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Good morning. Humankind can’t cope with too much reality, noted T.S. Eliot. We tend to like people in tidy compartments, labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Phil Spector, who died at the weekend aged 81, wasn’t a tidy person. He walked on the wild side in the music business in an era when the industry had a pretty extensive wild side.

Do we admire him as an artist of fantastic talent, transforming how recording studios worked? Do we moralise about how the excesses of his lifestyle made him a danger to himself and others? Should we solely revile him as a perpetrator of domestic violence and a murderer who spent his last years behind bars? Might we look with compassion on him as a person with mental illness, who needed help but never got it? Or do we have double standards about these judgements when a person’s famous?

It’s hardly new to find an artist who had, in his own words, devils inside that fought him, rendering him ‘relatively insane.’ Art traverses the boundary between the conventional and the liminal, the weird and the wonderful. The rest of us send artists as if on a mission – to outer space, or to the depths of the ocean. It’s hardly surprising if they’re changed by the experience; often not for the better.

But how then do we receive their art, when we find aspects of the artist deeply troubling? Much is made of tortured artists, but little of the pain of their victims. Do we hear ‘To know him is to love him’ and shiver, because we realise to love him was to put yourself in danger? Do we listen to ‘You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling’ and wince, because now it sounds less like a lament than a threat?

We might find help from a surprising place. In north Africa in the fourth century there was a controversy about what to do with priests who’d renounced their faith under persecution, making them a pariah in their churches. Were their sacraments and ministry still valid? Augustine, the bishop, said yes. The Holy Spirit could still work, however unworthy the agent of grace.

It remains a challenging, but liberating, judgement today. It tells us we’re all a mixed bag of worthy and unworthy. It affirms it’s possible for beautiful things to come from a dubious and disreputable person. It certainly doesn’t endorse criminality or cruelty. But it does enable us to disentangle artefacts of wonder and truth from an artist we don’t really know how to think about.

Such careful disentangling is an art in itself. It is, perhaps, precisely what life’s most important judgements are all about.

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