Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts I

Dorothy Sayers once wrote:

The Church as a body has never made up her mind about the Arts, and it is hardly too much to say that she has never tried. She has, of course, from time to time puritanically denounced the Arts as irreligious and mischievous, or tried to exploit the Arts as a means to the teaching of religion and morals....And there had...been plenty of writers on aesthetics who happened to be Christians, but they seldom made any consistent attempt to relate their aesthetic to the central Christian dogmas.

The goal of this paper is take up Sayer’s challenge by attempting to relate the arts to the major themes of the Christian faith. By “the arts” I mean the whole gamut of human imaginative and creative activity, including literary, musical, architectural, theatrical, visual, and even televisual arts. Art involves the imaginative arrangement and presentation of matter, such as words, or paint, or notes. It is universal and ubiquitous—no human society is without some form of art, and virtually no human being would live out of contact with art. The arts are held to engender an aesthetic response, meaning that something more than a merely sensory or intellectual or even emotional may be felt when we experience art.

Like work, art is cursed. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes:

Art is not isolated from the radical fallenness of our nature. It is an instrument of it. Art does not lift us out of the radical evil of our history but plunges us into it. Art is not man’s saviour but a willing accomplice in our crimes.

The human imagination reveals its own fallenness in its art. Not only do inherently corrupt forms of art—blasphemy, pornography, idolatry, kitsch, propaganda—proliferate; but our expressions of order are subject to chaos, and our hopes are subject to despair. And yet the arts have the capacity to elevate us, to provide some of our most glorious moments, to show us most in tune with ourselves and the world, even to give us inklings of the divine. As within man and woman themselves, there remains the tension between the potential both for great beauty and also great vileness.

The Christian response to the arts has been likewise rather ambivalent, for several reasons. First, the strength of the second commandment has been taken as a warning against depictions of the divine. Christ is the only true image (eikon) of God (Col 1:15): our imaginations are not permitted liberty concerning Him.

Second, the gospel mission (because “the time is short”) holds an absolute precedence over artistic activity. The old created order is beyond redemption (it is said) and will soon be exposed to fire. The human arts have no eternal value; so that they are not worth cultivating.

Third, since art often involves the outward expression of the inward state of the human psyche, evangelical Christians, who have a strong doctrine of inner sinfulness, may well fear what such expression reveals. That is, the public projection in art of inner depravity may draw a censorious response, rather than an intelligently engaged one, from conservative Christians.

Fourth, Protestant evangelicals have displayed a suspicion of metaphor and representation—which are central to the arts—perhaps derived from the priority of the sensus literalis in scripture reading.

Fifth, as the religious and the aesthetic are felt by some modern theologians to be responses to the same thing, more orthodox Christians have recoiled from the arts. Paul Tillich saw in art an revelatory expression of the “Ultimate Concern”. The beautiful is also holy and transcendent. For Tillich, art and theology both touch on what really “is”. Certainly, modern artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Rothko have painted as if this was the case. However, for those who would uphold the Christ revealed in the scriptures as God’s unique revelation, Tillich’s claim for art is extremely unsatisfactory. But what is to be said, thought and felt about the arts if what is said is to be theologically accurate?