CHAPTER 11 - Creativity and Morals: The New Ethic of Creativity
The creative New Testament morals of evangelic love have not been revealed in the Christian world—they have only been rarely glimpsed, like lighting flashes, in the lives of such chosen spirits as St. Francis. Christianity was oriented towards the world as a religion of obedience rather than a religion of love.
Christianity, as the revelation of grace, freedom and love, is something other than a set of morals under the law.
Traditional Christian morals are hostile to all heroism, to all heroic upswing of life, to heroic impulse, to heroic sacrifice. Traditional morals of the Christian world are bourgeois in the profoundest sense of the word.
In the patristic, traditionally Christian consciousness, negative virtues—humility, self-denial, abstinence—eclipsed the positive virtues of courage, nobility and honor.
(Christian morality) is impregnated with the pathos of small acts and modest situations; it is afraid of great, heroic, broad-winged action. And the lack of wings has been raised almost to the rank of religious heroism.
This type of morality has no love for the heights; it is hostile to any aristocratic spirit.
Everything which evaluates a man not by his innate qualities but rather by his situation or the milieu in which he lives is bourgeois.
The Christian conquest of “this world” is a conquest of all bourgeoisity; it is the sacrifice of worldly profit and well-being to nobility and beauty as a way of life.
Man cannot live in this world and create new life using only the morality of submission, only the morality of conflict with his own sins. One who lives in constant terror at his own sins is powerless to accomplish anything in the world.
Every man must pass through the redemption and commune with its mystery. The moment of redemption from sin in the life of a man is inevitably connected with obedience and humility, with renunciation of self-assertion, with the sacrifice of spiritual pride.
But it is impossible to construct a whole life-ethic on humility and submission. If they are recognized as the only guides of life, the great moments of humility and submissiveness can easily be turned into slavery, hypocrisy and spiritual death. Spiritual efforts of humility and submission are only movements on the way—the goal is the creation of new life in love.
The moral ideal of the Church Fathers was that of “starchestvo”—the tradition of certain holy elders in the monasteries. It decries youth, it denies the creative impulse and upsurge; it is afraid of youth.
Through the redemption the world will come to a new creative morality of youth in the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Absolute Man, is eternally young.
The morality of the Gospels is carefree and does not permit of worrying. The care-burdened morality, the morality of worry, is the bourgeois morality of this world. The morals of the elders easily turn into the morals of old age, the morals of constant fear, constant anxiety, constant concern about the troubles of tomorrow, perpetual denial of the divinely care-free birds of the heaven and the lilies of the field.
Creative morality cannot be based upon separating and placing opposite each other the human and the divine. Creative morality will always reveal the seraphic nature of man.
There is a morality of the aristocratic nobility of the spirit and a morality of the serf-like plebeian spirit. Christian morality is not slavishly-plebeian but rather aristocratically-noble, the morality of the sons of God, with their primogeniture, their high birth and their high calling. Christianity is the religion of the strong in spirit, not the weak. The Christian ethic is an ethic of spiritual victory rather than spiritual defeat.
True Christian morality lays on man, who has become a son of God, free responsibility for his own fate and for the fate of the world.
The whole worth of man is in his participation in God and in divine life, in his striving upward.
When man is aided by the God-man Redeemer, this is not some external help, alien to man’s nature, but an inward aid which reveals his own natural likeness to God, his own participation in divine life. Christ is not outside us but within us. He is the Absolute Man in us. He is our communion with the Holy Trinity.
The religion of Christ is the religion of man’s highest powers—it is the very opposite of all weakness or depression in man. Christianity is a way of the revelation in every man of the Man Absolute.
The way of Christian morality leads through sacrifice to creativeness, through renunciation of this world to the creation of a new world and a new life.
Christianity does not permit a lowering of quality for the sake of quantity—it is wholly in quality, i.e. in aristocratic value.
Christian morality is always something of the heights, something which uplifts, rather than a thing of the valley, something which flattens out.
In the world-crisis of morals the longing for moral creativeness is struggling forth, the longing for morals as creativeness rather than obedience. The crisis of moralism, the protest against the law of moral submission, is also a foretaste of a new world-epoch, an epoch of creativeness.
Never yet, in any epoch, has there been born out of canonic morality a new community of men. Like every other law, morality has done more to denounce evil than to create higher truth in life.
