Literature Psychology

Finding God in Lowbrow Art

Our search for unity is almost always wrongly aimed.

Joey Goodall / 9.20.22

Have you ever been bored to tears by a movie that everyone said you should watch? Been entirely unable to connect with an acclaimed book? Detested an album that reviewer after reviewer had dubbed innovative, important, and essential? Or failed to see what’s so special about a particular place? Of course you have, it happens all the time. So often in fact, that an entire storyline of a classic Seinfeld is devoted to it. In the eighth season episode, The English Patient, Elaine goes to see the titular, Oscar-devouring smash, and hates it, which alienates her from her date, her friends, her boss, her waitress, and almost costs her her job.

This is overblown for comedic effect, but when you’re the Elaine in a situation like this, it can feel pretty close. If we all find ourselves in Elaine’s shoes semi-regularly, does it mean that we’re all secretly philistines? Or does it mean that maybe it isn’t a thing’s status as highbrow or the acclaim it receives that gives it it’s worth?

In Thornton Wilder’s wonderful short novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a character named Doña María writes beautiful letters to her estranged daughter that (within the context of the story) become primary documents of modernizing the Spanish language in Peru, in the same way that Luther’s translation of the Bible did for the German language. In one passage, Wilder writes that Doña María’s son-in-law appreciated her letters, but “thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.” Doña María had no thoughts in the direction of a posthumous legacy or artistic achievement. She was just writing letters to her daughter, hoping to be loved in return, and that was what actually made them worth reading.

The son-in-law appreciated the letters for their technical mastery, confusing the sophistication of style for artistic brilliance. To him, the letters were impressive, but not moving. They evoked awe, but not devotion. Like the reviewer who fawns over the latest Oscar winner and then returns home precisely the same person, the son-in-law has, Wilder’s narrator believes, entirely missed the point. Wilder’s status as a pre-eminent stylist and three-time Pulitzer winner might at first seem ironic or at-odds with this position, but maybe it only made him more aware of how these things are ultimately smoke and mirrors.

In the most recent episode of PZ’s Podcast, Paul Zahl talked about how people tend to over-inflate the importance of certain things in their lives. How different places, paintings, movies, music, books, etc. cause different people at different times to be opened, to understand something they’d missed before, to be changed. What we encounter is far less important than what’s going on in our lives at the time. That’s why some people are moved by Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son or the Grand Canyon, while others find their lives changed by Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein or Baba O’Riley. It can be anything! What actually matters is the movement of the Holy Spirit already at work in one’s life.

We might think we like certain movies or music because we have somehow curated good taste, or because we can recognize the good, true, and beautiful simply because it is so. This can be argued (up to a point), but what really makes us love something is how it hits us on a gut-level, how it affects us emotionally, which is often entirely unrelated. H. Rider Haggard once wrote that, “our search for unity is almost always wrongly aimed, for it is only to be found in God.” We aren’t meant to find an end to our “eternal loneliness” in a song, story, or place, but God might use those things (or anything) to edge us toward reunification with him. God loves working through imperfect and surprising means — even foolish and shameful things — to bring his people home.

We often focus on things we can take credit for, like good taste or skill, as qualities a person has to work hard to cultivate. But if the real driving engine of art (and everything else) is actually our inborn longing for love, then there is neither high brow nor low brow art. There is simply that which moves our hearts toward the love that surpasses all understanding — no matter what the critics might say.