Creation is wonderful. I don’t mean that as a cheap synonym for pleasing or interesting, I mean full of wonder.
Consider that a teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh more than every human alive today, matter packed so close its own atoms have folded in. Consider that the iron in your blood was forged in a star that died before our own sun was lit. Consider that the sun’s light spends tens of thousands of years working its way out through the crush of the star, and then crosses the void to us in eight minutes.
Consider that Bach wrote music that can be turned upside down and played against itself and still consent to be beautiful. Consider that medieval masons finished the backs of statues set high against a wall, carving detail no eye below would ever reach. Consider that a violin is carved by ear as much as by eye, the maker shaving the wood and tapping it, listening for a note in a thing that is not yet an instrument.
None of this had to be so. A functioning universe could have been grey and boring and still be entirely sufficient. And yet, creation is wonderful.
And notice how all of it reached us. The neutron star, the forged iron, the eight-minute light came by way of science, the discipline of finding what is true. The fugue, the hidden carving, the note coaxed from a plank came by way of art, the discipline of making what is beautiful. These are the two ways a person goes out to meet the world and comes back having actually seen it. They are not decoration on a serious life; they are how we take creation seriously at all.
We Christians pour ourselves out toward the Lord our God, who is the creator, and I worry that some of us spend too little of that love on the creation He made. There is a posture toward art and science I have seen most plainly in American evangelicalism, though it is not ours alone: a coolness at its mild end, something closer to hostility at its hot end, dismissive and suspicious either way. No one decides on it. It is not a doctrine anyone holds; it is a temperature, and it settles over exactly the people you would expect to burn hottest. That is what makes it hard to see. It never feels like the refusal it is. It feels like devotion, like a soul keeping the main thing the main thing, even as it goes quietly cold on the very means God gave us to love what He made.
Knowledge and beauty
To realize how strange this is, look at what it degrades. Knowledge and beauty are not hobbies in the background of real faith. They are both the stuff of that faith.
Medieval philosophers noticed that there are certain properties of all things that exist, simply because they do exist. They called these the transcendentals: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Truth is what being looks like to a rational mind. Beauty, in Aquinas’s definition as the schools condensed it, is id quod visum placet: that which, beheld, pleases.
Two disciplines take up two of these as their whole business. The first is art, and for all the complication a modern university graduate can bring to it, the thing itself stays intuitive: art is the practice of the pursuit of what is beautiful, the making of something whose reason for being is that it is worth beholding.
The second is science, and it is older and humbler than its instruments make it look. It began in alchemy and star-charts and the reading of omens, the same appetite for the true feeling its way forward with primitive tools, and over centuries it disciplined that appetite into the most exacting method we have ever built. But the equipment is not the essence. Science is the most sophisticated version of the human practice of the pursuit of what is true.
That leaves the good without a road of its own, though not without its thinkers. The true and the beautiful are ways of going out to meet the world; the good is not one of them. It is not something we find, as we find what is true, or make, as we make what is beautiful. It is the worth of a thing, being as it lays a claim on the will, what makes a creature something to be loved and not merely used, and so it is not a road but the end the roads are for, and the one of the three a materialist cannot finally ground.
If the scientist follows the true and the artist the beautiful, they each are reaching out into being itself and showing us the goodness in what they found.
And here is where going cold on them turns out to be a mistake. Nothing exists on its own. Creation is held in being, moment by moment, by the One the same tradition called ipsum esse subsistens, being itself, in whom the true and the good and the beautiful are not three properties but one infinite thing. Which means the roads have a destination. To follow the truth of a thing far enough is to arrive at the source of all truth; to be captivated by the beauty of a thing is to be pulled toward that which made it beautiful.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
The heavens do not only declare the glory of God; they are, themselves, glorious. The declaring and the glory are aimed at the same place. And so the artists draw starscapes, and the scientists reckon with planetary bodies. To know what God made, truly, and to be moved by it, rightly, is not a lesser thing you do instead of loving Him. It is one of the ways we go about loving Him.
This is not the worship of nature, and the fear that it might be is part of what keeps so many at a wary distance. It is the opposite. It is reading a signature. The Maker has signed His work in two hands, the true and the beautiful, and to refuse to read the signature is not humility about the creature. It is the refusal of a road God Himself laid down, and an important one, back to Himself.
A love that costs
Dismissive, suspicious, pretentious: that is the surface.
The not-caring has become the proof of caring about the right thing. It is humility’s costume worn over the oldest pride there is, because the claim underneath it is enormous: that the world God spoke and called good is beneath the attention of a serious soul.
