David Taylor paints a portrait of the value of local art and explains the importance of artists in the Body of Christ; also detailing a vision for both reaching artists and improving the stature of the Church as a culture maker.
David Taylor-In His Own Words from The Austin Stone on Vimeo.
John Hodges, one time conductor of the Germantown Orchestra and student of Leonard Bernstein, talks about transcendence: what it means and how one accomplishes it through the window of art and music.
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Ben Cumming, scholar and writer, lectures on the value of simply enjoying literature. Never disagreeing that there can be gain from critical analysis, he, nevertheless, concludes that not all stories require such a scientific approach and that substantial value is lost if delight is set aside in favor of criticism.
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Regularly has the question been put to me in some form either open ended or directly, “What is the purpose of art?” Since the Reformation, art has been looked at as a means to an end: to tell stories to the illiterate or illustrate a truth better said then seen. There are those who believe it to be merely propaganda: a means to proselytize or spread the gospel message. And then there’s the “secular” world who considers art sometimes as a means of provocation, sometimes as escape, and always a vehicle for self-expression.
But consider the purpose of food and drink. They certainly exist as fuel for the body—sustenance necessary to maintain our bodily routine and perpetuate our daily labors, but is this the sum total even the greater portion? The psalmist tells us “Taste and know that the Lord is good.” The implication is that the smorgasbord of flavor in food has a role in reminding us of God’s goodness and His superabundant blessing and bounty. Then there is the Eucharist where bread and wine together tell us about the being and promise of Christ: also implied is the superabundant blessing and His life sustaining quality. One could go further to the agricultural portion of food; the rain that falls on everyone’s crops is what some might call “common grace”; the tilling of the earth, the sowing and harvesting is reminiscent of man’s first call to stretch out the Garden of God across the whole world; and what of the many parables which Christ analogically connects to food and the agrarian life? To regard, then, only the caloric portion of food and drink is to flatten out its rich potential.
Imagine if in describing something as commonplace as food how severe the risk of fixing its purpose; what risk then exists when demanding “purposiveness” of something as grand as beauty and art? The word is reductionistic, and this is to be avoided. One should not deny that art has purpose, nor be surprised that it can serve many purposes at once, but should not demand that all art fit or embrace a single intent. To do so limits the possibilities of how God (not man) tends to work by repurposing things, yet the common fear is that it will be misappropriated. Where does their distrust lie? Not then in the artist.
Beauty is passé. It is kitsch. It is to be avoided. So say the modernist artist and the postmodernist philosopher. Take Gilles Deleuze who says of beauty that it is irrelevant and in actuality a lie—an obfuscation of the univocity of the supreme truth of chaos, or as Jacob Rogozinski writes the “supreme order” found only in primal Chaos (a perversion, for sure, of Aristotelian wisdom). Enter Hans Rookmaaker and Francis Schaeffer—their raised voices, together, decried this flight from classical forms of beauty, toward the nihilism they pronounced inherent in all forms of abstraction. It is their voices that we still hear and which overwhelmingly shape the tenor of the contemporary Christian aesthetic; the one in which Marcel Duchamp, his Dadaists, the surrealists, the cubists, and the abstract expressionists are all rejected as anarchic, dehumanizing, immoral and bereft of beauty. In so much, beauty in Christian culture is understood to be best exemplified as anything pre-modern; therefore, in this Christian economy, Caravaggio is unquestionably superior to Mark Rothko and any landscape painting, ala Thomas Kinkade, is indisputably more excellent than Picasso’s Guernica. Certainly, Rookmaaker and Schaeffer were at least fractionally right in their concern over the artist as provocateur intent on destabilizing the moral and true (consider Serrano’s Piss Christ) and rightfully afraid of the Derridean and Deleuzean themes such as unconditional freedom, erasure, absence and chance (leading to an absolute dissolution of transcendence), which permeate the intention of much of modern art. But as Christians have defined beauty, so, too, might the modernist elite find vindication for their rejection of it; for the Christian churchmen appears attracted to beauty only in its burlesque. Nevertheless, the modern artist has not found complete escape. Many modern pieces are both transcendent as well as beautiful even if not classically so; the problem lies, then, in the limitations both sides have placed on the category of beauty: what constitutes it and what is allowed under its nomenclature, and both sides seemingly display ignorance as it turns to the nature of beauty. Therefore, I find it necessary to ask and resolve the question: What, then, is beauty?
