Creator Spirit

The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human

Guthrie, Steven R.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441231987
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Art is often viewed as being inherently spiritual. But what does it mean to describe an experience of art or beauty as "spiritual"? Is there a relationship between the spiritual experience a person has in the presence of a work of art and the Holy Spirit of Christian faith? Skilled theologian, musician, and educator Steven Guthrie examines areas of overlap between spirituality, human creativity, and the arts with the goal of sharpening and refining how we speak and think about the Holy Spirit. By exploring various connections between art and spirituality, he helps Christians better understand the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and offers a clear, engaging theology of the arts. The book includes a foreword by renowned theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie.

1

Is There Anything to Talk About Here?

Spirit and Mystery

“Holiness”—“the holy”—is a category . . . peculiar to the sphere of religion. . . . It contains a quite specific element or “moment,” which sets it apart from “the rational” . . . and which remains inexpressible . . . in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts. The same thing is true (to take a quite different region of experience) of the category of the beautiful.

Rudolf Otto[22]

There is probably no conviction more deeply rooted in modern aesthetics than this, that works of art express what cannot be expressed in ordinary discourse.

W. E. Kennick[23]

Why a Theology of the Spirit?

What exactly is so “spiritual” about the arts? Among the many answers to this question that have been suggested, there is one we should consider right at the beginning. If it is correct we can stop—in fact, we will have to stop—before going much further.

There is an anonymous but often repeated quip that goes: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”[24] The conviction behind this one-liner is that words and music, concepts and song, are not only different but incommensurable media. Words and music each have a kind of meaning, certainly. But what is “said” in one domain really cannot be said in the other. “Is there a meaning to music?” asks composer Aaron Copland. “My answer would be ‘Yes.’ . . . ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’ ”[25]

Here, some have said, we’ve found the important resemblance between the spiritual and—not just music, but art generally. Each, it seems, moves us out beyond words and definitions, beyond concepts and logical distinctions. Each opens us up to realities and experiences of great profundity, but realities that wither on the examination table of the philosopher or the theologian. And—if this is the case—then ineffability, the “unsayable-ness” of art and spirituality, isn’t a limitation to be overcome. It is instead precisely the virtue we value. In these areas we are given the privilege of speaking languages beyond language and knowing truths beyond knowing.

So, theologians, go home! If art and the spirit reside entirely within the domain of ineffability, then our study has both begun and ended. The last thing we should want in this case is a theology of the spirit, or a theological reflection on the arts. If the spiritual always runs out beyond our words and categories, then a conceptual, theological analysis of spirit seems misguided, or maybe even distasteful. Like producing a study titled The Exhaustive Mechanical Physics of Lovemaking, it misses the point entirely. The first proposal we must consider is this: the most important resemblance between art and Spirit is that we really can’t talk about either one.

Art and Mystery

This is an idea that appears throughout a study by Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, titled Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist.[26] The book’s dust jacket claims that “artists have become the spiritual vanguard of our time.” Increasingly, Wuthnow says, when Americans look for spiritual guidance and insight, they are turning not to priests or theologians, but to poets, musicians, sculptors, and dancers.

Why should artists—artists particularly—be singled out as the spiritual vanguard of our time? Why would people be inclined to seek spiritual insight from a poet or a painter, rather than (say) a dentist or an electrician? A number of the artists Wuthnow interviews answer along the lines we have just suggested. The arts usher us into the “spiritual” realm of ineffability. They invite us to stand open-mouthed before the mystery of things, and this, Wuthnow suggests, is the “spirituality” of art.

This is not a new idea. Particularly during the Romantic era the idea that the arts “say the unsayable” becomes something of a philosophical cliché.[27] In a famous study of Beethoven’s music, the nineteenth century critic E. T. A. Hoffmann insists that “music reveals to man an unknown realm . . . a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing.”[28] It “comes to us from an unknown domain and kindles in the breast an inner bliss, a higher significance than feeble words, confined to the expression of banal earthly pleasures, can communicate.”[29] In Hoffmann’s breathless tribute music “reveals,” though what it reveals remains somehow “unknown” and “inexpressible.” Music has “significance,” but what it signifies escapes—and in fact, exceeds—words.

These same ideas appear in Wuthnow’s book, in an interview with wood sculptor David Ellsworth. Ellsworth creates free-form wooden objects that are difficult to define, and in fact, Wuthnow writes, “This is the essence that he is most intent on expressing. ‘Without a definition,’ he explains, ‘we’re left with wonderment.’ ”[30] “Being without definition is the key to Ellsworth’s understanding of spirituality,” Wuthnow continues, observing that an “emphasis on mystery occurs repeatedly in artists’ accounts of their work.”[31] Wuthnow believes that artists are sensitive and responsive to mystery because they recognize the futility of attempting to explain, define, or categorize their own creative work. He notes that the artists he interviews likewise place mystery and ineffability at the center of their spiritual lives and “emphasize the impossibility of fully understanding God.”[32] Ellsworth for instance explains: “I believe in God, in a higher order that is above the human species. . . . There’s something bigger than us. But it cannot be defined. If we could quantify it, identify it, catalog it, it would lose its value.”[33]

For Ellsworth, then (as for many of the other artists Wuthnow interviews), mystery (what cannot be fully known or seen), and ineffability (what cannot be defined or spoken of) are the hallmarks of “the spiritual.” And an interesting conviction follows from this belief, namely, that those who are at the furthest possible remove from spirituality are theologians and clerics—those who deal in reason, words, and explanations.

