A fellow professor and Roman Catholic asked me recently whether I could direct him toward any books that would help him understand the relationship between religious culture and the arts, including architecture. He said that he had asked his university colleagues, and they could not give him any help. He meant more, of course, than that, for many centuries, there were a lot of paintings of religious subjects because the churches were great patrons of the arts. He was asking the truly interesting question regarding cultural modes of thought and action that manifest in painting, sculpture, music, and the kinds of homes, town squares, public buildings, and places of worship men erect. I have no doubt that he was telling the truth about his colleagues and their perplexity, or perhaps their apathy. Meanwhile, in a course on 19th-century literature that I am teaching at Thales College, we have been reading John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, and one of my students, bright and cheerful, sent me a note thanking me for giving him and his classmates such a phenomenal book to read, which he had never heard of before. It was a remarkable note. We are proceeding to Ruskin’s criticism of laissez-faire economics, Unto This Last, to be followed by a series of novels by Dickens, Cooper, Manzoni, Cather, and Undset. (READ MORE: A Broadway Memoir With Midwestern Sensibilities) Now, Ruskin is exactly the sort of author my friend’s colleagues should have been able to name in a heartbeat. His famous chapter from The Stones of Venice, “The Nature of the Gothic,” is an analysis of a kind of architecture that is not simply Christian in its subject but deeply and even unconsciously Christian in its execution, and specifically northern European in penchant for ruggedness. I told him, then, to look up Ruskin, and Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, and a few other works, for starters. What caused me to forget Henry Adams’ Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, I don’t know. But I did also say that, to judge from the 19th-century magazines I collect and read, this connection between a culture’s religion and its art was a very common subject of study. After all, Englishmen and Americans were exploring the globe, meeting up with tribes that had had no contact with the wide world, and opening up trade with every nation under the sun. They very much wanted to learn about the people they met: think of Kipling’s sympathetic treatment of the competing religions in India, in Kim. You may well wonder why a regular reader of one of my favorite journals, the Century Magazine, would have been better instructed in the question my friend had in mind, than are university professors whose fields should feature that question as central. There are, I think, three principal causes. Each one of them involves a brain drain, that is, the diversion of native intellectual power away from fruitful fields of learning and into the salt-sands, respectively, of careerism, presentism, and political noise. First, it is simply impossible to become deeply familiar with a culture overnight, and that is especially true if we are talking about its holy books, its modes of worship, and all the customs that arise from a distinct way of looking at who man is, where he has come from, and where he is going. We are not talking about information that you can stuff a database with. We are talking about the kind of knowledge you get when you walk with someone for many miles, for many years; the slow and patient waiting upon a revelation; the habits of mind you discover only when those habits have, in part, become your own, or at least when they become imaginatively yours, had you been born where and when your companion was born. What was it like to be a mason working at one of the ribs of what was going to be a cathedral, towering far above the plains of Salisbury? You cannot answer that question, indeed you can hardly conceive of the question unless your imagination has led you to the threshold of a world that is not yours, and worlds are not explored in a day. What language did he speak? What did he celebrate, and when, and how? What was the relationship between him and his masters, or between him and the bishop and the priests who oversaw the raising of that house of God? What did he see from his perch in the air? What other artisans were working alongside him? Where did they get the stone from? Why did they want to do what they were doing? (READ MORE: Film Noir Made Me Conservative) What requires such patience to study will, in our universities, not be studied. Patience makes you wise. It does not get you employed. But impatience encourages a tendency, already all too powerful among people of our time, to dismiss what comes to us from the past. For the past is a foreign land, even another world. Those who truly value cultural diversity must needs cherish the past and do much intellectual archaeology, not to mention the more material kinds, simply to get a fair view of it from afar. The hope is not just that you will find this or that quaint article to put on display, as at a curio shop. It is that you will begin to recover, remember, and revive: If the human memory is that time-transcending and age-amalgamating power that lends us a distant similarity to the timeless and all-provident God, human forgetfulness is as much a part of us as age and decay are, and perhaps it is well for us that it should be so, in that each generation sets out on its journey afresh, built up by the past and yet not overburdened by it. But to cut yourself off from the past is like undertaking the journey without provisions, without the wisdom of those who have gone before you, without their many examples of failure and success, and without any clear idea of where you are going and why you would want to get there.  You are then an easy mark for the confident man who takes you by the way: and in our time, that man’s name is Modernity, and he will rob you blind. If you believe I am exaggerating, I ask you to consider, for example, all of the art and architecture wrought by people who despised the past and taught others to go and do likewise, and to see it as a colossal and long-continued swindle; and then to take the same insight and apply it to education, politics, theology, poetry, and any human enterprise loftier than the production of cheap goods to be consumed and forgotten. And that brings us to the third cause, the third reason why nobody at the university could point my friend toward someone like John Ruskin. We have traded the vistas of eternity, which are real, for the phantasms of the political future, which are purely imaginary, and often downright delusory, as they flit from one half-mad dream to another. It is not that Ruskin never wrote about politics or the economy. He did so all the time. It is just that when you have no eternal aim, you must have a temporal one, or you will go mad or cease to act at all, and if your aim is merely temporal, it becomes urgent; because otherwise, it will seem as if each year of not drawing closer to the new political heaven is a year wasted. Contemplation gives way to action, of a peculiarly busy and meddlesome sort, as music gives way to noise, and prayer gives way to demand upon demand. Art that is wholly in the service of politics has lost its soul; you might as well imagine husbands and wives who go to bed wholly to make more citizens for the nation; or clergymen who pray to a social cause but not to God, in whom they do not believe. (READ MORE: Gustav Klimt’s Last Painting Was Among His Best) This turn to political action does not sharpen the mind or deepen the soul. It does exercise the lungs, though, and thus it lends the illusion of consequence. You do not have time to consider how much you do not know, or to fall in love with a field you want to know better and better, for its own sake and regardless of any use to which it might be put. Pump blood to an angry face, and drain the brain; thus will you make your way into higher education. The post Higher Ed Can’t Study Art Because It Drained the Brains appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.