Hearing West Through Christian Tradition

Volitional Division and Family Life in the 21st Century

The following essay was written in the fall of 2016 subsequent to the release of Kanye West’s album The Life of Pablo and never published. Since 2019, West has described himself as a Christian. With his subsequent musical output, West has jettisoned the use of profanity and focused on lyrical themes that are more objectively Christian. Nonetheless, his first several albums reveal a brokenness at the heart of American culture.

A curious news item appeared on a number of news feeds in early September: “Kanye West Is Bigger Than Pope Francis,” read the headline at The Daily Mail. West, over the course of two shows at Madison Square Garden in NYC, had sold more merchandise than Pope Francis did during a visit to the Garden in September 2015. It is doubtful that Pope Francis would much mind a silver medal here. But as The Daily Mail noted with glee, it was The Beatles who were bigger than God, and now West who was bigger than the Vicar of Christ.

There is no surprise in seeing Pope Francis sharing a headline with a major force in today’s music industry. Francis—more than his predecessors it often seems—takes painstaking efforts to engage pop culture. He has released a rock album, regularly entertains celebrities at the Vatican, and millions of Americans remember him sharing a primetime stage in Philadelphia with star personalities of all types. More surprising to many would be Kanye West sharing a headline with a major force in today’s religious culture. Long branded a sex and drug obsessed narcissist, the thought of West engaging with Pope Francis seems wholly out of place.

That should not be the case. West—whether he knows it or not—is in dialogue with Catholic tradition, old and new. In what follows, I want to explore that conversation with an analysis of the pressures on the self, family, and society that West describes in his art, and then correlate these pressures to aspects in Christian tradition dating from the 4th century to the 21st. My hope is demonstrate that West gives us an image of the problems that afflict modern society. I use the word ‘art’ with a touch of hesitation. Many doubtlessly object to the very idea. And yet, West does something with his craft that few artists in our time are doing: pointing us toward the good in a way that recognizes the deep intertwining of personal and systemic vice that does violence to our society. West knows that his own brokenness both results from and serves to foster the brokenness of American culture. Whatever the vulgarities that constitute so many of his lyrics, his words are nonetheless unique.

I

The review of 2016’s The Life of Pablo in The New Yorker places the album in the context of a man yearning for simpler times. Hua Hsu relates the story of an interview that West gave to a European fashion website in 2015, when a growing nostalgia overtook West as he told of seeing schoolchildren running after a bus on a Paris street. West quipped that the sight “really saddened” him, and his voice tightened and rose in the course of his response. West had been asked about the hopes that he has for his newborn son, and Hsu writes that, “he [West] wasn’t sure that his son would ever feel that sense of desperation, the humility of struggle.” The Life of Pablo Hsu refers to as a God dream: a desire for a time before wealth and fame turned family life and personal growth into a life absent real struggle.

That interpretation of The Life of Pablo gets two themes of the album exactly right: volitional division and family. A third theme is the hoped-for answer to the challenges endemic to the first two: God. The Life of Pablo tells a simple story: the strong desire to act on the worst of his desires—now with the added risk of doing harm to family—results in manic experience, and so West appeals to God to bring resolution and peace to his life. This is not so much a desire for a simpler time as it is a desire for a simpler state of being.

The emotional core of The Life of Pablo revolves around three songs placed in the final third of the album: “FML,” “Real Friends,” and “Wolves.” In “FML,” West fears that he will succumb to lustful temptation and jeopardize his marriage. As far as his business life is concerned, West is “the only one that’s in control.” But not so in his family life. Kanye raps that he is “willing to give up the women” for the sake of family, but his words are laced with doubt. A moment later, The Weeknd chimes the chorus, “they wish I would go ahead and . . . my life up / Can’t let them get to me / And even though I always . . . my life up / only I can mention me.” It is a devastating brace of lines, wherein the best West can do to defend honor in the face of public expectation of infidelity is claim territorial exemption. Two tracks later on “Wolves,” Kanye considers his life from the perspective of his parents, and hears both mother and father criticizing again and again that he’s “too wild, too wild.” Soon after West implores himself: “don’t trip, don’t trip.”

What West experiences on this album is volitional division. He experiences desires both to care for his family and to pursue whatever pleasures might appeal to him at a particular moment. The consequence of this psychic tension is a kind of mania that routinely terminates in flights of fancy. Much like on 2010’s magisterial My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy—something of an ode to the role of the imagination in personal and public life—West on The Life of Pablo seeks to externalize the worst of his desires in wild imaginings. On “Famous,” he speaks of having relations with Taylor Swift before boasting that his outburst at the 2009 Video Music Awards is the cause of Swift’s own fame. On “Feedback,” Kanye writes that he’s been out of his mind for quite some time, before asking the listener to name “one genius who ain’t crazy.”