Press him and he will tell you, sincerely, that he has already dealt with creation. It is a settled account. What more is there to know? God made it; it declares His glory; the matter has been noted and filed under Genesis 1. The wondering was done once, by someone, and the findings are in. So while he might pay lip-service to science, it really has nothing left to teach him, because he already knows the only fact about it that finally matters, which is Who made it. This is how a sincere word of praise can close a wonder in the very act of paying it: the astonishing thing is credited to God and set down in one motion, and the setting-down feels like reverence.
Some of the coldness is inherited rather than chosen. For a century now, in a certain kind of church, the arts and the sciences have been shelved under enemy territory: science the siege engine that came for Genesis at Scopes, art the miasma drifting off a culture that holds the church in contempt. So even at rest the two carry the enemy’s scent, and turning from them can feel like discernment. So he is not incurious, he is guarding his faith. He is not unread, he is too wise to be taken in by the wrong literature. Unfamiliarity gets promoted to prudence.
At the root of it is a simple mistake: mistaking love for God for the absence of other loves. But creation’s grammar runs the other way. The other loves are the vocabulary of loving Him.
So the name for the thing is not exactly indifference. Indifference is what I feel toward canned tuna, a simple absence, costing nothing to keep. This costs. It is a presence, a labor, a whole posture held in place, and the thing it is held against is exactly the wonder that creation asks of us: the willingness to stand in front of a made thing and want nothing from it but to witness it, and to delight in the witnessing.
The desert fathers had a word for a not-caring that is secretly this much work. They called it acedia (uh-SEE-dee-a). The Greek is akēdia, from a-, not, and kēdos, care: the absence of care, a carelessness gone hard enough to become a refusal to be moved. Evagrius, a monk who catalogued the soul’s diseases from his cell in the Egyptian sand, set it among the eight deadly thoughts and gave it the name no one has bettered since, the noonday demon, after the plague that lays men low at midday in the ninety-first psalm. It is the torpor of the long hot afternoon, the listlessness that makes a monk despise his own cell and his own prayers and find every good thing in front of him grey and not worth the trouble. Cassian carried the word west and described it as an aversion to the very place one had been given, a boredom with one’s own cell. Aquinas, later, defined it with terrible economy, a heavy sadness that so presses on the mind that no good thing can please it.
The fathers aimed the word inward, at a weariness toward God himself. I am aiming it one step outward, at a weariness toward what God made, and I do not believe they would have counted these as two different sicknesses, because to go cold on the creature is already to go cold on the Creator who is speaking through it. It is not indifference, and it is not humility or mere coldness. It is an acedia for creation, a carelessness toward the made world that has taught itself to wear the face of devotion, and it is the exact contrary of the wonder it has learned to distrust.
A fair hearing for the refusal
It would be easy, and unfair, to leave it there. The refusal has a pedigree, an old and honorable one, and the people who hold it are standing, mostly without knowing it, in a very long tradition. Before arguing with them I want to grant them their best case, because they have one.
This line too runs back to the desert fathers. The world is passing away, and its desires with it (1 John 2:17); set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth (Colossians 3:2); make the best use of the time, because the days are evil (Ephesians 5:16). A man who believes his lamp holds one night’s oil has a reason not to spend the light cataloguing the wallpaper. The monks who walked out into the Egyptian sand were not philistines; they were triaging. If the house is on fire you do not stop to admire the joinery, and a faith that takes eternity seriously will always carry some suspicion of any pleasure that asks you to sit down and stay a while. That instinct is not a mistake. It is a real virtue, and every version of the acedia I have described is a real virtue that has gone sour.
You can watch it curdle in the American branch of the family. The revivalist inherited an urgency about souls, which is holy, and let it convince him that anything not visibly saving someone is a distraction from the one thing needful. The fundamentalist inherited a hunger for holiness, which is holy, and after the culture laughed him out of the room at Dayton in 1925 he let separation harden into retreat, pulling back from the laboratory and the gallery as from enemy ground. The dispensationalist inherited a vivid hope for Christ’s return, which is holy, and let it whisper that if it is all going to burn, there is no reason to learn how it works or take the trouble to make it beautiful.
Three real virtues, urgency and holiness and hope, each soured into the same incuriosity. Mark Noll named the result a generation ago with a sentence that still stings: the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.
And underneath all three: Do not love the world or the things in the world (1 John 2:15). There it is, apparently plain: the creation is off-limits, and the man who turns from it is only obeying. But John is the last writer you can read that way, because it was John who also wrote that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. The same word, and it cannot mean the same thing, or God is in violation of His own command. The world we are forbidden to love is the fallen order in its revolt, the system organized around appetite and pride and the passing away; the world God loves and made and called good is the other thing entirely. Read the prohibition as a ban on the made creation and you have not only cancelled the sunset, you have cancelled your neighbor and your own body and the bread on the table, all of them things in the world. The verse that seems to license the refusal, read closely, forbids the corruption riding on creation and never touches creation itself.
