An Artistic Manifesto

Everyone was reading Hesse in the Sixties. Steppenwolf was the hallucinogenic Bible—a literary acid trip. People thought he was advocating Eastern philosophies, paganism, Jungian psychology, drug use, and an ethic of doing your own thing. Sadly, his reputation has waned since from this perception, just as the Sixties sensibility has waned.

I have reread him since, and he is just as good as he was. But he wasn’t saying the same things.

In his own journals, he speaks disparagingly of Indian civilization; and of Jungian psychology. He was actually advocating Christianity. In his own words, “Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me.” In many cases his essential point has been exactly reversed.

For example Journey to the East, as the title is translated into English, seems to be advocating a trip east to find truth. India or Tibet, right?

In fact, “Die Morgenlandfahrt,” the title in German, “Journey to the Land of Morning,” is the common term for the Crusades. Kind of changes the sense of it.

Of course, in the novel, he never gets to the east. Instead, the climactic final scene is a visual representation of John 3: 30: “He (Jesus) must become greater; I must become less.”

I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear.

Demian seems to advocate paganism and doing your own thing, scorning conventional morality. At least, its title character does. But look at that name again, “Demian.” It is actually a Christian morality play, and “Demian” is the Devil incarnate. The main character, who follows his lead, ends the novel in the fires of hell.

The realization hurt. Everything that has happened to me since then has hurt. But if I sometimes find the key and go all the way down into myself, where the fate pictures slumber in the dark mirror, then I only have to lean over the black mirror and see my own image, which is now completely like him, him, my Friend and leader.

For more on that, you could do worse than to read my paper, “Hesse’s Demian as Christian Morality Play.”

Hesse is not the only Christian writer the Sixties got wrong. How about Tolkien? His Ring trilogy was also de rigeur reading for hippiedom, and everyone thought themselves Hobbits. Far from being pagan, it was entirely intentional Christian allegory. Nobody seems to realize just how hallucinogenic and countercultural real Christianity really is.

Another foundational author to the Baby Boomers and the Sixties zeitgeist is Jack Kerouac. A lot of the phraseology and the concepts of the time, things like “hung up,” and hitchhiking across the continent, come from Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums. He is read as casting off Christianity for Buddhism, and conventional morality for “if it feels good, do it.” Being moral is being “hung up.” But he was actually advocating Catholicism, and called himself a “general of the Jesuits.” To him, one became “hung up” on desires, not inhibitions. Dean Moriarty, whose libertine lifestyle was taken by everyone in the Sixties as example, was not his hero, but an example of someone taking the wrong road. The book ends with Dean unable to talk, unable to explain or justify himself, refused the final ride, disappearing in the rear view mirror. 

Dharma Bums begins with an encounter with a hobo who has carefully preserved, as his prize possession, a prayer to Saint Theresa. He is the “dharma bum” of the title.

Kerouac called the movement he inspired “the Beats.” People think this has something to do with rhythm and jazz music. Kerouac himself explained it as a reference to the Beatitudes.

He was plain enough; people refuse to see what they don’t want to see, and take it all the opposite of as intended.

Another example, speaking of beat, is rock and roll. People see it as the Devil’s music, soundtrack of Sixties rebellion, “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” Few seem to realize that rock’s roots are religious, and it got its energy from the gospel.

Go to YouTube and look for Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She invented it, and performed it in a thousand churches in the South and Midwest, That’s where all the early rockers heard it, singing themselves as kids in their church choirs. 

Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin was a famous TV evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart. Elvis Presley recorded a good deal of gospel; remember “Crying in the Chapel”?

You saw me crying in the chapel
The tears I shed were tears of joy
I know the meaning of contentment
Now I am happy with the Lord

Little Richard actually became an ordained minister.

Rock was gospel, but with the lyrics skewed to speak instead of courting and sexuality. And it has lost its energy since it lost this awareness of its origins. You want to feel that old rock energy now, you’re going to have to go back to a Pentecostal or a Baptist church.

How about another Sixties icon, in another medium, Andy Warhol? Supposedly all about sexual rebellion, right? Actually, there’s no evidence of any such rebellion in his personal life; he was a devout Byzantine Catholic. And, once you hear this, you can perhaps see where his art comes from: he was transferring the concept of the icon to popular culture. 

The tragic truth is that all the underlying energy of the Sixties was directed towards a religious revival. It was a reaction to the deadening robotic scientistic world view, a rediscovery of the human soul. You even saw it budding, in movements like the Jesus people, the Hare Krishnas; and the like.

Then it was all strangled in the Seventies and Eighties by dark forces. By Marxism, by Yuppiedom, by the cheap materialist pseudo-salvation of New Age, and by postmodernist relativism.

I had a bit of an online scuffle once with a contingent of Leonard Cohen Facebook fans who were mocking Christians for playing “Hallelujah” at their funerals. After all, the song was obviously about kinky sex, and the Hallelujah chorus referred to an orgasm, right?

