Only the Lover Sings
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club Reading of Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper.
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German philosopher who wrote extensively on art and literature from a Thomist perspective. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation was a fortuitous reader recommendation. I’m curious about Catholic art theory. Pieper is more accessible than Dietrich von Hildebrand. I haven’t dared attempt the latter’s two-volume, 1100-page work on aesthetics combining Christian and phenomenological approaches. Now I’m a little closer to doing so.
Perhaps this sounds strange coming from a Jew. Point in fact, I was a student of the Rhode Island School of Design’s now-defunct European Honors Program, which was among the first of its kind in Rome.1 I remain an Italianophile. Catholics and Jews, despite the low points of their intersecting history, are simpatico in many ways. I developed a new awareness of our connection when I realized that what I now call postliberal progressivism was largely the product of the foundering of WASPism. Alas, we have an enemy in common.
Too, I’m a touch envious. Jewish iconoclasm and image taboos have moderated in the last couple of centuries, but they were severe enough to preclude a visual culture comparable to those of Christianity and Islam. An aesthetic philosophy was out of the question. For that matter, Islam hardly formed one either. To the extent it did, it was as indebted to Aristotle as the Christian one. But the culturally fecund periods of Islam, though it circumscribed adherents regarding what they might depict, had the learning and sheer population to produce masterpieces, about which man-made beauty per se might be considered at length. Despite the extolling of beauty and good workmanship in the Torah, Judaism barely even has that. It’s as though the plethora of 20th- and 21st-century Jewish critics that so irritates John Yau was history righting itself.
Since contemporary theory is mostly anticapitalist, anticolonialist, or anticonservative boilerplate, any exception past or present radiates health in comparison. So it is with Only the Lover Sings.
The title is from Augustine, Cantare amantis est. The book collects a series of short talks Pieper delivered between the 1950s and 1980s. The tone is profoundly human. Pieper is pessimistic about the trends of contemporaneity—that too may be why I find Catholic aesthetics attractive—but in contrast to the socialist dishwater that characterizes so much current commentary, creation is presumed to have been made well. It follows from there that mankind was also made well and serves some particular purpose to it. From “Work, Spare Time, and Leisure,” pages 21-22:
…of what, then, might such activity “meaningful in itself,” such “liberal” activity, consist?… Obviously, an answer here is possible only if a specific concept of the human person is accepted. For nothing less is at stake here than the ultimate fulfillment of human existence. We are really asking how such fulfillment may come about…. The most important element in the teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.
Pieper then invokes Plato: Man’s life becomes fully worth living when he “beholds the divine revealed in the purity of beauty itself: through this he becomes immortal.”
The most urgent essay is “Learning How to See Again” from 1952. Page 31: “Man’s ability to see is in decline.” He doesn’t mean seeing ophthalmologically, but “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.”
Searching for the reasons, we could point to various things: modern man’s restlessness and stress, quite sufficiently denounced by now, or his total absorption and enslavement by practical goals and purposes. Yet one reason must not be overlooked either: the average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see!
In 1952! Imagine if he had witnessed TikTok. “The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ a ‘destroyer,’” he notes. I had to look up the reference. It’s 1 John 2:16, “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” Compare the Tao Te Ching: “The five colors make man’s eyes blind, the five notes make his ears deaf, the five tastes injure his palate.”
Pieper’s remedy, aside from “a regimen of fasting and abstinence,” is—emphasis his— “to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see” (p. 35).
Long before a creation is completed, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for things previously overlooked.
As a metalhead, I’m struggling with the following chapters on music. “There can also be, as in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the music of nihilism, which lives on parody and comes about through the ‘devils’s help and hellish fire under the cauldron’” (p. 46). I don’t think I was supposed to read that Mann quote and feel moved to throw the horns.
And here I was playing along so nicely with the Catholics. Apologies.
I disqualify myself from further comment on the matter and move along to the last chapter, “Three Talks in a Sculptor’s Studio” from 1980 and 1985. Said sculptor is Hilde Schürk-Frisch. Pieper’s prior remarks on observation as an act of virtue led me to expect—brace for, really—the sort of preference for mimetic work that disastrously undermines the aesthetic philosophy of Ayn Rand. On the contrary, Schürk-Frisch was a modernist. There were a lot of artists working in some variation on Picassoid figuration from the 1960s through the ‘80s, and Schürk-Frisch’s sculptures are not the most inspired things I’ve ever seen. But they’re delightful, and Pieper was not some backward-looking prig who thought sculpture had fallen off since Bernini. Page 69:
You have only to look around here, walk through the studio and the garden, and you will see everywhere how the skill of an expert artist, by many sculptures, has allowed the festive side of the world and existence to “emerge” and become visible. All these entirely earthly and realistic forms—children, young girls, loving couples, then figures of the equally earthly Sacred Story, including the Passion Story—all these forms are by no means mere copies of reality, much less aesthetic idealizations. They contain nothing false. And yet, they reside nonetheless outside the common reality of everyday life—and thus, through the magic of artistic transfiguration, make us perceive, if ever so vaguely, the paradise of uncorrupted primordial forms beneath the obvious surface of that still discernible common reality.
That is exquisitely put.
Given the title of my project here, I have to point out Pieper’s three stories of the origin of the muses, concluding with this on page 69. Zeus asks for a critique of his creation of the world—had he missed anything? Yes, answered the other gods…
…something is missing: an appropriate voice is missing to praise this creation. And for this very purpose the Muses are brought into being; it is their task to sing the praises of all creation.
Since only the lover sings, our main assignment as servants of the muses is to love.
Our next book for ASBC is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. This is another short book that we’ll discuss in its entirety next Friday.
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The next entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. For more information see the ASBC calendar.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
Schürk-Frisch's memorial to Edith Stein, killed in Auschwitz in 1942: https://tinyurl.com/3zm2u7mb
Speaking of the Muses, I was taken by Pieper’s reference to Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (page 63): “The deal concerns “art”, created with uncommon technical skill yet entirely without substance, thriving only on the surprise it elicits by being outrageously novel and therefore unable to radiate any deeper meaning. As the Far Eastern proverb puts it, “Those who only look at themselves do ever radiate nothing.” Such a product, above all, contains no remembrance nor any power to elicit remembrance, and thus has nothing to do with The Muses.”