Tradition is the guardian of beauty
Back when I was a teenager desperate to be a writer and artist, I would stay up late into the night working on experimental poetry and paintings. I knew just enough to be dangerous. I knew about Kerouac and Van Gogh, a smattering of Bob Dylan and about the rooms in the local art museum that held the modernist paintings. Inspired, I followed my ad hoc gathering of artistic Virgils. I wrote modern poems in the style of T.S. Eliot and made melancholy pictures in all manner of modernist sorts (I was the incarnation of zeitgeist). I was searching for my authentic voice.
My writing and art remained immature for many years because I was laboring under the misapprehension that valuable art is, by definition, highly original. My saving grace, the one thing I did right, was to keep taking in more writing and art. I expanded my familiarity with artistic tradition and finally began to understand why various schools of art and writing existed. I came to value the shared culture from which works of beauty sprang, how they developed the tradition, where they rebelled, and where they deepened it.
I didn’t make any noticeable progress, however, until I put the pieces together that someone who wants to create beauty cannot do so all alone. Rather, beauty is created within the boundaries and formal structure of tradition. Slowly, patiently, I placed myself into that tradition. I honed in on the great writers and paid attention to how they worked, how they wrote, and how they developed upon and honored the writers who came before them. Instead of making juvenile attempts to be original at any cost, I began making drawings based on the old masters. I went to the art museum and instead of gawking at modernist manifestos on the little placards under the paintings, I instead went and looked at the Titian as long as I could (which, it turns out, is exactly what Van Gogh did. His originality is far more tethered to tradition than we think).
Titian’s Ecce Homo
This is a somewhat rambling lead-up to my theme, which is the necessity of a stable tradition in fostering beauty. The book I want to discuss is, perhaps, an unlikely one. Peter Kwasniewski recently sent me a copy of his new work Close the Worship: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed. A controversial title, to be sure, so I’ll insert here the disclaimer that Dappled Things isn’t interested in “liturgy wars,” but Close the Workshop is much more than the screed of someone who wants to fight about liturgy. Rather, it’s a careful, thoughtful explication of, among others things, the conditions under which beauty can thrive. The title, as provocative as it is (and whether one is inclined to agree or not, although I’d encourage everyone to read as much as possible on this topic because most people don’t really grasp what’s at stake. All of Kwasniewski’s books are well worth reading), raises a question worth asking (at least it’s a question I’m always asking myself) - Why are so many of our Masses these days so utterly devoid of beauty? It’s a similar question a writer or artist or musician might be asking, even now, of their respective fields - Where did all the beauty go? Why does it seem as though modern creativity foregrounds originality as the primary and sometimes sole marker of meaning, often to the neglect of beauty?
I’ll hone in on a specific chapter in the book, titled, “The Grace of Stability.” In the modern rush to make everything original at-all-costs, stability and the shared language of beauty has slipped away. Confronted with endless options and encouraged to be original, spontaneous, and always-changing, we have, in fact, removed the boundaries of tradition that are necessary to both foster beauty and form the soul to receive it.
Over at my substack, I wrote recently on the poetics of walls. We think of walls typically for what they keep out, but we should also consider what they keep in. Walls create the conditions for freedom. Think, for instance, of a formal garden. The boundaries create the conditions under which the beauty of the garden is planted, formed, and maintained. Or there’s the famous example that David Foster Wallace employs when discussing the beauty of sport; without the sideline no wide receiver would ever make a great catch in the game of football. It is the restriction that highlights his skill. Another metaphor we might use is that of a jar that holds a treasure inside. Without it, the beauty spills away.
Kwasniewski has a few metaphors of his own. In relation to sacred liturgy, he notes that the texts are fixed in a repeated cycle. Each year, each day, each vespers, each Holy Mass, the liturgy remains true to its form. There are no alternate options. Some might consider this to be pointless rigidity. Kwasniewski says, rather, to think of it like a garment to be worn, or like feasting on food and drink. We assimilate the beauty of liturgy through patient attention, meditation, and repetition. It becomes part of us. We carry it around with us on our shoulders like a garment that warms, inside of us like a feast.
The stability of it sets us free. We might even say it encourages a form of lectio divina. At the risk of introducing anecdotal evidence (although this is precisely the type of discussion in which anecdotal evidence is most valuable), this has been my experience precisely. The more time I spent with the traditions of both writing and painting, the more beauty sprang from them and the more they inspired me (this isn’t even to speak of the inspiration that the stability of the Old Mass and Divine Office has brought to my priesthood). The stability fixed me into a creative community and I realized that I didn’t have to invent everything myself. I didn’t have to run myself aground in the pursuit of originality. No, we are part of a continuous tradition of shared beauty. Beauty can, of course, be a private matter of the heart but it must also be public. We have great public beauties that arise from our culture, and they are all the more beautiful for the fact that we share them.
There’s nothing to fear from artistic repetitions, either. This is a point Kwasniewski makes that resonates particularly with me, seeing as how (at the risk of imprudently referring to my own work not once but twice in a single essay) I recently wrote about that also. My point there was that all the repetitions count. Every time I go to look at that Titian, the experience is formative. The painting unveils itself more and more. It gives me just what I need on that particular day.
Every time I celebrate Holy Mass, it is familiar yet uncanny, unveiling itself through the repetitions, which are acts of hope. I climb the sacred mountain one more time. Say the prayers yet again. Every trip counts. Every poem written in an attempt to master a classic form, every painting copied from an old master, every repeated Hail Mary feels to us like a circling but, from the perspective of beauty, nothing of it is lost. Every effort counts. It adds up.
This is the fertile soil from which creative beauty is born – repetition, stability, tradition. Every patient development is the action of a jeweler revealing a new facet on a gem.
The grace of stability allows for beauty. That which is too “pluriform, too gigantic, and too mutable,” writes Kwasniewski, cannot sustain meditative attention because when everything is in flux, beauty has no solid ground. Originality and constantly-shifting expressions of individual creativity with no reference to tradition is not something that one can surrender oneself to. It demands nothing. It asks only to gain your momentary attention before disappearing. But the discipline of a tradition? These are the conditions of greatness.
Form and stability hold an inner fire, a sacred fire. We must be very careful with the form because it is guarding precious beauty, that which we give our lives in search of and suffer a great deal to create and experience. The stability of the form is hieratic. Ultimately, it’s not about the form itself, but that to which it is united.