The pagan Cohenites apparently had no awareness that “she tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, she cut your hair” was a Biblical reference. They thought it was celebrating sadomasochism. Even though the first two words of the song are “King David.”

It isn’t just about the Sixties. It isn’t only the Sixties that most people seem to get wrong.

Years earlier, I had a similar scuffle with a fellow student who was shocked by my reference to Coleridge as a Christian writer. She thought him a pagan nature-worshipper and an advocate of drug use. A view that would have horrified Coleridge, a key Anglican theologian of his day.

And another scuffle with a with-it band of fellow students who thought it outrageous of me to claim Oscar Wilde as a Christian mystic, instead of, as they supposed, a prominent advocate of sexual libertinage and the gay lifestyle. You probably thought so too, didn’t you?

But his love of paradox is extremely similar to Chesterton. His fairy tales are full of Christian references. Wilde declared himself a Christian, converted to Catholicism, had a priest administer extreme unction at his death, and denied throughout his life being homosexual.

And I recollect another argument with a grad student who marked down my undergrad essay for referring to William Blake as a mystic. Despite the fact that his preface to Jerusalem has become the classic Anglican hymn.

There is serious and widespread denial here. It is embedded in the culture, and certainly embedded in the academy.

It is impossible to understand English literature in general, or Western art in general, or any art in general, in other than religious terms. Outside of Western Europe, there is no concept of non-religious art in the first place. English literature is incomprehensible without background knowledge of Christian symbolism, Christian morality, Christian philosophy. Yet it is never studied in these terms.

My ambition was to study it in these terms; I signed on for graduate school to study the new field of “religion and literature.” Unfortunately, that movement within the academy, timid as it was, died with the first generation of scholars. I arrived on campus just as they were retiring, and was unable to find a supervisor for a doctoral thesis.

Instead, the religious beliefs of writers and artists seem to be deliberately ignored, if not suppressed, everywhere. Instead, utterly foreign philosophies are imposed, things the writers themselves would not have recognized: Marxist interpretations, feminist interpretations, searches for supposed homosexuality, Freudian or Jungian interpretations, structuralist framings, existentialist framings, postmodern deconstructions. All of which arrive at having nothing to say about the text.

Realizing all this has long shaken my faith in the value of creating art. Being oblique, it can easily be misinterpreted, and lead people, as here, in exactly the wrong direction. Makes me wonder, what is the point?

But then, the same can be said of Jesus’s parables. They can be, and usually are, misunderstood, even to the extent of meaning the opposite of what they say. For one example, people commonly seem to suppose that “the Good Samaritan” is simply telling us to help those in need. “The Prodigal Son” has actually been preached to me as a lesson in the higher morality of never leaving home. Nobody seems to notice that every parable says something deeply transgressive of conventional wisdom, of their own time or of this.

Yet Jesus actually says he speaks in parables for this very reason: so that they will be misunderstood by people.

"The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:

Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand."

Art is actually a way to separate the sheep from the goats.

In the Garden of Genesis, God forms Adam out of the clay—“Adam” apparently means “red clay.”

“God said, ‘Let’s make man in our image, after our likeness. … God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.”

“Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

God made man as a potter casts a pot. Man is God’s work of art. And in breathing a soul into him, God makes man in his own image. Man has the soul of an artist. His mission is to create art.

When the Bible portrays the goal of creation, the heaven that will emerge at the end of time, it is a city, not a garden. 

“I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.”

“Her light was like a most precious stone, as if it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal; having a great and high wall; having twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels; and names written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. On the east were three gates; and on the north three gates; and on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb. He who spoke with me had for a measure a golden reed to measure the city, its gates, and its walls. The city is square, and its length is as great as its width. He measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand twelve stadia. Its length, width, and height are equal. Its wall is one hundred forty-four cubits, by the measure of a man, that is, of an angel. The construction of its wall was jasper. The city was pure gold, like pure glass. The foundations of the city’s wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; he fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; and the twelfth, amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls. Each one of the gates was made of one pearl. The street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.”

This describes a vast work of art.

Man is co-creator of heaven. Nature is from God; art is nature processed through the smithy of our souls.

And the religious life is life itself approached as a work of art. That Christian mystic, Oscar Wilde, almost said as much: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”

It is traditionally understood that history is, to monotheists, the working out of man’s salvation. But this is far more true of culture. The development of culture is the development of salvation. Because this is so, culture is an ongoing war of good and evil.

This is why the understanding of the parables, the literature, the art is inevitably perverted. Because evil gets its innings.

All true art comes from the Holy Spirit—it is inspiration.

Yet it is then denied or perverted for the general population by the opposing power. Sometimes the initial inspiration is perverted by the original artist; more often by the academy or the experts or the popular culture.

When religion wanes, accordingly, art wanes too, having lost its inspiration. We see in more recent years that most of the arts are moribund. They are failing to create, because the artistic class has drifted away from the sources of inspiration.

We tried to get back on track in the Sixties.

It is time to try again.