“What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.”
That line was written in 1871 by the British Jesuit priest and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his journal. Although Hopkins’s experimental and expansive poems are some of the greatest works of Catholic literature, I find myself especially drawn to his private writings. Hopkins looked at the world with a spirit that was charged by belief.
If we believe that God created this world — with all of its mystery and beauty — then that world is worthy of our attention. It is good to be reminded, from time to time, that this is a radical approach to the world. It is easy, and perhaps understandable, to be distracted during life; to see neither the forest nor the trees. Artists like Hopkins, suffused with the Holy Spirit, remind us that attention is a spiritual act.
On the pages of his journal in which that quote appears, Hopkins was writing about the Spring weather — about clouds. He sketched those clouds in his journal through words, as well as through images; his journals are littered with interesting drawings. He described one cloud, which he had seen in a northeast wind, as “solid but not crisp, white like the white of egg, and bloated-looking.” In his attempt to describe the natural world from a distance, Hopkins tried to bring it close to the mundane. He anchored his figurative language in the world that surrounded him.
When Hopkins wrote that “what you look hard at seems to look hard at you,” he was writing of both clouds and trees: of the natural world inviting his attention and rewarding it back to him, a sort of communion. If we are of God, and if the natural world is also of God, then such a communion almost seems inevitable.
What then, of the human-created world? Of art, or more broadly, culture? It is one thing to imagine the natural world as God’s creation, but we might be less inclined to extend that grace toward culture.
Yet I posit that we do exactly this. An Ignatian view of culture imagines art as worthy of our intellectual and spiritual attention. We should be catholic in our scope — engaging art of all stripes and modes, including work that is subversive or challenging to our conventions — and Catholic in our sensibility, meaning generous, omnivorous, curious.
In his book “Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination” (1960), Jesuit priest William F. Lynch offers thoughts worth pondering: “Creation is not far removed from us, relegated into an inaccessible past. It continues today as in the beginning; or more exactly, today is also beginning. Genesis has not ended. It continues. We are in genesis … The real is not a universe of fabricated objects, finished once for all. It is in the act of being created.”
In the Ignatian spirit, I suggest we follow Fr. Lynch’s dictum: “We are in genesis.” Culture is unfolding around us. Let us be both observant and participatory.
An Ignatian sensibility compels us to think of criticism less as being critical — negative, dismissive, combatant — and instead of criticism as being attentive, engaged, and contemplative.
Criticism is active. Criticism is a creative act. Criticism is an act of imagination.
Imagination arises from wonder, curiosity, awe. A critic wonders about the possibilities of art. Such wonder leads a critic to be curious; to seek out culture. A critic is open to awe; a hardened heart would miss the beauty and surprise of great art. Rather than being a reactionary, a culture critic in the Ignatian tradition is one who embraces the challenges of both faithful and subversive art and seeks to understand that art on its own terms. And, in the tradition of Hopkins, the culture critic looks outward, knowing that close attention toward art reflects back and reveals our spirit.
An Ignatian view of culture imagines art as worthy of our intellectual and spiritual attention.
Within the past week, I’ve gone to see a ballet (the New Jersey Ballet for Creative Forces), a film (“Heretic,” a horror film with a deliciously evil turn by Hugh Grant as a nefarious, rogue theologian and eerily persuasive performances by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as Mormon missionaries), re-watched the first two “Godfather” films at home, and read some poems by Franz Wright. Despite being varied in form and style — and certainly not doctrinaire in any traditional manner — each work elicited an Ignatian encounter.
The ballet unfolded in three acts, each prepared by a different choreographer, although the dancers were shared across some of the acts. My wife, who had danced, was able to help me understand some of the techniques, and since she is also a pianist, she helped me understand the choice of Chopin for the second act. I recognized those Chopin pieces from her playing them, and she was able to affirm the skill of the pianist on stage who played them. We went to the show, though, for entertainment; I wasn’t there as a “culture critic” in the sense that I was planning to write a review or essay on the experience. Yet I found myself especially engaged in that performer through my wife’s knowledge; it was at once a performance on a stage, and yet also my appreciation for her knowledge.
Criticism is active. Criticism is a creative act. Criticism is an act of imagination.
Although “Heretic” is not for the faint of heart, it manages to be both talky and tense. Jump scares are replaced with theological banter. While I found the theology of Grant’s character to be solipsistic and reductive, a reactionary encounter with the film would have neutered the horror. In his classic essay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge contrasted his poetic style with that of William Wordsworth. His peer’s goal was “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,” and “by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom,” he could direct it “to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us.” In contrast, Coleridge sought a more “supernatural, or at least romantic mode”: a desire to conjure the “shadows of imagination,” the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” “Heretic” required me to willingly suspend my disbelief, and in doing so, I was able to settle into the theological discourse, however different from my own Catholic tradition.
An Ignatian culture critic reads, looks and listens closely, with humility rather than hubris.
“The Godfather” films depict Catholic characters behaving badly, and Franz Wright’s Catholic vision is often melancholy. Yet in receiving both with an open and curious mind, I was able to encounter them on their own terms; my critical experience began in observation rather than judgement.
There is certainly a time to be critical of art. Yet criticism that begins in judgement is like art written toward an ideology; it is mere propaganda. An Ignatian culture critic reads, looks and listens closely, with humility rather than hubris. In doing so, the critic will discover, like Hopkins, an energy and wonder directed back at them: a communion.