Is the analysis of the “cool” an important task? Many societies have a kind of person who determines taste: a connoisseur, doyen, maven, aesthete. Our unabashedly mercenary world has given birth to the “influencer,” a marketing instrument (or “a tool,” if you will) who makes little claim to having any power of judgment.
I was assured at summer camp that God doesn’t care whether I’m cool or not. However, Christians do need to have a sense of taste, a certain instinct to judge what is the real deal.
In the ecclesiastical polity, the arbiters of taste are the saints. St. Augustine of Hippo says that his saintly mother, Monica, was able to judge between dreams or imaginings that came from her own spirit, and those that came from God. Although it’s not the closest translation, I like to read Frank Sheed’s rendering of Augustine’s Confessions. In Sheed’s arbitration of Augustine’s Latin, “there was a certain unanalysable savour, not to be expressed in words, by which she could distinguish …”
We need to be prepared to admit that we have bad taste in certain things. The customer is not always right: some customers like very bad things, even criminal things. Sometimes we are stuck with the way that our tastes have been formed. My generation will probably always like sleek, insubstantial movies, and hardly be able to appreciate slow, black and white classics. My grandparents’ generation will not often be able to eat sushi. Fortunately those are not serious matters. But some matters of taste can become decisive for salvation.
Put no trust in this world’s arbiters of taste. What you should care about, even what you should buy, eat, and read, is not always a trivial thing, and sometimes it must be revealed to you—if not by God himself, then by one of his intimates. If you do not have a Monica in your life, who can discern the things of God by “a certain unanalysable savour,” consider finding her in the pages of Augustine, along with that saint’s own (nearly) infallible instincts. Follow the scent to God through those who have found him, and in time he will give you senses attuned to him. Apprentice yourself to the connoisseurs of the Spirit, and learn to discern the genuine article from the overhyped garbage.
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Image: Sprezzatury, Cooltimeline2 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
