When You Call My Name, It's Like a Little Prayer

My thoughts on Paul Elie's latest book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s

One book that had a profound impact on me (as a writer and scholar and thinker) was Paul Elie’s 2003 work The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. That book, which focused on the intertwining lives and narratives of four major mid-twentieth century American Catholic voices (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day), was the inspiration for my dissertation project in the way in which it built off of the consideration of O’Connor and Percy. It also deepened my sense of the religious (specifically Catholic) artist and thinker and provided a framework through which I could think about how artists engage with their beliefs and philosophies in their work. Since then, Elie’s produced some writing I’ve enjoyed (his introduction to the recent edition of The Moviegoer as well as his work editing the Library of America volume on Percy’s work) and that I haven’t (his New Yorker piece arguing for Flannery O’Connor’s racism). But Elie’s written and published another book that very much follows in the tradition and style of The Life You Save May Be Your Own. That book is The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. As I will discuss, Elie takes a different approach with The Last Supper with a wider array of artists and creators but still puts forth another interesting and engaging examination in the relationship between art and religion.

Last Supper picks up where Life You Save left off both in terms of chronology (Life You Save is firmly grounded in the 1950s/1960s while Last Supper is moving into the 1980s) as well as consideration the intertwining of religion (mostly Catholicism, but not solely in Last Supper) and the arts.

Here’s the back of the book description:

In Elie’s acclaimed first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Catholic writers ventured out into the wilds of postwar America; in this book, creative figures who were raised religious go to the margins of conventional belief, calling forth controversy.

While Life You Save had a very precise focus on four figures, Last Supper jumps around and covers a greater range of figures. Some feature quite prominently, but none to the degree of those four writers in his earlier book. Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, U2, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, The Pogues, The Neville Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Sinead O’Connor, Robert Mapplethorpe, Toni Morrison, all of these voices make an appearance in this book (and that’s certainly not everyone). Scorsese, Cohen, the Smith/Mapplethorpe combo, and Warhol get a little more attention and provide the bones of the book, but the range of artists documented is much greater and you see how many artists were producing work that was, in some core way, religiously inflected.

The expansiveness—Elie moving from different figure to different figure in each chapter—was quite striking and gives the book a different feel. It’s not so much about singular voices, but rather something going on more broadly that many voices were tapping into. As the 1980s gave rise to the “culture wars” and the idea of religious belief being linked to a kind of conservative, traditional, heteronormanitive approach, it is quite intriguing to think about how that might not have been what was going on. Elie gives a great deal of thought to the notion of the “crypto-religious,” which is certainly different from Life You Save. That earlier work, considering O’Connor and Percy and Merton and Day, discusses voices who were clearly identified with Catholicism and were adherents to that belief. They were more… traditional? orthodox? Figures who are frequently held up and pointed to by the institutional church. There’s an air of legitimacy and acceptance to the status of Catholic writer/thinker ascribed to all of them.

Last Supper, by contrast, is thinking about voices of the “lapsed” Catholic or the writer who was influenced by their religious background and experience but might not be invested in the institutional practice of it. The concern is how the various figures live out that engagement with religion rather than how strictly they practice. Elie tracks many of these figures in Last Supper, like a Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano (best known for his controversial photographic work Piss Christ) or Madonna, who are not thought of as being religious artists because so much of their work challenges or goes against the norms of the religion and yet their work cannot be understood and appreciated without grasping they are in some way a “religious” artist.

Elie gets that notion of the “crypto-religious” from the poet Czesław Miłosz, who also figures into the narrative of Elie’s book. Here’s how he considers this concept:

“Crypto-religious” is best understood in narrative terms. From novels, movies, songs, paintings, photographs, and the stories of how they were made a sense of what it means emerges. In shorthand, it goes something like this. Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect—so that as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.

This idea of the “crypto-religious” complicates what that very idea means—a “religious” artist¹. Does it mean one who creates work that strictly reinforces tenets of belief in a strict and orthodox way? Or does it mean someone who creates something that engages with the questions brought forth by religion and whose work possesses a point of view and aesthetic inexorably linked to that religion? Where Elie seems to come down, and where I certainly do as well, is the latter. These problems—what does it mean to be a writer or artist who is “religious” in some essential way—are still with us. The culture wars are still being fought in our modern world, which gives Elie’s latest book a greater and continuing resonance.

Ultimately, I think the lack of focus and wider scope keeps The Last Supper from being quite as strong as The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and I also think Elie’s conclusions in The Last Supper are a bit more nebulous and that the strands are not woven together as closely as his earlier work. But I do think it’s a book that has more to say to our moment in time (our world mirroring in some respects that time in the 1980s). I also think that Elie did a great deal in illuminating the strands of religious thought running throughout the creative realms in the 1980s, which I might not have fully grasped (I tend to see that midcentury moment as a real apex for creative work engaging with religious themes and concerns while tending to overlook what comes after). With The Last Supper, Paul Elie has cemented his place as one of the preeminent examiners and historians of art and religion in the modern world and has shown how the latter half of this century is robust with voices speaking to the lived experience of believers.

1. I use artist when I might be speaking about a writer or a singer or director—basically, a creator of some kind.