How is it that the creation of a work of linguistic art is a human, and humane, act? How can we rightly understand what it means to create art by means of language? And why does such creation continue to be worth doing in a time when, we are told, “nobody reads anymore”—not even those who once were thought to be the very avatars and advocates of literacy?
The particular urgency of these questions for our global and technological moment is perhaps so self-evident as not to need spelling out. But in the spirit of Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Advice to a Prophet” (“mad-eyed from stating the obvious”), I would frame the motivation for asking them not in merely theoretical but in practical and even ethical terms: in a time when machines claim to be able to craft language “better” than humans can do it—a claim which, when we cash it out, really means that one group of humans claims to be able, by means of their access to and complicity with language-spewing machines, to craft language that is “better,” i.e. more copious, more complex, and more quickly produced, than the language generated in any comparable measure of time by the group of humans who either lack access to or refuse the use of these language-spewing machines—in this time, in our time, how can we articulate and defend the urgent necessity of learning once again to hear, preserve, and defend the uniquely human voice and humane quality in works of written linguistic art?
It may help to begin by going back to a given point of origin. Until quite recently, the ethos of the writer’s vocation as we understand it has been defined by two parallel but distinct roles, that of prophet and that of craftsman. (For purposes of this essay, the “man” of “craftsman” is the human without direct reference to gender or other category-belonging; this commonplace, apparently throwaway, observation will carry some weight later.) The writer of the kind I mean, the writer with a vocation, is not merely someone who generates blocks of text suitable for utilitarian application to practical or social purposes. Rather, this writer is someone who, whether with few words or many, intends to communicate something from the heart, worth saying, knowing, preserving: something of more importance, greater reach, and higher and deeper validity than either blunt edifices of fact or unmasked expressions of the will to power.
To know (or, what is more important, to be able to care about) what this means, it is necessary to acknowledge up front as a matter of first principle that language has a unitive purpose: that it is possible to use language to rally human hearts around purposes higher than the communication of bare fact or the assertion of some humans’ rights or powers, as over against others. The arguments needed to establish these points, by no means simple in themselves, we will have to bracket for now, so that we may proceed from the core conviction that human language does have purposes beyond the scientific, the legal, and the political. What those purposes are may become clearer as we go.
The first and perhaps most obvious paradigm of the writer-with-vocation is the writer-as-prophet, one who produces written work as ordered to the utterance of something true in a sense deeper and higher than the commonplace, a sense we might identify as wisdom. The writer-as-prophet is engaged in accessing—and in giving an audience access to—wisdom, insight, understanding. This version of the writer’s identity, though it has many and brilliant characteristically Christian expressions, precedes the Christian understanding of prophecy by some millennia and seems to arise wherever human cultures are organized around a body of shared texts that shape that culture’s self-understanding. In cultures not thus organized, the act of writing does seem to produce mere scribes or copyists and to center around more purely economic and legalistic activities.
Without denying the value or interest of other global approaches to the question of who the writer is and why the writing act is of worth, we can identify the sponsors of the writer-as-prophet in the Western tradition: the positions represented by Plato in the Socratic dialogues, especially Symposium and Phaedrus; the Old Testament prophets and writers of the wisdom literature; and certain Christian saints and mystics, from Paul through Julian of Norwich to figures like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and John Paul II, who have seen themselves primarily as voices crying in the wilderness, in season and out of season, against falsehood and in favor of the deepest realities.
The attentive reader will realize right away that each of these prophetic figures has persisted and succeeded with so many hearers, not only because they have said what is true, but because at one and the same time they also fulfilled the role of writer-as-craftsman: bringing careful thought, love of language, and well-turned phrasing to bear on the core truths they cared about. No illusions were cherished among the above-named writers as to the supposed value of sloppy articulation as long as the “content” of the utterance should be factually accurate or—still less—a transmitter of commonplace and popularly desired social signals. For the craftsman, form and matter must find their union, and what is true is likeliest to be seen as true if it is also well said. This approach to writing is best articulated by Aristotle in his Poetics and, later, by Jacques Maritain in Art and Scholasticism.
Prophecy and craft need not be set in opposition to one another, but many writers of serious purpose will feel a stronger natural pull in one direction than in the other and will desire to take measures to fill in the felt lacunae in their own formation. In the late classical tradition, an anonymous rhetorician we know only as Longinus spoke implicitly of an achieved unity of prophetic and craft-driven approaches in his work On the Sublime. Longinus tells us, in detail, how this unity of craft and prophecy can ensure true expression in sublime language.
