The Eric Metaxas Show - Margarita Mooney

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Eric's Socrates in The City conversation with Margarita Mooney 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. We'll get you from point A to point B. But if you're looking for point C, well, buddy, you're on your own. But if you'll wait right here in just about two minutes, the bus to point C will be coming right by.

And now here's your Ralph Cramden of the Airways, Eric Mattaxas. Folks, you're listening to a special edition of Socrates in the studio. These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet. We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus.com. Sign up. This goes live January 4th. You can see the videos.

It's amazing. I also want to encourage you. If you haven't yet, go to metaxis talk.com and give to CSI, one of the greatest things you could conceivably do around the Christmas season, an amazing gift for anyone you can think of. Go to metaxus talk.com. Click on the CSI banner. Be generous.

It's a beautiful thing. Metaxistalk.com. And don't forget, Socrates in the city plus.com. And now here's my conversation from Socrates in the studio, just for you. Incidentally, today's conversation is with the great Margarita Mooney at Socrates in the studio. Here it is. Welcome to Socrates in the studio. Today my guest is Margarita Mooney.

Margarita Mooney is on the faculty of the Princeton Theological Seminary. She served on the faculties of Princeton University and Yale University. She is the founder and executive director of the Scala Institute. And she is the author and editor most recently of a book titled The World, wounds of beauty, seven dialogues on art and education. We'll be discussing that with her today at Socrates in the studio. Folks, welcome to another edition of Socrates in the studio. Socrates in the studio means there's no audience. So if you hear people laughing, it's your imagination. It's my privilege to have as my guest, someone I've interviewed before, but not in the Socrates

format. Margarita, Mooney, Suarez. Margarita, welcome. Thank you, Eric. It's great to be here. Well, it's great to talk to you about anything, but particularly about what we're going to talk about today. You've put together a book called The Wounds of Beauty, the Wounds of Beauty, seven dialogues on art and education. Often Christians banning. about the phrase, the good, the true, and the beautiful. But they rarely talk about the beautiful and beauty. So I want to ask the larger question, what does truth have to do with beauty?

What does beauty have to do with the good and the true? But as we get to all that, why don't I start with you and ask you, Margarita, how did you find your way into writing about these things? This book really emerged out of the COVID crisis. When suddenly classes at Princeton Theological Seminary were shut down, I had been reading C.S. Lewis's book, The Weight of Glory. It's a series of essays, of orations.

And one of my favorite quotes from Lewis is, I'm going to paraphrase him here, If humans had postponed the search for beauty until we had perfect safety and security, the search never would have begun. And so... Now, I just, in case people don't know, I think it was somebody asking him about, you know, how can we do these kinds of things during wartime? Precisely. Shouldn't we just focus on the war effort? And he basically says, no, these other things are vitally... Central. Precisely. He's delivering this as an oration at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, just as England

is getting into World War II. And he's speaking himself as a Ward War I veteran. So St. Mary's Oxford, fall of 39, C.S. Lewis. That's right. Delivers this oration, right? And part of the reason I wrote this book was that, having spent most of my career in higher education, the word beauty practically never comes up. And I had begun this journey of my own to understand the different traditions of beauty and why it matters and how to bring beauty back into education. And during COVID, I actually thought this made it that much more urgent for me, precisely because people suddenly felt isolated. They felt on the edge of a precipice. And there can then be a temptation to despair. And so when I wrote about, when I wrote this book and I did it as a series of dialogues, it's an

to people who may not know much about beauty at all to reconsider why beauty has been so central to the Christian tradition, why beauty is so central to the common good. And as you said, why we have this term or these three words we put together, truth, beauty and goodness. We've all heard that, right? But most of us, myself included, with a degree from Yale and Princeton, I'd never taken a class that actually dealt with philosophy or theology of beauty. And now, through writing this book and in the research I've done, I've realized that most of the way I've heard people talk about beauty is actually from a kind of critical theory point of view, a postmodern point of view, or a romantic point of view, which fails to actually get at the very central idea in Christianity that beauty is a property of being that allows us to participate in the divine. Now, that sounds like a lot of big words. I'm sorry, what? That's a lot of big words.

