The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren

Rating:
Summary: Not what I bet on, more than what I bargained for
Review: I came across this book as I was looking for material to help me write a presentation on the divine hiddenness for a philosophy of religion course, thinking it would be a philosophical discussion on the subject. It isn't, not directly.

It was originally a series of lectures delivered during the thirties, updated and revised for print in the fifties by the author himself. It talks about the role of the artist, the problem (described by Tillich) in modern culture of man being reduced to "a mere thing", the problem where the world has been arranged so that "everything is a means to ends which are themselves means", without any ultimate goal, and how the true artist offers mankind a vision to grow beyond this.

He also explores the relation between the various author's visions/philosophy and the Christian vision/philosophy towards life, at first mostly how it relates to virtue (courage, discipline), to the reality of evil as something that cannot be explained away, but must be confronted (this was hauntingly well done), to the experience of the eternal within the temporal (mostly Eliot), conversion (all the authors), the corrosiveness and destruction of rationalism of any sort (everyone but Hemingway), and redemption (mostly Warren). It wasn't overdone or proselytizing, it was a fair appraisal of the author's themselves (Hemingway is _not_ made into a Christian, etc.). I actually found it very corrective and illuminating for my own understanding of these things, it made them much more concrete, manifest, less obscure and theoretical.

The conclusion again briefly revisits the role of the artist within a society as one who offers you a vision of reality and explores it, helps you encounter it; whereas most of what passes for art today is really kitsch, a narcotic playing on assumed sympathies, entertainment rolled off a factory line that deadens the mind and dulls the wits. He notes how these authors bring the reader to a new encounter with reality, and the author himself did this for me in the process, while whetting my appetite for more of these authors.