In practice, Longinus observes that the person who is by circumstance caught up in “mean and servile” forms of work rarely, if ever, produces art that rises to the level of prophecy. Yet, in principle, he as good as admits, all of the necessary inner realities could be given to anyone from anywhere, and could be realized, under the right material conditions. It is not clear whether or not Longinus was a Christian; it is therefore also unclear whether Longinus fully shared the Christian tradition’s great preoccupation with transcendent Truth; but he at least shared the classical orientation to small-t truth as found in human virtue and heroism, expressed as “grand conceptions” and “powerful and inspired emotion.” Furthermore, he thought that this orientation could be “cultivated” by a person’s choice of what to focus on: where to center the attention and, thus, the interior life.
The full separation of transcendent Truth from the sources of sublimity did not occur until the advent of Romanticism. Facing the fragmentation caused in Christendom by the combination of corruption among Catholics and puritanism among Protestants, and the fragmentation caused in society by the Industrial Revolution, the Romantics rightly sought to restore humane value to a world gone mad but wrongly located the center of humane value in the isolated individual rather than in the Trinitarian Creator of humanity.
A key feature of this disjointed locus of value therefore became the exaltation of the atomized individual as supposed source and origin of prophetic truth, an exaltation which gave birth to the myth of the “art monster”—the gifted individual whose galling, vicious, or outrageous behaviors attempted to find self-justification in the excellence of the artwork that same individual also produced. Under the sway of this myth, artists’ errancies in the moral realm were claimed to be inextricably linked to their ability to reach new heights of aesthetic technique, though such claims were dubious at best, satanic at worst, and spurious always. Claire Dederer’s compelling recent book Monsters studies this phenomenon of the art monster in detail; Dederer’s conclusions tend to support the thought that our execration, envy, and ressentiment of such figures may be rooted in the desire to arrogate their outsized permissions and undeniable gifts to ourselves, often by means of the same destructive, ultimately fruitless social aggressions by which art monsters seek to establish their supposed supremacy.
But what about the desire to arrogate such permissions and gifts, not to individuals, but to whole groups on the basis of sociological belonging or exclusion? This seems to be the root of a third, more contemporary, attempt to ground artistic identity not in God-given wisdom (prophecy) or in man-made excellence (craft) but in some other root altogether. Dissatisfied with slang or neologism, we might want to call this the sociological approach to identifying aesthetic value. “The sociological approach” represents one way of characterizing the belief that the value of a work of art is to be found not in its manner of expressing certain impressions and insights or even in the genius of the single individual who generates it, but rather in its expression of the collective consciousness of a given social group, often (though not always) a group historically underrepresented in arts and letters. The sociological aesthetic is a kind of Romanticism writ large and applied not on an individualistic but on a demographic basis: an attempt at communal anointing.
To identify the incursion of the sociological into the aesthetic, not to say the ascendancy of the sociological over the aesthetic, as contemporary trends and therefore worthy of scrutiny, is in no way to say that a range of stories from a range of places and circumstances should not be told, heard, and uplifted. Quite the opposite: one of the most compelling reasons human beings desire to tell and hear stories in an artful way is precisely for the sake of better mutual comprehension and rapprochement between human souls of disparate origin but similar spirit. Even if not every mind will reach the same heights, all minds should be encouraged to reach as high as they can, and no one should be surprised when gifts not merely competent but transcendent emerge from places once labeled “nowhere” by the guardians of culture’s present epicenters. To God, everywhere is somewhere, and the epicenters the world creates for itself are usually not the epicenters he has most in mind.
Nor, by speaking of the “sociological,” do I primarily mean the identitarian. For what gets itself called a question of identity in literature and the humanities is often not at all a matter of identity properly understood—not a question of the unique and unrepeatable bedrock reality of the person in memory, experience, and givenness—but, rather, a matter of positionality. And positionality again traces back to sociological categorization. Positionality, understood as a function of one’s economic, social, and group-belonging relations, is relatively easy to use as a lever with which to move persons toward the achievement of overtly, explicitly politicized ends, organized around supposedly shared group interest. This utilitarian instrumentalization of narrative is the natural logical outcome of the questionable belief that the personal is always political, yet it functions in practice as a kind of determinism arising always from outside the person, usually ignoring or at best enforcing an artificial conformity upon his or her actual beliefs, wishes, desires, needs, aspirations, memories, and telos.
Quite simply, if artists allow their positionality to be put to utilitarian purposes, they will also, in the end, be used by their positionality—more to the point, used by others who want to use their positionality—perhaps used to ends that they did not choose and do not desire. Put bluntly, positionality and group belonging are as easily leveraged against the aesthetic purposes of the serious writer as for them. Just ask any writer who has ever had the experience of hearing that his or her story cannot be published because it does not fit comfortably enough with previously received and understood narratives about people who have been categorized in a certain way. Or ask one who has been told that there have simply been “too many” stories recently released about his or her positional group, region of origin, or assigned category, so that in the clamoring scrum of a zero-sum game their voices must be forced aside to make way for others.
