Seeing God in Art

The Christian Faith in 30 Images

Richard Harries

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780281083831
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte religiosa

Over the centuries some of the world's greatest painters have explored and expressed their faith in God through their art. Here, Richard Harries invites you to reflect with him on thirty such artists, and to see how their paintings illuminate important aspects of Christian faith and teaching.Encompassing masterpieces by Rembrandt, Leonardo, Titian and Caravaggio as well as modern works by Chagall, Spencer and Rouault, this book presents the essentials of the faith in a way that will move the reader to respond with heart as well as head.

Part 1

IN TIME

1

‘Let there be . . .’

The creation of the sun, moon and stars, twelfth-century mosaic

This is one of the many superb mosaics in Monreale Cathedral, in Palermo, Sicily,2 that tell the Christian story from creation onwards. It depicts the creation of the stars, the sun and moon, and the planets (Genesis 1.1–5, 14–19). In God’s left hand is a scroll that symbolizes the ruling principles on which the universe operates or, as we would say, the fundamental laws of nature. A similar scheme of mosaics can be found in the nearby Palatine chapel in the royal palace.

As mentioned in the Introduction, there was a difference between East and West in their understanding of Christian art. In these Monreale mosaics, the two approaches come together. The Christian story is told from creation onwards, but each scene has an iconic quality that draws us to reflect and pray.

The creation of the universe is of course beyond anything our tiny human minds can picture, but the artist here has made a bold attempt to put it in symbolic form. All stems from God’s great ‘Let there be . . .’, indicated by his outstretched arm. This ‘Let there be . . .’ runs throughout the first chapter of the Bible. God’s hand not only brings things into being, it is a hand that blesses. It reminds us of other words from Genesis: ‘All that he made was very good’.

We might think it childlike to picture God in these terms, but however sophisticated our attempt to visualize the moment when matter appeared ex nihilo, out of nothing, it will still only be a human picture of what is beyond our comprehension. In a way, the more childlike the better, for it then brings home to us the fact that we are using human images to depict what cannot be imagined.

One of the great scientific achievements of recent decades is that the created side of this unimaginable moment of creation can be mapped out in mathematical terms. Advanced instruments for measurement, together with very high-level maths, can take astronomers and mathematical physicists back to the first few seconds of the explosion of energy we call the ‘big bang’: the point from which the universe has since expanded ever outwards at the speed of light. It was the Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître who first noted in 1927 that an expanding universe could be traced back in time to an originating single point; since then, scientists have built on his idea of cosmic expansion.

We now know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. It contains 10 billion galaxies, and each galaxy contains about 100 billion stars. This means that there are something like one billion trillion stars in the observable universe. Earth is of course a planet of one star, the Sun, which is part of one galaxy, the Milky Way. Time and space, as we know them, begin at this point. No wonder the psalmist cries out, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork’ (Psalm 19.1, kjv). No wonder poets in every age, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, have written words such as ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’ We do not know God in himself. We only know him in and through the secondary causes of which he is the first cause. We know him in the wonder we feel when we look up at the night sky.

What is fascinating about the brilliant scientific work done on the origin of the universe in recent decades is the way its truth has been yielded up through mathematical equations of great beauty. Mathematicians sometimes marvel at the way amazing complexity can be brought together in equations of such simplicity and elegance. Not unrelated to this phenomenon is the equally amazing capacity of the human mind to explore and map out the universe in this way. All this bears out what the Church has long taught, both about the fundamental beauty of the universe and the natural laws on which it is based, and our God-given reason, which is able to recognize and understand these laws.

No scientific exploration can locate God in this process, for God is not a thing in the world of things. He is the uncreated source of all things. There is only one place where we can discover God, and that is in ourselves. We discover him as the root of our own existence, the source from whom our being flows. But because the fundamental energy that keeps us in being is one with the fundamental energy that brought the universe into being in the first place, God is the root of the universe as well. Moment by moment I am held in being – and if I am, so is the universe as a whole.

