The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
-W.B Yeats

Alongside The Song of Wandering Aengus, this poem of Yeats’ is my favorite, and I think the most indicative of his perennial concerns. St. Sophrony Sakharov, and the Orthodox tradition more generally, conceives of the artistic act, as rendered in paint or stone or ink, as an extroverted subset of the superordinate creative process of synergistic participation in the Logos that is the manifested in the abandonment of non-being in favour of communion with God. More succinctly, the greatest artistic act is that of actualizing the potentiality of our likeness to Christ. Fr. Silouan Justiniano calls this the ‘aesthetics of deification.’ This is the art of arts, the science of sciences.

Where then does that leave the conventional artist, other than “raging in the dark?”

Is it possible for the creative act, exemplified in music, poetry, and painting, to be deified alongside the person? I, of course, don’t know. However, if we refuse the call to deepen into this ‘aesthetics of deification,’ whatever art we produce will remain superficial. As David Foster Wallace said in an interview, what we admire most in a great writer is their soul.

There is a noetic swiftness that cannot be reproduced by rote; no matter how pedantically technical one was, they couldn’t write the Psalms.

I asked Martin Shaw how one’s language becomes deeper. He said, “Time, and suffering.”

Now, we have to answer the question I posed in an earlier essay. Why do (should) we write?

Out of compassion, out of gratitude, out of joy, or out of suffering. So I think. And, as I've said before, joy and gratitude are an eternal hymn.

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’

St. Sophrony distinguishes three kinds of men: those who are noetically illumined, but illiterate, those who are educated, but noetically lapidified, and those who are noetically illumined, as well as educated. It is the last of these that he calls a Father of the Church.

These categories can apply to the artist as well. Plenty of souls are of thorough subtlety and profound perception, yet unable to create art objects; plenty are able to work with a medium sophistication and dexterity, but their souls are hard and insensitive; and some few are people of profundity and skill at once. 

The artist is a conductor, a lightning-rod, a midwife. In one medium or another, he has become a master of articulation. While this confers on him no especial value in and of itself, if it should be emissary of a deep heart, then God can bless the world thereby.

Morality reveals to us we are a conflicted being, yearning for and called to great heartedness and depth of heart, but also inclined toward smallness…this spark wants release, and thus constantly urges us, against all the odds in this world that dictate the converse, be great, go deep.
-J. Moran

Our goal is to become Beauty. The contemplation of the beautiful is a means towards this end. For Yeats (who, for all his desire to escape what he thought to be a flesh-despising Christianity, ended up a captive to Platonic dualism) there is an insurmountable barrier between the world of toil, of life, and the world of pure eidetic intellect. His poetry at its best escapes this, but his intellect failed to do so. 

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’ 

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, what then?’

‘The work is done’, grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought;’
But louder sang that ghost ‘What then?’

All that I will offer in response to these harrowing lines, is that, if we introduce a bifurcation between an attempt to pursue ‘great heartedness’ and ‘perfection of the work,’ then we will certainly be left with the ‘night’s remorse.’ In consolation I offer this: 

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
-Matthew 6:33

While I sympathize with Yeats profoundly, something in my heart says that it is possible to overcome this duality. The work of our hands can be an offering to God alongside our hearts. The repeated exhortation of St. Porphyrios seems to straddle the world’s vanity and the creativity of man as the priest of creation:

“Work like an immortal, and live every day as if it is your last.” 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
-R. Wilbur

Let us force our intellects to choose Christ, who is the archetype of Beauty, and whose delight it is to make us beautiful. ‘Perfection of the life’ or ‘of the work’ are likewise fruitless unless we love God, our neighbor, and the creation. 

At the culmination of all things, I think the artist may find a surprise.

If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.
-1st Corinthians 3:14-15

“Christianity is poetry.”
-St. Ignatius Branchianov