Christianity has a long history of incorporating art into its liturgy and worship. Some classic examples of this are cathedral architecture with its soaring towers and stained glass windows, the religious paintings of artists like Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and of course hymns and classical music. Of course there are modern versions of all of this too that incorporate contemporary music and visual media into services.
What Christians are much less aware of is how the artist's unique perspective can enrich and deepen how we approach theology. So in this post I'd like to take a look at what doing theology as an artist looks like, and how that differs from the way theology has typically been done.
Let me begin by offering a definition of art: First of all, art is not just about creativity. That's part of it, of course, but lots of other work involves creativity too. Art in particular is about taking something in your heart, and putting it out there (on paper, a movie screen, a song, etc.) in such a way that another person can connect with it in his or her heart. A musician writes a song about a breakup, and you hear that song and deeply connect with it. It captures how you are feeling about your own breakup so much that it makes you want to sing it at the top of your lungs as you drive in your car. Art makes us laugh, makes us cry, inspires us or shakes us up because it has become ours. It moves us because we relate to it personally.
Art is something deeply personal of the artist, that becomes deeply personal to us as well. In that sense, the Incarnation can be understood as God's art. It is God's heart, presented in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That's why the Apostle Paul calls Jesus the "image of God" (Colossians 1:15). Jesus is God's own self-portrait, and the artistic medium of the Creator is not oils or clay, but life itself. Again, that divine self-portrait, that song of God in Jesus, is successful to the extent that it connects with us, to the extent that it becomes the song we sing, too. That means that truth needs to connect with us personally to function as truth. We cannot remain neutral and detached around it. With art, to be unaffected by it is to not get it, and the Christian story, at its very heart, is God's art. It's not about abstract doctrinal formulations or moral principles, it's about us connecting with what Hans Urs von Balthasar famously called God's theo-drama, God's story. That gospel, that message from God's heart, is not primarily informational, it is incarnational, and thus personal and relational.
Now, all of this is very different from the way Protestant theology has been approached throughout the modern era. There the focus has been on formulating precise doctrinal statements. It seeks to find objective truth by observing as a neutral party from the outside. This approach works well for the natural sciences, but it does not work in human relationships because we do not live in the general. Everything we experience is particular and personal. That's why the artist insists that truth can only be encountered in the concrete and personal, and never in the abstract, never in a detached way. For us as Christians that means knowing truth is about knowing God relationally, not just knowing facts about God.
The difference between the artist's relational approach to faith, as opposed to the more typical dogmatic approach which has characterized modernism, has many implications. It goes a long way toward explaining why the church has had a history of violence, and why many still perceive Christians as being unloving today. These are of course big topics that are beyond the scope of one blog post. So I'll be covering these themes and others in future posts.
What we can see right away however is that, while the church has often viewed artists with suspicion (and vice versa), there is a lot that we can learn from the artist's perspective that can enrich, expand and challenge how we approach faith. It ultimately involves learning to think with both our heads and hearts, developing both cognitive and emotional intelligence. You don't need to know how to paint to do that.
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Cathy Luchetti
"Something about a Landscape that's More than Land", watercolor by r.g. phillips, http://rgphil.com/?s=363
So far, so lucky.
Sometimes, on here, religion well-aside, when the subject of art comes up, I fear mentioning the nature of some of the art I do (my non-religious art) for fear of an angry response because there are a lot of er-hem, "moral guardians of a kind" here who spoil for fights.
As a singer, who happens to be a Christian, one of my biggest pet peeves as both is the (blanket generalization coming) reality that a lot of mainstream Christian musicians, authors and visual artists seem to think that their faith gives them license to be mediocre in their field. That being a Christian should be *enough* to propel them to fame, glory, and hence a platform from which to preach. That absolutely repels me. (For example, the shoddy writing and editing of the ENTIRE 'Left Behind' series. You have GOT to be kidding me.) To them, I say, if God has called you to be an artist/speaker/painter/anything, why not be excellent at what you are doing? Why just be 'ok'? In the highly competitive "real world" of performing arts, mediocrity doesn't get you anywhere. Neither does merely having faith (in a god/God, in yourself, in your high notes). It's a combination of skill, talent, practice and yes, being in the right place at the right time whether through luck, divine intervention or whathaveyou. My advice to those Christians wanting to pursue art as a profession: develop that God-given passion and skill and become excellent at it, be a good colleague...that will speak volumes more than a mediocre output with an overbearing message.
80s-era U2 might be a case in point.
"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is a song of 'The Troubles' -- a mix of religion, nationalism, regionalism and social identity.
The last line - "And the battle's just begun, to claim the victory Jesus won" --- is usually censored on digital juke boxes and radio. It sounds OK because the chorus --"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is repeated on either side of the offending line. If you listen--it's clearly scrubbed and the chorus brought up in the mix.
No religion at the local pIzza shop is the message I guess! As weird as the censorshop of God and Jesus in VFW Honor Guard funerals or scrubbing 'For God and Country' from the American Legion motto.
The bland survive.
I totally know what you mean. I think that at least a part of what is going there has to do with people not valuing art in itself, and thinking it is something that is sort of tacked on, as accompanying decoration, and the real "stuff" is the informational content.
The thing is, to really convince people you need to move them. Art can do that. Sometimes we really only first get something when we hear it expressed in a song, or see played out in a film or book. The art takes us there. In a novel for example like Les Miserables we can experience what the characters are going through and as a result become aware of the plight of the poor in a way that knowing statistics alone could not do.
