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Christianity and the Arts

The feast of St Luke: 18th October, 1998
Fr Colin Holden, Assistant Priest, St Peter's Eastern Hill

The glorious company of Apostles praise You.

As the author of the third gospel and its sequel, the book of Acts, St Luke might well be expected to inspire a few words focussing on our calling to a mission of evangelism. If the author is the same Luke referred to in Colossians as 'Luke, the beloved physician', and as 'my co-worker' in the epsitle to Philemon, his exposure to St Paul must have meant a sharing with that saint in a sense of mission and evangelism: a Latin text from about 180 CE., the Muratorian fragment, indeed describes Luke's gospel as being based on St Paul's preaching &emdash; but that is an interpretation of its origins that no modern Biblical scholar would try to endorse.

However, it is not as an evangelist, in the more obvious sense of an individual with a verbal mission, but as an evangelist, a communicator representing the power of other mediums to convert — and artistic media at that — that I would like to consider him. For St Luke is the patron saint not only of physicians, but of notaries, bookbinders, butchers, and, most of all, of artists.

The origin of this association lies in the church's appreciation of the pictorial quality of the series of pictures of Christ's infancy that are unique to his gospel. Its appreciation of their character was given expression in a tradition first found in the seventh century Byzantine historian, Theodore the Lector, that St Luke was by training a painter. From being an artist in words, he was becoming an artist in a more visual way. Portaints of the Virgin and Child in Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome and at St Matthew's in Treves have been attributed to him; so have portraits of the Lord in the Lateran, at Viterbo, Trevignano and Tivoli. This tradition that Luke was a painter gave rise to an iconography which represents him as the first painter of the Madonna and Child. Among artists in the Western European tradition, Stephan Lochner and El Greco show him with his finished work, while Roger van der Weyden and Martin van Heemskerck show him in the act of painting.

As the gospel's most pictorial narrator, and as the patron of painters, St Luke may logically invite us to ask some questions about the relationship between the gospel's proclamation and the arts, and thus, of their rightful place in Christian culture. At least I like to think that St Luke so invites us, and that I am not just using him as a point from which to jump onto one of my favourite merry-go-rounds.

Firstly, whether it is the two dimensional painting of the kind represented by the works of art already mentioned, or three dimensional figures like our church's figure of St Peter, carved by Robert Prenzel and modelled on his own brother, Julius — how do we justify the existence and presence in our shrines of such works, given the Old Testament's ban on the use of images in worship? As I understand it, the solution to this question lies at the core of Christian understanding of the basis of the New Covenant, as distinct from the Old Covenant of which the Mosaic prohibition was part. God Himself provides us with an image in Jesus, mediating His life, as well as containing it, a visual and three-dimensional presence. God accomodates to our physical nature, communicates with the spiritual in us through the physical. And when it comes to the arts, the physical includes both the visual and the aural.

It is true that while Eastern Orthodox Christianity has rigidly codified regulations permitting two-dimensional but not three-dimensional art, Western Christianity has veered between an acceptance of both two- and three-dimensional images, and the exclusion of any kind of visual aids as a transgression of the commandment concerning images.

Anglicanism has, even in those periods when many of its adherents have been suspicious or hostile to three-dimensional images, included within its ranks those who have been convinced that such means were based on a theologically sound principle. At the same time in the 17th century that the Puritans rejected visual aids, Bishop Cosin of Durham could speak of 'the historical and moderate use of painted and true stories', Peterhouse chapel and Christ Church Oxford could be decorated with a picture and a statue of the Blessed Virgin respectively, and Charles I could carry on his travels around the country a tapestry of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin which hung behind the altar wherever the king worshipped.

Secondly, if the Incarnation sanctifies the physical so that it becomes a means through which God communicates with us, we may well claim that the arts have an important place within Christian understanding of the world, because they are channels of communication, and therefore of revelation and conversion: in John Wesley's terms, the arts can be a converting ordinance.

In this context, I suspect that behind the overload of secondary superstition that covers many stories of miraculous and wonderworking images and paintings, lies an experience further back in time, simply a viewing, which for at least one person, became a powerful means of awareness of God; subsequent viewers have confused the gift and the giver. And the capacity of the visual arts to move people deeply continues in an industrialised and commercialised society. For example, the Lutheran 'Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary' a religious order, was founded as the result of one woman's powerful sense of vocation to a life of renunciation and prayer when she saw Grunewald's compelling Isenheim altarpiece.