According to Wuthnow, artists insist “on the limits of rationality in spirituality.”[34] They recognize “that spirituality is more than a system of knowledge,” and so, for them, the value of Scripture “lies less in its theological propositions than in its accurate description of human experience.”[35] “They agree that God is ultimately too great to be fully comprehended by fallible human intellect.”[36] Moreover they emphasize a lifestyle of faith “as opposed to simply ascribing intellectually to a set of abstract doctrines.”[37] This, Wuthnow observes, “is a corrective to those philosophers and theologians who seem to think that the key to faith is having logical answers to every conceivable question.”[38]

Artists, Wuthnow says, are unwilling to “settle easily for a faith that emphasizes intellectual arguments. They are drawn to artistic expressions of spirituality because they have experienced life in a way that cannot be reduced to words.”[39] They are “uneasy with theological systems that claim to understand God through reason alone. Indeed, reason compels them to believe in a God who ultimately defies rational understanding.”[40] Author Madeleine L’Engle echoes these sentiments in her interview, quoting one of her poems:

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason,

There’d have been no room for the child.

“She elaborates: ‘We try to be too reasonable about what we believe. What I believe is not reasonable at all.’ ”[41] L’Engle tells Wuthnow that theology “in today’s complex world” must be “more about questions than answers.” She recalls that when her children were young, she removed them from Sunday school when she discovered that “they were being taught questions that had answers.”[42]

According to this perspective, knowledge, answers, and reason are toxic to mystery. Wuthnow reports that artists believe the “mysteries of life are too great to be captured fully in any religious community.”[43] They insist that “spirituality should not be reduced too readily to doctrines or creeds.”[44] The verbs—capture, reduce—insist upon a hostile relationship between what is fixed and known (religious communities, creeds, doctrines) and mystery. These are alternatives between which one must choose: “faith is more important to spiritual life than abstract knowledge.”[45] Doctrinal formulations and theological systems obstruct rather than illuminate spiritual realities. Wuthnow believes that this may be why “many Americans,” when faced with difficulty “turn more often to the music of Aretha Franklin or Jessye Norman than they do to theologians. Their spirits are uplifted as much by the concert on Saturday night as by the sermon on Sunday morning.”[46]

The Spirituality of Non-Knowing

Perhaps the artists interviewed by Wuthnow would be surprised to learn that this same antipathy toward creeds and precise theological description is also common among theologians. At about the same time that “ineffability” assumed a prominent place in philosophical aesthetics, the idea of the “unknowable” and “unnameable” became important in theological discussions. The great theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) would be especially influential in moving the verbal and the conceptual away from the center of the Christian faith. While we must speak and reason, Schleiermacher argued that whatever can be contained in words and concepts is not “the essence of religion.”[47]

This idea and its connection to the arts is at the heart of Schleiermacher’s beautiful little dialogue, Christmas Eve.[48] The dialogue describes a pleasant gathering of friends in a middle-class German home on the eve of Christmas. Much of the dialogue revolves around the contrasting characters of Sophie, a deeply pious and musical little girl, and Leonhardt, a skeptical, analytical lawyer. While Sophie displays “that childlike attitude . . . without which one cannot enter the kingdom of God,”[49] Leonhardt is (only somewhat teasingly) described as “the evil principle . . . among you.”[50] While Leonhardt represents learning, Sophie’s piety is marked by a “deep underlying intelligence of feeling.”[51] While Leonhardt analyzes things rigorously, Sophie feels things deeply and musically. “She knew how to treat each note aright; her touch and phrasing made each chord sound forth with an attachment which can scarcely tear itself from the rest but which then stands forth in its own measured strength until it too, like a holy kiss gives way to the next.”[52] In Schleiermacher’s dialogue it is the child—who sings, who feels, and who does not think and analyze—who shows us what true piety is.

In the same way, Agnes, one of the women participating in the conversation, admits that Leonhardt can reason and speak “better and finer than I,”[53] but this does not cause her any distress. Words are not at the heart of faith.

For I do not know how to describe with words how deeply and ardently I [have] felt that all radiant, serene joy is religion; that love, pleasure, and devotion are tones making up a perfect harmony, tones which fit in with each other in any phrasing and in full chord.[54]

Agnes’s relative awkwardness with words is no great deficit in the religious sphere, nor are Leondardt’s rhetorical and conceptual powers any great advantage. Leonhardt summarizes Agnes’s perspective: “You have yourself stated how you would have [the truth] expressed,” he says, “namely, not by words, but in music.”[55]

Music and religion, the dialogue suggests, reside primarily in the domain of experience and feeling, not that of ideas and knowledge. That is why, as one of the characters observes,

we can well dispense with particular words in church music but not with the singing itself. A Miserere, a Gloria, or a Requiem: what special words are required of these? Their very character conveys plenty of meaning and suffers no essential change even though accompanying words may be replaced with others, so long as they fit the timing of the music; and this is true no matter what the language. Indeed, no one would say that anything of gross importance was lost even if one didn’t get the words at all.[56]

Karl Barth sums up the message of Schleiermacher’s dialogue: “Exactly because of its lack of concepts, music is the true and legitimate bearer of the message of Christmas, the adequate expression for the highest and final dialectical level, a level attainable by singing, by playing on flute and piano.”[57]

More recently, the philosopher John Caputo stakes out similar territory in his essay On Religion,[58] claiming a central place for the unsayable in religion. The spiritual life, according to Caputo, has to do not with answers but with mystery, not with knowing but with uncertainty, not with theological definitions but with that which is unspeakable. In fact, he goes so far as to say that non-knowing is “the condition of [religious] passion.”[59] From Caputo’s perspective, the danger against which the spiritual person must guard is precisely the tendency to try to nail things down, tie things up, draw things to a close—choose your metaphor—through answers and definitions, creeds and doctrines. In so doing we ...