So the refusal is sincere, and ancient, and it even has a proof text. It quietly assumes that the oil is finite, that attention is zero-sum, that every hour given to the fugue or the far side of a star is an hour stolen from God.
One act, two faces
It is not true, and the reason is already in hand. Underneath the arithmetic of stolen hours lies one assumption: that God is in one direction and the world in the other, so that every turn toward the made thing is a step away from its Maker, love a single account that creature and Creator draw down until one starves the other.
But we have already seen the true shape of it. The roads do not lead away from God; they lead toward Him. To follow the truth of a thing far enough is to arrive at the source of all truth, and to be caught by its beauty is to be drawn toward the One who made it beautiful. The creature does not stand between you and its Maker, a rival for a love too small to cover both. It is the road that runs to Him. So the hour you give it is not subtracted from God; it is spent walking toward Him. The two loves were never two claims on one heart. They are a single motion seen from its two ends, the near end where you attend the thing and the far end where the attending arrives. One act, two faces.
You can feel it in the counterfeit. You cannot claim to love a composer while finding his music tedious and mean anything by it. To turn from the work is not a shortcut to the Maker. It is evidence you have not yet met Him.
He would not leave
The Gnostic could hold the world cheap and keep his integrity; his god was a stranger to matter and wanted the spirit out of it as badly as he did. The Christian has no such exit. And if there were any question about how God Himself rates the created world, He has answered it already, permanently, with His own body. The Word did not hold creation at arm’s length. He was born into it, took on flesh and fever and death, and rose still with a body. The end He promises is not an escape out of matter into pure spirit but a new heaven and a new earth, the creation healed and kept. Whatever the pious refusal imagines it is guarding when it holds the made world beneath a serious soul, it is out of step with the God it means to honor, who did not find that world beneath Him but climbed down inside it and would not leave.
The wonder should not be cold at all. It burns. Acedia is that mild middle, the measured, useful devotion that prides itself on keeping the main thing the main thing. Wonder is the fire. And it is a fire we were made for, and very nearly made of, for the iron running in your blood was forged in a dying star, and to stand in front of creation and refuse to burn is to be untrue to the furnace you came out of.
Over the doors of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where the electron was first found, and the neutron, and the shape of the molecule that carries life, runs a verse from the Psalms. James Clerk Maxwell had it cut in Latin over the oak of the original lab; when the work moved to the new building, it was cut again in English:
The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.
Psalm 111:2
The pornography of piety
Delight like that is the hardest thing to keep, and the honest way to fail at it is simply to refuse; the desert fathers had the courage of that. But almost no one lives in the desert. There is a service to fill on Sunday, and it wants music. There is a child home from school asking how old the rocks are, and a culture asking the same, and silence is not an answer anyone will accept. The world will not be wholly declined, and sooner or later the man who holds it cheap is made to make something out of it anyway.
And this is where the contempt does its second and stranger work, not by turning from the thing but by making it. To make something true, or something beautiful, is to sit down in front of the world and attend to it a long while on its own terms, wanting nothing from it but to witness it as it is and set it down rightly. It is the mason finishing the back of the statue no eye will ever reach. That patience is a kind of love, and it is the very love acedia has spent years training out of him. He will not kneel to the creature that long. So the thing he makes was never really about the world at all; it is about the verdict he needed it to carry or the feeling he meant it to produce. A verdict, or a feeling: strip a made thing of anything real to answer to, and those are the only two things it can be reduced to. You cannot render lovingly what you hold cheap. That is why the art comes out false and the science comes out fixed. This is not the opposite of the refusal. It is the refusal with something in its hands.
Pornography comes from two Greek words, pornē and graphein, prostitute and writing. Pornē traces to a verb for selling; the pornē was a bought woman, a slave purchased for the purpose. At its root the word is a person turned into a price.
Pornography is not immoral because it shows sex; Scripture shows sex. The Song of Songs is eight chapters of it, unmoralized and unembarrassed, a man and a woman praising each other’s bodies at length. The violation is not that pornography depicts the body. It is that it reduces the body, and the person.
The word’s sting has bled out of it since. In 1977 Alexander Cockburn reviewed a stack of glossy cookbooks for The New York Review of Books as “Gastro-Porn,” and the suffix spread from there, to food, to poverty, to disaster, and then, once the internet had it, to a whole family of harmless -porns, EarthPorn and its cousins, until it meant little more than an image engineered for aesthetic indulgence through excess or perfection. No landscape looks like EarthPorn.
