“Not a formless sublime exceeding and annihilating the beautiful, but an endless display of beauty, surpassing the beautiful as the ever more beautiful.”  – David Bentley Hart

Sola Scriptura permeates the portion of protestant faith I have grown up within. It is a term which tends toward an epistemology that raises the written word above everything else, after all John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is powerful, the word—both the spoken word that made everything that was made and the Word through whom life and light was given to “all mankind [as] the light [that] shines in the darkness” that cannot be overcome. But within that same tradition, the word is often eviscerated.

The artist Makoto Fujimura was recently commissioned to illuminate the four Gospels in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It is the first time the Bible has been illumined in centuries with gold and silver leaf, verdigris, vermilion and azurite. Far different from the bibles I have owned—starkly black and white, pages diaphanous, perhaps the binding is leather but the gilt is suspect. Similarly, the early Reformers white washed church walls, eradicated icons and images and alter pieces and simplified architecture all to convincingly enunciate the great importance of sola scriptura—the word. They did this because there were abuses—great abuses and tragedies where the word was undervalued, beautiful as it was, but unknown. Maybe all they did was necessity. I do believe the Protestant Reformation has done much good for the Church; after all, it is much closer to the concept of the priesthood of all believers, now, then when under the exclusive domain of the papacy. But it was a reactionary movement, nonetheless, and like many reactions it conceivably went too far to value only, as Jerram Barrs says, that which exhibits “bare simplicity, barrenness, and even ugliness” as if these things were “somehow considered more pleasing to God”—more spiritual, even.

It did not help that along with the Protestant Reformation strutted the Enlightenment, both at times made bedfellows. One can almost hear the likes of Voltaire, Hegel, Kant, Hume and Rousseau singing along with Rabbit of Winnie the Pooh fame,

Never trust your tummies, tails, or toes
You can’t learn a thing from any of those
Here’s another fact I must disclose
From the mighty pen true wisdom flows.
(“If It Says So”, Winnie the Pooh)

In so much we have the proliferation of reason—that abstract portion which constructs texts on texts. In Christian circles we call these Systematic Theologies. I am no anti-intellectual, but know enough of philosophy from Plato to Descartes to Derrida to know where reason alone takes its travelers. I know enough to assert that an epistemology which assumes we are merely “minds on a stick” (James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom) as opposed to tummies, tails, toes, minds, ears, noses and eyes (amongst other things) is deficient. After all, we are called to know what surpasses even knowledge. (Ephesian 3) And the only way I know to accomplish this is incarnationally.

This is the evisceration: that the Word is not truly flesh, full of grace and truth (John 1:4) and “the [very] image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) Rather that it is just a word flattened into 2-Dimensional space—made just an excerpt, an abstraction of text. When C. S. Lewis wrote of human nature, he called it amphibious; that is, we exist simultaneously as physical and spiritual beings like a salamander lives in water and on land. But somehow the spiritual is not just coexistent along with the physical; it is intertwined with it and accessed by means of it. Martin Luther wrote of God that He cannot be seen directly, but He can be seen through the “face or mask” of creation, (Martin Luther, Commentary on Galations) which is echoed when Ravi Zacharias mentions, “we make a cardinal mistake if we look only at the [external of a thing]. We cannot stop like secularists do by looking at something; we’ve got to look through it and beyond it.” We must consider the physical and spiritual, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, as a surface folding in on itself which creates a continuous, unseen interior that is not incomprehensible because of its concealment but knowable through its tactile surface exposed for all to perceive. It is much like the Orthodox Christian concept of Icon, which is defined by their tradition as a window into the unseen world “where the visible and invisible embrace each other from a fire that no longer destroys but rather lights up the divine face for humanity,” (Jean-Luc Marion) and the Incarnation creates this economy in which material reveals the immaterial and transcendent.