Average morality, which has held off the beginning of the end, which hides the ultimate limits of being, must itself sooner or later come to an end and be overcome by the creative effort of the human spirit.
What, then, is the essence of the moral crisis? The essence is above all a revolutionary movement from a consciousness for which morality means submission to a general-average law, over to a consciousness for which morality is a creative problem of individuality.
Creative morality is not the fulfillment of law; it is the revelation of man in moral creativeness. The sinful side of human nature remains oriented towards the law, but its creative side surpasses the law.
In our bourgeois epoch, the task of creating a spiritual chivalry, a chivalry of the spirit, stands before the elect of mankind with new compulsive power. That every value is aristocratic—this is the revelation of the spirit of chivalry.
Aristocratic morals (in the metaphysical rather than the social sense of the word) are morals of value, of quality, of individuality, of creativeness. And every degradation of value, of quality, of individuality or creativeness is a sin against God and against the divine in Man.
CHAPTER 11 - Creativity and Morals: The New Ethic of Creativity
The creative New Testament morals of evangelic love have not been revealed in the Christian world—they have only been rarely glimpsed, like lighting flashes, in the lives of such chosen spirits as St. Francis. Christianity was oriented towards the world as a religion of obedience rather than a religion of love.
Christianity, as the revelation of grace, freedom and love, is something other than a set of morals under the law.
Traditional Christian morals are hostile to all heroism, to all heroic upswing of life, to heroic impulse, to heroic sacrifice. Traditional morals of the Christian world are bourgeois in the profoundest sense of the word.
In the patristic, traditionally Christian consciousness, negative virtues—humility, self-denial, abstinence—eclipsed the positive virtues of courage, nobility and honor.
(Christian morality) is impregnated with the pathos of small acts and modest situations; it is afraid of great, heroic, broad-winged action. And the lack of wings has been raised almost to the rank of religious heroism.
This type of morality has no love for the heights; it is hostile to any aristocratic spirit.
Everything which evaluates a man not by his innate qualities but rather by his situation or the milieu in which he lives is bourgeois.
The Christian conquest of “this world” is a conquest of all bourgeoisity; it is the sacrifice of worldly profit and well-being to nobility and beauty as a way of life.
Man cannot live in this world and create new life using only the morality of submission, only the morality of conflict with his own sins. One who lives in constant terror at his own sins is powerless to accomplish anything in the world.
Every man must pass through the redemption and commune with its mystery. The moment of redemption from sin in the life of a man is inevitably connected with obedience and humility, with renunciation of self-assertion, with the sacrifice of spiritual pride.
But it is impossible to construct a whole life-ethic on humility and submission. If they are recognized as the only guides of life, the great moments of humility and submissiveness can easily be turned into slavery, hypocrisy and spiritual death. Spiritual efforts of humility and submission are only movements on the way—the goal is the creation of new life in love.
The moral ideal of the Church Fathers was that of “starchestvo”—the tradition of certain holy elders in the monasteries. It decries youth, it denies the creative impulse and upsurge; it is afraid of youth.
Through the redemption the world will come to a new creative morality of youth in the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Absolute Man, is eternally young.
The morality of the Gospels is carefree and does not permit of worrying. The care-burdened morality, the morality of worry, is the bourgeois morality of this world. The morals of the elders easily turn into the morals of old age, the morals of constant fear, constant anxiety, constant concern about the troubles of tomorrow, perpetual denial of the divinely care-free birds of the heaven and the lilies of the field.
Creative morality cannot be based upon separating and placing opposite each other the human and the divine. Creative morality will always reveal the seraphic nature of man.
There is a morality of the aristocratic nobility of the spirit and a morality of the serf-like plebeian spirit. Christian morality is not slavishly-plebeian but rather aristocratically-noble, the morality of the sons of God, with their primogeniture, their high birth and their high calling. Christianity is the religion of the strong in spirit, not the weak. The Christian ethic is an ethic of spiritual victory rather than spiritual defeat.
True Christian morality lays on man, who has become a son of God, free responsibility for his own fate and for the fate of the world.
The whole worth of man is in his participation in God and in divine life, in his striving upward.