To start let’s consider the current state of beauty—on the one side much maligned and discarded, on the other side wanting, at its best. Why so? For very different reasons but the same root cause: a distinction made between it and the sublime first with Longinus in his treatise, On the Sublime (1st C. AD) and culminating with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The sublime is that which is so immense, grand or incalculable that it seemingly surpasses our own capacity to grasp or understand it and even escapes any attempt to represent it; instead, it exists only formless as thought. Beauty, on the other hand, is something ordinary—an aesthetical assessment properly applied to a common “coat, house or flower”[i]. The Kantian or Hegelian devotee marks the sublime as provocation to thought leading to pure reason—a triumphal mastery over the mystery of the unknown—and beauty, a simple trifling, incontrovertibly inferior (inferred in Critique of Judgment by terms like play and subjective universality) to the sublime. From this we arrive at the current perception of beauty as “the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant.”[ii] So, too, do postmodern assemblies wish to break from beauty, which requires embodiment—an obvious burr to sustaining their own disbelief in some unifying order. They, therefore, contend beauty is a subterfuge concocted to suppress the truth of the primordial nothing, the complete mystery of the veil and the resultant unknowability of anything transcendent. Thus beauty is discarded, and the objective (consider order or form—classically attributed to beauty—rather than absolutism) along with it, by association (all the more easily since it is trivial to begin with). Hence, in order to elevate reason or unseat it, the beautiful must first be diminished—reduced to kitsch—lest anyone be distracted from the fact of sola-thought (belief in belief itself); whether it be maddening chance—in all of its alterity, conceived but never grasped—or the rigor of reason leading to a comprehensive metanarrative.
Christians should recognize (but too often don’t) the dilemma resulting from a framework founded on beauty’s demise or marginalization; for the claim of its authenticity depends on the unrepresentable God who became representable as a supreme act of beauty. Instead, western Christianity follows the course of the Enlightenment placing its primary emphasis on biblical exposition, systematic theologies and God (or the sublime) as primarily resident and accessible only in reason and contemplation; it habitually considers beauty and art only as each might play its demure but second-class supporting role as illustrative, possessing no value in and of itself and dangerous if not pedagogical. In so doing, modern Christianity has affirmed the Enlightenment ontology of man as mind on a stick rather than the more expansive biblical definition: mind, body and spirit.[iii] In fact, a Christian Enlightenment mentality has somehow conjoined mind and spirit and set them collectively opposed to the embodied. The common expression, sacred and secular, is its most frequent manifestation, and I believe is very much tied to the severance of the sublime from the beautiful. But embodiment matters! Mainly because as C. S. Lewis reminds us, we are amphibians and in so much biphasic: both material and immaterial. So, it is that art and things are beautiful primarily because they remind us in some small way of the reality of the immaterial. Therefore, sublimity and beauty must be reunified. For it is through form that we engage the unknowable, to do so we must journey outside of the critical texts that have caused its bifurcation. Ergo philosophy and aesthetics aside, we’ll consider the biblical term glory: a term often used to describe majesty, much like Longinus describes the sublime, but also synonymous with beauty, a word otherwise and mysteriously lacking from Holy Scripture (but not in conceptualization only in its orthography), but where it does appear in either form, we’ll find additional characteristics meant to broaden the meaning of the term, and in so much exceed the fashionable but diminutive definition: decorative excess; we’ll find that beauty always points to something greater than itself, and often to something, otherwise, intangible.
Glory, by looking at the Psalms, is a term that seems to encroach on all three of the philosophical transcendentals: truth, goodness and beauty; Donald McGilchrist tells us that when considering sets of three, Christians should not neglect a comparison to the Trinity. Doing so, he describes the intersection likewise: the truth of the Spirit, the goodness of the Father and the beauty of the Incarnate Son. It is beauty that is embodied; it is beauty that is manifestation,[iv] and it is beauty that exists as a pointer to reveal truth and goodness by means of its physical attractiveness—or rather some analogical quality that both invites while urging one to respond to some ideal. Kant tells us in Critique of Pure Reason that we experience and come to know things only through space and time; it is of utmost importance, then, that the transcendent God (transcendent to what? Space and time) becomes tangible and embodied. The person of Christ is, therefore, critical to any complete Christian aesthetic[v] or epistemology, for that matter; He is the pattern by which the amphibious is best observed. He describes himself as a door—not so far removed from the Orthodox tradition of icon as a window into heaven. Beauty always speaks to something other than itself. Even in its apparent baroque-like excesses; where it does not prefigure opulence, but goodness in its ideal state—inviting, generous and replete with the promise of some ontological satisfaction. Consider the psalm, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”[vi] Note the value in sumptuousness rather than scarcity. As if, some repudiation of a neo (or proto)-Manichaeism has always been necessary, and, as if, the representable (all that can be fondled, sniffed, savored, heard or scrutinized) has value beyond its agreeability but never in spite of it; how else can the goodness of God be intimated (certainly not through treatise or sermonizing)?
