Although the word Islam figures in Murray's subtitle, he devotes less attention to the religion itself less than he does to Europe's response to it. Islam also gets less space here than Christianity – or, more specifically, Europe's loss of Christian belief and identity. This focus makes for some of the book's most original and fascinating sections, in which Murray (an Oxonian, by the way) explores the impact of Darwin and of the nineteenth-century Biblical “higher criticism” that led to the loss of faith limned in, for example, Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem “Dover Beach.” It was to overcome this loss that the twentieth-century totalitarianisms were concocted. And once they'd done their massive mischief, and been expensively quashed, what remained? A spiritual void.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Hmm …
… A Masterly Look At Europe | Frontpage Mag. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I haven't read the book, but this is certainly a telling quotation from it:
ReplyDelete“Today, if you walk through a gallery like Tate Modern in London the only thing more striking than the lack of technical skill is the lack of ambition. The bolder works may claim to tell us about death, suffering, cruelty or pain, but few have anything actually to say about these subjects other than pointing to the fact that they exist. Certainly they provide no answers to the problem they present.”
How very odd. Why should anyone expect a painting or sculpture to provide answers?
Well, doesn't the Uffizi have all kinds of art that gives us answers as to what Renaissance Italy was like? And if your work claims to tell us something about a given subject, shouldn't we expect to be able to discern what that something is?
ReplyDeleteThe context for that quotation from Mr Murray's book can be found here.
ReplyDeleteFRank, thatt is not my reading of the Murray quotation.
ReplyDeleteVisual art can tell us what life is like. But to expect it to provide answers to suffering, cruelty, pain, etc. is an entirely different matter, one which has no business being used as a yardstick to measure Europe's so-called submission to Islam.
But we already know that death and suffering and cruelty and pain exist. If the only art can do is remind us of it, who needs art? I thought art had something to do with catharsis.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David. The context is very illuminating. I still have my doubts that art which connects us to something beyond ourselves is art which provides answers. Questions, yes. Answers, no. But perhaps I am just another of Murray's dead men walking who is deeply sceptical of the existence of profound truths.
ReplyDeleteFrank, I think we are at loggerheads over the word 'answers'. Is catharsis an answer to the human condition? Is there one?
ReplyDeleteWell, to be purged of fear sounds good to me. It seems that art has been thought to be beneficial to us regarding life's vicissitudes, and involves more than just belaboring the obvious about them. I felt exhilarated many decades ago after seeing Paul Scofield perform Lear.
ReplyDelete