The Angel and the Devil

I visited a small gift shop one day and spotted an angel ornament and a picture of a devil on the same wall. The angel is made in a more traditional form and medium, while the devil is drawn in a moral radical, avant-garde medium. I can interepret this different as a subtle nod to the depictions of religious rationality emphasized by Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society because a more rational and more religious individual tends to be reserved and more traditional when it comes to artistic expression, and a more radical and less religious individual tends to defy tradition and society's moral norms (as a euphemism, defying the 'political correctness' enforced by an immoral society) in order to experiment with different forms of artistic expression.

Fittingly, the angel is placed at a higher position on the wall, while the devil is placed at a lower position, creating a distinct boundary between heaven and hell and hence good and evil. The higher position of the angel over the lower position of the devil faintly reminds me of the 17^th century painting Michael and Satan as mentioned in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experiences, although Micheal was depicted as more of a soldier with a sword in his right hand and foot on the devil. Furthermore, the angel is colored to look golden and is near the top of the white wall (which represents heaven), invoking the antediluvian trope of artistically glorifying religious figures, something the Catholic Worker paper defied in Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness by having Saint Catherine drawn as a simple black-and-white figure humbly carrying two baskets of bread. The angel has a classic pose of blowing into a horn, symbolizing the spread of the gospel to believers and non-believers and invoking them to do add more religiosity into their lives. Most of the authors of this course's readings, such as James, Day, Niebuhr and Falwell, are blowing the horn to us, calling us to take more action into improving our social lives through religious, rational and socially ethical needs.

The devil picture, on the other hand, is loud and bright with hues of red and yellow, invoking the main colors of communism which led to the 'red scare' in America during the Cold War, and inspired the socialist ideals put forward by the characters in The Long Loneliness. Funnily enough, the devil picture is right on top of a surreal picture depicting Elvis Presley, who came to prominence around the same era (I didn't get the whole picture, but you can see 'Elvis', which I presume is about the King, fair enough). While this appears to be an attempt to demonize American pop culture and the American dream in general (this doesn't mean that Day and Niebuhr dislike America; they don't hold a high opinion of how materialistic and shallow the American culture has become in general).

Although the simple display of an angel and a devil motif in the same setting primarily represents the coexistence of good and evil, as well as the many subtle references to different religious texts, I'd have to say that almost everyone, myself included, would perceive this display from a single or few perspectives. Nevertheless, the creativity and contrast of these simple artworks can create a wide range of representations for us to guess, and they are pretty much left open to interpretation.