Lack of originality

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

A mark of modernity often referred to is the craving for constant novelty. There has been a clear increase in the sheer availability of new experiences that have opened up to the average person over the past 50 years. Technology, from radio through television and into the internet age has opened up a rapidly expanding flood of content for people to consume. Cheap travel has enabled people to get to many places once considered inaccessible, and the free flow of goods and information has provided an inexhaustible supply from which to draw novel things and ideas.

An even more recent development is the appearance of devices and software such as smartphones, tablets and browsers aimed at streamlining entertainment, shopping and knowledge content and making it even easier to get hold of. This is a superficially enthralling world, we are like children let loose in sweet shops with a never-ending supply of goodies to get our hands on. And we all know that too many sweets are bad for you. "Distracted from distraction by distraction" wrote T S Eliot nearly 100 years ago, words that were prophetic for an increasingly pick and mix culture enabled by high-speed internet access and handheld devices.

There is nothing particularly original in these observations. They have been made many times in recent years, especially in books like The Shallows and others. I want to focus on the pre-eminence of novelty that seems to come with modernity, where progress and the new are the only criteria of value. I believe they are the concomitants of a focus on knowledge as power, of a narrow definition of truth as that which you can use to predict behaviour or events. Almost the only response you hear to any challenge to the predominant naturalism inherent in the modern west is that the model must be true as with it you can make accurate predictions.

With such a ratiocination of truth you begin to accept a more quantitative approach - what matters in the question of a theory's truth is the amount of predictions it makes and how much power it gives us over the natural world. The aim is absolute mastery of the sheer otherness of things by making them into copies of ourselves. First we empty them of their otherness by calling them matter - and meaning by it a blank colourless formlessness - mere extension in Cartesian terms, and then we fill this with our own desires, making the world into our plaything. In such a world of phantoms, we quickly tire of each new game, as they are merely the flickering of shadows on the cave wall, and we yearn for the new experience to come along and replace the emptiness at the heart of things, which we know is our eternal boredom with staring at our own reflections. This disenchantment is central to the modern experience of the world.

It is manifest in the deadliness and addictive power of technology, which draws us further into the world, offering greater and greater control. It is the promise of the serpent in the book of Genesis: "You will not die - you will become as gods", and it is the lure of magic, which is merely the art of causing changes in accordance with the will, according to the Great Beast himself, Crowley.

How do we free the world from our deadly grasp? We have been given a Midas-like gift and mired ourselves deeper in the illusion of what Buddhists call maya, the play of appearances. We have hoarded the world, so that we don't have to see it anymore.

One thing we can do is to champion the tried and tested, the old, unoriginal and traditional. Doing things how they've always been done is not always such a bad idea. There's usually a reason why they're done that way. If the tradition you are brought up in recommends prayer and sacramental worship, then give it a try. If it recommends meditation, try that. Don't immediately scorn the familiar just because it is familiar.

In art this will lead to an appreciation of the value of many things which seem old-fashioned. In education the same. Something of this is actually in the air in the these spheres anyway. For example in the world of art the old-fashioned atelier is making a reappearance, with its painstaking emphasis on verisimilitude and realism, and the old-fashioned virtues of grace and beauty high on its list. In the sixties many art schools rejected such practices as deadly and barren, with the result that a generation of artists only had a minimal acquaintance with drawing, which I think explains the work of Damien Hirst (and perhaps someone can explain to me why Tracey Emin has been made an RA prof. of drawing? See here for an entertaining piece of self-delusion re Emin - the comments are the best bit! ).

If this was the twenties and I was a Futurist, or it was the 1890s and I was a symbolist, I would put out a manifesto. As it's now I will be content with this blog post. It can function as a kind of manifesto for my vision of art. Here is my vision for my art:

1. It will not seek originality as a virtue.
2. It will have instead as a virtue the creation of the beautiful
3. This will not be for its own sake, but rather for the sake of truth and goodness
4. Its practitioners will continue serenely with their work when people mock them for seeking to express such things as the good, the beautiful and the true in their work.
5. It will be a humble art, inasmuch as it recognises that the work of creation of an artist is a simple re-working of a prior greater creation
6. It will seek to free things from the tyranny of our perception
7. It will thus make use of fantasy
8. However it will not seek the fantastic for its own sake, but will be grounded in the real
9. Through this method the fruits of recovery, consolation, and clarity will be established in the soul of the practitioner

Medieval Cosmology

C S Lewis on this here

Art reconciles us with life

"Art reconciles us with life. If an artist does not accomplish the miracle of transforming the soul of the spectator into an attitude of love and forgiveness, then his art is only an ephemeral passion."

Gogol

"There is no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, a very time consuming verb... If you're doing it right, it's going to feel like work."

Milton Glaser

Art and Scholasticism

In the powerfully social structure of mediaeval civilization, the artist had only the rank of artisan, and every kind of anarchical development was forbidden his individualism, because a natural social discipline imposed on him from the outside certain limiting conditions. He did not work for the rich and fashionable and for the merchants, but for the faithful; it was his mission to house their prayers, to instruct their intelligences, to delight their souls and their eyes. Matchless epoch, in which an ingenuous people was formed in beauty without even realizing it, just as the perfect religious ought to pray without knowing that he is praying; in which Doctors and image-makers lovingly taught the poor, and the poor delighted in their teaching, because they were all of the same royal race, born of water and the Spirit!