Looking deeper at beauty (or glory, or splendor, or majesty or awe), we find a breathtaking gamut of definitions determined by philosophers since Plato, though never assembled collectively (and in many cases discarded in part or whole by subsequent thinkers): order, idealness, simplicity, unity, divinity, pleasure, passion and the introspective. Who am I to deny any of these? In fact, I believe glory and biblical beauty make room for each of them, but I do wish to allow the Psalms to, also, expand them. But first let us consider what the Psalms say about God Himself as beautiful (curious that we understand Him to be truth and goodness but often forget the third transcendental, as a result marginalizing its value and that part of God along with it):
I have asked one thing from the Lord; it is what I desire:
to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
gazing on the beauty of the Lord
and seeking Him in His temple.[vii]
It is God’s beauty that draws the psalmist to the Himself, resulting in such an abundant overflow that the psalmist can often be heard thusly:
Sing a new song to the Lord;
sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Sing to the Lord, praise His name;
proclaim His salvation from day to day.
Declare His glory among the nations,
His wonderful works among all peoples.
Splendor and majesty are before Him;
strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.[viii]
Such that beauty begets beauty: song from God’s glory before us (much like Aristotle’s concept of art as mimetic). This begs the question of the spiritual health of those who do not crave, create or are enrapt by the beautiful (is God to them underwhelming; if so, how then can they desire after His kingdom). Beauty overflows from God and exists because He exists. It is inspired by Him, and when it is found, it always points back to Him. Just as Christ says, “If you know me you know my Father too.”[ix]
To continue, the Psalms tell us that beauty takes various other shapes and can be found in concrete expressions of power[x], truth[xi], creativity[xii], wonder & mystery[xiii], justice[xiv], the infinite[xv] (or sublime), goodness[xvi], joy[xvii] (even its negative, lament, in that it acknowledges the absence of the ideal state), hope[xviii], mercy[xix], as well as kindness[xx] in all its forms. And as is the case with joy and lament, so, too, can each of the others speak to beauty through the via negativia; for beauty always deals in the relationships between things often crossing the chasm separating the real from the ideal state[xxi] as a form of resistance to imperfection in an attempt to create an alternative reality or affect a yearning for it.[xxii] What is important to note in all of this, is that beauty has density. It is a shape with mass and not just a flimsy surface; rather it is a surface through which we see something on the other side. But the surface is required; power cannot be known without some action, truth without a particular or goodness through absence. When these are displayed, there we find beauty. Accordingly, when art attempts to reveal the chaotic truth of a muddled world, or display the power of a symbol, or even attacks the power of a symbol, or shows novelty even through whimsy, it can potentially be classified as beautiful despite its apparent lack of prettiness or the form it takes.
So, looking again at art both the distinctively Christian and the unapologetically modern with the clarity of new eyes—carrying a fresh definition—we might be able to comprehend the thesis that it is notably abandoned in the kitsch and not, as is the common opinion, in an embrace of abstraction; that as Mark Rothko attempted to uncover the truth of the infinite in his iconic paintings or as Picasso demonstrated the injustice and inhumanity perpetrated by German bombers over the Spanish city of Guernica, each navigated their canvases with compasses set to true north: the Judeo-Christian sensitivity to beauty—perhaps unaware themselves they were doing so, but dealing in its currency, nonetheless: the former drawn to an inexplicable vastness and the latter lamenting the injustice of modern warfare. In Daniel Siedell’s essay Embodying Transcendence: Material Spirituality in Contemporary Art,[xxiii] we are given many more such examples then the two I’ve proposed; his book is a considerate, Christian challenge to Schaeffer and his views on modern art. Schaeffer’s adherents demand realism; there is nothing inherently wrong with realism. Historically, the artistic tradition is rich with it, and it has added much to beauty—neither is its well exhausted. But what most Christian artists present today is representation only at the surface, and it is often so flimsy that it mocks the glory we’ve just discussed. As a result passion suffers, and those for whom it is made are steeped in apathy. At best this art is pleasant and adequate hung over a barcalounger; for it is storyboard art that produces only ambivalence; and lacks the creativity and power to foster hope, induce goodness, reveal the infinite, spur a passion to mercy, or a love of truth. Rather, art should exist to collapse the boundary between the sacred and secular; it should be an opportunity to realize that “all actions are liturgical and all artifacts sacraments” and provide a goading to understand how it is possible to make a Eucharistic reality out of all of nature.[xxiv] The often-derided Duchamp, with his readymades, in a certain, sense, comprehends this reality much better than his Christian counterparts. Take for instance the infamous Head of Christ by Warner Sallman, which points to nothing beyond its surface and is every bit as small as Kantian beauty ever was imagined; personally, I’d sooner display R. Mutt’s Fountain; why? Because it implies that an object is not just an object. May be little more, but at least on the right track.