When man is aided by the God-man Redeemer, this is not some external help, alien to man’s nature, but an inward aid which reveals his own natural likeness to God, his own participation in divine life. Christ is not outside us but within us. He is the Absolute Man in us. He is our communion with the Holy Trinity.
The religion of Christ is the religion of man’s highest powers—it is the very opposite of all weakness or depression in man. Christianity is a way of the revelation in every man of the Man Absolute.
The way of Christian morality leads through sacrifice to creativeness, through renunciation of this world to the creation of a new world and a new life.
Christianity does not permit a lowering of quality for the sake of quantity—it is wholly in quality, i.e. in aristocratic value.
Christian morality is always something of the heights, something which uplifts, rather than a thing of the valley, something which flattens out.
In the world-crisis of morals the longing for moral creativeness is struggling forth, the longing for morals as creativeness rather than obedience. The crisis of moralism, the protest against the law of moral submission, is also a foretaste of a new world-epoch, an epoch of creativeness.
Never yet, in any epoch, has there been born out of canonic morality a new community of men. Like every other law, morality has done more to denounce evil than to create higher truth in life.
Average morality, which has held off the beginning of the end, which hides the ultimate limits of being, must itself sooner or later come to an end and be overcome by the creative effort of the human spirit.
What, then, is the essence of the moral crisis? The essence is above all a revolutionary movement from a consciousness for which morality means submission to a general-average law, over to a consciousness for which morality is a creative problem of individuality.
Creative morality is not the fulfillment of law; it is the revelation of man in moral creativeness. The sinful side of human nature remains oriented towards the law, but its creative side surpasses the law.
In our bourgeois epoch, the task of creating a spiritual chivalry, a chivalry of the spirit, stands before the elect of mankind with new compulsive power. That every value is aristocratic—this is the revelation of the spirit of chivalry.
Aristocratic morals (in the metaphysical rather than the social sense of the word) are morals of value, of quality, of individuality, of creativeness. And every degradation of value, of quality, of individuality or creativeness is a sin against God and against the divine in Man.
BIOGRAPH
MERCIFULLY BRIEF
Tom Willett (1950- ) is an American musician, author and entertainment industry executive. He toured and recorded extensively as a bass player during the ‘60s and ‘70s, served as booking agent and manager for numerous artists in the ‘80s, and worked as an Artist & Repertoire and Marketing executive in the ‘90s. In the ‘00s he co-founded a fully-accredited artists’ colony for college-aged musicians and entrepreneurs, and currently entertains fantasies of a restless retirement in Sodom-on-the-Cumberland, Tennessee.
EXCRUCIATINGLY LONG
Touring and Recording Bands
Born in 1950 in Portsmouth, VA, Thomas Alva Willett III (Tom) moved with his family to the Washington, DC suburbs in the mid-1960s. While attending Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, VA, he played bass with DC-area Garage Rockers the Keggs, the Uncalled Four, and the Nightcrawlers, which also featured Gerry Beckley, later of the best-selling British ex-pat band, America.
While completing coursework for a B.A. in Psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, Willett toured with Brit Rock-Psychedelic outfit Orange, featuring Danny Brubeck, son of legendary Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, on drums.
After graduation in 1972, Willett recorded and toured with the Sons of Thunder,
founded by Blaine Smith in 1968 and the first U.S. Rock act to record a contemporary Gospel album for a major label (Till the Whole World Knows, Zondervan). He also played bass for D.C. Folk-Rocker Scott Wesley Brown.
Early Not-for-Profit Work
While pursuing post-graduate studies in the mid-1970s at a commune in the Maryland suburbs, Willett helped launch both the Cornerstone Study Center (Jim and Lorraine Hiskey) and the C. S. Lewis Institute (James Houston, John R.W. Stott, J. I. Packer). He and Santa Rosa, CA-native Julie Atterbury were married in 1978.
Booking and Artist Management
Willett returned to the music industry in 1979 when he launched the Chanan Agency to handle booking and management for DC-area talent including musician/author Brian McLaren and college-circuit favorites, Jim and Kim Thomas (the Carpenter’s Tools, SaySo).
In 1980, Willett joined Dharma Artist Agency in Nashville, TN where he served as booking agent for a number of leading artists, including Leon Patillo (Santana), Maria Muldaur, and Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield, Poco). He later formed Tom Willett Artist Management to provide career direction for John Fischer (Word/A&M), Scott Wesley Brown (Sparrow/EMI), and Marty McCall (MCA Songbird).