This is the very reason why Romans 1 can emphatically assert:

Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)

Nature itself bids testament to the unseen. Psalms, Job, the prophets all tell of God’s greatness, power, beauty, justice, goodness, truth and mercy, and creation is often the evidence for it. Imagine the power of the sea even when pacified, even at low tide—the pounding surf, the unremitting sound of waves, amplified in the tempest, and at times devastatingly destructive. Nevertheless, it is a place of peace and relaxation, of bounty and of infinite, creative diversity. There is a Buddhist saying which states that every stone has a sermon to disclose. Yes, every stone and grain of sand, every krill and whale, too, point back to God, themselves icons. Imagine a place of praise no longer contained within the four walls of a church building but extended into the world; this temple as large as the cosmos and all of its contents sacraments. It is equally full of wonder, this place, which is always fresh because of the creative pervasiveness redolent from dappled and variegated things like shells, bejeweled and spun in delicate Fibonaccis, to the expedition into that ever telescoping realm of atomic, subatomic, fermion, quark, lepton, Higgs boson.

This is the world the artist attempts to preserve and enlarge; he does so through his vocation regardless of his faith, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, the artist works at the nexus of the physical and spiritual creating and identifying icons whether to God, or to an unknown god resident in the Aeropagus, but always inescapably to the Transcendent. Artists work incarnationally; in so much it is a form of cognition often revealing what could not otherwise be known or qualified. The art historian, curator, author and Christian Daniel Siedell calls the practice and consumption of art a form of “non-rational knowledge”, but he just echoes Thomas Aquinas. It can make visible the invisible. It can teach us things that the rational scientia find difficult, or mysterious or down-right impossible, to affirm and believe. The scripture attests to this fact in its structure. There is but one didactic sermon  I am aware of in all of scripture, the great majority of which is song, poetry and story. And even so, the scripture emboldens us to look outside of it.

My favorite example is Psalm 34:8, “Taste and know that the Lord is good.” It is my favorite kind of sermon, one found in the delight of food. Far from being an extravagance (or more likely because of its extravagance), good food (the culinary arts) is a means to participate in the goodness of God. It is a goodness that cannot be known in any other way; it is a pervasive goodness, the kind to be enjoyed and remembered at every meal (for as often as you eat and drink). It is to be known in a satisfying cheese burger as well as foie gras micuit strait from a street vendor in Sarlat, in a glass of Spanish, spiced lemonade, or a cup of coffee or in a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti “La Tâche.” With each sip or bite, with every hmmm, we lift up our voices in praise acknowledging God’s goodness.

Never doubt it is a goodness expressed through artistry. I would never take a bite from an onion as if it were an apple, but sliced with a bit of garlic, salt, olive oil and carrots and the scent becomes splendid; add to it apple cider vinegar, jalapeños and a blend of spices and you’ll have escabeche (for fish, chicken or pork); one of my favorite meals. Much of beauty is latent, like this, in need of cultivation, exploration, experimentation and craftsmanship to fully render. And though I can praise at every level of artistry, I find that some burgers are more effusive with it, as they are more lavishly exemplary of God’s unmatched goodness.

There is so much more that can be said of food as icon. The corollary between it and Christ as bread and wine or, as the Gospel of John points out, living water and living bread, which quenches all thirst and satisfies all hunger. Good and satisfying food is anticipatory of our ultimate satisfaction at the wedding feast in heaven, but even its lack speaks, too. For hunger pangs are our regular reminder of our great need—our thirst for God.

