[T]oo much contemporary art, as Roger Scruton notes in his book Beauty, reflects a “cult of nihilism” devoted to “acts of aesthetic iconoclasm” or “postmodernist desecration.” It is not concerned merely to identify the limits of reason or of traditional standards of beauty. Instead, it delights in what is irrational and ugly, engaging in subversion for its own sake. In this way it is often diabolical and leads us in a direction opposite to that of mysticism—not to a realm higher than human reason can reach, but to one that is lower or subrational.
Smith tries to assimilate the mystics to this irrationalist sensibility, claiming that their experiences are “intended to break the mind,” yielding a “decentering of rationality” and insights that are “something other than knowledge.” But this account is wrongheaded. To “break” a human being’s mind is to leave him not wiser, but insane or lobotomized. Since Smith thinks he has reasons for his position, reasons that are better than those his opponents can offer, he has hardly “decentered” rationality. He just exercises it badly, because he scorns the standards by which reasoning can be evaluated for cogency. And since he is making truth claims of various kinds—claims about art, mysticism, philosophy, and so on—he himself purports to have a kind of knowledge. Smith allows that his view may therefore sound incoherent, but he offers no solution to that problem other than gimmicks, such as use of the strikethrough when he speaks of the “knowledge” his position is supposed to give us.
A friend sent that review of James K.A. Smith’s book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark along the other day. I don’t read much FT these days but, I have to admit, it struck a cord with me.
I have a pretty large soft spot for Smith. I started reading his stuff around 2014 and found him to be one of those breaths of fresh air, especially at that time. (I eventually pushed his book You Are What You Love on many many people. He also lead to my discovery of Comment Magazine, which continues to provide fresh air.) But somewhere along the way — probably around his departure from Comment — he started losing me. Not entirely, but largely, and some of Feser’s excerpted phrases from Smith reminded me of why.
Comment did just recently publish what I assume is the introduction to his new book. One thing I kept thinking when I read it was that Smith has been doing this “I’m a philosopher philosophizing about philosophy’s philosophical insufficiently” stuff for a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a one-trick pony (which Smith is not), but it always seems like another new discovery in that “Now I know” fashion, and it’s often in heady, theatrically circular ways that I don’t find very helpful.
I remember talking to a self-described church planter in Portland, ME, I’m guessing around 2016. (Yup, another southerner here to evangelize the “unchurched” of New England.) He and his group were having a meet-and-greet of some kind and he was telling me what his ethos was or whatever. After a minute of listening, if even that, I said “That sounds a lot like Jamie Smith.” His eyes lit up, “Yes, I love Jamie Smith!” I have no memory of what he said or why it was so noticeable, and I didn’t have any negative connotations even in the back of my mind at that time, but reading some of Feser’s excerpted phrases from Smith reminded of it. Smith does have a unique way of waxing lyrical.
“In the search for strength, beware fine writing,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in October 2001. He went on to mercilessly criticize John Updike, who “produced a description of what he saw [on September 11th] that would not differ from a description of a painting of what he saw.”
Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible. … There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth. All this is the testimony of a man who has words for everything and nothing but words.
I’m not so confident as to accuse Smith of the same thing, but this stuff does come to mind. And to the degree that he has leaned in that direction, that is probably the degree to which I have leaned away from Smith.*
At risk of taking these thoughts too far… I believe it is to Smith that I owe my first discovery of Jason Isbell. Take a few minutes to hear Isbell describe the writing process in this 2023 interview with CBS. I think Isbell is doing a good part of the thing that Smith wants to praise but isn’t doing. “Don’t wash the cast iron skillet” is an infinitely better sentence than “I find myself dreaming of a contemplative phenomenology…”
The best I can attempt to say is that Smith might be an example of what happens when you try too hard to say things about things that can’t be said. (And, ironically, can’t stop ‘splaining to people what “true faith” is.)
I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t also say that The Front Porch Republic published (a little surprisingly, I think) a more charitable review. It still points at some of the same problems — and includes, in the reviewers words, only one cheap shot — but it had much nicer things to say about Smith’s book.
I’m probably somewhere between these two reviews. I still quote Smith from time to time and I still will. But I’m unlikely to find his new book on my shelves not only because I can’t see myself going with Smith’s version “unknowing” but because, as even the charitable review acknowledges, I can’t think of one person I could or would want to share it with.
Still, You Are What You Love is a great book.
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*There is another good excerpt from Wieseltier’s piece that doesn’t fit well in this post but is worth quoting because a) it’s good, b) I think Smith himself would appreciate it, and c) I think it fits well with the better parts of Smith’s aims. Namely, as the FPR reviewer put it, the complicated need for solitude, silence, and mystery.
No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. Everybody was shocked by the attack, but not everybody was philosophically unprepared for it. For a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless. There are states of happiness that are not states of stupidity. We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners.
But mourners can be imbeciles, too. “[M]any of those people who died this past week,” Billy Graham instructed the prayer service at the National Cathedral on September 14, “are in heaven right now, and they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful.” This was Mohamed Atta’s eschatology, too. It is not consoling, it is insulting. We are not a country of children. Nothing that transpired on September 11 was wonderful, nothing. The only effect of these fantasies is to loosen the American grip on reality at precisely the moment that it needs to be tightened. If it makes sense to call on religion in times of trouble, it is not because religion abolishes spiritual pain, but because religion acknowledges spiritual pain. When all the political and military and economic and psychological and cultural analyses of the slaughter are exhausted, there remains the question of the justice of the world.Whether or not it has a religious answer, this is a religious question. About this question it is not easy to be brilliant. Silence is often a surer sign of mental progress than is articulateness. For some people, a house of worship is useful for such a reflection because it is God’s house; but there are those who repair to a house of worship because it is Job’s house, and therefore the natural setting for their objection to the order of things. Belief and unbelief are a disagreement, but they do not disagree about what is significant, and the vocabulary in which they conduct their disagreement is for certain purposes the only adequate vocabulary. And so Billy Graham’s degradation of that vocabulary should have sent all intelligent souls in perplexity running from the church. Of course the air outside the church is not exactly thick with lucidity: at Yankee Stadium last Sunday, at the conclusion of the greatest afternoon in the history of American pluralism, Oprah Winfrey imparted the superstition that “when you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know.” No, you do not.