I recently came across the following passage from the architect Ralph Adams Cram’s commencement address at the Yale School of Fine Arts (as it was then called), published in The Ministry of Art (1914):

The artist is bound and controlled by the laws of his art, but doubly is he bound by his duty to society. If he is prohibited — as he is under penalty of aesthetic damnation — from denying beauty or contenting himself with expedients, or sacrificing any jot or tittle of the integrity of his art to fashion, or vulgarity, or the lust of evil things, still more is he bound to mankind by the law of noblesse oblige, and by the fear of God, to use his art only for the highest ends, to proclaim only the vision of perfection, to cleave only to the revelation of heavenly things.

The architect who abandons himself to the creation of ugliness, however academic may be its cachet; the painter who “paints what he sees” or makes his art the ministry of lust; the sculptor who regards the form and sees nothing of the substance; the poet who glorifies the hideous shape of atheism, or the grossness of the accidents of life; the musician who exalts the morbid and the horrible; the maker of ceremonials who assembles depraved arts in a vain simulacrum of ancient and noble liturgies, — these are but traitors to man and God, and however competent their craft, they are enemies of the people, and to them should be meted the condemnation of their kind.

Those unfamiliar with Cram (whose polemics, he tells us, were delivered with a twinkle in his eye) might consult Matthew Alderman’s fine reflection, or better yet, walk into St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York and gaze at what the exacting standards expressed above could actually accomplish.

He was America’s John Ruskin. But our Ruskin could build.

In his not-to-be-overlooked recent web essay, Rusty Reno reports that critical theory “remains an academic growth industry.” Berkeley’s Martin Jay, a scholar who has spent his career steeped in critical theory, see things differently.

In his review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (History and Theory, Feb. 2009), Jay describes an endless flow of freshly published religion books, such as Religion: Beyond a Concept, a tome which exceeds 1000 pages and is only the first of five projected volumes in a series entitled “The Future of the Religious Past.” After listing similar projects, Jay confesses exasperation with academia’s religious growth industry:

Clearly, whether or not religion can be said to have “returned”–did it ever really go away?–in an age that is no longer fully secular, it has generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well. The cultured despisers of yore–a few well-publicized exceptions like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins aside–have been replaced by a new gaggle of no-less cultured admirers. In the most advanced theoretical circles, it is now possible to speak, in the words of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, of “the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion.” Making one’s way through this thicket of new interpretation and appreciation is not, however, easy, especially for those of us who remain religiously “unmusical,” to borrow Max Weber’s still felicitous phrase.

Reno and Jay are, I think, both right. The questions is whether the burgeoning academic interest in religion will tame religion with critical theory, or let religion do some of the taming.

It appears I need to diversify my Google Reader, subscribe to different journals, or make some new friends, as no one in my circle of electronic, print, or human communication alerted me to the cinematic horsepower of Doubt.

Granted the fault is largely my own, for I didn’t seek out any reviews. Seeing that anti-Catholicism holds its place as America’s last acceptable prejudice, I assumed that the film would be a well orchestrated demolition, where the Catholic Church played the role that the suburbs did in American Beauty: a caricature of a cartoon of a straw man wherein nothing good can be found. I could not have been more wrong.

Granted, Doubt is a well-orchestrated demolition, but what it demolishes is that venerable theological tradition, with a long life in American Protestant and Catholic circles, of liberal Christianity. The film deftly exposes what can actually lurk behind some of the impassioned cries within the church for tolerance and inclusion. The result is that a warm, welcoming, creed-crunching post-conciliar priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) emerges as the villain, and a conservative, rule-abiding, orthodox nun (Meryl Streep) as the hero. In case we might miss that point, one scene juxtaposes the orderly, restrained meals in the convent with the rowdy, gluttonous feasting of Monseigneur Merlot and company. Another scene has the traditional nun open the blinds to let the in the sunlight, to the great annoyance of the liberalizing priest who—despite the dried flowers gently pressed into his breviary—prefers the darkness.

[Spoiler alert] Wisely, the film is laced with just enough ambiguity to enable differing interpretations (how else would it have slipped past studio censors?). For example, what is one to make of the final scene where said nun breaks down in an agony of “doubt” herself? Surely many viewers interpreted this moment the way Christopher Hitchens interpreted the “doubts” of another famous nun. But this facile conclusion is as problematic in Doubt as it was with Mother Teresa.

Make no mistake, our nun’s final breakdown is quite far from the “I’m not sure my religion is true” perplexity that evidently afflicts the film’s liberalizing priest. In the nun’s case, her agony was much thicker, much more real. It even happens in a garden, which may sound familiar: Corruption of the religious hierarchy (who promotes an abusive priest) causes a dedicated reformer intense spiritual suffering, to the point where she desperately asks the assistance of her disciple as she agonizes in a garden? Call it surrendering to doubt, but it sure sounds like the imitatio Christi to me.

I’ll admit I was perplexed at James Panero’s account of the Classical Realist painter Jacob Collins, back in September 2006. Do not renewal movements in art need as many friends as they can get?

But Panero’s assessment is now much clearer to me, for with his new review (in the current New Criterion) of Collins’s effort to revive the Hudson River School, Panero reveals—to me, at least—the root of his earlier complaint. After some effective contextualization, Panero expresses concern that Jacob Collins’s students, “with their small, scrupulous studies of rocks and stumps, may be missing the forest for the trees of genuine Hudson River School landscape.” Why?

The original Hudson River School artists did not go into the wilderness to paint illustrations of the natural world. They went to paint the God they saw manifest in the natural world. . . . Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God? This is the question that Collins and his students must confront. Their studies, no matter how precise, many never come together as a whole without an underlying philosophy that goes beyond mere proficiency.

Self-styled religious reviewers can unfortunately tend toward the Charlemagne-style forcible baptism of the secular efforts of contemporary art. Then along comes Panero: “To understand the Hudson River School today, Collins’s students must learn to see themselves as seminarians as well as painters.”

Philip Bess provided a similar critique of another positive development, the New Urbanism. In his book Till We Have Built Jerusalem, Bess writes,

something seems missing from the polemics and practices of the New Urbanists: viz., a recognition that a certain kind of social order is a prerequisite for traditional urbanism. . . . a social order that appreciates the centrality of the various moral virtues . . . The rationale for a new traditional urbanism . . . cannot be based upon the market appeal of an autonomous traditional aesthetic.

A new Hudson River School and a New Urbanism are admirable cultural turns. But to survive they need more than Christian cheerleading. They need the kind of religiously informed constructive criticism exemplified by Panero and Bess.