During the recent fracas it was suggested that some of us consider Johann Sebastian Bach the fifth Evangelist. I suspect someone was just trying to make a joke: we all know that Thomas was the fifth Evangelist. That would make Bach the sixth Evangelist.

I believe that what we have witnessed yet again was an attempt at desecration; since these people can't make desecration attractive, they try very hard to make it look spiritual. To rank Bach above Fanny Crosby is to mistake him for an Evangelist, obviously. That's just simple logic.

I'm fairly certain I've given this link before but to drive home a different point. In his third paragraph Roger Scruton compares art to jokes, and should any of the SI gang find this post, maybe they can learn something about art while studying joke-making. I recommend his comparison should you have to explain to someone at a Bible college how art can be considered good.

I mentioned a long time ago now that everyone lives with goodness, beauty and truth even while they deny the existence of transcendent things. These people don't choose what is bad on principle; they may prefer what is actually bad, but that's because they fooled themselves into thinking the junk was good. Just ask them. You won't get far into the conversation before you realize that it is not virtue they desired, it was just something they thought was fetching and they confused that with goodness.

I mean really, who would try to sell you an original Rembrandt by saying that it is preferred by 98% of the people polled? No one who understands beauty.

It seems to me, however, that the democratic attitude is in conflict with itself. It is impossible to live as though there are no aesthetic values, while living a real life among real human beings. Manners, clothes, speech, and gestures -- all require careful attention to the way things look. In every sphere of human life, from laying a table to giving a funeral speech, aesthetic choices are both necessary and noticed. Without them we cannot solve the vast problem of coordination that arises when a myriad private individuals crowd into a single public space. Hence, in the democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden, something that we must live up to, a world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness and imperfection of our own improvised lives. It is perched like an owl on our shoulders, while we try to hide our pet rodents in our clothes. The temptation is to turn on it and shoo it away.

Here we see another motive for the desire to desecrate. It is a desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself, so that it no longer seems like a judgment of us. This you see all the time in children -- the delight in disgusting noises, words, allusions, which helps them to distance themselves from that adult world that judges them, and whose authority they wish to deny. That ordinary refuge of children from the burden of adult judgment has become the refuge of adults from their culture. By using art as an instrument of desecration they neutralize its claims: it loses its authority, and becomes a fellow conspirator in the plot against ideals.

This demotic impulse we see repeatedly indulged is really very anti-religious. Religion is bound up with humility, even amongst the noble pagans. It is about admiration and wonder, and a pious man is properly driven by beauty and wonder and virtue to gratitude. St. Paul considered ingratitude a fundamental vice.

It seems odd to me that one might be ennobled by a consideration of the virtues of duty, self-sacrifice, courage, wisdom and justice but find faith, hope and charity inadequate for spiritual enlargement.

Perhaps church is not the ideal place to cultivate degeneracy. Maybe this indifference toward the excellent and the exaltation of the common is simply a mark of decadence. Maybe the groundlings and the philistines are just trying to hide their rodents.

In that case maybe Bach was not an Evangelist after all; maybe he is a Judge.

Now wouldn't that be funny?