Man created more beautiful things in those days, and he adored himself less. The blessed humility in which the artist was placed exalted his strength and his freedom. The Renaissance was to drive the artist mad, and to make of him the most miserable of men -- at the very moment when the world was to become less habitable for him -- by revealing to him his own peculiar grandeur, and by letting loose on him the wild beast Beauty which Faith had kept enchanted and led after it, docile.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism

The Old Road

The poet should be rooted in a tradition. "Man has always lived in myth, and we think we are able to be born today and to live without myth: that is a disease, that is absolutely abnormal, because man is not born every day, he is once born in a specific historical setting, with specific historical qualities and therefore he is only complete when he has a relationship to these things. It's just as if you are born without eyes and ears when you are growing up with no connection to the past. From the standpoint of natural science we have no connection with the past, we can wipe it out, and that is a mutilation of the human being." 

C G Jung

Tolkien and Tradition

Edit Jan 25th: This was rather hastily written before I had read the whole of Tomberg's letter IV: The Emperor, in which he clearly is saying the same thing as Tolkien, and not hoping for a political solution. Anyway, the post still works as an exploration of Tolkien's thought.

My previous post was an attempt to bring together several spheres of my life: my interest in the coherence of theism, my professional role as a teacher of religion in a secondary school, my love of the work of Tolkien, my interests in thomistic thought and the conflict between the political and the spiritual in the modern world.

I want in this post merely to explore the connections I have been making between the thought of J R R Tolkien and some of the ideas of the 'Perennial Philosophy'. In some senses it is a continuation of my 'Father Christmas' post.

 Part of my job is to be aware of philosophical and theological issues and the way they are approached by different thinkers, so that post may have come across to some as mental masturbation, sophistry for the sake of it, but I don't really care about that. I find that writing something knowing that it is going to have some kind of audience, even negative, motivates me, and I find that the process of writing helps me to order my thoughts, so I will keep doing it.

Over on another forum there is some talk of a comment by Valentin Tomberg on the Tarot card 'The Emperor' in his book Meditations on the Tarot. He said something to the effect that Europe is haunted by the shadow of the Emperor, and that without the Emperor hierarchy collapses and leads to the tyrannies that he saw around him in the sixties of communism and socialism, aiming at a levelling of all, in which the heights and the depths are lost - the vertical axis he calls it - the axis of spirit/form, and this is something that Tradition naturally abhors and obviously so did Tomberg. Clearly, communism is no longer the presence in Europe as it was in Tomberg's day, but Europe is still facing a crisis.

 Many Traditionalists trace this to the rise of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism, the dominance of liberalism in economies and a prevailing relativism which has the same flattening effect on the vertical axis as before.

However, the problem for many is that it seems that any attempt to actually restore hierarchy will lead to medieval style feudalism and as the writer puts it: "would you have wanted to be a peasant or a serf in the Middle Ages?". He says that Tomberg seems to want us "to follow some fossilized notion of political order drawn from the Middle Ages". I don't have any answer to this. I wanted to delve into this very issue in the work and thought of Tolkien though. Who knows, it may throw some fresh light on the issue.

I mentioned previously a thread in Tolkien's work - what he called in a letter 'God and His sole right to divine honour.' It takes the form of the usurpation of true Kingship and is obvious in many forms in LotR for instance. Aragorn is the heir of Isildur the true King of Gondor but is unable to assume the throne. Sauron demands obedience, and while Sauron lives, the people are forced to worship a power that has usurped the throne. Saruman operates a policy of appeasement and use of the power that Sauron represents, and brings technology to support him. Aragorn's healing ability is a sign of his true kingship - he represents hierarchy. This is meant to be a good thing. Hierarchy is the realisation that there are greater things than ones self, even simply the realisation that there are things other than ones self. Aragorn as a kind of suffering servant, messianic figure is meant to show that true authority is rooted in the spiritual realm. Tolkien says:

“in The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God … Sauron desired to be a God-King … if he had been victorious, he would have demanded divine honor”

This is Tolkien's view on this. He also said of democracy:

"I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the effort to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power -- and then we get and are getting slavery "

So he seems profoundly Traditionalist in outlook. He also seemed to believe in a long slow decline from a Golden Age, as reflected in his four World-Ages in his legendarium which echo closely the Four Ages of Hindu philosophy. I am not saying Tolkien was some kind of esoteric occultist however - it is clear that a person who was as profoundly Catholic and thoughtful as he was would arrive at this conclusion without need of studying some kind of perennial philosophy separately. In a letter he says:

"Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."

There is an interesting post on this here .

Anyone who has read Guenon's Reign of Quantity will find all this familiar. Tolkien lived through and experienced at firsthand one of the most horrific wars of the twentieth century. He could not help but be sceptical about ideas of progress and technological advancement.

However he would not have hoped for some kind of political messiah. His Catholic faith meant that he could only hope for what he called the eucatastrophe outside of history - “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

It seems that Tomberg may have hoped for something more historical and concrete.

The Hanged Man

I stood shivering under the stars
under the trees and looked
there was frost around the bowl of the earth
when i first looked up from the ground i saw only the night sky hung with gemstones
the earth was a hard cold
bed
and my fingers gripped it
as if knowing i might be thrown off and slip upwards at any time into that great cacophony

why did the stars sing?
high and chill their sound, I couldn't let them go
they had me
absolutely struck,
stricken for their sake
they caught me up
I ascended the tree and shook

waiting for their voices to end

nine days I hung
they took my entrails and replaced them with a belt of blood
my hands were pierced
Acubens took my left
Scorpius my right

I sung with terror
they placed a crown upon my head
a pathway for the sun

five wounds I received for their sake

know this they said:
you shall not go forward in the place of another
neither shall you retreat
you shall not take from another
neither shall you give

you shall not place yourself above another but
you will be lowest of all things