The Detours of Art

Matthew Arnold famously defined poetry as the "criticism of life." For those of us willing to acknowledge religion as "spilled poetry," religious criticism is a meta-critique of life. But it is also, as Harold Bloom argues, the means by which the critic acknowledges the degree to which she has been "contaminated" by the subject of her study. Consequently, claims made by religious critics to "objectivity" are not false, necessarily, but relative to a variety of subjectivities.

Yes, even objectivity is relative. In light of this series of observations, then, let me invoke the 1958 Preface to Albert Camus's collection of essays, The Wrong Side and the Right Side:

"... I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man's work is nothing but [a] slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened" [Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, New York: Knopf (1968), 16-17].

I would add that, if this labor is not a labor of love, it is not worth pursuing.