Beauty is a property of being. That's, it is universal. Yeah. It is part of what makes us who we are, that we are called by something beautiful to enter into the divine life, which is self-communicating. Of course, this sounds like a lot of words. When we're talking about beauty, I just want to be clear,

there's so many false ideas of beauty, right? The most false would be, well, not the most false, maybe the most recent, the most shallow, would be the idea that beauty has to do with like lip gloss and, you know, foundation. We're not talking about, you know, beauty tips, because sometimes when you hear the word beauty, people go there. Oh, beauty. Then we have the idea that you touched on a little bit,

which we'll get into in the conversation. But a view that has kind of crept into the culture, that beauty is like a dirty word, that like ugly is beauty or we're going to propagandize ugly. The ugly is beautiful and traditional standards of beauty are somehow, you know, whatever, you know, plug in colonialist patriarchal or whatever it is. So it's interesting when you're talking about beauty, how many different concepts there are about it.

But you particularly differentiate modern ideas. as quote unquote modern ideas of beauty with the classical and the Christian ideas of beauty. So that's ultimately how we're framing this. That's when you talk about beauty, you're talking about that kind of beauty or that idea. That's right, Eric. You're right that for a lot of people, when they hear beauty, the first thing that comes to mind is something that's attractive or pleasurable. Now, we can come back to that, but that's not actually the classical understanding of beauty.

And my dialogue in the book with Peter Brown and historian of late antiquity, who was also a biographer of St. Augustine, right? Most people are familiar with this idea from Augustine that his conversion to Christianity, in part, had something to do with beauty, right? What was this beauty to Augustine? And what Peter Brown makes so clear is that for the ancient world in which Augustine was educated,

beauty was a human achievement. It was great architecture. It was big buildings. But then Plato, classical Greek philosopher, had argued, no, no, it's not the building itself. health that's beautiful. It's the kind of muse, the spiritual being that that building directs us to. And you can kind of rise above the created world to the state of pure contemplation. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for

believing in Jesus. People have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years now. If you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years?

You can buy a believer's freedom and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life, just $250. Maybe you can give more and free more people. Call 888-253-3522, 888-252. 8-8-253-3522. Or go to metaxis talk.com. Please do it metaxistalk.com. Folks, right now in other parts of the world,

people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus. People have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years now. If you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally

thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years? You can buy a believer's freedom and provide her with food and other supplies necessary. to start her new life, just $250. Maybe you can give more and free more people. Call 888-253-3522, 888-253-3522, or go to metaxistocot.com. Please do it, metaxistalk.com.

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is because you talk about beauty being skin deep or beauty, just the opposite. right? No, but C.S. Lewis, when he talks about beauty, he talks about looking at a landscape that is beautiful, and it wants to draw you into itself. You want to, you want to become one with the beauty. So the bigger thing here, and again, we'll be talking about this, but the idea is that beauty is not about the thing itself. It's about calling you beyond it to something heavenly. something, I mean, I guess that's what you were just getting at somehow. Yes, so I would say that, again, using the example I was giving a moment ago of Augustine, the Christian understanding of beauty is that the material object itself does matter.

Yes. Because God created nature. Okay, this is not platonic stuff here. No. This is, this is. That's right. Right. Incarnational. The thing, material matter matters.

The thing matters. And beauty is not a human achievement. it's a co-creation with God, but it should not be abstracted away from the material world, because from a Christian viewpoint, that would be a kind of denial that material is good. Now, I think part of the reason people struggle with that is that the material world can also decay. It can distract us. It can pull us away. So people say, well, you know, but again, from the Christian point of view, you know, matters created by God, but it does need to be, redeemed. And it does need to have the human touch in order to uplift it through grace.

I have to say here, while we're kind of, you know, framing the whole conversation, it's interesting because you're Catholic. In the Catholic tradition, it seems to me that Catholics have not erred in the way that many Protestant sects have erred with regard to beauty and seeing it only as a temptation to folly or as somehow drawing. us to look at, quote, unquote, the world versus contemplating the divine. That's a false choice. And I think that it's interesting because you do have these traditions of people who would eschew beauty as though it is fundamentally worldly in a bad sense. And that's more platonic idea, a more divided, Gnostic idea that's not a biblical idea. Well, I would

would say I understand the concern from a Christian perspective that beauty can distract us from God, right? I teach at the Princeton Theological Seminary. The walls of the church are white. There's no visual images. But what I've learned by teaching about the Christian tradition of beauty and, frankly, rediscovering from myself, the Catholic tradition, was that, yeah, as Christians, we should be wary of the power of beauty to distract us from God. But we shouldn't also forget the incarnational message that matter is supposed to be redeemed. Now, for a bold statement here, Eric,