That is what is really meant when we say that God is creator, and that is why it would not affect this belief if some scientific reality could be found to exist before the ‘big bang’. That too would exist only because of the uncreated source of all energy. Nor would it affect the issue if it were discovered that there is a multiverse. Before the theory of the ‘big bang’ was shown to be true, a widely held view was that the universe was being continuously created. Even now it could be that the ‘big bang’ was just one in a series of explosions and contractions. If this were shown to be so, again it would not affect the fundamental Christian belief, shared by Jews and Muslims, that whatever the process whereby we come into being, it depends on an uncreated source of all processes. The basis of this belief is the lived faith of believers, that they are dependent on God as they are on the air they breathe and the ground they walk on.

Unimaginable God, you have set us in this universe of awesome grandeur. Moment by moment you hold it in existence. You are the fount from whom my being flows. On you I depend, in you I trust.

2

Animals come into being

Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals, 1551–52

This painting of God creating the animals, based on Genesis 1.20–25, exudes energy and vitality. All is on the move, a movement set in motion by the right hand of God who is himself moving, almost chasing the birds into existence.

We now know that animals were not created all at once but came into existence over a long period of evolution. The earth was formed about 5.54 billion years ago, and there is undisputed evidence that life was present on earth from about 3.5 billion years ago. Life has evolved very, very gradually over that period. Against that background, the age of the dinosaurs, which ended 66 million years ago, is relatively recent. When the theory of evolution was first put forward, thoughtful Christians found no contradiction between this and the biblical account in Genesis 1.20–25. They argued that God works through secondary causes over a long period of time. He does not just make the world. He does something even more wonderful; he makes the world make itself.

God is, by definition, the underlying, fathomless first cause of all secondary causes. He is not another thing in the world of things. He does not take up or threaten our space in any way. He works in and through all secondary causes in accord with the fundamental rules of nature. The twin secondary causes through which evolution takes place are genetic mutation and natural selection. All living organisms give rise from time to time to random genetic mutations. Those which adapt to their environment survive and those that don’t perish. Those which survive produce genes that will also survive in the particular environment. These random mutations allow new forms of existence to emerge, and the stability provided by the need to adapt to the environment means that new forms will be preserved. It is this combination of freedom and stability which is creative. The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ sometimes makes us think of a phrase commonly ascribed to Tennyson that nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’. Survival of the fittest, however, simply means survival of those forms of life that are best adapted to their environment, whether air or earth or water, hot or cold, light or dark. When watching wildlife programmes on television, for example, it can be distressing to see one beautiful animal tear another apart. We wonder whose side God is on, the desperately hungry tiger or the fearful antelope. There is a mystery here that we cannot fathom, but we should avoid projecting human emotions on to animals. Each follows the law of its own nature, and in being itself reflects the divine glory.

In Coleridge’s poem about the Ancient Mariner, the Mariner is in despair. Then he looks over the side of the ship and sees some water snakes swimming around. These shiny, slimy creatures would normally make most of us shudder, but the Mariner cries out:

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray . . .

It was the wonder and beauty of creation, even if what he saw was not conventionally attractive, that released the Mariner from his sense of guilt and self-absorbed depression.

We human beings have only been around for a fraction of a second compared with the long stretch of time in which other forms of animal life dominated the earth. So nature is not just a backdrop to human life, as our forebears thought, but significant in itself, for itself. Here is the creative exuberance of the divine in full play. Here is the glory of God revealed in countless forms. Our forebears thought that human beings, in dominating the earth, could do what they liked with it. We now rightly reject this and understand our role to be that of stewards, taking care of our environment.

When we look at this painting by Tintoretto (1518–94), we see the sea teeming with fish and the air full of birds. We now know that stocks of many kinds of fish are drastically depleted and numerous species of birds and animals are in grave danger of extinction. Saving the richness and variety of creation for future generations has rightly become a major priority. What is interesting about this huge shift in our attitude is what it brings home to us about the intrinsic value of the natural world. Al...