Admiring The Tree of Life

I highly recommend Terrence Malick’s remarkable new film, The Tree of Life, winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and featuring excellent performances by Jessica Chastain, Brad Pitt, and Sean Penn, not to mention the three young actors who play the O’Brien boys.

The Tree of Life is a difficult film to summarize, and admittedly my thoughts on it are far from crystallized. It might be best to call it the story of two spiritual quests. The first is that of Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), a woman raising three boys in 1950s and 60s Waco, Texas, with her husband (Brad Pitt). The second quest is that of the O’Brien’s eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), a quest begun in boyhood and continuing as he reflects back upon his childhood in the present time, especially upon his relationship with his father.

Mrs. O’Brien’s quest recapitulates themes from the Book of Job, beginning with the news of the death of her middle son, R.L, at the age of nineteen (which takes place sometime in the 1960s, from causes which are never revealed). Indeed, Malick begins the film with a quotation from Job over black:

Where were you when I laid the

foundation of the earth?...

when the morning stars sang together

and all the heavenly beings

shouted for joy?

(Job 38: 4, 7)

Jack’s quest takes its impetus, in his present middle age, from a general sense of dryness and dislocation in his life—including a certain emotional estrangement from his wife. But as we experience his thoughts drifting back to his childhood, we also see him grappling with the memory of his dead brother, as well as with his memories of his demanding, distant, sometimes cruel, father. At one point, in voiceover, middle-aged Jack asks, apparently of God, “My brother…my mother…did they lead me to You?”

Early in The Tree of Life, Malick, who both wrote and directed the film, sounds a contrast between the greediness and self-absorption of nature, understood as fallen nature, and the selflessness of grace—seeming to link the former with Mr. O’Brien’s character, and the latter with the warm, loving and childlike Mrs. O’Brien.  

One of the most interesting features of the film is the approximately twenty-minute sequence showing the creation of the world (including dinosaurs!)—in which we witness God “laying the foundation of the earth.” It is a very moving sequence, though it will also try the patience of moviegoers who expect their stories to progress at Hollywood speed. Yet it is interesting to see Malick’s attempt to give his seemingly small story of family relationships eternal significance by setting it against this cosmic backdrop. In a way it reminded me of similar moves made by Thornton Wilder in Act III of Our Town and in The Skin of Our Teeth.

Are the spiritual quests of Mrs. O’Brien and Jack Christian? They seem to be. The O’Brien family is shown practicing at what looks to be an Episcopalian church, and trying to live out their faith within their home. An image of Christ is shone in one of the stained glass windows at church just as Mrs. O’Brien, in voiceover, is making an appeal to God to help her make sense of her suffering. The general imagery that we find in the film is definitively Christian.

Such as the images of the Fall. In the film’s longest section we follow Jack through various adventures of his boyhood where he encounters the reality of his ability to sin. But there are images of Reconciliation, too. Even in Jack’s boyhood Mr. O’Brien apologizes to Jack for his failures as his father, and Malick also shows us middle-aged Jack on the phone with his father, telling him how he also thinks of his dead brother every day and how he is sorry for some rudeness to his father in an earlier conversation.

Finally, there is the climactic sequence with middle-aged Jack on the beach, a sequence that appears to take us inside Jack’s contemplation, in which he steps through a door into—Heaven?—and where he meets his family members, including his brother, in poignant scenes of reunion and ultimate beatitude.

So perhaps in choosing a tree as the central metaphor for his film, Malick is thinking of the tree as an image of life, growth, and continuity through time; but perhaps he is also thinking along the lines of the following thoughts, set forth by Fr. Anthony Thorold in a little devotional book called Conversation with God, published by Sheed & Ward in 1940. The chapter in which this passage is found is called “The Tree of Life”:

The Tree of Life was planted on Mount Cavalry by the Roman soldiers. It is the sacred sign of salvation radiating God’s Light and Truth which will lead us away from evil, and guide and goad us onwards towards our goal.

Still, as I say, Malick’s film will test the patience of those, like me, used to a steady diet of Hollywood cinema. Though there is a narrative, it unfolds quite slowly, and impressionistically, and out of chronological order, with Malick depending far more on gesture and imagery and voiceover than on dialogue and conventional plot points.

And yet, The Tree of Life repays attention. As I watched it I thought of these lines from Iris Murdoch’s essay, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” in which she says about beauty:

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

Malick does not give us kestrels, but in the loving, meditative, prayerful images he offers to us of the O’Brien family, he gives us a film that does shake us out of our everyday frame of mind, and takes us into territory where few films take us today, and even fewer still with much persuasiveness: into the world of the spirit.
   

St. Thomas Aquinas--Poet

One of the treasures of this Feast of Corpus Christi is the office written for it by St. Thomas Aquinas, which includes such masterworks of Catholic poetry as the Pange Lingua and the Lauda Sion Sequence. Of this poetry G.K. Chesterton wrote in his little biography of St. Thomas, The Dumb Ox:

All sanctity is secrecy; and his sacred poetry was really a secretion; like a pearl in a very tightly closed oyster….

But the composer of the Corpus Christi service was not merely what even the wild and woolly would call a poet; he was what the most fastidious would call an artist. His double function recalls the double activity of some great Renaissance craftsman, like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, who would work on the outer wall, planning and building the fortifications of the city; and then retire into the inner chamber to carve or model some cup or casket for a reliquary.

The Corpus Christi Office is like some old musical instrument, quaintly and carefully inlaid with many colored stones and metals….”

For more on the history of St. Thomas’s Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi, as well as excerpts from the poetry itself in both Latin and English translation, enjoy this short piece by James Chegwidden.