The appeal to the imagination has long been for West a means of managing the material of his own psychic life. On MBDTF, Kanye talks of the tension at play on lead single “Power”:

I just needed time alone, with my own thoughts

Got treasures in my mind but couldn't open up my own vault

My child-like creativity, purity and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts

Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child I'm fighting for custody

With these responsibilities that they entrust in me

As I look down at my diamond encrusted piece thinking...

He dwells between contrasts and contradictions. On Pablo, the track “Lowlights”—a soul inflected hymn to God—is followed immediately by “Highlights,” an ode to fame, success, and notoriety. Each track inverts the normal way to thinking of things (lowlights associated with God, highlights with fame and success) and the placement of these tracks in succession emphasizes the contrast.

West has never shied from the meta. On “Lost in the World,” from MBDTF, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon intones in rustic vocals the chorus to his own song, “Woods”: “I’m lost in the woods,” he sings plaintively. Kanye then introduces two contrasts: “woods” is changed to “world,” and the music transitions from a gentle strum on the guitar to a propulsive drum beat surrounded by techno synths and a chorus of voices. West then tells a lover that she is both his devil and angel, heaven and hell, now and forever, freedom and jail, lies and truth, war and truce before asking the question: “Who will survive in America?” In “FML” from Pablo, Kanye in the second verse contrasts his earnest musings on family life in the first verse with a series of manic lines in the second, insisting that we have never seen anything as crazy as West off his Lexapro. The venerable Lou Reed in his excellent review of 2013’s Yeezus album points toward the “manic- depressive, going back and forth” nature of West’s lyrics. On the track “Hold My Liquor,” “I can hold my liquor” is immediately contrasted with “I can’t hold my liquor.” As Reed states, on Yeezus “what he [West] says and what he does are often two very different things.” Reed is correct in his assessment. Living between contrasted and contradicted desires, what Kanye says and does are often very different. The worst of his desires are externalized to the imagination and there given life. The hope is that these externalized desires will not compel him.

But on The Life of Pablo, West’s use of the imagination now proves an insufficient means of control. When we last heard from Kanye on an album—on the track “Bound 2” from 2013’s Yeezus—he told us that we need to “remember how to forget” his lyrics, that they are not always meant to be taken seriously, and that keeping pace with his imagination is exhausting for everyone. The opening moments of Pablo tell exactly how exhausting that kind of living is for West: a young girl says two times “We don’t want no devils in this house, God / We want the Lord.” West then asks the listener to “pray for the parents” before The-Dream establishes the theme of the album: “I’m tryna keep my faith / But I’m looking for more / Somewhere I can feel safe / And end my holy war.” Family, desire, and God. There is nothing imaginative about the song. Throughout the album West returns to the imagination in an effort to manage desires, but these prove to be nothing but temporary diversions. West can only hope that God might heal his volitional division.

West—going back to moments on his debut The College Dropout—has always battled desire. But on Pablo, the realities of family life have raised the stakes. The birth of a daughter in 2013 followed by marriage almost a year later, and the birth of a son shortly before the release of Pablo, have ratcheted up the psychic tension in Kanye’s inner-life. West no longer picks and chooses from amongst the various desires he experiences, attempting to manage those unwanted with the gift of an imaginary half-life. On Pablo, we see West forming substantial attitudes— settled dispositions—toward his desires. The choice of one desire over another is now a matter of real consequence. We find West wanting to want certain desires, and not wanting to want others. He does not want unwanted desires controlled; he wants them gone. “Sun can’t shine in the shade / Bird can’t fly in a cage,” he tells us on “Waves.” Choice has become a matter of greater reflexivity. Family life has given West a heightened volitional life. On Pablo, Kanye finds himself wondering why it is that he cannot control the will itself, and hopes that God has the answers.