I think what I'll say is that having taught about beauty now to mostly Protestant students who haven't ever thought about it, and frankly, most Catholics haven't, for the early church, there are a lot of debates about this, right? But finally, the early church decided that depicting Jesus Christ as a human being in painting and an art wasn't optional. It was mandatory. Because we have to remember the reality that the divine took on human flesh. Christianity is not an abstraction. It's a person. And so the concern about the adoration of images, despite what people think, Catholics don't adore images. Even if it's an image of

Jesus, you're adoring, you're worshiping Jesus. And the image helps you do that. Similarly, with images of the mother and child, right? Why in Christian art is there so much art of Mary with the child, right? Think of the great fresco by frangelico of the annunciation. Well, you don't even see the child other than in the womb, right? Or think of Mary in the Oron's position where Christ is pictured in an almond inside of her womb. It's again reminding us that our creator took on flesh through a woman. And so in Christian art, what I think is really important is to present Jesus Christ as a person and to present the faces of his faithful as people.

And again, as I mentioned a moment ago, I started this book as COVID was launching. And what was one of the things that happened during COVID? We didn't encounter people with faces anymore. And I think although that may not be what comes to most people's mind when they think of beauty. right? A lot of modern art has moved away from depicting the human person as a person with a face. We present an abstraction. I mean, I was at an exhibit in London on St. Francis. And it was striking the difference between the art of St. Francis in nature, White Francis with the animals, versus a tree that represents St. Francis love for nature. But guess what? There's no St. Francis anymore. It's just the nature. And so by taking the person out, what I think a lot of modern art has done is taken away the idea that God has given the human person a dignity that is unique within creation because we have an intellect that allows us to co-create with God. Now, traditional Christian art has nature in it. but it's got to have people, right?

Because human beings uniquely have the image of God in their soul. So a lot is at stake for Christians to understand the tradition of beauty. And look, part of the reason I care about this is that my mother came to United States from Cuba, right? So I grew up in a family that had lived through communist revolution. And when I visited Cuba with my mother, after 40 years of not going back. Everything I'd ever heard was that the people in Cuba don't want to talk to the Cubans who left because they abandoned them and they're the worms. That's literally what they're called. Worms. And we go back to the village where my mom had grown up, where her family ran a sugar mill,

and they had built a church. And after 40 years of not hearing anything from my family, people started coming out of their homes. And they had saved the baptismal card of a relative of ours. They had saved like a marriage picture. And then one guy was a family. I said, come to my backyard. I want to show you something. The church in the town, like all churches in Cuba, had been closed. This particular church had been turned into a movie theater and all the sacred objects were taken out. This man took us to his backyard and under a giant pile of wood, he took out of canvas that he had rolled up two, eight foot by four foot stained glass windows that had been in that church. And he held on to them for 40 years.

in the hope that one day people could worship again in that church. Now, again, he's not worshipping the image, but the image was central to turning his attention. Again, I use that word transcendent property of being, turning his attention to the origin of the universe that is unity and not conflict. Everything about Marxism is predicated on this idea that all progress comes through the conflict,

of opposites. This is not the Christian idea. The origin of reality is unity. And beauty is disclosing that unity to us. And this man in Cuba knew that. Despite all the ideology, he was told that the church wasn't on the side of the poor, that Catholics didn't care about the poor people, that all you need to do is produce enough sugar and we're all going to be just doing fine. Well, guess what? People weren't producing sugar anymore when there was nothing to worship. See, this is so fascinating to me because people know this innately. You don't need to take a course. You know this innately because you can't not know it because you are, whether you like it or don't, created in the image of God.

So somehow innately we perceive these things. We have a sense of these things. And it's also interesting as you talk about this, that communist atheism has always been ugly, always been anti-eastern. beauty always... Because it's anti-human. I was going to say, these things all work together. That's why we're having this conversation, because these things all flow from each other. And so if you hate God, you will hate human beings. And you'll hate beauty because you have a utilitarian, materialistic view of everything

that says beauty is irrelevant. All we need is, you know, brutalist architecture, shelter, some food, some vodka, maybe some cigarettes, we don't need beauty. And that's contrary to what every human being knows innately. Precisely, Eric. And look, as you well know, the 20th century, we lived through some of the worst totalitarian movements that have ever existed. And one of the things that the Soviet Union did, the cultural revolution in China, was to destroy tradition and destroy the symbols of that tradition in the argument that a whole new world was going to spring. of destruction, right? This is not the Christian worldview. The Christian worldview is, yes,

of course, the world has fallen, but it can be redeemed through our cooperative work. And you don't have to destroy to redeem. But what worried me when COVID started was that I wanted Americans and the people reading my book and listening to the webinars that gave rise to this to realize that we have an important mission to witness to the reality that, yes, the world has fallen, but it can be redeemed. I'm a soul. My pillow is excited to bring you their biggest betting sale ever and just in time for Christmas. For a limited time, get the Giza Dream Bedsheets for as low as 2998,

