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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