II

Of course, West is not the first person to suffer from volitional affliction. There are striking parallels here between West’s plight and the personal drama that St. Augustine recounts in his Confessions. Like West, Augustine found himself torn between conflicting desires: one to sin from concupiscence, and the other to dedicate himself fully to God. That psychic tension for Augustine resulted in a brilliant meditation on the nature of the will, one that introduced the concept of second-order volitions to moral psychology for the first time: the idea that a person can not only want a desire to terminate in action, but can also want to want that desire to terminate in action. Trapped within the hierarchical structure of the will Augustine labels a “monstrous state.” He explains the experience of volitional division this way: “The mind commands the mind itself should will a thing, and yet, though it be the same mind, it does not do what is commanded” (Bk. 8, ch. 9). Augustine concludes that his will is not wholehearted. From “habit not resisted became necessity,” and so Augustine finds himself in the peculiar position of commanding a will that is not fully his own. He literally cannot act upon his desire to convert, despite the fact that he wants to want that action. We could imagine Augustine agreeing with West on Pablo’s “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1”: “I just want to feel liberated, I, I, I.”

Also like West, Augustine frequently speaks of the power of the imagination in the Confessions. He conceives of the imagination as a mental faculty that both helps and hinders personal conversion, and that brings both peace and pain to the soul. Augustine tells of the death of a friend, and writes of how the passage of time acted upon his mind through the senses. These experiences, “came day by day, and by coming and going, introduced into my mind other imaginations and other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my old kind of delights, unto which that my sorrow gave way” (Bk. 4, ch. 8). In the Confessions, the imagination works to bring solace to Augustine after a painful loss. He writes routinely of using the imagination to understand Christian doctrine correctly or incorrectly: forming a mental image of the soul or imagining the Trinity to take one form or another. But after his conversion, Augustine explains that God has “. . . evened me, lowering the mountains and hills of my high imaginations, straightening my crookedness, and smoothing my rough ways” (Bk. 9, ch. 4). The novel experience of volitional wholeheartedness leads Augustine to reflect on his earlier life and to conclude that a balanced and controlled imagination was necessary for conversion. Though the imagination frequently aided Augustine in his journey toward God, he recognizes that he could have no peace until it was “tamed.”

Augustine’s Conversion by Fra Angelico, 1430

Finally, the experience of volitional division causes both Augustine and West to compose beautiful reflections on friendship. Bad friendships—says Augustine—enable sin. He doubts that he would have stolen those infamous pears were it not for the cheering on of his friends (Bk. 2, ch. 9). For West, financial success and business demands have made friendships established on desiring the good of the other— “to the real end,” as Kanye styles it on “Real Friends”— impossible. “Maybe 15 minutes, took some pictures with your sister / Merry Christmas, then I'm finished, then it's back to business / You wanna ask some questions 'bout some real . . . ? / Like I ain't got enough pressure to deal with,” he tells us. Augustine developed genuine friendships as he continued to orient himself toward God. But West seems to lack the kinds of relationships and experiences that Augustine eventually described as many fires forging many souls into one (Bk. 4, ch. 8). Without friends, afflicted with a divided self, and with the pressures attendant to family life, West on The Life of Pablo can only hope that God might provide respite and resolution.

III

When West released 2013’s Yeezus album with a track titled “I Am a God” coming early in the rotation, speculation swirled regarding West’s moral and religious convictions. Spencer Kornhaber wrote in The Atlantic that, “All the lyrics build convincingly on West's big, important theme: that he's a living, breathing god, and yet America's so screwed-up and racist that even he can't get his due.” On the other side of America’s socio-political order, Nicholas Troester wrote in First Things that the song “Blood on the Leaves” just might be the anti-abortion anthem for our times. Falling anywhere on the spectrum from self-declared deity to conservative crusader, West found himself and his new album the subject of enormous controversy.

In an analysis of the album written for Vulture in June of 2013, Margaret Lyons considers Yeezus in the context of West’s full career. She writes that Yeezus represents the endpoint of long transition for West, where:

the religious references on Yeezus are actually not so much about him becoming more self-important as they are about gods getting less so. In fact, in the context of his work since "Jesus Walks," the song that made him a star, Yeezus is the culmination of a transformation from a fairly traditional Christian outlook to a more secular vision.

That seems right. On “Jesus Walks,” Kanye asks God to show him the way forward because the devil is trying to “break [him] down.” He tells us that—despite his religious conviction—he is afraid to speak to God because they have not spoken “for so long.” “I'm just trying to say the way school need teachers / The way Kathie Lee needed Regis that's the way I need Jesus,” West declares. On “Never Let Me Down,” West and his peers are heaven-sent instruments, they get their “hymns from Him,” “God's penmanship has been signed with a language called love,” we’re told, and that whenever they open heart, soul, or mouth, “a touch of God rings out.” Whatever the distance between West and God in terms of personal relationship, it is clear that at this point in his career Kanye continued to invoke the rhetoric of a convicted Christian.

