Faith-Music
All true art is religious. That is to say, true art is sincere in its construction and conceived with explicit knowledge of and/or aimed towards the Almighty. Lesser art is still sincere but lacks the Almighty. Sub-art is deliberately insincere and aimed downwards. Non-art does not concern itself with these two elements.
It is very difficult for some to accept that there are fundamental differences in art which reside outside the perceiving body; beauty, in fact, may have very little to do with the eye of the beholder. These are not merely matters of taste, preference, education, or temperament. The beautiful in art, which is enigmatic of the religious and thus realized most fully in faith-music, is a fundamental phenomenon that exists far above the human plane. Becoming aware of this phenomenon is possible by most anyone. In general, if one cannot realize it, it is due to sub-influences which have disaffected or corrupted the perceiving source away from the beautiful.
Most of what is being digested regularly would fall into the "lesser art" category; we could more easily label this category entertainment. It may elicit pleasure in the perceiving body; it may be charming, sincere, well-made, memorable, and even moving in a limited way. But lesser art itself is incapable of elevating to the next plane; it cannot disclose the created order or propel one upward. It can console the personality, but it cannot transfigure. Sub-art, far worse, drives the person lower, and quickly.
I remember becoming aware of all this very young, before I had any knowledge of aesthetics and only limited education of the Almighty. It is difficult to describe in words what exactly transpired in my youth, but the response to true art contains varying levels of awe, quiet, egoic death, reverence, consolation, gratitude, purification, rebirth, and the sudden realization that the total sum of creation is beyond human comprehension. One does not simply "like" the work. One is acted upon by it. The self becomes less interesting, the routine machinery of appetite, vanity, irony, and social performance falls silent. What remains is not just emotion, but the revealing of truth.
Intellectually, much later I came to the realization that most of the music I loved was from a world in which the sacred was not peripheral, but assumed. The composers I had been drawn to were not merely skilled craftsmen or expressive personalities, but men formed by a civilization in which God, creation, judgment, mercy, beauty, and eternity were living realities. This was true even when the subject was not explicitly sacred. Just as a great painting need not depict Christ to belong to Christendom, the greatest music need not be liturgical to carry the mark of faith. It had been formed in a world that still knew, or at least still remembered, that beauty descends from above. And so, faith-music.
Faith-music is the form in which this is most directly encountered. It is not simply music which is plainly religious, nor music written for direct liturgical use, though it may be both. Faith-music is music that knows, either explicitly or by deep inheritance, that the world is not self-explaining. It proceeds from the assumption that there is an order above man, and that the task of art is not to flatter the personality but to make said order audible. In faith-music, sincerity is not enough; sincerity must be directionally positioned.
There are any number of musical examples to illustrate these differences, but it is faster to see the division visually:
True art: Titian,
Assumption of the Virgin
Lesser art: Helen Allingham,
A Mother and Child Entering a Cottage
Sub-art: Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain
The Titian is not merely beautiful, but beauty ordered toward ascent. The lower world, the human world, strains upward while the heavenly world receives; the whole picture is organized around the drama of elevation. It is not to be decoded, mocked, or placed in quotation marks. The Allingham, by contrast, is pleasant, sincere, and domestic. There is no sneer in it (and it is not false), but neither is there revelation. It belongs to the lower, homely register of human comfort. Duchamp's Fountain is something else entirely. It is not an inferior attempt at beauty, but a refusal of the beautiful, a complete act of negation.
Similarly, with music. A true art example would be the Eighth Symphony of Bruckner. Eight is not religious because Bruckner wrote sacred works, nor because we can attach Catholic biography to the score. It is religious because the music itself is built as an encounter with judgement, order, mercy, and finality. Bruckner's music has the peculiar quality of making the listener feel that the visible world is only the outer surface of something much larger.
A lesser art example would be Rubber Soul by The Beatles. This is not an insult—the album is intelligent, tuneful, and sincere. But it remains within the human circle: romance, personality, style, mood, youth, cleverness, charm. It is art as human expression, not art as metaphysical disclosure. It does not aim downward, but neither does it truly ascend.
Sub-art can be found in music that deliberately seeks to deform the listener: music built around nihilism, desecration, cruelty, degradation, or even violence. Certain forms of metal, the more openly corrupt branches of rap, and other genres make this obvious, not because they are violent or vulgar, but because their spiritual aim is plainly descending. The point is not merely to describe darkness; true art can describe darkness with terrible power. The point is to enthrone darkness, to invite the listener to participate in it, and to call that participation liberation.
Sub-art proliferated in the 20th century. What went wrong here was not simply that artists became experimental; experimentation is not the problem. The problem was the gradual loss of metaphysical confidence, followed by the decision to turn said loss into a doctrine. Beauty became suspect, sincerity became embarrassing, and greatness became oppressive. Tradition became material to be ironized, inverted, dismantled, or placed in quotation marks. Eventually everything was about something rather than being something. A painting was no longer a painting; it was a critique of painting. A symphony was no longer a symphony; it was a problematization or complication of the symphonic form.
In all this we find a great disease: the inability to kneel. Everything must be mediated by skepticism, theory, inversion, or performance. The artist no longer stands before creation as a servant, but above it as a clever manipulator of signs—the downward aim becomes inevitable. Once the Almighty is removed, and beauty is treated as naive, sincerity as antiquated, what remains is appetite, politics, novelty, shock, and self-expression.
This is why faith-music will always be here. It reminds us that true art is not decorative, therapeutic, sociological, or entertaining. At its highest, art is a mode of communion. It gives form to the intuition that man is not the measure of all things, and that the soul is capable of being enlarged, judged, purified, and lifted. Lesser art may comfort us along the road, and sub-art may drag us off it. But true art, and especially faith-music, reveals that the road itself is ordered toward eternity. It aligns us, if only for a moment, to the eternal vibration.