Faith & Spirit Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens lands the punch where polite society least expects it: not in the pew, but in the gallery. The line is engineered as a provocation, a kind of moral judo that flips the usual hierarchy of offenses. Religious intolerance is the historically obvious villain; Stevens doesn’t excuse it so much as use it as a measuring stick. Compared with the thin-lipped certainty people bring to judging art, even doctrinal zeal can look almost principled.

The intent is less to defend religion than to indict a specific kind of cultural arrogance. Religion, for all its absolutism, at least admits it’s dealing in total claims about existence. Art asks for a different kind of participation: attention, patience, the willingness to be changed without being told exactly how. When someone shuts that down - dismissing a style as fake, calling a difficult work “not art,” policing taste into a single correct lane - they’re not just rejecting an object. They’re refusing the legitimacy of another person’s inner life.

Stevens wrote as a modernist, when new forms (free verse, abstraction, fractured narrative) were treated by many as an affront, not an experiment. His subtext is that aesthetic intolerance often masquerades as common sense. It’s socially rewarded, even: being “discerning” can become a license to be contemptuous. The quote needles that respectability. It suggests that the most aggressive dogmas now travel under the banner of taste, and that the culture wars start with something deceptively small: who gets to decide what counts as seeing.