These themes continued on 2005’s album Late Registration. But by the time West released Graduation in 2007, his religious orientation had begun to shift. On the radio staple “Stronger,” Lyons explains, “West says, ‘Bow in the presence of greatness / 'Cause right now thou hast forsaken us,’ but he's not talking to God. He's talking to the woman he's with, and he himself is the ‘greatness.’" On 2008’s 808’s and Heartbreaks, talk of God is entirely missing. With MBDTF in 2010, God is nothing more than an empty foil to lustful temptation. On the Kanye West and Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne from 2011, we hear a devastating chorus on opening track “No Church in the Wild”: “Human beings in a mob / What’s a mob to a king? / What’s a king to a god? / What’s a god to a non-believer?” These secular musings reach fulfillment in West’s acclamation: “We formed a new religion / No sins as long as there’s permission.” Talk of God is now fully expelled from West’s universe, and a faith of liberal consent established in its stead.

Lyons concludes her piece by noting that the sentiments expressed on “I Am a God” in 2013 are not all that far apace from the experiences of many Americans today: “that traditional organized religion holds less and less appeal, even if some aspects, like a higher power or versions of predestination, still affect us.” Making the claim “I am a God,” Lyons insists, is tantamount to claiming that neither God nor religion is necessary to know right from wrong. Maxims of action are self-generated. Moral authority is a human construct.

Given the transition from believer to non-believer that we see develop in West between 2004 and 2013, God’s dramatic reemergence on 2015’s The Life of Pablo is jarring. Kanye tells us immediately on lead track “Ultralight Beam” that the album is a “God dream.” A gospel choir joins a chorus begging divine intervention, guest vocalist Chance The Rapper offers religiously confessional lyrics that remind of West’s early years, and Pastor Kirk Franklin gives a passionate blessing of an outro. West had earlier given a radio interview explaining that Pablo would be “a gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it.” The description fits. On Pablo, all wayward roads—all wild boasts and broken fantasies—lead back to God. If West’s life between 2004 and 2013 forsook the spiritual, Pablo makes it clear that in 2015, Kanye is once again talking to God in a more traditional manner.

The oscillation between these traditional and secular conceptions of divinity demonstrate that West’s religious belief is metaphysically unmoored. Untethered to firm convictions regarding how it is that human beings relate to God on the plain of the metaphysical, West gets lost between God’s transcendence and immanence. This is the story that his craft relates: that slow drift from a God utterly transcendent and with whom it is nearly impossible to converse toward a God so thoroughly immanent that the notion of divinity and West’s own humanity become confused. West doesn’t know how to relate to God, and the consequence is a circumstantial and schizophrenic spirituality.

We need a theological vocabulary to better understand these issues, and one can be provided by the 20th-century theologian Erich Przywara. In his seminal work Analogia Entis, Przywara describes a metaphysical instability that holds between theopanic and pantheistic worldviews. The pantheistic worldview presents a world that is deified: everything becomes god, and so all human action exists as something that is somehow divine. The theopanic worldview presents a world from which God is exiled: God is utterly other and stands in no stable metaphysical relation to the world he created. On the theopanic view of human life, God becomes present only through singular and ad hoc interventions. Each position describes an extreme theological understanding of God’s relation to the world: either everything becomes god or nothing stands in an abiding relation with the divine. The Christian God is presented as either radically transcendent or entirely immanent and there is no way to reconcile divine immanence and divine transcendence. The consequence is a persistent state of movement from immanence to transcendence and back again; an abiding condition of metaphysical instability.

Przywara rejects both pantheism and theopanism. Critical to good theology is a sound underlying metaphysics; a particular way of “proceeding” in our human understanding of creaturely relations with the divine. The right way of proceeding, says Przywara, is best explained by St. Thomas Aquinas and his “doctrine of secondary causes”: “the doctrine that the creaturely ‘is’ . . . is so very much something produced from the divine Is . . . as to have its own power of operation.”¹ What is at stake here for the spiritual life is a foundational question concerning the relation between grace and nature. On the theopanic view, nature stands devoid of grace. On the pantheistic view, nature is grace. On the view of Aquinas, grace builds on nature: human participation in the divine life of God— participation made possible by a specific metaphysical relation—entails that human action can be authentically spiritual, and grace both causes and builds upon right human action. God is both beyond us and within us: God works through us as we work ourselves toward God.

