Posted on 08/26/2002 5:14:31 PM PDT by JMJ333
May I respectfully suggest that one starts by having a culture?
That doesn't necessarily mean High Culture (though high culture certainly embodies any society's most ambitiously imagined and evolved understanding of itself), but it does mean that the culture emanating from authentic bonds of family, faith, and country (especially when that country is a reflection of family and faith, writ large) is the most reliable protection against political and ideological tyrannies, which view humanity as something to be reduced, molded, re-formed, and exploited in the service of a lie.
Novena Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel
Glorious Saint Michael, guardian and defender of the Church of Jesus Christ, come to the assistance of His followers, against whom the powers of hell are unchained. Guard with special care our Holy Father, the Pope, and our bishops, priests, all our religious and lay people, and especially the children.
Saint Michael, watch over us during life, defend us against the assaults of the demon, and assist us especially at the hour of death. Help us achieve the happiness of beholding God face to face for all eternity. Amen.
Saint Michael, intercede for me with God in all my necessities, especially {mention special petition}. Obtain for me a favorable outcome in the matter I recommend to you. Mighty prince of the heavenly host, and victor over rebellious spirits, remember me for I am weak and sinful and so prone to pride and ambition. Be for me, I pray, my powerful aid in temptation and difficulty, and above all do not forsake me in my last struggle with the powers of evil. Amen.
You should be aware that the word "angel" denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message. Moreover, those who deliver messages of lesser importance are called angels; and those who proclaim messages of supreme importance are called archangels.
Whenever some act of wondrous power must be performed, Michael is sent, so that his action and his name may make it clear that no one can do what God does by his superior power.
from a homily by Pope Saint Gregory the Great
Well, it's been a few years since I last saw Tosca, but as I recall, it says: "Artists and political dissidents, Good; Papal police chief, Bad."
And since you bring it up, who, apart from Mimi and Violetta, dies from consumption? Butterfly takes her life, for love of an American cad. Aida and boyfriend are buried alive; Gilda is stabbed, There's a certain lady in Otello who's strangled, is there not? And in L'Elisir the happy couple discovers True Love.
But you're right that consumption does loom disproportionately large in the imagination, and that fact is worth pondering. I view it as a convenient plot device, a death-dealing deus ex machina that arrives on time to ensure a tragic end to a doomed love, thus ensuring that the bourgeois audiences who pay the freight are sent home properly chastened for their unprogressive views toward courtesans and bohemians.
If you say so, though I note GD was born 27 yrs. after Beethoven, and Puccini himself never surpassed the heart-tugging dampness of "una furtiva lagrima".
I almost missed this. Very clever.
This is all way off-topic. I'll try to have something more substantive to say after lunch.
LOL! I know the feeling. I love the Sacrament of Penance. We are blessed in this area with several good, faithful priests, who spend long hours in the confessional. It is good to go frequently to a priest who understands the Sacrament. I recommend it most highly. Monthly confession, at least is so beneficial that if I miss it even once, I can visualize my soul as a tattered, dirty rag.
Modern art is not the first international style to see its centenary - think of the gothic and the baroque, for example - but the very fact that we cling to the term "modern" betrays a subliminal conviction that we've broken with everything that came before. And for once the name fits the movement, for discontinuity, alienation, and disorientation are major themes of the movement.
Discords of one sort or another can be found at least as far back as Greek tragedy - not musically, I mean, but thematic discords, presenting a view of a disordered cosmos, violated and out-of-tune. So if it isn't the mere presence of discord that's revolutionary, it must be the role it plays in these latter days.
Until the ascendancy of an intellectual elite dominated by the disciples of Darwin, Marx, Einstein, and Freud, the cultural history of the West had always been characterised by a belief in objective truth and an orderly world in which the reasoned observer might discern natural law. Discord and "ugliness" (which signified disproportion, incongruity, grossness, and a chaotic loss of the center's ability to hold), if not momentary phenomena happily resolved by the end of the work, were received as shocking and disorienting precisely because they offered such an affront to the prevailing culture's cosmic view (you know, I suppose, that the Greek word "kosmos" implies not only the created universe, but also order and rational, and therefore beautiful. To speak of the "cosmos" is to take an aesthetic approach to creation. See The Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar).
Well, times have changed. Of course with the decline in standards a lot of bad art has emerged, much of it taking advantage of the hostility to order to mask simple technical ineptitude. The 20th century was probably the first to seriously advance the notion that discord, alienation, and radical subjectivity were the natural condition. The entire century may be viewed as a gigantic "Non serviam", a protest and denial of the natural order's very existence. That was new, and IMO goes a long way to explain why discords, willful ugliness, and impenetrable obscurity are the hallmarks of modern art.
It's a good question. Demoiselles d'Avignon made its appearance in 1907; "Nude Descending a Staircase" in 1912. Sacre du Printemps had its riotous premiere in 1913. And Ulysses made its first appearance in 1918, the same year that the Dada Manifesto was published. So many revolutionary events seem to cluster around the Great War that one begins to wonder whether that too was not just another cultural expression, a work of art wrought by the new-born culture of death. And, like other seminal masterpieces, the Great War served to hasten the process, erasing cultural memory and making impossible former forms of discourse.
Well, happily technology has made it available to a great many whose tastes have not yet been corrupted. But how much of this art lives in the popular imagination, as opposed to the textbooks of specialists? As just one example within memory still living, think how many orthodox icons have been ripped from their authentic context where they served as aids to worship, to be sterilised and isolated as "cultural artifacts" to be inspected by bored and ignorant cultural tourists. Surely you know about the financial difficulties of the classical music labels, white elephants preserved for the time being on life support till the day comes when their prestige will no longer be perceived to have commercial value. And how many symphony orchestras or opera companies, anywhere in the world, can survive without massive subsidy?
Certain decencies must be observed, at least till another generation or two is extinct, their replacements conditioned to bark like trained seals for whatever is cheap to produce and distribute. I don't like to think what comes after that.
The point of this post and my others is not to play the unreconciled aesthete, nor to strike attitudes about the bad taste of the unwashed. The point is that any culture is authentic and worth preserving to the extent that it notices and honors important truths, especially truths about what man is and how he is to live. The enemy in the Culture War is not ignorance or vulgarity or impoverished imagination; the enemy is pseudo-culture, a bogus device ginned up to enrich the few and enslave the many by propagating lies about what and why man is.
Thanks for posting this.
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