To Suffer the Beautiful
To Suffer the Beautiful
Part Two: Far Away from Home
Provided that you grant the thesis from my last post, part one of “To Suffer the Beautiful,” which proposed that art and beauty entail an artistic suffering, I would now like to expand on this type of suffering further—namely, how it relates to the suffering of sin.
Sin means many things—transgression, injustice, missing the mark—yet at the root of sin is the fundamental reality of separation. We see with a primordial sense even in Genesis that one of the first effects of sin is separation (Gen 3:23-24): Adam and Eve, having transgressed God’s law, are separated from the Garden, a place symbolic of blissful union with God and his creation. Therefore, it is not only the “positive” penalties of sin that are accrued to man, but such penalties exist by matter of a fundamentally negative loss: the pain of separation from that to which one should be united. It is the pain, more precisely, that comes from being separated from home, and by home, I mean our proper place within the universe, and the foundational source of our existence. With this separation ultimately comes disintegration and death.
Holiness, meanwhile, is ultimately opposed to separation; it is whole-ness, at-one-ness, at-one-ment (i.e., atonement). While certain forms of separation are inherent in this side of life, holiness here consists in wholeness of the soul, or ever-growing inseparability of the soul from God. Sin splits us inwardly, spiritually, metaphysically, and communally; by sin we become isolated, separated from holiness and from home. This is the suffering of sin, whether one realizes the separation or not.
Artistic suffering exists in a sense, then, because of sin. Why? For one, through sin we suffer separation from ultimate happiness, along with all the other pains that accompany it, but it is through—not exclusively, but in a special way—artistic suffering, the suffering that comes about through wonder of art and beauty, that we realize this separation from holiness, happiness, and home. However, this realization wrought by beauty can be discomforting at times. The German philosopher Josef Pieper writes:
“Wonder [in our case, regarding art and beauty] acts upon a man like a shock, he is "moved" and "shaken", and in the dislocation that succeeds all that he had taken for granted as being natural or self-evident loses its compact solidity and obviousness; he is literally dislocated and no longer knows where he is.” (Leisure: The Basis of Culture)
Man no longer knows where he is, perhaps because he is far from home in alien lands or is lost in what we “poor banished children of Eve,” we Catholics, call “this valley of tears,” as recited in the Salve Regina. The suffering of sin is the suffering of separation and disunion; the suffering of beauty is not only the realization of this separation, but the realization that there may just be hope for re-union. Artistic suffering, because of this, is more rich, engaging, and complex than the suffering of sin. Sin can hardly be described as any of these when it is, in fact, nothing.
Just as half the battle for the alcoholic might be the realization of his addiction, so half the purpose of art can be to awaken man from his living sleep of death, to realize the sin around him and in him, and thus perhaps realize his need for mercy. If you’ve read Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, think of when Sheldon returns home to a distraught Davy: it was the sudden epiphany of her sins that led Davy to seek mercy, and it is this experience which starts her on her journey of faith, which Sheldon eventually follows. Think likewise of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories—many of the characters are prey to the Holy Spirit’s shocking epiphanies, and we the audience can be stirred, if not almost violently shaken, out of our sinful stupor, too.
As I’ve already touched upon, artistic suffering is the more complex of the two sufferings I’ve discussed here, because not only does it involve the realization of sin, but it can awaken us to hope, which entails pain since we become aware of that which we do not have and we yearn for it; we are awakened, in effect, to the possibility of new life, and it is only that which is alive which feels. Due to sin, this feeling naturally entails suffering. Yet, unlike the suffering of sin, it is a suffering which is not without recourse. But this will be the subject for part three.
As always: in Mysterium Verbi.
James
“By absorbing beauty with the right disposition, we experience, not gratification, satisfaction, and enjoyment but the arousal of an expectation; we are oriented toward something "not-yet-here"” ~ Josef Pieper