What survived the bleaching is the tell. Strip away the shame and three things are left standing. The first is superstimulus: the image is more saturated, more idealized, more perfect than anything you will meet in the world. The second is consumption without participation: you scroll kitchens you will never cook in and mountains you will never climb, and the pleasure is spectatorial by design. The third is a small wink of self-knowledge, because the reason the word porn is used at all is that the pleasure is a little gluttonous. And underneath all three, the piece of the old meaning that survived best is the one the etymology began with: the sale. Every genre that takes the suffix is packaged, decontextualized, consumable image. The commodification held. It was the shame that fell away.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had already imagined the pure form of it and given it a name: the feelies, movies you do not watch but feel, every sensation piped straight into the nerves, all superstimulus and consumption without participation, pared down until only the guaranteed thrill remains. It reads less like prophecy now than like a description of an ordinary evening.
The same machine runs just as well on the other kind of wonder. A false-color nebula, tuned to frequencies no eye can see and pushed past anything a telescope would ever show you, is superstimulus; the mind-blowing fact, a spoonful of neutron star, is awe handed over whole and swallowed without a particle of the labor that discloses anything, packaged for the scroll and the sale. I should confess I opened this way on purpose. Those first astonishments were true, but they were also a lure, and the only thing that keeps a page of them from being pure science-porn is whether it is a door you walk through or a hit you take and forget.
So when I speak of a pornography of piety, or of despair, or of violence, I am not stretching the word past its sense. I am using it the way the language already learned to use it, and adding back the one thing the culture shed: the shame.
For a photograph of a mountain the shame was rightly dropped, since no one is wounded by an idealized sunset. But leave the machine exactly as it is and raise only the subject. Package a stranger’s grief, and it is disaster porn, a worst day sold as a pleasant ache. Package a human death, and the gore film and the cartel ballad hand you the thrill of the wound with the person scraped off it. Package the death of God, the scourging and the nails and the cry of dereliction, engineered into one dependable swell of feeling on cue, and you have reached the bottom of the thing: the pornography of the cross.
It is never the blood that makes it so, nor the ache; the holiest tellings of the cross have more of both, and are holier for it. It is pornographic in this: the ache has been manufactured, so that what moves you is the engineering and not the fact; and, deeper than that, the ache has been cut off from its end. A true telling of the cross turns the wound toward the good it was suffered for, the whole reason the Word took flesh, so that the pain, however terrible, is pain on its way somewhere. The pornographic one severs the thread and points the death nowhere; the wound, with nothing on its far side, circles back into you and stops. It is the passion with the redemption sanded off. The machine never changed. Only the subject climbed, from a stone that cannot be harmed to the one death that should have dropped the buyer to his knees, and he was handed a feeling and sent home.
The propaganda of piety
If pornography is one pole, propaganda is the other, and the two are mirror images even in their histories: where “-porn” lost its stigma, propaganda started innocent and acquired one.
The root is Latin propagare, to propagate, and the original sense is botanical. A propago was a shoot or cutting pinned down to grow a new plant, from pro- (forward) plus pag- (to fasten, the same root as “pact” and “page”). So the core image is horticultural: extending something by planting cuttings.
The word enters modern usage through the Catholic Church. In 1622 Gregory XV founded the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to coordinate missionary work in the New World and counter Protestantism in Europe. It was the word for evangelism, for carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth, and it stayed a churchly word for the better part of two centuries before it curdled into the thing we mean now: the manufacture of conviction, belief produced on demand by whatever works. The word for spreading the good news became the word for manipulation.
For another century it stayed nearly innocent; there was temperance propaganda and abolitionist propaganda, meaning only what we would now call advocacy. What poisoned it was the twentieth century, the manufactured persuasion of the Great War and the revelation afterward of how much had been fabricated, so that by the time Goebbels ran a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and used the word without a flinch, English speakers heard a confession. It has meant manipulation ever since.
So the two words make a neat mirror pair. Both encode a mode of transmission, one bodily appetite, one belief. Pornography traveled from stigma toward playful neutrality; propaganda traveled from piety toward stigma. And in both cases the semantic residue tells the story: what “-porn” retained was commodified consumption, and what “propaganda” retained is the planting, harmless in a garden and sinister once the soil is a mind: ideas planted in you, deliberately, by someone else, to grow on their schedule rather than yours.
Huxley built this pole too, and named it: hypnopaedia, the state’s slogans whispered into a sleeping child ten thousand times until he wakes convinced the thoughts are his own. It is propagare with nothing left to the metaphor, the cutting pinned down to grow on someone else’s schedule, and between it and the feelies Huxley had assembled the whole two-poled machine.
