat the timbrels, while placing in Moloch’s arms the poor man’s baby we’ve “adopted,” to cut the economic deal with that horrid king. What point would there be in that? We all agree now that Moloch was only a demon of man’s fevered imagination. Moloch can’t get anything done. 

But if getting things done –accruing raw power for ourselves – is the aim, then the child is either constantly in the way, or is the one who suffers the exercise of our power. We murder children in the womb. Why? The child would, in his very helplessness, destroy our aims. 

         He, who was once a child, never ceased to be that child.

We can’t drop out of school now. We can’t quit our important work. We can’t tie ourselves down with marriage. Or, to consider the decision from beforehand, we will do as we please with our bodies, and if something unfortunate happens despite all our technological precautions, we have a technological solution for that, too.

We haven’t yet regressed so far as to murder children outside the womb. We retain a superstitious regard about that. The ancients believed that the lion was too noble a creature to kill a sleeping man. We are in this regard the reverse of the lion. We are those cowardly beasts that will kill a child sleeping in the womb, but will duck and shrug and grouch once it has come awake. 

But if we can’t murder children yet, we can certainly murder childhood. That murder follows naturally upon our decision to worship the false god of prowess. When Macbeth murdered the good King Duncan in his sleep, it wasn’t just the single man’s death he was guilty of. No, the doughty Thane of Glamis and Earl of Cawdor hears a voice crying out,

Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more.

In killing the sleeping man, Macbeth has murdered the very principle that allows us to sleep in peace: our trust that our weakness will be honored, and that we will be protected. 

So too, once we agree to subordinate the child to our dreams of power, then childhood itself is scotched as it were in the egg. We wish to design our children, as we draw up blueprints for a banking house or a factory. We institutionalize them as early as possible, because we want to “make something” of them, or because we want them out of the way while we are “making something” of ourselves. 

We are the tools of our tools. We subject these simple children to batteries of tests, regardless of the waywardness of the child’s developing mind. We murder their innocence every day by exposing them to what is lewd, vicious, and demeaning, justifying it because, we say, that’s the world they’re going to have to live in. Is the child sensitive to the holiness of his body? Too bad, kid.

How far this is from the family huddled in the stable, and the child wrapped in swaddling bands! In the child Jesus we do not see God hiding his power so much as revealing what it is, really, to be mighty: for power divorced from the magnificent self-lavishing of love is demonic, and is finally futile and empty. 

Rummage for human empires in the garbage heap of history. “Unless you become like little children,” said Jesus, “you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” It must be so, since He, who was once a child, never ceased to be that child. He wants for us that innocence, that wonder before the glory of God, because then we will be filled with that mighty and Holy Spirit that plays forever in the love between the Father and the Son.

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College. 

Retrieved February 1, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Lost in Translation

A trend in translation took off in the wake of Vatican II that, in retrospect, was as devastating in its way as the iconoclasm that included stripping the altars (even in Europe the destruction of beautiful, centuries-old high altars), liturgical desacralization, discouragement or abolition of almost every kind of distinctively Catholic devotion, ascetic practice, and celebration.

The aim - evident in the New American Bible (see the piece on Nabbish below), the Roman Missal, and the lectionary - was to strip these texts in their English translations of everything metaphorical, poetic, lyrical, beautiful, noble, and numinous, and replace it with the plain, unadorned, stripped down language of an instruction manual.

What were the perpetrators of this horror and hubris thinking?  Esolen here and in his other essays explains the theory as "dynamic equivalence," something that did unique damage to the English texts.  The new translation of the Missal, introduced this Sunday at the beginning of Advent, restores a faithfulness to the Latin texts that had never been lost from translations into other languages.

It is sobering to reflect on the sheer energy and determination over years that went into this destruction of the Church's patrimony - and on how deeply some of the worst aspects of 20th century modernism were absorbed like a virus into the Church, all in the name of opening the Church to the world.  The effect, of course, was not to build a bridge that millions would cross into the Church, but to make one that millions, stripped of their cultural and religious heritage, crossed in the opposite direction.