In an ironic twist, for the very sake of avoiding one set of lazy, thoughtless, and hurtful mischaracterizations, a whole subsection of established minds has now devoted itself to a new set of other, different, but no less mischaracterizing narratives which absolutize and essentialize certain features of sociological group-assignment, often (not always) at the expense of unique voice and prose quality. In the face of attempts at establishing a new but no less controlling Grand Narrative, the real personal voice at the heart of each human narrative is once again at risk of being lost.
And it is the real person’s real voice that we must seek to hear, drowning out or fleeing from all noise to the contrary, as pretend persons arise to rattle the chains of their claims on our attention. The technological drift can feel, far more than the sociological, transfixing and paralyzing for true artists, as new technologies parasitically drain the parts of coherent human narrative and recombine them into scarcely recognizable yet also uncannily intimate shapes.
It is tempting to wonder whether contemporary society has brought this apocalypse of appropriated personhood (yes, I mean so-called “generative” “AI,” which is neither generative nor intelligent) upon itself by allowing so much unreality to surround us and subsume us—so much pretense, hypocrisy, vice, dissimulation, and doubleness. There are no easy answers, but in the face of all falsehoods, the ideals of prophecy and craft can free us from the sociological and technological traps in which we find ourselves to the degree that they empower us to claim radical access to transcendent truth, not by virtue of our group-assignments or our ability to resort to certain dubious externalizations of thought and speech, but by virtue of our creation, redemption, and belovedness in the image of a God who creates, redeems, and loves.
This liberation is a byproduct, not a primary end, of the search for truth. Unless we seek the truth for its own sake, we will not find any of the benefits that go along with that search. Another way to say this might be: If we want craft more than we want truth, we will tend to lose both truth and craft. Apollo, eclipsing Christ, quickly turns from light-bringer to demon. We must learn, with Augustine, not to love words more than we love the realities they represent.
And again, we must remember the wisdom of Longinus: in principle, anyone can learn the skills necessary to produce sublimely crafted and perhaps even prophetic art, while at the same time it rarely comes about that the individual artist is fully able to develop without access to a certain modicum of practical and intellectual support—support that, I would argue, is nowhere near as out of reach as society’s skewed standards tend to make it seem. No defense of unearned privilege, this: Longinus’s On the Sublime concludes with invective against the deleterious effects on art of luxurious living. For Longinus, too much wealth is as likely to be destructive of the ability to render valid prophetic utterance as too little—and on balance, he tells us, perhaps having too much is worse. If details of social position matter to Longinus, they matter only in the degree to which material circumstances either empower or hinder freedom of mind and soul—not a freedom of indifference, but a freedom for excellence.
What the twin ideals of prophecy and craft can do for the writer—for whoever, from wherever—is to provide a universal ethos that is at once elevating, accessible, and liberating. No accident of life need be thought to bar anyone from attaining to some degree of participation in this ethos. Its only limiting condition, if we can even speak of this condition as “limiting,” is the wild, reckless, generous abundance of God. Neither the sociological lens nor the false ideal of positionality-as-prophecy can perform these functions, because both are inherently flattening, divisive, and reductive. For the prophet-craftsman, the universal is found in the particular; for the sociological-positional writer, only the particular is or ever can be found in the particular, because no universal is acknowledged or recognized as valid. Positional and sociological modes of establishing aesthetic identity are always contingent on humanly constructed—and constantly shifting—categories, and therefore they lend themselves always to the depersonalizing instrumentalization of those with less worldly power by those with more: instrumentalizations which certain worldviews consider to be determinative of all human acts. By contrast, prophetic and craft-based modes of establishing aesthetic identity are rooted in the reality of the human person and, more than this, in the reality of the three-personed God who created us in a Creator’s image.
For a model of the wholehearted, full-throated, paradigmatic expression of the unity between prophecy and craft, we need look no further than the creative coherence of the Magnificat: this hinge moment between covenants of faith and truth, this single, powerful poem which encompasses, transforms, and incarnates a whole tradition into a heightened utterance that all at once celebrates the old and proclaims the new. Let us notice afresh, too, who is the speaker of this coherent thought: a dark woman from a poor family in a small town, one who surely carried more than her share of life’s mundane labor, who most in her time would have seen as precisely “no one from nowhere.” And yet it is this “no one from nowhere” whose words we now sing daily at the conclusion of our evening prayer; it is she in whom the Holy Spirit has chosen to perfect his art: to speak with the unifying voice of the people of God, to carry to a weary world the Savior it still so needs and, when it can fall quiet enough to hear its own inner voice, still so desires.