Propaganda is pornography with the dial moved. It is the identical machine, reduction to one guaranteed response with the rest stripped away, aimed now at the belief instead of the appetite.
The film that resolves every doubt on schedule so you leave the theater sure. The national anthem that plants an allegiance in children while they’re still being formed. A violin is carved by listening, the maker tapping the wood for the note already latent in the grain and shaping his hand to what he finds. Propaganda works the other way: it fixes the note in advance and makes the material sound it. Art placed in submission not to the truth but to a predetermined effect: a guaranteed response handed over on cue in exchange for the ticket. A made thing put up for sale that way has been prostituted.
So the Christian art that is engineered to convert, to resolve every doubt, to leave you certain, is not pornography; it is that same machine with the dial moved, the propaganda of piety.
Pornography and propaganda are the two cases where we already agree a work has gone wrong, and they fail in opposite directions: pornography reduces you to an appetite, propaganda to a conviction; the one manufactures a feeling, the other installs a belief. Both sit at the far end of the line, and from there it runs back, not from dirty to clean but from the work that extracts a purchased response to the work that tells the truth and lets it stand. Everything harder to judge falls somewhere along it.
The two severed halves
Pornography and propaganda are not two vices that happen to rhyme. They are the two halves of one broken thing. Remember what wonder was: to stand in front of a made thing and want nothing from it but to witness it and delight in the witnessing, which is two faculties working at once, the affect that delights and the attention that discloses, held together by the one real thing they are both trained on. Take that thing away, the object that rewarded the looking because it was genuinely there, and the two halves come apart in your hands. The delight comes loose with nowhere to land, and is manufactured and consumed for its own sake: that is pornography, the feeling of wonder with its truth cut away. The attention comes loose with nothing left to disclose, and does the only thing attention can do when there is nothing to see, it imposes: that is propaganda, the aim of wonder with no real thing to aim at. Subtract the object and you do not get less wonder. You get its two severed halves, each gone to rot in its own way.
The materialist subtracts it in principle. In his cosmos there is no being itself in which the true and the beautiful are one, no Logos underwriting the look, and so his premises leave nothing to hold wonder in place: strip the object out of the world, and there is no ground left to keep it from decaying into pornography and propaganda. The Christian in the grip of acedia subtracts nothing in principle. He confesses the object, calls it Lord, would defend it to the death. He subtracts it in practice. The praise that closes a wonder in the very act of paying it holds the creature cheap enough that the real thing stops rewarding his attention, and the object might as well be gone. The materialist loses it in the premises themselves. The Christian keeps it and treats it as though he had lost it, and comes out holding the same two products from the opposite end. One is consistent and wrong. The other is correct and will not act like it.
And it is not only the products that match; the picture behind them matches too. Strict materialism can grant the world no worth of its own, and the cold believer grants it none in practice, and both come to rest in the same flat creation: a bare fact to be used or filed and not loved. They differ in what they make of it. The consistent materialist calls the emptiness the truth, the disenchantment a grown man faces without flinching; the believer calls the same emptiness piety, the creature set aside so the Creator can have all the love. One holds that there is finally nothing there to love; the other holds that there was, and that it has been dealt with. And the believer, going cold on the creature to keep faith with its Maker, has without meaning to taken up that same emptied picture and now defends it in God’s name. He thinks he is guarding heaven. He is standing in the materialist’s world, holding the materialist’s premise, and calling it worship. There is no bare fact. There never was. The creature is full of worth, the good is pressing in it still, and the one who was given it to keep has handed it to a creed that cannot hold it.
Give the materialist his due, because he reasons well from where he stands. The critic who says that all art is propaganda and all reading a bid for power has made no mistake in logic. If there is no Logos, no meaning waiting in the thing to be found, only force and construction all the way down, the conclusion follows without a gap. If nothing is really there, then every made thing is only someone’s will in a costume, and interpretation is only the counter-exertion of your own. The inference is valid. The error is in the premise, and it is the very premise acedia has taken up with its hands while denying it with its mouth.
Honest, not clean
So what makes for good art, and good science? If these are roads by which we come to know the Lord, then the counterfeits mark exactly where a road gives out, and what they lack is what the true article asks. The poles are the easy part, the two cases everyone already grants have gone wrong. Harder by far is to say what lies between them, and the line is easy to mistake. The natural guess is that it runs from the clean to the dirty, that a work earns its place by keeping its hands off sin and sex and violence and despair, and forfeits it by touching them. That guess fails in both directions at once. A crucifixion is a torture scene, and it is the holiest image we have. Much that never risks a wound is a lie. Good art is often vulgar, and it never has to be; the vulgarity is never the measure of it.
