Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Review by Andrew J. Zwerneman
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Gibbs, Joshua. Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Circe Institute, 2023.
In reading Joshua Gibbs’ Love What Lasts, I was reminded of “The Forge” by Seamus Heaney. The poet writes of a smithy, hammering away at the art passed down to him from a bygone day and incredulous toward the world around him:
All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music. Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.[1]
Joshua Gibbs sees what the smithy sees. His response to a world passing by is to hammer away and make a spirited case for lasting things, a case for the cultural continuum so difficult to hold. Through his probing lens, culture means art mostly but also encompasses religion, politics, education, morals, and customs. The author sets off a classroom full of sparks and percussive light that delineates his field of inquiry into before and after. There is before Shakespeare when human nature does not change, as we allegedly find it in Homer’s Iliad (I say allegedly, wondering about Book XXIV), and after Shakespeare when it seems to do so with alarming speed. Before the French Revolution, Gibbs reminds us, cathedrals were at the center of civic life; afterward, human will seemed to snatch crozier and scepter for itself. There is even a before and after Joshua Gibbs, the demarcation formed by the moment he awakened to lasting things and the need for the cultivation of judgment and taste.
Sometimes that framework strikes the reader as incomplete. One notes in the before realm a repeated invocation of monarchy. In his after, Gibbs neglects America’s representative politics; hence, there is no mention of the Founding’s self-evident truths or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s invocation of them in his “I have a dream” speech.
By representative, I mean what Eric Voegelin means in his New Science of Politics: that beyond institutions that represent the people, there are cultural, even institutional, representations of the sacred in the temporal realm. I’m thinking here of the Preamble to the Constitution; rights understood within—not divorced from—the moral order; Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speech, with their calls for seeing the life we have together in sacred terms; and, King’s invocation of scripture, Socrates, Christian martyrdom, and natural law theory found in Augustine and Aquinas. These examples denote lasting things among us, things we know and love that free us to love the life we have and shore it up. One wonders why they hold no place in Gibbs’ considerations.
Still, one has to admire Gibbs’ spirit. He reads the field combatively and hopefully. He is combative because the ephemeral loves of base culture and the reductionist loves of secular culture would consume us. His hope rests on the observation that gods of either kind of diminished culture are neither reasonable nor finally the God of the most lasting things; they cannot and will not prevail. Still, humans are free, and they can choose well or poorly. So that his readers do not concede the field, the author calls them to love what they ought to love with intelligence. And that requires them to see the field correctly, to know true loves, and to cultivate them. Gibbs encourages his readers to reason about things that are not purely rational as such but are illuminated by right thinking: Reason and faith meet each other, knowledge meets love, truth meets beauty. Follow that kind of reasoning, and taste will emerge beyond the purely subjective as true because the subject has reasoned well.
The author is a teacher at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia, one of the nation’s leading classical Christian schools and a veritable haven of lasting things. From his post as a humanities teacher, he does far more than peer out from his forge to see the passing world as the smithy does without comment. On the contrary, the man has a lot to say about a wide range of topics. Just under three hundred pages, this book is neither a quick read nor one for readers who wish to skim through a discourse on what matters in life.
Pedagogically, Gibbs especially cautions his readers against mediocrity. Toward that end, he intends his readers to adopt two measurements: the one is quality, the other is time. Each is intimately connected to the other. What is truly good lasts; what is not, does not. His readers are tasked with thinking hard about what is intrinsically good in a book, a song, a film, or a painting; how that causes it to last as either commonly or uncommonly good, versus mediocre; and why choosing what lasts is worthwhile. In other words, his readers are called to hold onto classic things, the great standouts in their respective times and the ones that endure across time: classic rock or Christmas preparations (common), classic books and classic works of art (uncommon). If you love lasting things, he argues, you live intelligently and happily. And why, for goodness sake, would you not live so? Why concede to the shackles of mediocre culture when you can know the uncommon freedom offered by Milton and Mozart? On a more common scale, why choose Jurassic Park when Bicycle Thieves is just another click away or one shelf down in the DVD collection?
Gibbs invites the kind of thinking Sir Roger Scruton calls judgment: an assessment of what is genuinely humane and what is not; a meeting of what the artist or writer sees and frees us to see, on the one hand, and the judgment we bring to the work, on the other. If a work shocks one’s sensibilities or by its banality flattens one’s spirit, we don’t see more of life but less of it; and that is not freedom. If one looks hard, what’s wrong is measurably discernible. If, by contrast, we simply ride along for the latest from Netflix or uncritically accept what the gallery curators indulge, true judgment won’t develop.