The psalmist directs our attention also to the category of the sublime—that Romantic era word for greatness beyond all possibility of calculation or measurement, like the psalmist describes:

You answer us in righteousness, with awe-inspiring works, God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and the distant seas; You establish the mountains by Your power, robed with strength; You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves, and the tumult of the nations. Those who live far away are awed by Your signs; You make east and west shout for joy. (Psalm 65:5-8)

So it is, when I look at the photography of Ansel Adams or Richard Hoesel or Frans Lanting, I see sublimity. There is power in Ansel Adam’s images; consider “Canyon de Chelly”, “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome”, “Winter Sunrise, from Lone Pine” or “Tetons and the Snake River”. Each celebrates God’s awe-inspiring works, intentionally or not; they speak of majesty. Ansel describes Yosemite Valley as “always sunrise, glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” The valley captured his imagination, and it needed to be shared. With his heavy large format, Korona View, camera and magazine of 8 x 10 glass slides he ascended mountain sides and often perched precariously between rock-face and abyss to capture these incredible images. But as anyone who has snapped a picture knows there is a knack to translating the three-dimensional onto photographic paper. It only begins with ISO, shutter speed and aperture. For Ansel it was knowledge of filters, light, lenses, papers and enlargers, dark room technique but most of all an imagination in order to visualize the final artifact. Half Dome had a story to tell that day in 1927, just as the psalmist says, “Day after day they pour out speech” (Psalm 19:2), and Ansel Adams listened, heard it and had the capacity to translate it for all to see. When I sit to listen to his or another’s retelling I wish to mingle with its splendor; I am raptured and left stirred with a deep longing “to find the place where all the beauty came from.” (C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

The response of the psalmist to such moving splendor is oftenest, praise in the shape of music: “Praise the Lord with the lyre; make music to Him with a ten stringed harp. Sing a new song to Him; play skillfully on the strings, with a joyful shout.” (Psalm 33:2-3) A new song, the anonymous author writes. Why must it be a new song? The theologian, David Bentley Hart postulates it is out of music’s innate ability to represent the polyphony of being, specifically the infinite music of the divine Being “whose beauty and variety can never be exhausted” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite). Take Bach’s Art of Fugue which is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject. Each of the 14 fugues develops from a single, deceptively simple, musical theme.

A very good friend of mine, Roger Lowther, is a Julliard trained organist who is intimately familiar with the works of Bach. One evening he was explaining his love for this collection of music which ends mysteriously with the “unfinished fugue,” Contrapunctus XIV. Early musicologists surmised that Bach had died before its completion; modern scholarship has its own and different theories, but Roger told me he believed it to be intentionally left so. The idea behind the Art of Fugue is the richness of variety possible in a lone musical theme. By Contrapunctus XIV, it becomes evident that this theme’s contours cannot be exhausted; it could progress, infinitely building and extending itself. So the composer prematurely ends it as a statement of this disclosure. Unfinished it is arresting; for to perceive the infinite one must be yanked from time. If this feels like an unnatural terminus it is because the listener has left the familiar for the unfamiliar, or as Lewis tells us in The Last Battle, “The dream is ended: this is the morning”, and temporarily we have awakened to the morning whilst in the midst of a dream.

But regardless of where Bach chose to end the Art of Fugue, it would have been left unfinished even if musically resolved. For, there is an infinite reserve in the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, & G, even if further constrained by one simple theme. We see this in the Jazz scales, which open up endless provisions of improvisation such that each performance of Brubeck’s Take Five is marvelously unique. Then there is the joke that all Rock ’n Roll is achievable with just four Barre chords; humorous as it is, it smacks of the possibility contained even within the most modest of sets. After all, aren’t these just repetitions unbounded by imagination? Consider the possibilities of color variation from just three hues: red, yellow and blue. God’s imagination conceived of an eight-legged octopus, a bipedal man, a horned narwhale, and a creepy gulper eel all from 4 amino acids. What the musician achieves is an echo rumbling with the resonance of the infinite God, himself an ever renewing song. It is a modest set, yet the variety intrinsic to it reveals emphatically the truly boundlessness of a God whom, himself, has no limits.