Don’t miss Esolen's outstanding articles in First Things: Nov 2011, Restoring the Words; and June/July 2011, A Bumping Boxcar Language. My post for July 4, 2011, Nabbishing the Bible, summarizes and discusses the latter essay.

Lost in Translation

By Anthony Esolen

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Now that we finally have the Novus Ordo translated into English, it’s time to look at the other mistranslations that plague us Anglophones in the Church. I’d like to begin with the lectionary.

Apologists for the cardboard-twinkie texts we gnash down every week argue for something called “dynamic equivalence,” by which is meant the translation of the general idea of an original text into something that conveys that idea in the receiving language. But the premises here are corrupt at the roots.

To see why, consider the Bauhaus modernist architecture of the twentieth century. Architects like Le Corbusier proclaimed that they were going to create “machines for living,” utterly rational – it was supposed – boxes designed for maximum efficiency for our daily needs. But who wants to live in a box? The hideous Pruitt-Igoe apartment complex in Saint Louis, inspired by modernist theories of urban renewal, quickly became a pool of social disintegration and crime. 

Human beings are embodied souls. They crave beauty. They like music. They invent poetry. The Italian housewife in the second story of a medieval stone house festoons her balcony with geraniums and eggplants. She keeps pictures of her nieces and nephews in a glass hutch with fancy knobs, next to a statue of Jesus of the Sacred Heart.

Such things are not “extra,” no more than food, for a human being, is simply fuel. Animals gobble; human beings celebrate meals. Our very aspirations to the sacred are expressed in earthy, bodily ways, and our humblest bodily needs, like eating and drinking, or caring for the sick, or taking our rest, are most humanly fulfilled when they point to what transcends the human – as when a child kneels down to pray for his sisters and brothers before he goes to sleep. 

This is true of our language also. When we speak, we do not simply convey information, as data might be fed into a computer. We express surprise, gratitude, humor, sadness, love. We revel in the physicality of our words. We bring whole scenes of life to mind. We combine and recombine images that we may never have combined before. 

              The Fruit Harvest by Natalia Goncharova (1909)   

So Jesus doesn’t say, “The kingdom of God has inauspicious beginnings,” but “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.”  He doesn’t say, “One should try to cultivate inattention to acts of charity,” but “Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” It is not simply that his phrasing is better suited for simple people who need to see things to understand them. It is that both his thoughts and his words are essentially poetic, delving into the heart of things by a means inaccessible to the bald abstraction. 

We’re meant not just to compare the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed and then to toss the seed away once we have “understood” the motive behind the metaphor. We are indeed invited really to see the Kingdom of God in that seed, and that is why Christians came up with the charming and deeply human custom of enclosing a mustard seed in a brooch, for girls to wear, as testimony and remembrance.


The reason why we don’t always translate word-for-word is not, then, that the particularities of the words are unimportant, but that a mechanical substitution of words in one language for words in another may do violence to the words themselves, or may fail to convey the fullness of the human expression. So the good translator seeks to penetrate more deeply into the beauty and the richness of the words and the expressions in the original language. Poetry should be translated as poetry, prayer as prayer, oratory as oratory. 

It’s nonsense to suppose that some “common language” of the street corner exists, into which the common Greek of the New Testament should be translated:  nonsense, because in both contexts we are dealing with human beings, not data processors, and human beings, especially in the time of Jesus, speak one way when they are ordering their groceries, and another way when they are praying. 

They launch into flights of fancy; they rhyme, they alliterate, they build to a climax; they repeat themselves, they reverse direction; they shed light upon a vista of meanings as various as the flowers in a garden, then they shroud all in darkness. Thus it may be rightly said that the problem with a mechanically literal translation is that it is notliteral enough, that is fails to capture the fullness of meaning suggested by the fascinating bodiliness and spirituality of the speaking human person.


Here is an example. Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a landowner who left tenants in charge of his farm. Then he sent servants to collect – what? The Greek reads tous karpous, literally, the fruits, what you pluck from the tree. By that simple word “fruit,” a vast field of Scriptural imagery is brought before our eyes. Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit.  Abel sacrificed to God the first fruits of his labor. Jesus tells us that a good tree is known by its good fruit. Saint Paul says that Christ is the first fruit of the resurrection. 

