In my last article I suggested that it is foolish to suppose that the categories of theological instruction can stand against the giant, Imagination. To form a Christian imagination is not something to be added to a Christian education. It is the very blood of that education, and in important ways its action, or its receptiveness, is a form of prayer.
As an aid in the forming of that imagination, I said that we could turn to films made before our current hatred of the family, of manhood and womanhood as completing one another in marriage, and of the natural human orientation toward God. Love of those things cannot be produced, like bottles in a factory. It is not even a deduction from theological principles. It is instead like fresh air or sunlight, good things we are given, and in which we participate by right feeling.
If your children cannot attend to a stream, a flower, a poem, or even a not-so-noisy but tactfully human film, then our problem is not what sort of imagination they have, but whether they can be said to have an imagination at all.
But I have to meet an immediate and most disappointing objection. It is simply that some young people lack the capacity to watch those old films. The old films tend, by comparison with contemporary fare, to be slower. Think of Fred MacMurray trying to smoke his last cigarette, at the end of Double Indemnity. They are not usually full of noise. Think of the silence in How Green Was My Valley, as from the flooded mine the windlass pulls up one empty platform after another. The black and white film focused the viewer's attention less on the background than on the foreground, the human face and hands.
Think of the face of the wrongly imprisoned Joel McCrea, near the end of Sullivan's Travels, suddenly breaking into broad laughter at the sight of a Walt Disney cartoon, which he is watching in a black church among poor black men and women and other prisoners in chains. In that sense the black and white film was like the Greek theater at its height, when the actors wore masks that concentrated the audience's attention on the voice, and the words of consummate poetry that the actors delivered.
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Art is not something we consume. This is true whether it is a play by Aeschylus or a film by John Ford; whether it is a fugue by Bach or a folk song whose original creator no one remembers. It is not something we use for any purpose, even for the purpose of distraction or relaxation or entertainment, although it may indeed relax us or entertain us. The question for us is not whether young people can be brought to appreciate the art of old films, once they have been used to appreciating the art of current films. That question seems to make no sense. It is like asking whether someone who stands enthralled by the color of a landscape by Monet can be taught to love the color of a sacred fresco by Giotto.
The question is, how can we bring up young people who can participate in beauty, wherever it is to be found?
Here I'm taking my cue from the great Catholic philosopher, Gabriel Marcel. Have I lost half of my readers right now? Patience, dear reader. Marcel begs us to cease thinking of human feeling as merely instrumental. We must not be “spellbound by physical science's picture of some distant stimulus traveling towards the organism and shaking it up.” But given our technocratic and utilitarian world, “we can hardly avoid thinking of sensation as the way in which a transmitter and a receiver communicate with each other.”
Think here of Robert Frost trudging over the half-frozen mud of his farm in New Hampshire. He has cows to milk, a fence to mend, and apple trees to prune before the sap runs in the early spring. Frost was a poet, and the French peasant was not, but even of the peasant, Marcel says that we would be dead wrong “to say that the peasant is attached to the soil only because of what he can get out of it, or because his holding assures him a certain independence which he values, and so on.” That soil is a part of him. He has given himself to it and it has given itself to him. If he were to sell the land and move to the city, he might be eating better, but he would suffer from “a kind of incurable internal bleeding.”
“Feeling is not passive,” says Marcel. If we are talking about the nervous jitters and adrenal arousals that spectacles are meant to stir in us – the essential category of pornography – then we are not talking about truly human feeling. It is subhuman, and it quickly becomes automatic, so that we can be aroused physically while never escaping from the encrusting mud of tedium.
Marcel asks us to consider the case of an artist, as opposed to the technician in a laboratory. They are both looking at a flower, the technician to reproduce it in the laboratory, the artist to draw it on his canvas. The technician, to do his job, must reduce the flower to an object of a certain class. Its individual being is of no import to him. But the artist, to recreate the flower, must have welcomed it into himself: “The artist's ambition is possible only at the level of participation, while the technician's, on the other hand, in some sense implies a refusal to participate, a blank negation.”
Now then, you do not have to have the skill of an artist or the inclination to make works of art to enjoy the receptivity of the artist, because that receptivity is truly human. A child has it, and would keep it, were it not for his being needled all day long by television, school, garish textbooks, the Internet, nerve-rasping mass-produced music, and so forth. A small boy in a field of grass and dandelions has it. For him, the dandelion is a wonderful creature, bright and bold and sunny, and all the finer if the lawn is full of them. It is not a thing merely, but a being, a presence. The puddle by the side of a weedy stream is as great as the sky, and it holds the sun itself within it.
What I am getting at is this. The cry to be aroused constantly is a sign not of sensibility but of insensibility. Boredom is a sign not of a longing to receive but of a refusal to receive. Impatience is a sign not of great powers pressing towards realization, but of feebleness. The nearly blind need garish colors, the nearly deaf need bombastic sound. If your children cannot attend to a stream, a flower, a poem, or even a not-so-noisy but tactfully human film, then our problem is not what sort of imagination they have, but whether they can be said to have an imagination at all.
They must then un-learn the evil habit of consuming images, and learn the virtue of beholding. In this regard the Church can do much to teach them – or could do, if we better understood what real participation is all about.
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