If the visual can act as a backdrop for God's presence, or rather, as that which ushers the individual into a sudden and direct awareness of God, such a claim can certainly be made, with a scriptural base, for music. In the sixth chapter of Isaiah, the prophet describes his initial experience of vocation, a vision of God in an incense-filled temple, surrounded by angels singing 'Holy, holy, holy'. While the singing is clearly music of 'another world', the description of the incense filled building suggests that the vision took place during the routine of temple wroship, indeed possibly while the incense was being burnt and the psalm sung that accompanied the act of sacrifice. The accesories of worship, including its music, acted as windows onto another dimension, a new world.

Thirdly, if Christian traditions have at times displayed negative attitudes towards the arts, we need to ask why, and see if there is not a way of channelling that to which objection is raised — and that has already happened. The most common reason for which the arts have been treated with caution is one that I have already mentioned, and which I will describe as the confusion between the gift and the giver. On rare occasions, it has been deliberately perpetrated. The fourth century historian Eusebius describes how the third century bishop Paul of Samosata was perpared to make himself the liturgical centre of attention, and was ready to reorient the music of services so that it might refer to him instead of to God:

All hymns to our Lord Jesus Christ he has banned as modern composition of modern writers, but he arranges for women to sing hymns to himself in the middle of the church on the great day of the Easter festival . . . . (!!)

More commonly, the confusion betwen the gift and the giver is less deliberate. In the case of the visual, there is the possibility of the situation in which we identify the object of God's creation, which is less than Him, with God Himself: the classic case of idolatry. However, few literate and educated Christians, if any, are likely, for excample, to identify the wood and paint of a statue such as a crucifix, with God Himself. They might identify the crucifix as something that acts as a focus or channel for attention in worship, without ever suggesting that it was physically more than wood, plaster and paint, let alone that God and this material object were one and the same.

But there is another form of this confusion into which the literate and educated can still stray, that of enjoying the beauty inherent in a work of art, not as a reflection or shadow of a greater beauty, that of God Himself, but as an end in itself. The danger that the artist and his or her art, would occupy centre stage, rather than act as a channel of a greater life, is a possibility that the more iconoclastic stream of Christian thinkers have never tired of reminding their audiences. Among them have been the Puritan critics of Anglican worship. The vitriolic 17th century pamphleteer, William Prynne, whose supposedly thinly veiled attack on Charles I's queen, Henrietta Maria, led to branding and the cropping of his ears, almost seems to have enjoyed painting a picture of the Anglican liturgy as an invitation to aesthetic decadence:

As for the Divine Service and Common Prayer, it is so chaunted and minsed and mangled of our costly hired, curious and nice musitiens (not to instruct the audience withall, nor to stir up men's minds unto devotion, but with a whorish, tickling harmony to tickle their ears) : that it may justly seeme not to be a noyse made by men, but rather a bleating of bruite beasts; whilethe choristers ney descant as iot were a sort of colts; others bellow a tenour, as it were a company of oxen; others barke a counterpoint, as it were a kennell of dogs; others rore out a treble like a sort of bulls: others grunt out a base as it were a number of hogs; so that a foule evill-favoured noyse is made, but as for the wordes and sentences and the very matter itselfe, is nothing understanded at all; but the authority and power of judgement is taken away from the music and from the eares utterly . . .

In 1577, the Puritan preacher John Northbrooke criticised the extent of the choral portions of the Anglican officees of morning and evening prayer for not leaving sufficient time for a long sermon, but did not point out that the preacher's occupying of a central position holds its own temptation to become the end, rather than the means — and how many preachers don't enjoy their centre stage?

However, there is another possibility that critics such as Prynne and Northwood never raised. Even if there is the risk of confusing the gift and the giver, the lesser and the greater, enjoyment and positive response to beauty in itself may often have results that more than compensate for other shortcomings. I would argue that when many men and women leave a concert hall, an art gallery, or a performance on stage, feeling that that they have a renewed sense of the possibilities of life, of its worthwhileness as a result of the art that has engaged them, this still represents an enrichment, and can offer powerful motivation, even if many such people do not explicitly identify the inspiration of the artist as a channel of God's presence. Many of those who would not name God when they are moved through the arts still have an experience of what Christians would call grace when they experience a sense of meaning and purpose through them.