Augustine is the corrector here. Evil, he taught, has no nature of its own; it is a privation, the loss or corruption of a good, not a substance with a shape to be copied. “Evil has no positive nature,” he wrote; “the loss of good has received the name evil.” Which means that depicting a wound is not inflicting one, and painting the dark is not serving it. A picture of the fall is not itself a fall, and a finding that comes out dark is not a dark deed; the result that unsettles you is not false for unsettling you. So the surface will not tell you what you need to know. The real question is never how dark the work is, or how unwelcome the finding. It is whether the work is telling the truth. That is not a new test but the one that fixes the poles: to reduce a made thing to a single guaranteed response is already to lie about it, because the surplus you sanded off was the creature’s own fullness, the very truth the work was there to tell. And that test grades the laboratory as strictly as the art gallery: a study that has fixed its result before the first measurement is a lie of precisely the sentimental kind, every finding that might have complicated the verdict quietly scrubbed away, and no rigor in the footnotes makes it honest.
Beauty and truth are the two faces of one wonder, the delight and the disclosure, and they come apart only when the real thing between them is absent. Honest work holds the two together the way wonder holds them, the maker attending to what is really there until it yields its truth and its beauty in the same witness.
What beauty points at
If honesty is the test, it can be failed from either side, and the two failures are mirror images. Milan Kundera named the first. Kitsch, he wrote, is “the absolute denial of shit,” the world with everything unbearable trimmed out of the frame, and its tell is the second tear, the one that weeps not at the children in the grass but at how moving it is to be the kind of soul that weeps at children in the grass. It is feeling in love with itself, sealed off from anything that might complicate it. That is sentimentality, and it lies by subtraction: a creation with the fall edited out. The opposite failure lies by the same method turned the other way. The nihilist scrubs the good and the rescue instead, until only the wound is real and the healing is the lie. Both sand the creation down to a single mood. Both are dishonest about the thing in front of them.
The rigorous among the materialists go a harder way: they flee beauty on purpose. Not because they cannot reach it, they have eyes, they stumble into it like anyone, but because in their world they cannot trust it. With no referent, beauty is either an accident of the nervous system or a soft edition of the same power-bid as everything else, a pleasant lie the body tells. So many a serious materialist artist learns to distrust the beautiful as a kind of superstition, and prefers the ugly, because the ugly at least is not pretending. This is not a failure of craft. It is a conclusion drawn honestly from a false premise, and it is more coherent than most of what the church makes while insisting all the while that the referent is real.
Which leaves the referent itself, and three ways of standing toward it. The pagan carves his god, and the carving is genuinely beautiful, often more beautiful than what the church sets up beside it, and its beauty truly points; it is ordered toward a real transcendent, reached for in earnest. He has only misnamed the one he reaches. His god is false and his beauty is honest, because for him there is still something the beauty is beauty toward. The materialist has no god at all; he may make beauty and love it, but kept to his premises he cannot say why it is more than an accident of the nerves, and his most rigorous artists, feeling that, have turned from it. And the Christian has the true God, the actual referent, the being in whom the true and the beautiful were one before there was a world to show it. The test is clear now, honesty and not the surface. The hard cases answer to it, the grotesque that is holy and the clean thing that is a lie.
Confession moves, display circles
Two songs can go to the same dark place. Both can sit in grief, or rage, or the bottom of a life, and refuse to look away from any of it, and from the surface they are indistinguishable. The man who fears the dark in art cannot tell them apart, which is half of why he fears it. But one of them is going somewhere and the other is staying. The first descends into the pit the way a road descends, in order to come out the far side; the grief is real, and it is also a direction. The second climbs down into the pit and makes itself at home, turning the suffering over and over for the pleasure or the spectacle of it, going nowhere. Confession moves. Display circles.
The master text for this is not a worship album; it is the Psalter. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments, and they are not polite. They rage, they accuse, they sit in the ash and demand to know how long. One of them, looking on the children of his enemy, calls it a blessing to dash them against the rocks. This is Scripture’s own songbook, and it does not flinch, because the God who gathered it would rather be shouted at honestly than praised by rote. But watch what the laments do: they move. They carry the grief somewhere, up out of the pit and toward the God who is still, even in the accusation, being spoken to. The turn is almost always there.
Almost. There is one that does not turn. Psalm 88 goes down into the dark and stays, and its last word, where every other lament reaches for the morning, is that darkness has become the singer’s only friend. No resolution arrives. And Scripture kept it. That one unresolved psalm is doing something the whole songbook needs: it certifies that the rule is not “always resolve.” The rule is “tell the truth,” and the truth on a given night is sometimes that the morning has not come and you cannot yet pretend it has. Psalm 88 is honest about the very thing sentimentality exists to deny. It reaches the way the others reach; it has only not yet arrived, and it will not lie about the distance.
