Life Is Not an Error

In fact, there is no way to "return to the faith of your childhood," not really, unless you've just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life--which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.

To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.

--Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (2013)

The Vocation of a Systematic Theologian

I took the pieces you threw away and put them togather by night and day. Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.

—Howard Finster, Folk Artist (20th Century)

'To write for everyone or for no one'

When we consider the style of our times, we cannot help wondering about the reasons for its corruption. The modern artist is a solitary who writes for himself or for a public of which he has no precise notion. Linked to an epoch, he struggles to express its features; but this epoch is necessarily faceless. He does not know whom he is addressing, he does not imagine his reader. In the seventeenth century and the one following, the writer had in view a small circle whose requirements he knew, as well as its degree of finesse and acuity. Limited in his possibilities, he could not depart from the rules, real though unformulated, of taste. The censorship of the salons, more severe than that of today's critics, permitted the flowering of perfect and minor geniuses, constrained to elegance, to the miniature and the finite.

Taste is formed by the pressure the idle exert upon Letters, especially in epochs when society is refined enough to set the tone for literature. . . . The terrorism of taste has ceased, and with it the superstition of style. To bemoan the fact would be as ridiculous as it is ineffectual. Behind us lies a sufficiently solid tradition of vulgarity; art must adapt, must resign itself to it or be isolated in an absolutely subjective expression. To write for everyone or for no one—each man decides the matter for himself, according to his nature. Whatever choice we make, we are sure of no longer meeting on our way that old scarecrow, a failure of taste.

—E.M. Cioran, "Style as Risk," The Temptation to Exist (1956; trans. R. Howard 1968)