Alright: The title above is just a tad facetious. Pope Benedict didn’t actually refer to Bob Dylan when he addressed a gathering of artistic types in the Sistine Chapel yesterday. And the basic ideas he expressed did not originate with Bob Dylan any more than they originated with Benedict. Nevertheless, I wonder if I’m the only one sufficiently insane to have noticed the resemblance between some of the pope’s reported remarks yesterday and remarks Bob Dylan made in an interview with Dave Herman in 1981. (Perhaps the very fact that I wonder if I’m the only one who noticed this is what makes me truly certifiable.)

But permit me to illustrate. Yesterday, this is how it was reported by Reuters:

Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often “illusory and deceitful.”

The former Cardinal Ratzinger’s full remarks are reproduced at this link.

Here is a more generous quote:

Beauty pulls us up short, but in so doing it reminds us of our final destiny, it sets us back on our path, fills us with new hope, gives us the courage to live to the full the unique gift of life. The quest for beauty that I am describing here is clearly not about escaping into the irrational or into mere aestheticism.

Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day.

[...]

Faith takes nothing away from your genius or your art: on the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them, it encourages them to cross the threshold and to contemplate with fascination and emotion the ultimate and definitive goal, the sun that does not set, the sun that illumines this present moment and makes it beautiful.

Very well said indeed by the pontiff on Saturday, November 21st, 2009. Now, in 1981, Bob Dylan was interviewed in London by a fellow named Dave Herman. At this juncture of the interview, Bob was just saying how much he admired doctors and surgeons who can save people’s lives, as opposed to thinking so highly about what he himself does. (He later put this same thought into a song.) But then he thinks again about the worth of his own profession: (audio clip here)

Dylan: Not to say now that art is valueless. I think art can lead you to God. Y’know, but …

Q: Is that its purpose?

Dylan: I think so. I think that’s everything’s purpose. I mean if it’s not doing that what’s it doing? It’s leading you the other way. It’s not certainly leading you nowhere. It’s bringing you somewhere. It’s either bringing you that way or this-a-way.

Q: Well, if it expresses truth and beauty, then it’s leading you to God.

Dylan: Yeah …? (laughs)

Q: Well wouldn’t you say?

Dylan: If it’s expressing truth I’d say it’s leading you to God and beauty also.

Q: I always thought those were the only two absolutes that there were.

Dylan: Well … beauty can be very, very deceiving. And it’s not always of God.

Q: Could you elaborate on that a bit?

Dylan: Well, beauty appeals to our eyes.

Q: And to our heart?

Dylan: Our heart’s not good. If your heart’s not good, what good does beauty do, that comes through your eyes, going down to your heart, which isn’t good anyway? The beauty of the beast.

Q: (talking over Bob) The beauty of a sunset?

Dylan: The beauty of a sunset. Now that’s a very special kind of beauty.

Q: Well how ’bout the beauty of the natural world? I mean, ah …

Dylan: Like the flowers?

Q: And the beasts.

Dylan: The beasts of the field?

Q: And the rain.

Dylan: And the rain — all that is beautiful, that’s God given. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with the man-made beauty. So that sometimes the beauty of God’s world has evaded me.

So — aside from the clear echo here of what Pope Benedict would say to a gathering of artists in the Sistine Chapel twenty-eight years later, what’s remarkable to me is how precise Bob insists on being. He could easily have just nodded assent to his interiewer’s assertions about “truth and beauty” (after all, he’s just doing the damned interview to promote his new album!) but instead he firmly (albeit gently) insists on making clear the distinctions he sees between the various concepts.

Later in the interview he talks about his own work in a not unrelated context: (audio clip here)

Q: … You quoted him in a Playboy interview a few years ago. You said Henry Miller — Henry Miller said that “the role of an artist is to innoculate the world with disillusion.”

Dylan: Yeah …

Q: Is that a lot of what you try to do with your work as an artist?

Dylan: No, I don’t consciously try to innoculate anybody. No. I just have to hope that in some kind of way this music that I’ve always played is a healing kind of music. I mean if it isn’t I don’t wanna do it. Because there’s enough stuff, so-called music out there, which is sick music. It’s just sick. It’s made by sick people and it’s played to sick people to further a whole world of sickness. Now this is not only true of music — this is true in the film industry, it’s true in the magazine industry, certainly a lot of it on television, billboard signs. Y’know, it caters to people’s sickness. There’s a lot of that. And if I can’t do something that is telling people, or hoping anyway, that whatever their sickness is — I mean we’re all sick! — whatever it is that you can be healed and well and set straight — well, if I can’t do that then I’d just as soon be on a boat, y’know, I’d just as soon be off … hiking through the woods.

Q: There’s a song on Shot of Love, Every Grain of Sand, which is about as healing a song as I’ve ever heard from you. It’s a beautiful, beautiful song.

Dylan: Oh, well I wrote that last summer. I think I wrote that last summer.

Q: Did I get you right? Is that what you mean by hopefully healing music?

Dylan: I would hope so.

(A reasonably good transcript of the entire interview is at this link.)

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