Live Dangerously — A Response to David Layman

Having been trained as a musician, I am more suspicious of the arts in some ways than anyon else in this discussion, including David Layman. Arts depend ultimately on artifice, and the more one knows about the details of the artifice, the more tired it becomes. Once you’ve made the white tiger disappear for the 7,000th time  the trick loses its fascination. Then again, one listens to some of the really astonishing tricks — the two rhythms competing in the final section of Schumann’s Kriesleriana, or the rhythmic assymetry of the theme of the first-movement variations in Mozart’s K. 331—and stands in astonishment at what might be the next best thing to prophecy. Thn again, one years what Wagner did with these devices and wonders whether it was worth it.

That really isn’t the point, though. I believe that we are stuck wtih art. Heschel argues in The Prophets that revelation itself is wordless: God’s communication is beyond all words. The communion between God and prophet goes beyond language. It is up to the prophet to create in language what he (or she) has “heard” from God. In that sens the function of the prophet is similar to that of a poet, who also must put into words what cannot be stated in ordinary language.

We cannot distance ourselves from the arts. We cannot pinch our nostrils together, avert our eyes, and tiptoe away from danger. We must cultivate the arts and convert the artist, knowing that the enormous powers the artists possesses will time and again lead to betrayal: the artist will act like a little god.

If we abandon the arts, the other side will have a monopoly. Consider the nauseating display of adulation for Michael Jackson, this tortured, perverted, utterly weird personality. If people don’t find exaltation in religion, Heschel said, they will look for it in drugs — or in rock concerts in which the performer is an anti-priest standing before an anti-congregation. (That is why I found deplorable JPII’s use of rock musicians to attract a youth audience).

We have to fight for the arts, and we have to know how to do it. With God’s help I will have more to say before too long on the subject of music. We shold fear all arts, but we should do so for the same reason that we should fear God. As a Jew, I accept R. Joseph’s Soloveitchik’s teaching that the fear of God precedes the love of God (indeed, God’s love is so overwhelming as to inspire fear). David Layman is absolutely right that all art is dangerous. We should fear it, because its power can be terrible. But we must tame this power on behalf of faith, or it will be used exclusively against us.