Now the hard cases. Matthias Grünewald painted a crucifixion for a hospital. The monastery at Isenheim took in the victims of ergotism, Saint Anthony’s fire, whose skin broke out in sores and whose limbs burned and blackened before they died, and Grünewald gave them a Christ pitted with the same plague, his flesh torn and gone the color of a corpse, his feet a knot of congealed blood. It is one of the most harrowing images in Western art, and it is holy. It was hung where the dying could see it, so that a man rotting alive could look up and find that God had been there first, in exactly this, the sores and all. That is beauty ordered to a real thing. Take the horror out to make it fit for a nicer room and you would not have made it more reverent. You would have told the dying man he was on his own.
Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. is profane and aggressive, the sort of record acedia would file under enemy territory without ever playing it, and it won the Pulitzer for music the year after it came out, the first record outside classical and jazz ever to do so. What the surface hides is the telos. It is an album about fear, the fear of God among them, built to land on judgment and a curse that has to be broken. It goes down into the dark for a reckoning, not for a thrill; it offends the ear and tells the truth, and it moves.
Set one counter-case beside them, so none of this is mistaken for a license to be dark. The narcocorrido, the Mexican drug ballad, is often more honest about violence than any hymn, naming the shootouts and the betrayals and the bodies with a plainness the church would never risk. Not all of it glamorizes; some of it grieves. But the strain that made the genre notorious is on the wrong side of the line, because it does not grieve the violence, it glamorizes it. It circles the wound to sell it. It makes the trafficker a hero and the killing a glory, which is why the cartels fund it and pass it around, the way power always keeps the song that flatters it. There is the tell: not the blood, which the Psalms have in plenty, but the direction. The narcocorrido goes down into the same dark the lament does and throws a party there. It is display all the way down, and it stands nearer to propaganda than to any confession.
The laboratory has its own version of the same tell. Honest research follows the data down whatever hole it opens and reports what is found there; commissioned research already knows the verdict and works backward to it. The tobacco companies ran that second engine for decades, hiring real scientists to keep the link between smoking and cancer looking unsettled long after their own labs had settled it. “Doubt is our product,” one of their memos said, “the best means of competing with the body of fact in the public mind.” That is display in a lab coat, the finding fixed in advance and the inquiry staged for effect.
Theodore Sturgeon, worn out by hearing science fiction dismissed on the strength of its worst, answered that ninety percent of everything is crud, and he was right; ninety percent of everything is. Ninety percent of Christian art is crud too, and the man who sneers at it is not wrong about the sample in front of him. But you do not judge a tradition by its landfill. You judge it by its best, by Grünewald and Bach and the Psalter, the same way you judge science fiction by its masters and not by the airport spinner rack. The contempt is fair; it is only aimed at the wrong shelf. And the concession has to run the other way as well, because there is a failure on the clean side that none of this has caught yet, a way of going wrong that keeps its hands spotless and its doctrine sound and leaves you hungry all the same. That one needs an accounting of its own.
The taste without the bread
Most of the failure so far has been a failure of honesty, a truth scrubbed away or a wound put up for sale. But there is a way to go wrong that keeps every rule and still falls short, and it deserves a careful hand, because the thing at fault is one I love. Contemporary worship music is the soundtrack of my own faith. It has carried me through mornings I could not have prayed on my own, and I would defend it against the easy sneer without a second thought. It gets the hardest things right. It knows that creation is good and that the world is being remade, and it says so with a confidence the wider culture cannot touch. What it does not know how to do is grieve.
That single missing note is the trouble. Go looking, on the worst day of your life, the funeral, the cancer diagnosis, the marriage coming apart in the kitchen, for the song that will sit with you in the dark, and you will not often find it on the worship station. Phil Wickham is about as good as the form gets, twenty years of some of the most beautiful praise anyone has written, and he is not blind to grief; he has songs for the valley. But nearly all of them reach for the light, and they keep their hands clean; consolation is not lament, and safety is not depth. A worship song can go into the dark the way a third of David’s songbook does, the way Psalm 88 does, ending with darkness for its only friend, but such songs are rare, and rarer still on the air, and almost none carries the grit of a life actually lived near the edge. The lack is not Wickham’s but the form’s, whose dominant register, what the station plays and the room sings on Sunday, selects so hard for uplift and resolution that no one, however gifted, will make lament its center. A faith trained only to praise and never to lament is not a stronger faith. It is a faith with half its language gone, and it falls silent at the moment it is needed most. Sweetness is not nourishment. The taste is real and the bread is not there, and you learn the difference on the day you are actually hungry.