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These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet. We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus.com. Sign up. This goes live January 4th. You can see the videos. It's amazing. I also want to encourage you.

If you haven't yet, go to metaxis talk.com and give to CSI. One of the greatest things you could conceivably do around the Christmas season, an amazing gift for anyone you can think of. Go to, go to metaxus talk.com, click on the CSI banner. Be generous. It's a beautiful thing. Metaxistalk.com. And don't forget, Socrates in the city plus.com.

And now here's my conversation from Socrates in the studio, just for you. Incidentally, today's conversation is with the great Margarita Mooney at Socrates in the studio. Here it is. We have to have hope. And we have to keep creating. beautiful things even in times of crisis, because that's what's going to pull us out of the crisis, right? What totalitarianism did was destroy everything beautiful, uphold everything utilitarian,

but it destroyed people's hope. And without hope, people don't work anymore. They don't produce anymore. People who haven't visited a communist country and seen the complete economic standstill really cannot imagine that people don't do anything all day long. Actually, you don't need to actually visit a communist country. You just need to get a complete economic standstill. You just need to go to the DMV. Pretty similar. Oh, that's nothing compared to what I've seen. But you can get a flavor of the hopelessness.

My goodness. And the brokenness. Right. But it's the same concept, yeah. And so what I have tried to help people to understand, and it's also interesting, Eric, if you look at the biographies of a lot of people who thought beauty was a distraction

or just part of capitalist domination, they couldn't help but want it a little bit for themselves, right? So even figures like Adorno, who most of you maybe have never heard of, but he's sort of the founder of critical theory. Nietzsche, again, many of you've heard of, a nihilist. John Dewey, who most of you probably have never heard of but has been more influential on you than you can imagine because he shaped our whole public school system. They all turned back to beauty after once having moved past it. But when they turned back to it, they refused to turn back to the description of beauty that I just said, which is that beauty is that beauty, is a transcendental, that it discloses the reality of God unto us.

And what they end up doing is making beauty into an aesthetic God, right? That, oh, actually, what's great is, once again, the human achievement, a beautiful building or a beautiful painting. But there's no connection anymore between those paintings and the architecture, and actually our destiny is human person. So ironically, what we end up with is in the elite level, in schools of art, people sneer at the word beauty. Yeah.

No, I said that in the beginning, and that that's, it's an interesting concept. They sneer at the word beauty, and sneer is really the only verb. They sneer at it, and they scorn it as effectively kits. Anything that's attractive, somehow they have been propagandized. And again, it's really this Marxist, atheistic view. but they've been told that anything appealing, oh, that just appeals to the shallow masses. If you want to be sophisticated, you know, don't read anything that rhymes. Don't admire Norman Rockwell or anything visually attractive.

That's just all, you know, you need to be looking at abstract art or you need to be. And most educated people have allowed themselves. to be propagandized toward that view of beauty. But most normal people innately resist it. They know that there's something wrong. Precisely. That's why there's such a gap, right? That beauty ironically is for the masses.

And this kind of this anti-human beauty is really only held on to by the elites. So why do the totalitarians want to destroy beauty? Because they can't control it. And because it's bigger than them, right? So I do think we need to be worried that a lot of the elites in our country who make art don't actually believe in beauty. I think this is deeply problematic, but yet I'm hopeful because I've seen, as in that case in Cuba, that you can't take beauty out of the human heart. You cannot get rid of that desire. So what I'm hoping to do, what I'm trying to do through Scala is to help and my teaching and my writing is to help people to understand that if you think that a beautiful,