Whether or not beauty is to be preserved or discarded is a question that must be preceded by another: whether or not the current definition is even adequate. As it stands, we experience no loss to lose it; but the real travesty is that beauty has been denuded of its power. What is disputed appears as nothing more than ravenous dogs before a worthless scrap. Instead, a rescue mission must be mounted to resurrect beauty from frivolity. What’s at risk is our ability to know and crave the divine presence; for it is hidden behind a veil unless we have doors and windows to see it, and those doors are always through the “material immanence of [and in] the world.”[xxv] Plato conferred a prophetic calling to the artist. May be it is right to say that the artist can preach, but the expectation of the artist nowadays is far less lofty—almost buffoonery, reduced to a court jester whose accomplishments are for nothing more than amusement. But what the artist can do is provide us tangible representations of God’s power, truth, creativity, wonder, justice, immeasurability, goodness, joy, mercy, and beneficent love—God’s glory and beauty. Alas, the current state! But beauty doesn’t easily succumb; it persists despite all intentionality to eradicate it. It exists in places most Christians deny, but such is the case with God in His omnipresence—observed when beauty is allowed to flourish in all its originality and glory because all beauty points back to God. What stands in the way of its flourishing is the status quo: the inept definition we’ve all accepted. What’s left, then, is to embrace beauty in the totality of its significance—finally finding revelation as it was meant to be: God affirming, fully and holistically experienced and in no nook or cranny entirely missing.
[ii] Hart, David Bentley. Beauty and the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. pg. 15.
[iii] Matt 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27
[iv] For an excellent, non-philosophical unpacking of the ultimate expression of beauty as an act of goodness, or sacrifice, see Makoto Fujimura’s stirring article: Fallen Towers and the Art of Tea, which can be found in Refractions pg. 43, or online from Image Journal.
[v] Siedell, Daniel A.. God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. pg. 65-66.
[vi] Psalm 34:8
[vii] Psalm 27:4
[viii] Psalm 96:1-3 & 6
[ix] John 8:19
[x] Psalm 29:3; Psalm 29:9; Psalm 45:3; Psalm 49:16; Psalm 63:2; Psalm 96; Psalm 102:15; Psalm 104:1-4; Psalm 145:11
[xi] Psalm 19:1-4
[xii] Psalm 19; Psalm 139:13-6
[xiii] Psalm 72:18-19; Psalm 78:11b-12; Psalm 97:2-3 & 6
[xiv] Psalm 96; Psalm 97
[xv] Psalm 104:31
[xvi] Psalm 64:10
[xvii] Psalm 16:9; Psalm 149:5
[xviii] Psalm 106:5
[xix] Psalm 3:3; Psalm 79:9; Psalm 84:11; Psalm 108; Psalm 113
[xx] Psalm 96:1-3
[xxi] Hart. Beauty and the Infinite. pg. 20.
[xxii] Siedell. pg. 30.
[xxiii] Ibid. pg. 71.
[xxiv] Ibid. pg 140.
[xxv] Ibid. pg. 32.
The following video is the first part of 6 in a BBC special hosted by philosopher Roger Scruton on Beauty, the contemporary world’s apparent rejection of it, and the imminent need for its return. Personally, I am not completely convinced of all his points, but the general arc is salient and thought provoking. I certainly believe capital “B” Beauty is necessary, but Scruton’s Kantian and Neo-Platonism are limiting; these under gird a beauty that exists only in its idealism. To my understanding, the idealistic in beauty (though surely not to be excluded only eschewed as the only end) resulted in the 20th Century’s rejection of that capital “B” Beauty which he vehemently shuns. We often forget that capital “B” Beauty can be found in “ashes and dust, blood and bodies” as well as broken bread and a creation that includes its brokenness. After all, as believers, are we not to find the ultimate Beauty as Christ’s most ghastly sacrifice: macabre, despairing, and gruesome (not in spite of it but because of it)? Still, the essay will stir us to think and there exists plenty in it that speaks to truth and is worth fighting for.
