presuppositions
I adore this song. It’s so repetitive and monotonous on first listen but there’s something about it that’s just worked its way into my consciousness lately.
I’ve been reading The Francis Schaeffer Trilogy lately. Wonderful, compelling stuff. He effectively carried the torch of Christian intellegentsia from the late ’60s to his death in the early ’80s, picking up where C.S. Lewis left off in terms of influence, if not necessarily mainstream accessibility. Back in high school I watched his excellently produced video series How Should We Then Live? and it influenced my thinking in profound ways. It details the history of thought and ideas in Western culture and addresses, just as the book does, the progression of those ideas from philosophy to art and then to music, popular culture and finally theology. It has applications in arenas from politics to apologetics and everywhere in between.
The early chapters of the book lay out his theories concerning the progression of ideas through the areas mentioned above. He specifically addresses the genesis (pun intended) of the idea that absolutes can be arrived at using man as the starting point and sole frame of reference, and the despair that was the inevitable result of that point of view. He then traces the manifestations of that existential despair through philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard), art (Impressionism and beyond), music (jazz forms), and finally popular culture and theology. He talks about the division that was created between “rational” pursuits such as science and those “nonrational” areas that ostensibly give our life meaning, and the artificially created notion of a “leap of faith,” which was said to be necessary for the intellect to make in order to bridge the gap, discarding the idea that a Christian worldview could be a profoundly rational worldview. Indeed, in most ways it is even more rational than the ones that followed, at least in terms of describing the world around us and constructing a unified, meaningful and consistent way of relating to the world.
In any case, it’s a compelling book by a man who wrestled deeply with what he thought and believed, and highly recommended.
Reading the first few chapters, especially the ones where he shows how culture’s newfound despair permeated art, I was convicted that I never took any of it seriously enough. There’s never been any despair in my life, existential or otherwise, and when I admired works from deconstructionist artists (Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock, etc), I would do so while impressing upon them in my mind at least a few of the assumptions native to my worldview. I would stand in awe of the creativity displayed, the new ways they found of looking at things, and at least on the surface, their message about the world around them. But what never hit home until just recently was the unabashed, deep-seated disillusionment they felt when they viewed their world, and how only a well of emotion of incredible depth could have created the works they did. These were broken men and women, straining to find meaning in an intellectual and popular climate that increasingly discarded the notion of external absolutes and embraced humanism, and it shows in their art. Joe Carter, in an excellent post today, discusses bioethics but creates an analogy that applies across the board to those at the cultural vanguard (and otherwise) attempting to piece together meaningful answers from an exclusively humanistic frame of mind:
Unfortunately, we live in a society where answers that cannot be shoehorned into an acceptable non-religious interpretative structure must be discarded altogether. It is similar to being asked to provide the sum of 4 and 3 but having to do so without resorting to a “religiously based” prime numbers. The absurdity of this approach is obvious since no answer we could give would ever be correct. Yet this is often what is expected when we are asked to provide answers to questions […] that must rely on non-religious criteria.
And that’s the place in which art has found itself for the past century or so. It’s driven creativity to immense heights, searching desperately for answers, but at what human cost? I don’t think I’ll look at a Gauguin or a Mondrian the same way again.