As an adolescent and young adult I was extremely idealistic about the possibilities of "the Arts" - which, for me, were particularly literature and classical music, but also the visual arts (fine arts, architecture etc).
It seemed to me that creating, understanding and appreciating these, were the best possibility for a good life, and - at any rate - represented the highest ideal of which I was aware.
I now find my views almost at the opposite - except that I can see that the Arts have some kind of valid role as a developmental phase - an opening our of consciousness towards...
Well "towards what?" is the whole point at issue.
It is, for me, the personal and spiritual world of Christianity that now occupies the "ideal" mental territory once occupied by the Arts; and I can all-too-readily perceive that the Arts have (long since) been incorporated into the Totalitarian System - incorporated every bit as thoroughly as the legal system, education, science, and the mass media.
Indeed, the Arts Today seem, mainly, just a sub-department of the mass media.
Now, as with any System-included activity; the process of incorporation is incomplete, which means that a selective and discerning approach can find much that is good and spiritually helpful in that vast treasury of the Arts.
But the Arts - on average and overall - are here-and-now a part of the value-inverted anti-Good, anti-creation, anti-God "side" of the spiritual war - as is readily conformed by considering a sample of its creators, performers, exponents, critics, scholars, broadcasters, administrators...
Almost-everybody who is professionally a part of the Arts sub-System, or set-up, is - very obviously and explicitly - on the Wrong Side.
This means that I have no "faith" in the Arts; no faith that they are good on the average or overall, no sense that the Arts (here and now) are A Good Thing; including no belief that experience or devotion to the High Arts is ennobling, or can validly be distinguished from Low or Popular Art.
And this is a big change for me, and certainly leaves a sense of loss, a vacuum - and one that I have not discovered any wholly-satisfactory way to fill. Spiritual Christian activity does-not and cannot simply slot-into that existential-hole which the Arts have left-behind.
I'm not happy about the situation that the Arts have been subverted and inverted; such that they mostly need to be avoided, supped with a long-spoon, or taken unseriously!
But, so far as I can tell, that's how things are; and have been for many decades by-now.
Yet, if there is a vacuum where once stood the vast edifice of the Arts of Western Civilization; we may be consoled to recall that this always was a symbolic edifice; that the Arts were a form of mediation between Man and divine realities.
While symbols functioned effectively as an objective link between Man and the divine (i.e. specific symbols being linked, by human consciousness, with particular spiritual realities) - then the inevitable distance between symbol and reality (i.e. the incompleteness and intermittent nature of Art as a secondary representation of the divine) - was less evident.
Symbol seems almost as good as reality; the actual gap was less evident, but the gap was still there.
A positive way of regarding the loss of validity of the Arts is that now the underlying reality of the situation is more evident.
Insofar as we desire personal knowledge and experience of the divine, we must seek it directly - rather than symbolically by via intermediaries.
Perhaps - knowing this; and having (pretty much) no alternative; we may be more motivated, and more accurately orientated-towards, that which we ought to be doing, anyway.