The irrelevance of art in the contemporary ethos happened perchance by accident, alas it is so. Reason, science and religion cannot find a place for it except as superfluous, and by them it has been classified into the genera obsolescence. Yet the concept of beauty (a very classical pursuit of art) has been forever linked with truth and goodness throughout the philosophical heritage of every civilization; it is, itself, a transcendental that as humans we are eager to define, quantify and grasp at, but in our modern age, we know it less well then the ancients we have supposedly surpassed in every human faculty. Where as once, it was known as universal, it is now considered subjective; where as once it was considered both inspired and imbued with power to, itself, inspire, it is now a plaything, a fancy, a leisure—ignored. Art once depicting the most powerful symbols of a culture is now produced irreverently hiding behind its every sparse line an increasingly sparse and vapid message. It has fallen from its lofty place beside the other transcendentals; like others, though, who scale towering heights, they (each tied together) succeed or fall as one. So it is that these three (Truth, Goodness and Beauty) have all become whimsical fancies, and have lost the potency to carry any lasting messages; by Fact they are slain, sterile though it is, humane perhaps, they headless bow to the every compounding, shifting, competing fact. Fallen. First beauty, then truth and goodness. All fallen; the loss of beauty a mortal wound that cannot be borne.
The word poet we get from the Greek more precisely translated as “maker” or “creator”. How much more profound then are God’s first words spoken for us into the void and recorded by Moses in his primordial account. That first poetic utterance, “Let there be light,” did more than just paint an image with figurative language; it overran the void taking shape and substance: the idea became word, the word became reality. On that first day with that first poem He founded all poetry (and art, too) that would issue forth from His greatest poem: man. For so man is called in the New Testament, and so is man called to express God’s poetry.
Thus Adam & Eve’s thoughts were like God’s envisioning a reality to bring it into existence, to order the chaos, to extend the dominion of God through an artful, creative, ordering process. They were called to extend the confines of the garden; they were called to extend its order over the rest of the untamed world. They were called to apprenticeship in poetry to continue the work, the making, the creation (the very poetry) of God. Their inspiration, their motivation, their vision would come from participating fully in God’s revealed beauty—daily walking with Him in all His splendor. It’s presence would produce wisdom to act for God as God’s functioning hands and imagination.
Alas, the folly of our first parents! His unspoiled, undiminished beauty was hidden from us behind the many walls and curtains and veils of the tabernacle lest our sin and His holiness come into fatal contact. So, too, was Moses, his faithful servant, denied his great desire to see God face-to-face lest he too be killed, but His wake God allowed Moses to see. The wake of God’s beauty and nothing else, yet this wake was transformative! He was transformed such that the divine glory remained on his face for all to see and themselves to also become transformed by it—transformed by the wake of a wake of God’s celestial glory. So is God’s wake amongst us now: in creation and in the artist’s vision who see as Wordsworth describes “more acutely the absence of things:” an Eden that should be, God behind the mask.
It is participation with God in His full portion of glory, which was lost with Eden and shall be regained at our teleological end, that offers one hope. Beauty in its wake offers a morsel—an amuse bouche—to tantalize the soul to the feast yet to come. Beauty in its wake offers an invitation to the banquet and as such makes one deftly aware of the hunger that consumes his own belly and the poverty and famine that exists so plainly—and everywhere—around them. God has enlisted the artist to write these invitations and to prepare these morsels that generation to generation does not become inured to its own deprivation. God enlists the artist to remind constantly each of us the form of goodness and truth, their necessity, and their value. Moses cried out to God on Sinai, “Show me your glory.” And then the law: Truth and Goodness, but first the reason to abide them—His beauty in the portion that could be endured.
We see this played out again in Isaiah. In chapter 6 the prophet is confronted by the beauty of God in all of “His majestic splendor” which results in an awareness to the reality of his own condition: his unclean lips. From this encounter with beauty he knows instantly the sin of his own people, too. The outcome of these truths was missional action as an emissary of the Holy one. The artist is charged likewise to present the truth and inspire good amongst men that there be no lack of prophets—no lack of God’s messengers on earth. Plato describes the artist himself as having prophetic purpose when he wrote:
There is a divinity moving him, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended. (Plato, Ion)
The artist in his craft imitates God in his creative acts, fulfills his primal calling through it, prophesizes, motivates, inspires, and demonstrates to us reality. Without the artist, God’s ordained messenger of his glory, the mask which hides God’s beauty from us might be too impenetrable to prevent despair. The artist’s calling is immense, deep, profound and essential as he discloses to his brethren his personal encounters with the splendor of God. The artist reminds constantly of forgotten glory.