Here is a good representation of Gibbs’ thinking, a practical but insightful example of how to judge rightly between things great because they are useful and things great because they are beautiful:
The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth, and it has been functional for more than eight hundred years (110).
Now go with him a step further. Take the investment in stadiums and our culture’s unhealthy obsession with sports, and write that large to encompass the music of Ed Sheeran, inscrutable abstract paintings, blockbuster movies, and other wildly lucrative “art” forms. The field as Gibbs reads it starts to come into greater clarity. Too many of the goods being bought and sold today, while powerfully alluring, are simply ugly and fleeting.
Lesson learned? Pursue what is beautiful and lasting and see how good it is to live that way, to love what lasts. In his chapter on Beauty, Gibbs extends the benefits of good taste into a second kind of economic value, this time noting that beautiful things—because they are lasting—cultivate a kind of character in society’s members. Like a dollar, which turns over multiple times in an economy, character shaped by uncommon culture reinvests itself in others:
[B]eautiful things are repositories of generosity that can be perpetually drawn upon. . . Good taste entails the enjoyment of beauty, which is a gratuity of being, while bad taste is a spiritual malady that cannot help cultivating stinginess. When people prefer things which do not last over things that do, they invariably create chaotic societies where no long-term cultural project is possible. On a cultural level, ugliness does not follow poverty so much as poverty follows ugliness. Bad taste is far, far more expensive than good taste (127).
Love What Lasts will strike many readers as a welcome response to the constant pressure to buy what falls short of the best of culture. The book bears a clear linear movement, something akin to a tight syllogism or a succinct but comprehensive profession of faith. One thing leads to another. You can see the line of thought here:
When St. Paul teaches the Corinthians to ‘set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth,’ he is not implying that heavenly things and earthly things are naturally at odds with one another. . . Common art prepares us for uncommon art and uncommon art prepares us for the halcyon joys of Glory (271-272).
Some would likely welcome something less linear, a wider scope by which to see our times. While Gibbs’ scope reaches far back in history for the adequacies of classical sources and far into the current world for the inadequacies of its art, something is missing: specifically, a deeper response to the unease that life is passing by. What I have in mind is allowing our hold on lasting things to be formed by a modest but authentic wellspring of recent and thoroughly modern works that situate us in the world, which is the welcome role of culture. They are works that work us through modernity’s predicaments.
One wonders why there is no consideration of Arvo Pärt’s works that constitute an important break from the kind of soulless atonality that befuddles many but the smallest elite. In a similar vein, why not consider Gorecki’s Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrows, based on three lamentations that speak to those who suffer now in this world and include us listeners in that shared suffering?
What of the twentieth-century artist, Ivan Mestrovic, whom Rodin declared the greatest sculptor of their generation? Contemplate his Pieta and see clearly an exercise in modern art as evidenced in the zig-zag lines that organize the subjects and their exaggerated physicality. Yet, the Pieta is profoundly, enduringly humane; its arrangement offers us a path into the redemptive suffering of Christ and into the tender, arduous mission of the little church constituted by Nicodemus and the two Marys. In the hold the three have on the one, we experience the depths of the person.
For all his critical references to American movies, Gibbs might have considered the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life, and A Hidden Life, all three of which, while clearly stories of our distinctively modern woes, are redemptive stories within and through modern life. Like Dostoevsky’s novels, Malick’s films are restoratively experiential. In this world we have been given, we experience the connection between worlds—between the present and the past, this world and the next—and between one another. That connectedness is not a line of one thing leading to the next, higher one, but lines altogether removed, a veil pulled back, a revelation by which fleshy hearts experience eternal love.
I closed Gibbs’s book thinking of the smithy’s appearance on this side of the inner sanctum, then of his return to his final, fading days behind his closed door. Love What Lasts resists the final fading of life as we have known it. It does so in the form of holding on to what is measurable and certain, to what perhaps cannot fade because it is arguable as true and good.
I say perhaps because the hold offered appears not to be within and through the world in which we live, at least not through an embrace of the world today as the indispensable field on which we cultivate our “shape and music.” That disconnection to the world, like the door closed between the forge and life passing by the forge, makes the hold on lasting things more tenuous than if one were to see the inherent connection made visible by a wider, sympathetic vision.
Andrew J. Zwerneman is co-founder and president of Cana Academy. He blogs weekly at www.canaacademy.org and is the author of History Forgotten and Remembered (2020) and The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal (2022).
[1] Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 20.