To this point we have over looked the most ancient of the arts—poetry. Or have we forgotten that the word poet derives from the Greek, meaning “maker” or “creator.” Thus God in his act of creation penned poetry when he uttered “Let there be light.” Imagine figurative language doing more than just implying something else metaphorically but becoming the figure and form of the word, itself. Imagine it having life and breath. “For we are God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:10 a) made in the “image” and “likeness” of God. We are his poema the Greek says; we are God’s poems and as such we are tangible symbols of the Creator—we are body and spirit like he is, we are little creators, we are vested with authority. But consider also that God is known through every face and fingerprint, every personality and aptitude. He is both Achilles & Odysseus as he is also Paris; he is both the lion and the lamb, and no less one than the other.

Imagine God created everything in like manner. Imagine that instead of stumbling on “wine and vine” as apt figures of speech, God created them to allegorize himself even when he said in Genesis, “Let the land produce vegetation.” Imagine bread, likewise—lamps, doorways, lambs, lions all created to anticipate the person of God, to give us insight and understanding into his nature and being and not just in the “wow” of it all. And all we must do is look to see God all around us.

Enter the poet. The poet demonstrates the relationship of things. He takes what at first glance appears to be completely other and unifies it. Take for instance these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…

Only a poet could see the feline in fog, but once he reveals it, fog forever becomes animated as such. Perhaps this is just an exercise (I do not believe so), but if it is, it exercises the muscles of our own intuition that we might more easily perceive the analogic reality about us—that all things are little metaphors of God. I wish we could all see like Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins perceives the warm glow at sunrise as the very manifestation of the Holy Ghost. He sees God descending in the golden light of morning hovering as if over a nest of chicks. The 20th century Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, reminds us that the “intellect sees by conceiving, and conceives only to see.” (Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism) If it is all Poetry, we do well to understand poetry; we do well to seek poetic knowledge that we might see what is just below the surface though at first it is obscured; for what is there is often the Holy Ghost.

But poetry plays another crucial role. It fuses the object back to the word—affirming sola scriptura. It reminds us that the Word is interstitial tissue knitting objects together, binding them to spirit and memory alike, otherwise they are just objects, or things. According to Maritain, art is connatural as a person is connatural, bridging body and soul. Maritain’s use of connatural is akin to Lewis’ use of amphibious, except even broader extending to all of reality. A poet’s poem becomes for him a special communication and means of knowing the spirit through the formative—ergo all form; such that “the soul is known in the experience of the world and the world is known in the experience of the soul.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) Maritain posits, in an ontological argument beyond the scope of this article, that participation with beauty engages the whole human being in the “two substances [soul and body] that function as co-principles of the one existent reality.” (Maritain, The Person) The whole being, including its senses, memory, reason, intellect, heart and will, become engaged whether in the production of art or in the aesthetic experience of it. And not just these portions within us, body and soul, but also, as Tolstoy tells us, the greater community of bodies & souls who have and will yet participate along with us in mutual love of the form wherein splendor is revealed

to become conscious of union and mutual brotherly love. Each glad that another feels what he feels; glad of the communion established not only between him and all present (not only between him and the artist or him and God), but also with all now living who will yet share the same impression; and more than that he feels the mysterious gladness of a communion which reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the future who will yet be touched by them. (Tolstoy, What is Art?)

We know, now, that all love, all relationships (between God & man, man & man and man & World), are mediated through Jesus Christ. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship). Poetry is formed and formative—shaping our very desires through the mediation of love; “poetry unwittingly gives us a foretaste, a hidden desire for supernatural life.” (Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge)

Not just poetry but all art accomplishes this feat, but poetry does so via the spoken word (for poetry is a collection of chosen sounds). Aloud, poetry preserves the word as it reinvigorates language by rejuvenating disappearing, unspoken speech—words as well as metaphors—conceives of new ones, and even realizes genuine poetic utterances in everyday vernacular: at the coffee shop and water-cooler (just as a musician hears notes in train whistles and birdsong). As the word first transformed the spiritual into flesh when it was spoken into the void, poetry transcends the “thingness” of flesh that it might return to the spirit world where once there was only void.

