Francis Schaeffer Trilogy Blog Pt. 3

     In the last blog I wrote about how the breakdown in the concept of truth moved from the philosophies into the world of art. Van Gogh is just one example of an artist who hoped to find ultimate meaning through human artistic expression, but fell short. In the end, the Dada-ists chose randomness and created art which had at its heart the goal of propagating their chaotic and destructive worldview.

     Schaeffer next turns to music and general culture. The decay of a cohesive approach to truth through absolutes and healthy logic (antithesis) is becoming pervasive. The musique concrete movement presented its chaotic, deconstructive compositions as if to say, "All is relative, nothing is sure, nothing is fixed".  With such a strong relativist sensibility being thrust forward "the possibility of finding any universal which could make sense of the particulars is denied".

     Modern Cinema soon became a powerful avenue for widespread communication of modernity's approach to truth. "The so-called 'good' pictures have almost all been developed by men holding the modern philosophy of no certain truth and no certain distinctions between right and wrong," observes Schaeffer, and, "...the films they produce are tools for teaching their beliefs". In the 1960's Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up carried this tag-line: "Murder without guilt, love without meaning".

     Schaeffer's last example of the relativistic approach's popular infiltration is The Beatles' Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rather than disconnected individual songs, this album, which expertly weaved together a conceptual whole, effectively communicated "psychedelic music, with open statements concerning drug-taking, [and] was knowingly presented as a religious answer".