PZ's Picks - S&H Jan/Feb 2006

Now here’s a howdy-do! In general, I like to stick with “low brow” when it comes to making recommendations. So we circle down there with Los Straitjackets and “? and the Mysterians” and movies like Cabinet of Caligari, the 1962 version. But sometimes still, one can draw down a thing or two from the heights. Mendelssohn’s music for Antigone is stirring, and Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” still delights and touches.

At all costs, avoid “middle brow.” This means you steer away from anything dating from the ‘70s (‘cept The Trampps)! At all costs, avoid middle brow.

Yet I wish to commend to you today some very high pieces of art. The author, Leo Tolstoy, would not have referred to them as high art. This is because he changed his style after his conversion in 1876. Tolstoy forswore his earlier work, and focused on short stories that were Christian parables. These stories are masterpieces even under the old Adam, for they are tellingly and bravely written. But they are actually composed under the new Aeon. They are just so filled and rooted with Grace, and guilt atoned for, and acts of love and selflessness in the midst of our hard and merciless world.

I love the late Tolstoy.

Here is what to read. All of these picks are easily available and mostly in paperback. “The Destruction of Hell and its Restoration,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb, is late Tolstoy, and tells the truth concerning “church” and original sin and the devil, in a once-you’ve-read-ityou- can-think-of-nothing-else kind of way. Then read “Where Love Is, God Is” in How Much Land Does a Man Need? And Other Stories (just out in a crisp new Penguin paperback), with its story within a story concerning an old grandmother who is robbed of an apple by a little boy. Sayonara, retributive justice!

Then you have got to read, also in the same Penguin paperback, “The Two Old Men.” This is Tolstoy’s dramatization of St. John 4:19-23. It is a completely successful and overwhelmingly original parable concerning true worship. If you have ever visited Jerusalem, it will have particular meaning for you.

Finally, get a copy of his late treatise on aesthetics, entitled “What Is Art?” This is his notorious attack on “counterfeit art,” ripping into Raphael, Beethoven, and many other sublime “sacred cows.” You may not agree with a single word of it, which Tolstoy regarded as his last and final word concerning Christian art. But what you will remember in any event is the list he gives of examples of “true art”: Dickens, Hugo, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy gave me my reading list for the next six months. And, if you substitute the word “preaching” for the word “art” throughout the length of this long but very readable essay, you will also have just about the best textbook on homiletics you could possibly get.

Those are my picks this time. We buzzed right up to the top of the mountain. But next time, hey, let’s go back to ... The Astounding She Monster (1958).