From Graduation to Yeezus, humanity and divinity are routinely conflated in West’s lyrics. But on The Life of Pablo, personal crisis causes a full reversion to God—but to an idea of God that is now completely transcendent. On “Ultralight Beam,” Kelly Price sings the lines, “So I look to the light / (Lord) To make these wrongs turn right,” and that, “Hey, cause I know that you'll make everything alright.” There’s no talk of participating in God’s sanctifying act. “Someday,” we hear on “Lowlights,” “the sky above will open up and he will reach out his hand and guide / me through, oh yes he will / I won't always be crying these tears. I won't always be feeling so blue. Someday, he will open up the door / for me and call my name.” And on “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” Pastor T.L. Barrett offers the advice: turn toward God—there is no other help—with outstretched hands. As West describes the situation, to be Christian is to wait as best you can for an act of divine gratuity.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with beseeching God’s grace. To ask God for help is an integral component of any spiritual life. But compare West’s approach to spirituality in the midst of personal crisis to Augustine’s. Similarly afflicted, Augustine—on reading the epistles of St. Paul—writes that:

It is one thing from a wooded mountaintop to see at a distance the ‘land of peace,’ but to find no path that leads to it . . . besieged on every side and waylaid by fugitive deserters . . . It is another thing to keep to the way that leads there, safeguarded by the care of our heavenly Commander . . . ( Bk. 7, ch. 21)

Augustine did more than await God’s gratuity. He prayed and he studied, developed better friendships, sought out wise and holy men, and sacrificed what he was able to sacrifice in the pursuit of God’s peace. Augustine participated in the process of his own conversion. For the future bishop of Hippo, grace built on nature. West’s turn toward God lacks this participatory aspect. Volitional division has made West reflective and his turn toward God for the sake of his family is genuine. But beyond the offer of a “gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it” as sacrifice, West does not engage in the kind of spiritual heavy lifting that Augustine describes in his Confessions. And given that West lapses between immanent and transcendent understandings of God’s relation to the world, that fact ought not to surprise.

IV

So far, I have tried to describe the following situation: on The Life of Pablo, Kanye West wants to expel from his psychic experience the kinds of desires that might destroy his family life, he finds that he cannot, and so after a long separation, West turns to God for deliverance. The lyrics of West’s songs relate something like this narrative, and point toward a sincere hope that peace might be possible. Moreover, I have introduced Augustine and his own confessional work of art as a point of comparison and contrast. Like West, Augustine suffered from volitional division. But unlike West, Augustine had a better idea of who God is, of how humans relate to God, and of how to more fully participate in the divine life. Augustine expended real effort in his pursuit of peace. West has only asked for peace.

The final element of West’s craft that I would like to investigate in order to paint that picture about modern American culture concerns West’s addictions. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber evaluates the state of modern marriage through West’s The Life of Pablo and Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. It is an excellent analysis, but one that finds Kornhaber concluding that “the issue at the core of Pablo is sex.” Kornhaber reminds that an original draft of the album art for Pablo featured a wedding photo and the photo of a scantily clad model with the words “Which/One” scrolled in long vertical columns. But this idea that sex is the real driver in Kanye’s life misses on a more insidious threat to modern life that West has pointed toward since the beginning of his career: consumerism.

On the track “All Falls Down” from 2004’s The College Dropout, West offers a genealogical account of the consumerism that afflicts black America. He writes, “We'll buy a lot of clothes when we don't really need em / Things we buy to cover up what's inside / Cause they make us hate ourself and love they wealth,” and a line later, “Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack /And a white man get paid off of all of that.” West describes the consumer mentality as a form of slavery, one introduced to black culture by whites aiming to preserve the social hierarchy. This idea appears again on “New Slaves” from Yeezus where West makes a distinction between two forms of modern racism: a racism against impoverished blacks described as a “Don't touch anything in the store” and a racism against wealthy blacks described as a “Come here, please buy more.” The ramifications of the consumer mentality affect the whole of American civic and family life. This is the narrative told on The College Dropout. On “Never Let Me Down, West laments that African Americans “can’t make it to ballots to choose leadership / But they can make it to Jacob’s or to the dealership.” And on “Family Business,” it is consumerism that poses the greatest threat to the family: all that glitters is not gold and diamond rings do not mean a thing, West instructs, as he tells of a family reunion at a prison to visit an incarcerated relative. Perhaps the purest distillation of West’s critique of the consumer mentality comes on “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” on Late Registration. There West tells of how consumerism drives the violence that destroys cultures the world over, white or black.

