Look at the moon, not at the finger

Look at the moon, not at the finger

Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

I first heard of the Abbé Mugnier (1853-1944) in an essay Somerset Maugham wrote about the journals of the French writer Paul Léautaud. The Abbé, in his shabby soutane, was a fixture in Parisian literary circles. He knew everyone and just about everything about everyone. Leautaud was outspokenly anti-clerical and, finding himself in the company of the gentle abbé, took advantage of the situation to mouth as loudly as possible all manner of blasphemies. Unperturbed, the Abbé Mugnier whispered to him. “God will forgive you, M. Leautaud, because you have loved animals.” Leautaud at once became silent, embarrassed to realize the Abbé knew that the cranky atheist often went without food in order to feed stray dogs and cats.

I would come upon the Abbé’s name from time to time, but didn’t really know much about him until I read Louis Auchincloss’s “The Abbé and the Great World” in the New Criterion. This snippet gives a clear idea of the sort of man he was:

As priest the Abbé was always compassionate, certainly to a fault in the eyes of his fellow clerics. Once, after hearing a peculiarly horrid confession, he left the booth and hurried after the departing sinner to embrace him and exclaim: “Pardoning is not enough — we must love!” He had to believe in hell, he told his parishioners — it was dogma — but he didn’t have to believe there was anyone in it. Those who liked to imagine the infernal region as filled with the damned conceived of a god in their own image.

I thought of this recently when I came upon a remark, coincidentally enough, by Somerset Maugham: “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” In other words, it must be alive, and not something that has calcified into empty protocols and brittle gestures.

Moreover, a tradition, whether religious or literary, must be made a part of oneself, and not simply assented to intellectually or imitated formally. Obviously, it is a lot easier to insist upon the niceties of dogma and ritual than to do as the Abbé did and live a life informed by goodness and kindness. Likewise, it is easier to master the formalities of verse than to feel the connection between those formalities and living, spoken language.

This is not to argue against either the commandments or prosody. It is merely to remind that, while rules and rituals may serve a given truth, they and the truth are not identical. As the Zen masters say, when someone points to the moon, look at the moon, not at the finger.

This is what makes it so interesting to compare the early work of a great artist to the later work. As often as not the early work is more complex, evasive, and difficult. Compare one of Georges Braque’s late, wondrously simple, bird paintings to his earlier cubist works, or Wallace Stevens’s final poems – “The Planet on the Table,” for instance – to, say, “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” Eliot’s Four Quartets is much more direct than The Waste Land. Beethoven’s late quartets are complex enough, but they have a fresh, improvisatory quality that only seasoned mastery can achieve. Simplicity, directness, and the capacity to improvise demand not only technical mastery but also the experience of life that turns technique into something spontaneous.

All of this points to a larger issue. The tendency to codify human activities into sets of rules is yet another manifestation of our futile craving for certainty. Rules are perfectly serviceable as guideposts, but can easily keep one from exploring the hinterlands of life and the imagination. It is precisely because the master craftsman knows the rules so well that he knows when to forego them. The saint is too absorbed in the pursuit of love to worry much about sin. In art, a preoccupation with rules leads to mannerism. Puritanism is the mannerism of religion.

Or, as legal scholar Grant Gilmore put it in The Ages of American Law, “In heaven there will be no law … In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

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