C. S. Lewis on bad hymns
Found by Joel Zartman
"I question whether the badness of a really bad hymn can ordinarily be so irrelevant to devotion as the badness of a bad devotional picture. Because the hymn uses words, its badness will, to some degree, consist in confused or erroneous thought and unworthy sentiment."
From "Christianity and Literature"
posted by Ryan Martin at 2/19/2006 02:02:00 PM
2 Comments:
That essay has been really helfpul to me. I especially like what he says about originality, innovation, creativity and so on.
"But I think there is so great a difference of temper that a man whose mind was at one with the mind of the New Testament would not, indeed could not, fall into the language which most critics now adopt.
"Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a 'moral genius' or a 'spiritual genius' thus insinuating that his vitue or spirituality is 'creative or 'original'.
"...an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
"...above all, it would be opposed to literature as self expression."
This was one of the essays that first got the wheels turning in my head that my garlockian ideas about music were terribly deficient. I was never quite able to put a finger on what it was until I stumbled upon Unk's and Dissidens' blogs.
Lewis is often very helpful in these matters.
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