West describes himself as a victim of the consumer mentality. “What's your addiction? / Is it money? Is it girls? Is it weed?” West asks on “Addiction” from Late Registration, before explaining “I've been afflicted by not one, not two, but all three.” Sex—for West—is just one desire that can be sated amongst a field replete with options. The mentality pervades the whole of West’s thinking, and so also his catalogue. On “Good Life” from Graduation, West inverts an old expression with a brilliant touch of irony: “The good life, let's go on a living' spree / . . . they say the best things in life are free.” The mentality appears again on “Gorgeous” from MBDTF. There we are met by the tragic chorus, “Ain't no question if I want it, I need it / I can feel it slowly drifting away from me.” Desire results in a sense of necessity that runs so deep it literally pains to lose that which is not yet possessed. Though West often speaks of the life of merger and acquisition in celebratory language, his lyrics in their totality reveal a tension: West wants both to embrace and reject who he is. In a moment of grandiose pathos, West on MBDTF’s “Runaway” apologizes to a former lover for being the man that he is, while recognizing that his insatiable desire to satisfy all of his desires—for luxury items, for other women, for new experiences—is so thoroughgoing that relationship is impossible. He offers a toast to his defective self, and advises his erstwhile lover to keep her distance.

The Life of Pablo examines the consumer mentality in the context of the family. Here the great threat to family is consumerism, of which infidelity is but one form. Sometimes the threat is more systemic. On “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” West speaks of his own father: “All his time, all he had, all he had / In what he dreamed / All his cash, market crashed / Hurt him bad, people get divorced for that.” But Pablo is more personal in its critique of consumerism than The College Dropout or Late Registration. With “Real Friends,” wealth and status have made the maintaining of family relationships impossible; money has introduced favor-seeking and mistrust into the family. On “FML,” West is incapable of distinguishing between finance and family: he is willing to give up the women, he says, before he loses half of what he owns. And on “Wolves,” West asks whether or not the Holy Family could survive the pressures attendant to life in modern America—an America that in some way he is desperate to reject. Surrounded by wolves, he tells his wife to cover the children in lamb’s wool. West knows his enemy, even if that same mentality is a formative element of his own psyche.

V

There is significant common ground here between Kanye West and Pope Francis. With West in mind, the Holy Father’s opening to the exhortation Evangelii Gaudium in 2013 reads like a psychiatric diagnosis: “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience” (§2). Francis describes a consumerist, throw-away culture in which human persons become objects fit for use. The mentality destroys family life as well. In Amoris Laetitia, Francis warns that relationships today often take the form of social media: people quickly connect to, disconnect from, and block one another (§39). Couples make decisions regarding children on the bases of preferred lifestyle and relative freedom (§42). The great worth that is the love of friendship is innately beautiful, but the consumerist mentality perverts and distorts beauty therefore making real friendship impossible (§127). Francis has—in a way that makes him unique amongst recent pontiffs—identified modern society as so thoroughly commercial that consumerism is no longer one vice amongst many but the proper hermeneutic for identifying our personal, political, and societal failures in the realm of morality. Or, as West puts it on “Never Let Me Down”: our God given lives are a mix of hard living and Crystal sipping.

There is a point in Amoris Laetitia where Pope Francis cautions that the Church must be self-conscious in order to better understand and respond to the challenges of our times. That particular claim about the importance of self-reflection is yet another feature shared between West and Francis. West—more than most artists—dissects, evaluates, and criticizes the depths of his psyche through art. As a consequence, West gives a critic of contemporary culture a particularly clear image of 21st century American life. Thoroughly consumerist, relationships are often impossible to maintain; families break apart; blame is apportioned on broken systems or personal failures, but rarely is the dynamic relationship between the two appreciated; these kinds of pressures on the self result in moments of volitional division; and moments of volitional division and hardship prompt many to turn back toward a God poorly understood and so a God related to with difficulty. Of course, none of these are issues unfamiliar to the observant. But it is rare to find so many of these sentiments expressed by such a successful artist. West is the rare talent that does inform about the real brokenness in our culture, and in that way, he points toward the good. Once, West proclaimed in rhyme that “we’re all self-conscious” and that he is just the first to admit it. He was likely wrong to say so. Were people so self-conscious, more members of society would understand something of the deeper nature of their afflictions, even if—like West— they lack the knowledge or ability to find peace.

1. Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (2014). p. 229.