painting is good and is helping you and is directing you somewhere, you're not crazy. And if you look at modern, brutalist architecture and say, oh, gosh, I don't really get that. You're also not crazy, right? And I want people to understand that there's certainly important debates. But the most important reason I think I wrote this book, there's many important reasons, is that we have got to look at these traditions because we're surrounded now by a digital culture. It's very deeply visual. And people are being drawn by social media. And I do think there's a lot of false images going around social media. There's a sense of a competition for attractiveness. This is not the beauty I'm talking about. And we can see by its effects, right? Does looking at beautiful images on social media

make you happier? Not really. Does pornography make men happier? I don't think so. Why? Because it's false. And so there is a, there is a tempting allure to false forms of beauty. And so look, on the one hand, as we've said, beauty is for the masses and people instinctively get it. But it also does need to be educated and it does need to be formed, which is why classical civilization cared about it. It's why European civilization cared about it. It's why the founders of this country cared about it. And it's why it's currently being destroyed. Because when you destroy beauty, you destroy the image of God and man. In various places about something called the graced imagination,

because obviously people who are at war with God, people who are at war with human beings made in the image of God, they're at war, as you said, with beauty because it somehow competes with the totalitarian desire to subjugate people. It calls us out of ourselves. imagination is part of that. Talk about what you call the graced imagination. There's been a resurgence of people wanting to talk about imagination and creativity, right?

Probably because a lot of people feel we're living in a mechanized, bureaucratized kind of world. But I use the term graced imagination to recall people to people that, although we have an intuitive sense of beauty that can hear tones and music and that can see beautiful. patterns and see poetry, it doesn't mean that our imagination doesn't need to be redeemed or ordered. Because what I was just mentioning a moment ago about social media or pornography, that can play on the imagination, but actually hinder it, draw it into fantasy, draw it into unreal world. And what I'm arguing for with the graced imagination is that through grace, the imagination can be ordered towards our proper end. So this idea of creativity as kind of breaking free from the shackles of reason, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm talking about, right?

Creativity has to be ordered. We have to use our intellect to reflect on the mathematical properties of the buildings that were created, the use of harmony and proportion, and look at the quality of the objects that we're making. That's why there's an objective quality to beauty. Something is not beautiful just because I put a blob on the wall and call it beautiful, right? There's this great Peanuts cartoon where I think it's Sally. I think it's Sally. Comes home and she says, Mom, I got a C plus on my coat hanger sculpture.

And she says, well, you know, why isn't my coat hanger sculpture beautiful? I guess that local dryer cleaner we use doesn't have good hangers. Or I guess my teacher didn't know how to tell me how to make this beautiful. Or really, it's just beauties in the eye to beholder. But the reality is that her coat hanger sculpture is an object that she's twisted around and that doesn't make it beautiful. And she's struggling to figure out why, right? So simply creating something, you might end up making a coat hanger sculpture.

And I wouldn't put that in a frame and put it in the New York City Public Library and have thousands of people come see it. What I would have millions of people go see, maybe some of you watching saw this. There's an iconographer based in the UK that I'm working with, Raskalah, who designed, he designed the anointing screen for King Charles' coronation. And it's a beautiful tree embroidered on cloth representing the unity of the Commonwealth of England. was seen by millions. And it symbolizes the sanctity of the anointing of the King of England and the unity of the people that come together under this. So again, the art is beautiful to look at,

but you also have to look at what is the message it's communicating. And if you want to understand the message, go to Schala's YouTube channel, and you can see the artist in his studio talking about it. So artists that I'm working with believe, that it's their vocation is to express through the objects they make a hopeful meaning that can help then create in our minds the unity that we're called to live out. And if what the art of the objects we look at are all twisted and blackened and don't have human faces, how on earth is

our vision going to be shaped to live the life of communion of persons that we're called to as human beings? There's obviously a lot here. There are two things I want to tease out of One is the idea, when you talk about we have to order our imaginations. In other words, this idea that whatever I like is beautiful or whatever I like, it's like, no, no, no, we, to some extent, we need to allow ourselves to be trained to know what is beautiful and what is good and simply liking something. We're not talking about that, right? It's about ordering our affections.