Artist & Repertoire Work in Los Angeles
In 1984, Willett was asked to become Executive Director of Artists and Repertoire in Los Angeles for ABC’s Word Records, the world's largest distributor of inspirational music and books. Responsible for signing new artists and overseeing production, Willett managed the creation of more than 50 award-winning CDs and videos, including Grammy and Dove Award winning records by Sam Phillips, The Choir, Dion DiMucci, Philip Bailey (Earth, Wind & Fire), Randy Stonehill and Bryan Duncan.
While in L.A., Willett founded What? Records, a boutique label marketed and distributed by A&M Records. Working with T Bone Burnett, David Miner, John Carter and Lynn Nichols, What? released four critically-acclaimed albums: IDeoLa’s Tribal Opera, Tonio K.’s Romeo Unchained and Notes from the Lost Civilization, and Dave Perkins’ The Innocence.
Willett’s A&R work saw him in the studio with such notables as T Bone Burnett, Phil Ramone, Charlie Peacock, Booker T. Jones, Little Richard, Tchad Blake, Bill Schnee and Doug Sax.
Marketing, Product Management and Career Development
In 1990, Willett and Epic Record’s Roger Klein brokered a new marketing and distribution relationship for Word with Epic Records and Sony Music Entertainment. After relocating to New York, he, along with Dan Beck (Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Indigo Girls, Sade), coordinated the release and marketing of over 300 albums that generated more than $50,000,000.00 in revenues. While serving as Vice President of Marketing for Word/Epic, Willett and his team spear-headed international marketing campaigns for such artists as Al Green, Deniece Williams, Shirley Caesar, Phil Keaggy, Soul Mission, Sandi Patty, Petra, and Point of Grace. Through their efforts, Word/Epic artists found expanded audiences, while leading mainstream personalities such as Bruce Cockburn, Wynton Marsalis and Garrison Keillor crossed back over into the Gospel marketplace.
In 1995 Willett moved to Virginia, and later, Florida, to pursue writing and independent marketing. He published more than 50 articles in music and arts journals while helping manage the literary estate of Dr. Richard C. Halverson, former Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. With Beck, he formed ADi, a property development and marketing organization focused on creating unique entertainment, character and lifestyle properties. In conjunction with Peacock Papers, ADi’s products found distribution in Hallmark and other leading card and gift shops. Their recording and touring project, The American Soul and Rock & Roll Choir, went on to tour performing arts centers throughout the U.S. Willett and Beck later co-managed Hip-Hop trio, Scratch Track, and artist/writer/filmmaker, Will Gray.
During this period, Willett also founded Creative Development Network, providing career support to Artist/Producer T Bone Burnett (Counting Crows, Wallflowers), recording artist Sam Phillips (Virgin, Nonesuch), and Internet sensation, Boondogs, the first band signed to a major recording contract based solely on consumer voting during the first wave of downloadable .mp3s.
Music Industry Educator and Mentor
In 2000, Willett was asked to spearhead a feasibility study for the creation of a fully-accredited, 4-month long off-campus study experience for college students interested in careers in the music industry. In conjunction with CCCU’s Dr. Richard Gathro and a committee of college presidents, deans and music department chairs, he created a business plan and curriculum that offered developing artists classes and hands-on experience in songwriting, recording and performance, while training young entrepreneurs in artist management, booking, publishing, record company operations and marketing. Established on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in the Fall of 2001, Willett and the faculty and staff of the Contemporary Music Center (CMC) have helped launch the careers of more than 1,000 students from nearly 100 colleges and universities. After 10 years with the CMC, he served as an Adjunct Professor in the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business at Belmont University before becoming Music Business Instructor and Director of Education at Dark Horse Institute. In September of 2017, Willett was named President of Dark Horse Institute.
Willett’s work has been cited in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Musician, the L.A. Times, Entertainment Weekly, CMJ and the Hollywood Reporter, while his articles encouraging excellence in music making and marketing have appeared in Image, The Wittenburg Door, CCM, Release, The Other Side and Prism.
And if you believe that's the whole truth, HERE'S THE ACTUAL STORY!