Beatus vir, baby

I remember reading this the first time, Mike Aquilina, one of the best minds of my generation, threw this heavy thing down in '97. Excerpts:

Thus it was with the Beats from the beginning. Though ostensibly a literary movement, the Beats were about much more. Critic John Clellon Holmes noted in 1958: "The Beat generation is basically a religious generation."
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Perhaps that should not be so surprising. The Beat movement’s other founder, novelist Jack Kerouac, was an intermittently practicing Catholic. It was Kerouac who named the movement (in 1948) and wrote its early aesthetic manifestos.
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Ultimately, what the Beats were after was mystical experience. "I want God to show me His face" was Kerouac’s description of his goal.

To that end, the early Beats spent long hours poring over the saints’ works on prayer and the spiritual life. Ginsberg, a secular Jew, was an avid reader of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. Kerouac was fond of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Yet just as Beat writing had rejected traditional forms and disciplines, so eventually would it reject religion. The Beats wanted the mysticism, but without any ascetical preparation.

So being "beat" was an attempt to attain the beatific vision "on the cheap." In my experience most people who are into the Beats don't often acknowledge this relationship between the word beat and beatitude. That's probably because, as Mike writes, "most of his Beat-sympathetic biographers dismiss Kerouac’s fitful faith as the last infantile regression of a deeply troubled man." But Jack K. came up with the word, and it's how he defined it. Check it out:

He seemed to be grasping his way, again, to Christianity. In a 1959 essay on the origins of the Beats, he expresses outrage that Mademoiselle magazine, after a photo session, airbrushed out the crucifix that hung from a chain around his neck.

"I am a Beat," he wrote, "that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to it."

Whoa, John 3:16. Strange flowers for someone who learned about Kerouac from the revisionistae.

So by definition, the Beat philosophy was sort a Christian heresy which accentuated the teachings about the existence of a Benevolent Deity and the blessedness (beatitude) of the Saints and the Heavenly Kingdom, the goodness of existence and creation and the ability of man to transcend the material world while completely throwing out any relationship these realities might have to behavior along with most of the Judeo-Christian moral code, teachings about the fall, the real danger of losing one's soul, etc.

These thoughts form sort of an unplanned dovetail with this earlier post regarding "kernels of truth and wishful thinking". I've always been intrigued by the work of these cats, especially Kerouac, since I read On the Road circa 1988. Before reading Mike's piece, I always felt guilty liking the stuff since it's so decadent morally. It's good to know that there might be a kernel of goodness in this literature, that you can catch a passing glimpse of the Divine amid the wrong-headed ideas of flawed these flawed visionaries. It's probably also good to only allow yourself small doses and restrict reading to mature adults. And let's not revise their material in the opposite direction to make these guys into the saints and mystics they claimed themselves to be. In other words, a kernel of truth is not the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" and while useful, we should be careful not to substitute the kernel for the whole.