The cult of celebrity

I am 139 pages into the 1000-page Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson. Slow progress to be sure, but it could be worse. Recall that last spring I finished reading Warren Carroll's current volume in his history of Christendom series, which dealt almost exclusively with the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's career-so I am well prepared for this volume.

The first point I really noted was that Bonaparte was really the first to have a secret police force-but it became, after his demise, a sign of prestige among European government leaders to have one. Certainly, one hallmark of modern governments is their secret police and spying agencies.

The second point I would like to spend more time on. Mr. Johnson writes,

Beethoven was a key figure in the birth of the modern because he first established and popularized the notion of the artist as universal genius, as a moral figure in his own right-indeed, as a kind of intermediary between God and Man.... Poets had been honored since the days of Homoer, but even at the end of the 18th century, muscians were low- or middle-ranking servants in the households of the great or minor cathedral functionaries.... Beethoven would have none of such subservience. ... It is important to grasp that Beethoven was not consciously trying to turn music into a secular religion. He was neither agnostic nor atheist, deist nor Unitarian, but a Roman Catholic..... Thus in countless anecdotes and eyewitness accounts (of Beethoven's deafness) was built up the composite picture of the archetype martyr to art, the new kind of secular saint who was taking over from the old Christian calendars as a focus of public veneration.

Along with this rise of the cult of celebrity for entertainers came the rise of the middle class and the demise of the aristocracy in Europe. Entertainers and artists replace Christian saints as the object of public veneration-especially in the growing (urban) middle class. Some could/would run with this saying that this proves that a return to an agrian lifestyle is the only legitimate way.

I would not go so far. I think that it is a warning that riches can shift your focus from God.

Yet there is something more important: how to return public veneration to Christian saints and put entertainers back in the place they ought to occupy? Is it even possible? More later....