So, I have been doing a few film reviews on the side. Never mind that I once vowed never to review a film- I wanted to have at least one art form that I could watch for pleasure, not intellectual masturbation. Never mind that the films that I review aren’t really the sort of films I would naturally go and see- I probably would, in the end, but not with the same enthusiasm. The thing is, I am reviewing them for a Jesuit website, which puts me back in the army of the Society of Jesus.

If I were a more considered user of Facebook, I’d be in that group called “I Loves Me Some Jesuits”. Like many other lay people- that’s Christian for non-priests and monks- I have found my adult life inevitably tangled up with the last of the great monastic orders. And that is in spite of not being a Catholic.

The reason that I was so keen to review the films for this site, Thinking Faith, was that I have been using the spiritual technology of the Jesuits on the sly for a while now. Based on the principle of discernment, Jesuit practice seems to be offered me a strategy for aesthetic judgement. Could I be any more unfashionable?

After twenty years of pretending to be a post-modernist, the whole thing is starting to make me sick. There are some things that I love; the stark nihilism, before it got repackaged as vapid consensus; bricolage, or sampling, the rough hewn materials flung together; encouragement of diversity. But post-modernism was unsatisfying, especially in the diluted, popular version. For a critic, it is ultimately self-defeating, because it denies the idea that one opinion is better than another. It also encouraged some very bad writing on the part of artists.

Like many other old men who drop away from a fashionable position, I find myself attracted to the past. Between saying things like “Plato was the last philosopher who really took art seriously” and bemoaning the quality of debate in the metro letters page (I mean, seriously, come on), I am looking very seriously at Ignatius’ spiritual exercises as a template for aesthetic judgement.

Hell, if that statement doesn’t destroy any interest in this blog, I am not sure what I can do next….