Another line of obection to the arts, voiced today by some critics of rock music, is that communicates a message that is diabolical in content and origin. This is in fact no new claim, as far as music goes, and there are a number of early Christian texts that express this point of view. A Syrian bishop, writing in a period when the gods of the classical world were still worshipped in the middle east, wrote the following words that indicate the crux of the matter:

(the theatre's characteristics are) dancing, sport and music, the miming of lying tales, teachinmg which destroys the mind, poems which are not true, troublesome and confused sounds, melodies to attract children, ordered and captivating songs, skilful chants, lying canticles, (composed) according to the folly invented by the Greeks.

And while not going so far as to describe it as diabolical and false, the second book of homilies, and official Anglican production of 1653, described piping, singing, chanting and plying the organ as 'things which displeased God so sore, and filthily defiled'. The Syrian text indentified the charm that could be exercised over its audience by both music and the theatre; it acknowledged the potential of art to reach peoplel, even in the accusation that it destroyed the mind; the arts were persuaders that could direct people away from God. And the answer to this criticism surely lies in the right use of this power. If the subliminal could be reached through the arts in order to distract, they could also be a way of re-channelling human attention and energy. In the past, Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy have been quick to grasp, for the purposes of their own teaching, the persuasive powers of music, and the immediacy with which a message could be communicated through this medium. The rise of hymnody in the eastern Christian world in the second, third and fourth centuries is closely linked to the use by heretical teachers of hymnody designed to persuade others to follow their mode of belief, and the creation of a corrresponding body of material which both refuted it, and presented orthodox doctrine in a 'sugar-coated pill'. Later, both Luther and William Booth were credited with the same saying when they responded to critics who condemned them for using melodies that had originally accompanied purely secular texts— why should the devil have all the best tunes?

So far, I have concentrated on the arts in terms of the experience of beauty. However, it is equally true that the arts convey powerful insights that focus on subjects that are far from matters or experiences of beauty. I referred earlier to the inspiration for a modern religious community that was initiated by Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece, with its profoundly moving representation of the agony-wracked Christ. Some scholars identify the distinctive scars that Grunewald shows on the body of Jesus in this early sixteenth-century painting as the consequence of a careful examination of ulceration on the bodies of those who had died from St Antony's fire, a condition that combined elements of bubonic plague and ergotism and struck Western Europe in epidemic proportions. Through Grunewald's art, a vision of the depths plumbed in suffering grows from an encounter with agony and darkness. Much of the art of our own era has a similar capacity to plumb the depths of suffering. I instantly call to mind the music of Shostakovich; the disturbed waiting of Beckett's characters in Waiting for Godot; the horror of Picasso's Guernica. And equally, from a distinctly Christian perspective, the great contemporary French composer, Olivier Messien, could write his Quartet for the End of Time in a concentration camp, a meditation on the power of the ultimate judgement of God to transcend what seemed the most appalling abuses.

While I have focussed on music, what I have suggested is equally true of other fields of artistic endeavour. If the arts can persuade, if they can lead to a centring on the artist or performer, their place within Christian culture remains, because they many be rightly used, and we are called to use them, as a means of making our response to something greater than ourselves. To conclude and to remind us of this, the experience of two great individuals, one an Anglican from the seventeenth century, the other an African from the fourth. George Herbert, poet, courtier and priest, walked regularly from Bemerton, his village parish, to Salisbury cathedral, to hear its music. Isaac Walton, his biographer and the author of the first great text in English on fising, says that he did this 'because it elevated his soul; it was his heaven on earth'. Music made the life of eternity immediate to him as the arts continue to do for others today.

St Augustine of Hippo reminds us that beyond the experience we appreciate, and at which we can simply stop, there lies another dimension: through the one, we approach the other:

What do I love when I love thee? Not the beauty of a body, not the attractiveness of time, nor the brightness of light, so friendly to our eyes, nor the sweet melodies of songs in various measures, not the fragrance of flowers and oils and spices, not manna and honey, not lims delightful to the embraces of the flesh. It is not these I love when I love my God. And yet I do love a kind of light and a kind of voice and a kind of scent and a kind of food and a kind of embrace when I love my God — the light, voice, scent, food, embrace of the inner being, where a light shines into my soul that no place can hold, and a voice sounds that no time can snatch away, where breathes a fragrance which no wind can disperse, where there is a flavour which no voracity diminishes, where there clings an embrace which does not eventually become cloying with overexposure. This it is that I love when I love my God.


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