So what do the lectionary translators do? They build the Bauhaus. They forget the echoes. They muffle the poetry. They disdain the body. Therefore they disdain also the soul. The landowner sends his servants to gather “the produce.”  


And we lovers of Scripture cry out, like the martyred souls in Revelation, “When, O Lord, when?”


Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

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Retrieved November 23, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=viewRestoring the Words

Nabbishing the Bible

Why are most efforts to ‘modernize’ the language of our great religious texts such dismal failures? In his memoir, The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens uses the apt subheading, "The Prodigal Son Returns Too Late," to describe his dismay at encountering this wreckage of the Anglican patrimony on his return to the Church of England he had abandoned as an adolescent. He means that the Anglican communion he returned to was not the C of E he had left decades earlier. Even more than the Catholic Church in the West, the C of E had been infected with a liberal, secularizing modernism. Traditional teaching on faith and morals as well as liturgy, architecture, music and ancient practices and forms had been abandoned and the communion was falling into apparently irreversible decline. Hitchens deplores these developments, which include discarding some of the greatest literary treasures of the C of E and the English language--the King James Bible and Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. (See my review of Hitchens’s book on this blog and for Amazon.)

American Catholics have to endure, not only similar liturgical, architectural, and musical horrors. Not least of these are the pop-music hymns of the 1970s and 1980s – what a terrible period in the life of the Church in so many ways! – hymns that are embarrassingly narcissistic, being all about me rather songs of praise and adoration to the Lord or Mary. (I finally had to change parishes after one crooning rendition to many of Dan Schutte’s “Here I Am, Lord.”)

But also, and perhaps worst, because inescapable, of these horrors is the New American Bible. Now at least we can relish an accurate account and at least a partial explanation of its peculiar language, the language of Nabbish, in the current issue of First Things (http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/a-bumping-boxcar-language). The essay by Anthony Esolen, also aptly titled, “A Bumping Boxcar Language,” explains:

The bland, Scripture-muffling, colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase American Catholics have had for forty years often was not a translation at all, nor even a paraphrase into English. It was a paraphrase into Nabbish, the secret official language of the New American Bible.

Esolen explains the principles of Nabbish:

Principle One: Prefer the general to the specific, the abstract to the concrete, the vague to the exact.
From Esolen’s wonderful, if depressing, account of this principle in action, let me take just one example. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say to you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. In Nabbish this becomes, Learn from the way the wild flowers grow.

Sigh!

Principle Two: Prefer the neuter, the indefinite, and the impersonal.
Thus St. Paul, in prison awaiting execution, writes to his beloved disciple, the bishop Timothy. As Esolen explains,

He is writing to his beloved disciple, the bishop Timothy. He regards the many years of his life spent preaching the word of God; he thinks of the shipwrecks, the stonings, the narrow escapes, the joys and the sorrows. And he utters those bold words that ring in the heart of every true Christian. Here they are in the Revised Standard Version, an exact translation of the Greek into contemporary English (and quite close to the King James): I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

And in Nabbish this becomes, I have competed well. As Esolen comments, “Try to remember that as you await your own last hours. Just try.”)

Principle Three: Prefer the office memorandum to the poem.
Here Esolen compares two versions part of the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, which he calls “one of the most powerful and astonishing poems in all of Scripture.” Here is the King James Version:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.

He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.

That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.

The simple, direct and awe-inspiring language of John, faithfully rendered from the Greek to the KJV, is muffled and stripped of its awe in the sadly familiar way of Nabbish:

A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him.

He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.
But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.

“Ah,” says Esolen, “the boxcar-bumping of Nabbish! Natural generation, human choice, a man’s decision—thudding softly as their train rumbles across the dusty plains of oblivion.”

Esolen describes and illustrates the core principles of Nabbish. He also explains how a reader may learn Nabbish on his own:

[H]e should simply take all the lessons in an old and reliable book of English style, say the classic Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and invert them. Or he may ask himself, “What are the things that make poetry lovely or memorable?” and eliminate them.

Esolen’s essay is available with a subscription to First Things, at http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/a-bumping-boxcar-language