Consider this short poem by Emily Dickinson:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

This simple verse reminds us that even in the absence of things there is no void. Notice how the words “bee” and “revery” are connected through their sounds. First we find the sound “ee” in the final syllable of revery in an imperfect rhyme, but there is also the reverberation of the buzz of the bee in the first stressed syllable—“rev”—and again repeated in the next line as if emulating the Doppler of wing-beats. The bee exists even if it does not exist because it finds itself in revery—in a word; in like manner, “bee” and “prairie” are imperfectly rhymed, also, becoming signs for one another. If the bee can be found in revery, there is a whole prairie there, as well. But the poem goes on to reveal a love for nature one which is known even when it is absent. There is a deep longing to return to bees, foxglove and hyssop; a longing, after reading it, I too share. But it is a desire for more than just bee and prairie. It is a desire for rest; spiritualized, it is a desire for escape into the idyllic. It is a spiritual emotion by which the author, as an embodied soul, and the reader, likewise, come to know each other.

But we have just barely scratched the surface, here. The ancients identified nine muses governing the arts; we have mentioned only a few. We have not yet to comment on painting, sculpture, film, fiction, drama, or comedy, which are each expressive as icons in their own right. There is too much here to flesh out, but needless to say each art form has its own language possessing its own vocabulary and richly communicative—appealing to and speaking through the different senses. Each form expresses a knowledge inaccessible by other means, or at least dulled in its translation. Marshall Mcluhan gave us the phrase “the medium is the message;” it is a wisdom the artist has long known even if left unarticulated. So much is gained from engaging them which would otherwise be left silenced.

But God has seen fit to reveal himself in the infinite variety of his Creation along with all of its perpetuating creations—along with all of its opulent but transitory moments (consider the bee in the prairie or the endlessly changing face of Half Dome) which all exist for “an instant and will disappear forever, and only in the memory of angels [and artists’ souls] will [they] be preserved, above time.” (Maritain, Creative Intuition) God rewards those ardent-hearted who understand that “to love God is to invest the world with significance, a significance which deepens the mysterious presence of things” (Graham Ward) and results in an ever watchful eye and ever transforming hand that helps us all remember that beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united.

What is written above is by no means exhaustive. Rather consider it a groundwork on which to build. For the God of the Bible is an inexhaustible sea of splendor, and each singular piece of art possess the capacity for something unique and never to be stated again. This is the nature of the infinite. The Word is much more glorious then ever surmised by reason alone; it is a much brighter light then we first believed, and we must be about the business of chasing after its abundant expanse as it overcomes the darkness with truth, goodness and delight—stirring up our passion to know the God of Beauty. Let us consider ourselves, now, without excuse.

Advance is a ministry in the Cleaborn/Foote community of inner city Memphis (for reference it is the 38126 zip code just south of the Fedex Forum). At the time Advance was started, 12 years ago, this zip code was the 3rd poorest in America. Hard to believe! Advance has been serving this poor community by “empowering residents to acquire knowledge, resources, and skills to be economically self-sufficient through the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Specifically, Advance teaches soft skills like how to search for a job and conduct oneself on an interview. They teach economic literacy and personal budgeting. They provide job placement, GED preparation and many other programs to help teach people to fish. In the process they build relationships with hurting, neglected people and are generous because the God of the universe, too, is generous.

The Continuum was given the opportunity to help recruit artists for a fund raising campaign called “Art for Advance”. The Continuum, along with Crosstown Arts and the Advance network, brought together 70+ pieces (some of which shown below) from over 50 artists! Some of the notable artists include: Makoto Fujimura (New York based Nihonga artist commissioned to illuminate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible), Alfonse Borysewicz (Image Journal’s Artist of the month, July 2004, also New York based), Jeremy Cowart (celebrity photographer) and Clay Enoch (Colorado based sculptor).