The defense of the sweetness always reaches for the same verse. Whatever is true, whatever is lovely, think on these things (Philippians 4:8), and there it is, apparently a command to keep the mind on the pleasant. But the true is right there in the verse he is quoting. Paul names the true and the lovely together, and the lovely he commends will not be cut off from the true; a loveliness that is not first of all true is a lie. And if the verse really licensed a diet of the pleasant alone, it would have to be read against the whole Bible it lives in, a book with the rivers of Babylon in it, and the ash-heap of Lamentations, and the flat exhausted honesty of Ecclesiastes, and a Messiah who wept and bled and cried out that he had been forsaken. Scripture is not squeamish. Any account of the lovely that cannot make room for the cross has been proven too small by the one example that finally matters.
There is one more thing the sweetness costs, and the cost is reach. The child growing up where the gunfire is real does not need to be told that everything is fine; he can see through his own window that it is not, and a song insisting otherwise will slide right off him. Kendrick reaches him where Phil Wickham cannot, not because Kendrick is the holier man but because Kendrick is telling a truth the child already carries, and having told it, has earned a place to stand and say more. This is not a new tactic. It is Paul on the Areopagus, standing before a pagan crowd and quoting their own poets back to them, in him we live and move and have our being, meeting them on the ground they actually stood on before asking them to move from it. Reach matters. It matters second. Honesty is what earns the hearing, and a reach bought with flattery arrives having already spent the thing it came to give.
So honesty holds even here, at the clean and well-meaning end where nothing looks wrong at all.
The right to be unhappy
In 1932 Aldous Huxley imagined the comfort taken to its end. The Brave New World is a civilization that has retired God and art and inconvenient science for the sake of peace, and it is governed by Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, a man who has read all of it and keeps the banned books locked in his own study and has decided, with his eyes open, that the species is better off without the things that would trouble it. He is comfort grown into a government. Into his paradise Huxley drops John, the Savage, raised outside the World State on a reservation and on the single book left to him there, the complete Shakespeare, so that he arrives speaking a language of grandeur and grief his captors have no name for. Brought before Mond and handed every reasonable argument for peace, he will not take the bargain.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It should trouble us that the one man in the story starving for God is the one raised outside the faith. The Savage is no Christian; he is a half-wild boy with a paperback of Shakespeare. But he has seen what the comfortable have trained themselves to forget, that a life scrubbed of difficulty and depth and the possibility of grief is not the good life but its taxidermy, and that God and poetry are worth more than peace. That hunger is the one the church exists to answer. And too often it is the church that has taken Mond’s bargain instead, not with soma, that world’s chemical peace, but with the safe sanctuary, the art engineered to reassure, the mind kept carefully incurious. Comfort chosen over wonder, and christened devotion. This acedia is only Mond’s civilization made small, the same trade struck one soul at a time. We hold the true God, the real referent, the very thing the Savage was reaching for through the wrong books, and we have walked off the field so thoroughly that the hunger for Him has to be voiced by a fictional savage and answered by no one.
But watch how the Savage answers his own hunger. Having refused the comfortable world, he flees it. He shuts himself in a lighthouse to scourge his body and purify his soul alone, and the world he fled comes to gawk at him even there, and the retreat destroys him. He was right about what he wanted and wrong about how to get it. The answer to a civilization of numbness is not a hermitage. The desert fathers fled the world too, and there was honor in it, because their leaving turned their whole attention toward the one they loved most. But withdrawal toward the real object and withdrawal from every object are not the same act. The Savage chose the second, and so does the sheltered devotion that shelves the world to keep its love of God pure: neither cures acedia, because both turn from the creature instead of standing in front of it and letting it move you. The cry is right. The lighthouse is not.
One sickness, then, with two faces, and one cure. Acedia turns from the creature outright, or, when it cannot turn away, it manufactures a counterfeit; either way it will not love the made world enough to look at it. The cure is not a technique but a homecoming: to receive the creature again as the vocabulary of loving its Maker, to let the real thing move you, and to call that a piety, because it is one. It has a face old as the workshop: the maker with his ear to the plank, listening for the note already sleeping in the wood, wanting nothing from it but to set it free. Wonder is not a reward waiting at the end of the devout life. It is one of the ways the devout life is lived, and the heavens have not once paused their telling of the glory of God.
So take up the Savage’s cry, remade into what a Christian can actually live. Sin is the one thing we cannot want with him. But under that word he reached for a life real enough to cost him, and a Christian can want that too, not the suffering for its own sake, but the love that is willing to suffer, the love God showed a world that would wound Him. Say it, not from a lighthouse at the edge of the world but from inside the world God made and called good:
I want God. I want suffering. I want beauty. I want truth.