“‘Recessional’ is a vital warning that if we don’t confront the cultural thuggery now, the commissars and their dupes will transform the Land of the Free into the dictatorship at which they aim.”
In one of the book’s essays, “Hamlet and Oedipus Meet the Zombies,” Mamet ends with this paragraph:“Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. So, for example, are marine boot camp and the Bar Mitzvah. But art is the connection between inspiration and the soul of the observer. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connection to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.”
Most of this paragraph is straight up in its meaning. In his mention of boot camp and the Jewish coming-of-age rite, for example, Mamet offers examples of reasonable indoctrination, designed in both cases to make men and warriors out of boys. But what did he mean by “soul,” “truths superior to human understanding,” and “the divine”?A Contradiction in Terms
Art that is intended to indoctrinate, to act as political propaganda for whatever cause, is simply not great art. It is a tool used to sway masses of people, to convince them of the righteousness of a cause or an ideology.Here we may think of those enormous spectacles of torches and uniforms during the Nazi regime, the dreary proletarian novels produced under Stalin that no one except scholars read anymore, the garish revolutionary paintings under China’s Chairman Mao.
These works may find a place in some museum or with historians interested in totalitarian movements, but none of them have anywhere near the effect of Chartres Cathedral, a Mozart concerto, or Giovanni Strazza’s sculpture “The Veiled Virgin.”
While aware of these agitprop “artworks,” Mamet is much more concerned with the current state of cultural propaganda in the West. Here censorship and the demands for correct thought come less from some strongman than from our culture at large.
A Higher Power
This latest version of the gulag, Mamet contends, is killing the arts, particularly its transcendental nature and powers, which explains Mamet’s use of supernatural language.What, for example, is this soul that he mentions? For many, the soul is that entity in us which encompasses both thought and emotion. It is everything we are, every particle of our interior being. We may share thoughts with others or emotions like grief and joy, but our soul—our soul is who we are.
What does Mamet intend by “truths superior to human understanding” in regard to the arts? Here, I think, he means those works of beauty and truth that overwhelm our intellect and lift us out of ourselves, carrying us to some inexpressible state of being beyond our normal comprehension.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is just one such work. Performed over 600 years ago, this play about the Prince of Denmark, his battles with himself and with morality, and the actions of those in his court, continue to this day to excite debate about its meaning. In addition, we who watch the play even in 2022 can identify with several of the characters, especially Hamlet and his moral qualms, hesitations, and frailties. The struggles of Hamlet’s soul mirror our own.
Here was a musician and composer who through prayer and reading the Scriptures sought the help of the divine in his music, and he became so successful in this quest that some refer to him as the “Fifth Evangelist.”
“It is a curious fact that the artist who produced the most compelling and accessible vision of Christian humanism in the twentieth century was a multiply married, luxury-loving, alcoholic atheist by the name of Robert Bolt.”
Bolt wrote the play and the film script for “A Man for All Seasons,” the drama about Thomas More who died a martyr at the hands of King Henry VIII of England and later became a saint.3 Scenarios
On a long-ago trip to Europe, my wife and I visited the Sistine Chapel. Though we’d read a little about the chapel ahead of time, that knowledge vanished as we gazed in amazement at the ceiling and those walls, lost in wonder, stunned by Michelangelo’s muscular, twisted bodies, the re-creation of biblical stories, and the 500-year-old colossus that surrounded us.On that same trip, we visited a small Swiss museum featuring a modern art exhibition. In the corner of one room, a British sculptor had arranged 10 or so paving stones on the floor, with an explanation of his work fixed to a nearby wall. I have no recollection of the words on the wall, but I do remember experiencing no connection to this work, except feeling empty of any sensation whatsoever. Here, of course, there was no sense of Mamet’s vision of art and a higher truth.
A third encounter: I’ve twice visited an ENT doctor here in Front Royal, and on the wall of his treatment room is a reproduction of Millet’s “The Angelus.” On each visit, while awaiting the doctor, I’ve stared at that painting of the two peasants in a French field, their heads bowed in prayer, and in their stillness found my anxieties calmed.
Here, as in the Sistine Chapel, was a bridge that allowed me to escape the anxieties of the self.
Reinforcements
Over the years, I’ve read other writers who emphasized these same ideas.“The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not to debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us.”
To return to “Beauty Will Save the World,” Gregory Wolfe reminds us that art can “give us a true image of ourselves.” The thrust of his book is that beauty can act as a redemptive power in our lives and is a necessary vehicle to give meaning to truth and goodness.Truth, Beauty, Goodness
All of these writers, and so many other artists, have recognized that these three classic transcendentals—truth, beauty, goodness—are the key elements found in all great art, music, and literature.They are the flames illuminating Mamet’s “human connection to truths superior to human understanding.” When listening to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, for example, both a mathematics professor and a wheat farmer can find themselves swept up in the music, their souls transported into a realm of being they hardly know existed.
The accountant, the nurse, and the high school student who stand before Michelangelo’s “Pietà” may discover themselves moved beyond words by this statue of a mother mourning her dead son.
In an age that seeks to make all of us walk together in lockstep and docile acquiescence, “Recessional” reminds readers that we are free: “Free will only means the power to choose.”
This moral choice “is a holy act, because it is moral—that is, in accord with divine will.” And, as Mamet adds, “The repression of this knowledge is an engine of human wickedness.”
Utter conformity to any ideology makes us slaves. But art, great art, sets our souls free.