The art show and sale will be September 15, 2011 (5-8 PM) at the Advance Memphis building in downtown Memphis (769 Vance Avenue, Memphis, TN 38126). All money raised will go to a great organization dedicated to the people of a hurting neighborhood. I know it will be a successful event. It has already been so successful with the generosity displayed by so many artists, both local and international. What’s left are patrons of art, community and Kingdom to show up and do their part. Prices range from $50 to several thousand dollars—something for everyone (and budget).

The Brass Door Pub will provide food and a coffee bar will also be available. RSVP with CINDY@ADVANCEMEMPHIS.ORG.

For more information visit their facebook page, blog, ArtsMemphis event page, or visit their website: http://www.advancememphis.org/.

If you’d like to support what Advance is doing, but can’t attend Art for Advance, you can mail gifts to P.O. Box 2201, Memphis, TN 38101 or GIVE ONLINE.

5) Desiring the Kingdom – James K. A. Smith

Smith is on a mission to sabotage and supplant the prevalent modern, Enlightenment mentality which reduces man to simply “a mind on a stick.” Rather, he argues with St. Augustine that people are “desiring agents” who are shaped and aimed not so much by logic and dialectic but by liturgy, which engages the entire sensing being through bodily practice—one can read here art (amongst other things). One of the most interesting portions of the book, though, is his analysis of malls, stadiums and universities as liturgical structures for which the modern Christian Church fails to adequately understand; therefore, it ceases to remain counter-cultural and offers no competing, greater liturgy, instead a hollow message that abandons desire to the more sophisticated liturgical experiences of the world. Like other books in this post, it’s emphasis on embodiment asserts the great value of the artist to both Church and culture at large.

What James K. A. Smith is Reading: http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com/

James K. A. Smith’s Blog: http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/

4) For the Beauty of the Church – Various Contributors; Edited by David O. Taylor

For the Beauty of the Church is a collection of essays with notable contributors Eugene Peterson and Andy Crouch. Some may decry the lack of hegemony, but the essayists each thoughtfully extend a dialogue which began in 2008 in Taylor’s home town of Austin, Texas. The first essay, “The Gospel” (Andy Crouch), is medicinal like oil and wine to a wounded artist’s spirit—asserting the primordial call to artmaking as a work of grace. Additional topics include art and worship, the value and necessity of art “indulgence” as patron, the artist and the artist shepherd, pitfalls to be avoided, ending with vision casting.

David’s Blog: http://artspastor.blogspot.com/

3) Refractions – Makoto Fujimura

Makoto is a painter first, rather than a writer, which is exactly what makes his essays both so insightful and invigorating. In each of the 20 or so that comprise this book, Makoto paints each as though his stylus were dancing across a canvas before settling on some denouement that when contemplated in its entirety is discernible only as an irreducible whole—each line and form contributing to the thesis like a hanging work of art. One can almost imagine him applying sheets of gold leaf on washi, painting over it with cinnabar pigment and applying a heavy wash—layering—rather than writing his ideas down. Refractions is a book of intimate meditations on art, culture and humanness—one in which the reader is invited to join—written (like an Icon is written) by a consummate artist and faithful brother-ascetic.

Makoto’s website: http://www.makotofujimura.com/

2) God in the Gallery – Daniel A. Siedell

Up until Siedell’s book, my only experience with Christian thinkers who turned their attention toward art was with Francis Schaeffer, who though often quite authoritative discounts all modern and postmodern (read here abstract) art as subversive and calls for a distinctly Christian, realist, art. Siedell, an art historian and curator, provides an alternative perspective with a call to consider all art as Icon in the vein of Nicea II. That is art as incarnational—suggesting that the Incarnation is critical to all understanding and often points to and engages non-rational knowledge (knowledge that cannot be said only pointed to and communed with, as Christ on earth is the embodied but Infinite God—knowable yet beyond understanding). Siedell suggests that the framework of the Icon is useful in understanding ALL art, including the works of notorious modern artists like Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee. The book itself is 6 essays on various topics which include: a brief survey of modern art, belief and spirituality within the context of art, the art of art criticism and the relationship of art and liturgy within the walls of the Church. It is a book to challenge, raise questions and engage in meaningful dialogue.