When the art (music, writing, acting, etc.) is poor, then it fails to move us, and as a result the message seems flat and "on the nose" and is thus ineffective.
Death Fictionalized and a Flower
photography, r.g. phillips
The Future Visualized
Prophecy Realized
Hope Vandalized
Death Fictionalized and a Flower
O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?
Hosea 13:14
1 Corinthians 15:55
Death Fictionalized and a Flower, photography r.g. phillips http://rgphil.com/?s=324
"...we can have correct dogma, ritual and even administration, yet still lack the substance, if we do not also have beauty. More than that, when beauty is present, we find that even the deficits our humanity inevitably introduces into the expression of dogma, ritual and administration are bearable, and do not suffice to sever us from hope, communion, and even joy. (Does anyone remember joy?) The upholding of beauty, and the refusal to refrain from celebratory participation in its development and forms–even in the midst of what appears to be its negation–is the strongest, most sustaining declaration we can make. Beauty is not empty. It contains the fulness of hope, and holds in secret all that hope anticipates."
Fr. Isaac Skidmore - Imaginal Orthodoxy and the Hope of the Future
Looking forward to more of your posts.
"On the artist’s priestly or ministerial function:
The original intention of intelligible forms was not to entertain us, but literally to “re-mind” us. The chant is not for the approval of the ear, nor the picture for that of the eye (although these senses can be taught to approve the splendor of truth, and can be trusted when they have been trained), but to effect such a transformation of our being as is the purpose of all ritual acts. It is, in fact, the ritual arts that are the most “artistic,” because the most “correct,” as they must be if they are to be effectual." - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Rest of the essay at: http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/A_Figure_of_Speech_or_a_Figure_of_Thought_Part_1-by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.aspx
If you find it useful, check out Coomaraswamy's many, many books. He knew more than 30 languages and wrote on many spiritual traditions, bringing out their common essentials. He was curator, collector, scholar, writer, mystic. IMO, one of the most brilliant human beings ever born.
I compare this to an art festival that I attended last year where some of the artists were Evangelicals and I remember being struck by the pottery that one of the artists makes depicting the Tree of Life. Candles can be placed inside and seeing such a work conveyed so much. The Tree itself, the inner-light that she feels as part of her faith, the Burning Bush of revelation, so much expressed and yet not a single word needed. Simple, direct, pointing to deep feelings on the part of the artist. THAT I can understand and even relate to because nothing needs to be said. It teaches through experiencing it. It's a living thing. Her inner life and faith in a simple bit of clay and a candle.
I think what you were encountering in that bookstore is not really art, but "merchandise" (greet cards, motivational posters, bookmarks, etc.). Christian popular merchandise is pretty much the same as any popular merchandise - corny. I don't think many artists would consider a photo of a cat hanging on a branch with the inscription "hang in there" to be art. One big reason is because art needs to be personal - it needs to come from the soul of the artist, and speak to our souls. It sounds like you were encountering that in the simple yet profound pottery you saw. Words can be a part of that (songs, poems, novels, and films are involve words), but the purpose of those words is not to explain away things, but to draw us into the experience, so that it becomes our experience too.
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To put it succinctly, art is about discovering or identifying horizon lines which the artists molds while the resistant public forms in their psyche impermeable boundaries that harden into concrete walls isolating them from the imaginary and thus from its muse dans le nom du pere (or du mere if you wish).
The artist's muse and the mystic's inspiration are the same. And each demonstrates this in his own separate way. So why the fear and obsession with that which deadens the spirit and numbs the flesh?
translation: The muse "in the name of the Father (or Mother if you wish)"
I like that!
I can only speak to Christianity, since that's where I sit, but faith without art is pretty ugly. My denomination (and many others) has a long tradition of incorporating the arts in worship and religious expression (and a tradition of not being doctrinal/dogmatic), for which I am thankful. I studied much worship and arts in seminary, and include it in worship, writing, and so on. I just finished directing a music, art, dance, and drama camp for teens at one of our church camps as well.
A few years ago I attended a worship and arts conference at the evangelical Willow Creek church - some good stuff, but mostly we were told that the arts' role is to prove points, teach lessons, convince belief. Pastor Hybels' keynote address said nothing about diving into the sublime or raising up mystery with unanswered questions, but was a rant about how we artists have to be careful of sexual sin. There is a very real fear of artistic expression in evangelical circles. It's why their "art" is so often so utterly bad.
Hans Rookmaaker wrote back in the 70's about the meaning of art from a Christian perspective:
"Art needs no justification. The mistake of many art theorists (and not only of Christian ones) is to try to give art a meaning or a sense by showing that it 'does something'. So art must open people's eyes, or serve as decoration, or prophesy, or praise, or have a social function, or express a particular philosophy. Art needs no such excuse. It has its own meaning that does not need to be explained, just a marriage does, or a man himself, or the existence of a particular bird or flower or mountain or sea or star." (Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, p. 229-230)
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I remember when I first read that as a young painter working on my BFA, it was revolutionary for me because I was feeling pressure - both from my secular art teachers, as well from folks in church - to have my art serve some "use," some agenda. As Rookmaaker says, art is good in and of itself, and artists need to have the freedom to make their art. That kind of freedom and honesty makes a lot of religious folks really nervous. But if we could have the courage to listen, to allow artist to really speak on their own terms, rather than being something the church "uses" for its purposes, then there would be a great deal of insight to be gained into the reality of the deep, the ineffable, and the sacred that artists can help us to see and connect with through their art.