Lenten Love
Donna Tartt’s masterly, prize-winning novel The Goldfinch details the story of Theodore Decker, whose life is initially destroyed by a terrorist attack he and his mother witness as they visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Theo and his mother become separated in the galleries, and his mother is killed. Theo is miraculously unscathed, though temporarily knocked unconscious. He eventually awakens, physically unharmed, to a nightmare of loss—disfigured bodies, charred priceless works of art, heaps of ash. In his daze, he happens upon a languishing old man, who points him to a small untainted painting, a captive Goldfinch, a rare piece by the Dutch master Fabritius. Theo grabs the painting as he flees the burning building.
The rest of the novel recounts Theo’s dizzying (often dark) life after the attack. He grasps onto the painting, primarily because of its connection to his mother, but even more as a reminder of his happier past. Initially, he gazes at it often, marveling at its delicate beauty—his mother had passed on to him a deep appreciation for great artwork. Yet eventually his fear of discovery and desire to keep the beautiful object drive him to stash it in a storage unit, where not even he can enjoy its goodness. This hiding away becomes the context for his ultimate loss of the painting itself.
Theo’s treatment of the Goldfinch is reminiscent of a primeval human temptation. We see beautiful, true, and good things and wish to dominate them to the exclusion of others. One could say this phenomenon was at work as early as the Garden of Eden, in which the first man saw the desirability of the Tree and wished to use rather than to enjoy, to devour rather than to revere. The problem with this became immediately clear. An effort to dominate the good instead subjugated man to the desires of his flesh, making him a slave. In The City of God, St. Augustine famously describes this as the libido dominandi, a lust for power that perverts our relationship to good things, eventually destroying our freedom and taste entirely.
Certainly, some goods must be pursued in an exclusionary way. If I want to appreciate a pastry, for instance, I must eat it, which precludes someone else’s enjoyment of the very same bite. But man’s mistake lies in supposing that all goods are like this, to be used by oneself in a privileged, exclusive sense. When we do this, we fail to distinguish between the merely consumable and the venerable.
The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, though secular, sees the concept of this “original sin,” that is, the inescapable fallenness of mankind, as central to revitalizing ethics in the modern age, for it concretely recognizes “the enemy [of moral philosophy as] … the fat relentless ego.” The task of moral philosophy becomes, then, to attack this fearsome foe and vanquish its self-obsession, purifying and reorienting the ego to focus its attention on proper objects of love: primarily other persons and extensively the Good itself. She admits that this task is akin to traditional religious practice, particularly prayer, which for her involves “an attention to God which is a form of love.” But art, too, can provide a transcendent pathway to dethroning ill attachment to self and selfish goods, for great artwork seeks to present reality and dispel fantasy, “to silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye.”
Granted, few works of art succeed in this goal. But in its highest form, art “teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.” Such an approach represents how we ought to interact with all of those good things we experience now and in the time to come.
An excellent spiritual teacher in my life reminds his parishioners every year that the penitential season of Lent is not the time to give up vices, for this should be the goal of every moment of the liturgical year. Rather, Lent ought to be the training ground for how to approach things of value with proper reverence. In other words, Lent retrains our loves. We “give up” chocolate or TV not because they are evil, but in order to learn to approach them with purified vision. This vision, however, is meant to reveal the limits of created goods. For although the delights of the flesh have their own genuine satisfaction, our appetites only remain satisfied for so long and the desire to appropriate beautiful things for our own selfish use ever lingers and even intensifies. The only goods that resist being subsumed by the ego are those which are above—who or which because of their transcendence evade exhaustion and provide true rest. That is, good that is boundless requires its participant to adopt a posture of pure openness and acknowledgment of its eminence. Such acknowledgment of inexhaustibility limits the ego such that man might finally experience the repose of simply being in the presence of good.
Perhaps, in The Goldfinch, Tartt is attempting to give us a suitably Lenten lesson: what Theo hid away was not the sort of object that ought to have been possessed. And by retaining it in his storage unit, “even what he has will be taken away.” The good contained in the portrait of the Goldfinch was one that had to be freely and communally enjoyed. But the painting itself hints at a deeper message—the bird is chained. Even art itself, though profound in its ability to reveal truth, is locked up in the created order, and in its best forms can only gesture toward the highest reality. The Goldfinch in the gallery narrowly escaped becoming dust, but inevitably, to dust it will return.