Precisely. Which is similar to ordered liberty, right? Liberty can become license. And the founders, when they gave us ordered liberty, it takes some doing. It's not, it isn't licensed. It's not pure freedom. It's something else. And so that's an important concept that our affections need to be ordered and that God is in the business of ordering our affections. So I want you to talk about that. But I also, don't want to forget to talk about the kind of, I guess it came, you know, via the romantic movement, but this idea, beauty used to be, or art, used to be that the artist would submit to being trained to create beautiful things. And at some point that shifted to where art was about the artist, quote unquote, expressing himself. And that's where you get the bent, you know, coat hangers. And you get all of this stuff that is manifestly ugly,

but you're told like, no, no, no, don't, you know, don't pay attention to the evidence of your eyes. Just trust me, this is worth looking at. And it's a whole different view of how the artist creates. look, as you said, a lot of people have this caricature of how artists used to be trained, right? That all you do is submit yourself to what the tradition has done. You simply copy what's been done before, follow a whole set of rules, and we'll just go on making the same kind of art that you see in, I don't know, Mount Athos, Greece or something for the rest of our lives. Well, first of all, this is a caricature.

This is not how artists worked in the early church or in the Middle Ages. but there is a sense in which through the romantic movement, which really grew out of the Renaissance, there was an emphasis less on the objective quality of the object being made and more on the subjectivity of the artist, but also on the subjectivity of the human beings. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus.

People have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years. Now, if you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years? You can buy a believer's freedom and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Just $250. Maybe you can give more and free more people.

Call 888-2533522, or go to metaxis talk.com. Please do it metaxus talk.com. Folks, you're listening to a special edition of Socrates in the studio. These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet. We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus. sign up. This goes live January 4th. You can see the videos. It's amazing. Most people are probably familiar with a kind of traditional icon like Christ the Panto-Crotor and Aeia Sophia.

There's a kind of, there's obviously it's a human being, but there's a strangeness about it. It's not a photographic representation of what Jesus might have looked like, right? And what the Renaissance and the Romantic movement wanted to do was to really portray the human being in its greatest glory and its greatest perfection. So you see a movement towards, in sacred art, for example, very human emotions being shown in faces. So now instead of Mary the seed of wisdom where Christ is sitting on Mary's lap and they're both looking out at you, now you see mother and child looking at each other in a tender glance. And it's not that those human emotions are wrong or that that didn't occur, but there's an

emphasis on the human emotional content. And from that, the next step in that was actually the postmodernism. That rather than kind of upholding or sanctifying the human emotion, because it's part of God's glory, now just human emotion itself is a good thing without being ordered. Right. And that actually, if you want to get to the depth of human emotion, you've got to overthrow the shackles of tradition

and this whole idea that our passions need to be ordered. No, no, no. That's keeping people back. and here precisely is when you get into trouble. Because if there's nothing ordering our passions, then why wouldn't we think that our passions are going to be manipulated and used to create objects that dehumanize us?

And so what I think has happened is that from the romantic movement, which wanted to say, oh, human emotion is good, let's celebrate the human. well, when you forget that what you're celebrating in the human is God's glory, and you just celebrate the human, then why not glorify violent? Why not glorify evil? Why not paint, you know, blood? Oh, I have a better idea. Why not take all that sacred art and destroy it or defame it or, you know, disfigure it? I wonder sometimes, why is there so much disfiguration of beautiful Christian art? Why? is transgression of traditional symbols of Christianity considered artistic?

Yeah, by idiots. I have to be clear, by idiots. No, but it's kind of funny because you're quite right. And this goes back to, I mean, there's so much here, but it's so, it's fascinating because you're touching on some things. First of all, this idea, which I guess you can say, it's Freudian, but, you know, you can point back to the romantics. This, like, you know, deification.

of our feelings, of self-expression, as though whatever is inside me is wonderful and there are no limits on expressing it. And we know that, you know, Freud, because, you know, he focuses on the libido, it's like, we need to be sexually not repressed. But he doesn't say that our violent tendencies shouldn't be repressed. We all know that if you have the desire to kill or to stab or whatever, it's like it would be a really good thing to understand that you should repress that, that there needs to be some order. But this idea crept into art that anything goes, no constraints, which leads to the deification of the idea of transgression, which is like a satanic project, really.

It's like I want to destroy God because he's the ultimate, you know, he's the moral policeman trying to keep me down, and I want to throw off the shackles of any of these traditions, order, whatever it is. That's a part of what has come into the world of art in the last, at least, you know, two centuries. Absolutely. At Scholar's recent conference on Art, the Sacred, and the Common Good, one of my favorite lines was from an iconographer from Quebec, Jonathan Pajot. And he said, the day I really started becoming an artist was the day I stopped trying to express myself. And what he meant by that was that in order to make beautiful objects, which he does, he needed to stand on the shoulders of masters.