James Agee and Walker Evans Entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Throughout reading the essay by James Agee and Walker Evans entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, my eye was drawn away from the essay and I began thinking about a couple of different ideas when reading one particular excerpt. In the paragraph it was stated: “Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art. Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again. And is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.” The reason that this particularly caught me eye and took my attention away from the page is because I found two distinct different meanings and questions within this quote. The first meaning and question that I found asking my self from reading this excerpt was; do I feel that official acceptance with Christ (or another religious God) is a misunderstood concept and is not the correct direction for one to go about conducting their everyday life? I also found another meaning within this text, which struck me as odd because I have never read anything that has two distinct understandings. The meaning that arose to me is when you think of something as “art,” there is an official acceptance within that meaning of “art.” By this I mean that someone somewhere must have said that when you as a person produces something that can be portrayed as “art,” you have an official acceptance within that object you created and by this opinion I think “art” is a misunderstood concept in society today.

Now, what I do mean when I say that a person thinks of himself as being officially accepted with Christ (or another person), will it in return be a bad decision or a good decision for that person to direct their every day life towards that idea. Personally, I find myself as being a religious person, for the fact that I was confirmed in the Catholic Church, whenever I am home I go to church with my mother, and ultimately I believe in God and Christ. But my problem with official acceptance is that, who is giving you this acceptance and are you accepting something or is someone or something accepting you? Yes, the priest works as a messenger of God but are we sure that he is relaying the correct message. The problem with this is there are many different religions out in the world today, but every single one of them portray a different message. So what does this mean? What I am trying to get at, and what is in the end confusing me, is the fact it might be possible for you to be accepted by Christ in the Catholic Church, or for you to accept Christ, but then you could go to a Jewish place of worship, where you are not accepted. To back up my point with this I decided to go and do some backup research on what it means to be officially accepted in a religious setting.

Within the Mormon Church I found that official acceptance with Jesus lives within you to officially accept him. As quoted from a website on the Mormon Church, “Latter-day Saints believe that faith in Jesus is a fundamental requisite to salvation. Faith in Jesus Christ means the acceptance that Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah. This includes two parts: 1. the belief that all who live on Earth are granted salvation from death (physical resurrection) through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and 2. that salvation from sin (or spiritual death) is obtained through forgiveness for sin through his grace and by following the teachings and commandments of Jesus Christ.” Now this differs completely from the Jewish meaning of acceptance. This is backed by information that I found on a Jewish Belief website that stated, “Judaism neither accepts nor rejects the theory of evolution. There are several schools of thought within Judaism regarding evolution. They are basically divided into the following categories: 1. Complete rejection - This argument is essentially that what science believes to be true today might well be considered foolishness 100 years from now, so we need not be concerned with it. 2. Complete acceptance - This approach accepts evolution and maintains that evolution was the mechanism which God used in creating living creatures. 3. Partial acceptance - This approach does not deny the scientific validity of the Theory of Evolution per se, but maintains that God did not use evolution to create living creatures, but instead created them fully developed. This approach does not entail the rejection of the theory of evolution. If the theory of evolution is correct then it is just one of the many processes which were created ‘in motion.’” It is possible for me to understand that in the text he might have meant that you are the one