Daniel’s blog: http://www.dansiedell.typepad.com/

1) Beauty and the Infinite – David Bentley Hart

This is a DENSE book; it is high philosophy meets unorthodox (read here eastern; so, therefore very Orthodox, only alien to my western brain) theology, but worth every grueling, laborious, ponderous moment. It is work, but truly rewarding work. Hart develops not a theology of aesthetics, but a theology that requires an underlying, Trinitarian aesthetic where every image, difference and particularity are revelatory of God as Logos—pronouncing His infinite fullness to and through the uniqueness of each logoi. In this text he develops a counter to the errors of modernity and postmodernity, gives validity to beauty and form, confirms the vocation of the artist as theologian, and enriches the soul with an endless wonder in a God that can both be intimately encountered yet, thankfully, never fully plumbed.

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 (1^st 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 (by means of the material). 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.

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This year for Christmas, the Continuum and its artists gave gift boxes to young artists, twelve to eighteen years old that demonstrate a passion and persistence in art of some kind. This year’s recipients, Cassie Cole (painter), Alex Porter (painter) and Hannah Tyson (illustrator and story teller) each received gift boxes in order to encourage them to continue and inspire them beyond what they’ve already accomplished.

The contents of each gift box included not supplies, but books, movies and music to inspire their future and broaden their perspective of what is possible in artistic media. I for one drew incessantly growing up, worked in pastels and charcoal and painted only to later find that poetry was my forte. Exposure is the key word in describing these gifts—exposure to good, creative and broadly categorized arts so that each might understand that imagination is what truly defines the artist; this so that they might not lose interest but engage the artistic endeavor as a lifelong pursuit.

The inspiration, too, will come from seeing art that is not widely taught in school. The greats are truly great and though Caravaggio and Turner have in some way marked my own maturation and my sense of aesthetic, there is art happening today that will and should inform their own. It does not assume what is happening today is superior but nonetheless required to a complete education—extending the artistic tradition. These artists deal in subject, media and concepts that push boundaries; not for the sake of doing so, but in interesting ways demonstrating that beauty can be found in all things, even thrown ink and water, as is the case with photographer Shinichi Maruyama.

It is the Continuum’s hope that these gift boxes will bring encouragement to these young artists. Too often, the world about them—parents, teachers, ministers, peers and the endless influence of media—suggest that art is superfluous; that art is decoration and decadent, and certainly, it is not as essential as science and engineering or business administration or preaching in contribution and should therefore be simply a hobby if there happens to be enough time. There aren’t many voices suggesting otherwise, but the Continuum understands the value of mentorship—the older embracing the younger to impart passion along with knowledge and skill, and wishes to use these gift boxes to establish that type of relationship, and to impart the immeasurable value of things like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

Each box was uniquely assembled. The contents from one to the next nevertheless are consistent enough that an example of one gives a good picture of them all. Inside a wooden plein air painter’s box with trays and compartments for their own supplies are the Nihonga painter Makoto Fujimura’s New York Works, photographer Shinichi Maruyama’s Kusho, poet laureates Kay Ryan’s Elephant Rocks and Richard Wilbur’s Things of this World, jazz artist Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and director Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Lastly and significantly, each box receives a personal letter to the artist.

We wish to broaden this project to include other young artists and are already considering ways to improve it possibly even by means of a young artist night where each artist is able to display and talk about their work at a Continuum event. We in the Continuum know that it will be young artists like these that will define culture in the years to come; we want to play a role in shaping it through them and others like them. We wish Cassie, Alex and Hannah good luck as they continue to engage their imagination and creative talents.