Jesu, Shepherd, Bread
indeed,

Thou take pity on our need!
Thou Thy flock in safety
feed,

Thou protect us, Thou us lead,
To the Lord of Heavenly Life.

Amen.
(St. Thomas Aquinas, Lauda Sion Sequence)

   

Impressive, Charming--But Is It Art?

Australian Aelita Andre is one of the most talked-about young painters on the world art scene right now.

Her abstract, surrealist paintings have invited comparisons to Picasso, Pollock, Dali, and Kandinsky.

She’s just wrapped up a solo exhibition at the Agora Gallery in New York—and a year ago her work was the subject of another solo exhibition in Hong Kong, where she painted live in front of 60 Chinese and International media crews.

Her website features a comment by Australian art critic Robert Nelson, who observes that “Aelita’s art is an antidote to the oppressive qualities of expectation in western painting.”

Her canvases have sold for as much as $24,000.

Aelita Andre is four years old.

Her paintings first appeared in a group exhibition when she was two.

Is Aelita Andre making art? Check out her website. The pictures of her paintings shown there certainly reveal a burgeoning artistic talent. But is the work of a child three years shy of the conventional age of reason capable of making a genuine work of art? 

To help consider the question of what counts as a work of art, and to launch our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies, let’s turn to a distinction that Jacques Maritain makes in Chapter II of Art and Scholasticism, a chapter entitled “The Speculative Order and the Practical Order.”

The two phrases in this title will sound strange to those not used to reading the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. What do they mean?

The “speculative order” and the “practical order” refer to two modes of activity of the human intellect or mind.

In the speculative order, the mind is active purely for the sake of knowing something. The word “speculative” is derived from the Latin verb speculare, which means “to look at,” or “to gaze upon” (speculum, the noun, means mirror).

When we go to a gallery to enjoy the paintings, watch a movie or read a novel, or when we engage in a scientific inquiry, our minds are active in the speculative mode. The sole end of the activity is to know—“to look at” some bit of reality, not for what we can do with it, but for its own sake.

Maritain speaks of speculative activity as immanent to the mind. Which is to say, speculative activity remains “within” the mind. It does not of itself flow into the world in order to transform it.

The opposite is the case with the human mind in its practical mode. When we cook, or clean, build a birdhouse or a computer network, our minds are not engaged with reality simply so that we can look at it, but so that we can do something with it.

  

Of course, it’s possible that something that we speculate upon can later be used for some practical purpose. The study of physics, for example, is in and of itself a speculative activity, but when an engineer puts physical principles to use in the building of a bridge, truths arrived at in the mind’s speculative mode are pressed into service for a practical goal.

Nonetheless, there is a clear distinction between the human intellect in its speculative mode, and in its practical mode.

What does this have to do with art?

In Chapter II of Art and Scholasticism, Maritain follows St. Thomas in saying that “Art belongs to the practical order. It is turned towards action [the mind in its practical mode], not towards the pure interiority of knowledge [the mind in its speculative mode]” (p. 6*).

So think of the simplest work of art—without yet making any distinction between a piece of useful art, or “skill,” or a work of “fine” art. Take, for example, a birthday cake. A birthday cake is a work of art—some birthday cakes more so than others. It is a product of the human mind exercised upon suitable matter: eggs, flour, butter, more butter, sugar, etc. Art belongs to the practical order, says Maritain. It is something made by mind in its practical mode.

A Shakespearean tragedy, or a Mozart symphony, is in essentials no different. Hamlet is a product of the human mind exercised upon the matter of human language, gesture, voice, costume, etc. Hamlet thus belongs to the practical order.

Now that we’ve defined art as an activity of the mind’s practical mode, let’s return to Aelita Andre. Is this no doubt very talented little girl making art?

The distinction between the mind’s speculative and practical modes does not itself settle the question. But it does help us clarify the question by enabling us to ask: is Aelita Andre capable of exercising her mind in its practical mode, such that her paintings can be called works of art?

I believe the commonsense answer is that Aelita Andre, while capable of exercising her practical mind to a certain, in many ways impressive, degree, is still not yet capable of exercising her mind to the degree of maturity that characterizes a person who really owns his or her actions.

Try this analogy. When Aelita Andre disobeys her parents’ commands, or when she obeys them, I am sure she is either reprimanded or praised. Even though she has not yet reached the “age of reason,” she is treated, insofar as she is capable, as an apprentice moral agent. Small children are what we might call proto-moral agents. They are moral agents “under construction.” No one would think of bringing a four year-old to trial for stealing (that is for fully mature moral agents). But nonetheless we reprimand the child who steals, or praise the child who does good, because his or her reason is capable to a certain degree of being formed by our negative or positive responses.

In a similar way, just as a small child is capable of proto-morality, Aelita Andre’s practical mind is capable of proto-art. I wouldn’t call her paintings art properly speaking, just as I wouldn’t call her obedience to her parents virtue properly speaking.

This is not to take anything away from Aelita Andre’s remarkable gifts. But it is to reserve the term “art” for mind in its fully mature, practical mode.

Why is such reservation desirable? Why should we care how old our artists are? We should care because we should see art as a human, that is rational, activity--and rationality is a power made to grow into a mature state. Art is more than the making of marks—even very colorful, expressive, charming marks—on a canvas.

If we fail to see art as human in this way, then we shall start thinking that art can be made by monkeys or pigs or dogs. I wouldn’t call the paintings made by monkeys, pigs and dogs, art at all, except in a purely equivocal sense. A non-rational creature—and yes, Fido is a non-rational creature—is simply not capable of art.

   

That the artworld takes Aelita Andre’s paintings as art without qualification is a measure of how far our high culture has fallen from the commonsense approach to art—a human approach to art which grounds it in reason—that we find in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and in Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism.

Or do you disagree?

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).