The Arts and the Christian Life

Earl Davey

• Editorial: Wipf and Stock
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666727852
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Littérature et arts dans le christianisme

Many find their engagement with works of art raises questions concerning where value is found and how meaning and import are understood and experienced. For persons of Christian faith, a parallel question arises concerning the significance such experience holds for the Christian life and the spiritual journey. This collection of essays pursues questions that address how we perceive value in our experience of the arts, how this experience leads to a greater measure of human fullness, and what significance engagement with the arts holds for the Christian life. The author argues that human experience and the quality of our personhood are enriched in and through the imaginative life and that our spiritual lives are profoundly impacted by our aesthetic engagements. An underlying assumption is that all great art, all that is beautiful, is inherently religious: that is, it embodies qualities that reflect the glory of God and is therefore valuable to the Christian life and one's spiritual experience. Indeed, insofar as the noetic privileges language and reason, the arts and the domain of the aesthetic provide an alternate pathway by which we are able to encounter the Divine.

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The Spiritual Significance of Art and Beauty

Introduction: The Arts and their Value

The human species, created in the image of God as told in the ancient wisdom of the Genesis text, is marked in many and diverse ways as God’s own: by its purposiveness toward knowing and toward freedom; its capacity for reason, imagination, hope, love, loyalty, self-reflection, and self-sacrifice; and, above all, its desire to encounter and know God. These defining qualities of humanness are reflected in our literature, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and rituals—the practices and structures by which we reflect upon and cultivate our capacity for hope, love, and charity. These are the tools we use to explore the essential features of our humanness and give expression to our striving to become more than we now are. Through these forms and mechanisms, we give voice to our prayer and praise, our love and longing for God, and both the good and destructive things of this world.

These products of mind and the human imagination contribute to what we speak of as culture, to the multiple cultures across time and space that are the footprints of our common humanity. They mark our humanness. These forms and symbols record our joys, sorrows, and triumphs; they stand as evidence of our need of redemption and transformation. But they also constitute magnificent products of the human imagination that have the markings of beauty, that point toward the Divine, and reflect the glory of God. It is my working assumption that engagement with such works is a means of cultivating a greater measure of fullness of our human experience, a fullness that God desires and makes possible for us. This search for fulfilment, I argue, is part of the process of our spiritual journey as Christians, part of coming to know and experience God through engagement with art and the beautiful—a process that involves the exercise of our minds and the engagement of our hearts in faith. To this end, this volume addresses some of the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the arts and our experience of these various forms, and we consider the question of their significance in the Christian life.

I have spoken already of music, literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance collectively as representing part of what is yet a more extensive set of artistic forms that are commonly denoted as the arts or fine arts. Let us begin by recognizing that the word art is now utilized in such a manner that it is impossible to establish boundaries that can be defensibly applied to the term. Moreover, when we consider the range of artistic forms, each with its particular materials, compositional techniques, and conventions, the difficulty of determining what, if anything, unites them becomes all the more evident. Yet these multiple and disparate art forms have long been viewed as a set, possessing some unifying principle or philosophical intent. Part of the work of philosophical speculation in the field of aesthetics focuses on the problems of how art is to be defined, why it is important, where its value lies, and what contribution it makes to human experience. In response to such questions, the philosophical community has developed various theories of art, several of which are examined in this work, including art as beauty, art as expression of human feeling and emotion, and art as significant form. In this context, we are also interested in what may be seen as a parallel question, a theological question that centers on the significance of the arts in the Christian life and spiritual experience. To this purpose, we turn to the American Jesuit theologian Alejandro Garcia-Rivera who poses a somewhat different question. Garcia-Rivera asks, “What moves the human heart?” This reframing of the philosophical orientation of questions pertaining to art and its value is critical, because it recognizes the spiritual nature of humankind and invites a method of inquiry into the value of art and aesthetic experience that is both philosophical and theological: where the two postures at various points intersect and together inform how we might better understand the place of the arts, artistic and aesthetic activity, in our society and, more particularly, in Christian experience and the life of the church. These, then, constitute the broad purposes of this work.

In this introductory chapter, I begin with a brief exploration of the idea of what it is to become more than we now are. What does this spiritual journey of the Christian entail, and what place does engagement with the arts have in this transformative process?

Beauty: A Pathway to God

In pursuit of personal and spiritual development, some choose a path that focuses principally on the reading of the biblical and spiritual texts, in the context of a life of prayer and contemplation. But the fact is that the life of the true ascetic and contemplative is a calling of the few. For most of us, the spiritual journey of which we speak includes these foundational elements of prayer and contemplation but draws upon a much broader range of elements. Inasmuch as we are created in God’s image with all the capacities, proclivities, and possibilities accorded to self-conscious and rational beings, we rightly assume that the exploration of imaginative and artistic worlds is part of the good and abundant life that God has made possible and intends for his people. The riches and glory of language, literature, and poetry, of mathematics, painting, sculpture, music, and dance—all of this is part of the bounty and mercy of God—gifts of God for his creation and his people. All of this is part of the spiritual life and journey in which we find ourselves drawn closer to God.

The exploration and cultivation of the mind as part of the stewardship of the intellectual resources that are ours have long been important to the life of the Christian church, as evidenced by the work of the great religious colleges and universities that emerged under the church’s auspices. In the West, one thinks of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in Europe, established in 1088. While initially dedicated to training in canon and civil law, by the end of the fourteenth century, the university had added to its curriculum the study of medicine, philosophy, arithmetic, astronomy, logic, rhetoric, and grammar. Theology was added to the curriculum only in the mid-fourteenth century. The founding of the University of Paris followed in the second half of the twelfth century. The earliest of the Oxford Colleges—University, Balliol, and Merton Colleges—emerged in the following century. In 1347, Pope Clement VI established a university in Prague, which was followed by the University of Heidelberg, the oldest university in Germany, in 1386. Over succeeding centuries, these institutions, along with many others scattered throughout Europe and the world, provided an enormous resource for the Christian church. Indeed, the church was the principal source of employment for university graduates, and the structure of the arts faculties was designed to meet their needs.

It is notable, however, that pursuit of the beautiful in terms of the study and creation of artifacts or artistic products was not principally the province of the universities, but of the guilds of the various arts and crafts, including masonry, gold and silver work, carpentry, weaving, glass work, and scores of other specialties. And of course, much of the finest of this work was commissioned by the churches and cathedrals throughout Europe. All of this is simply to note that stewardship of the mind and human imagination, and the practice of artistry and production of the beautiful, has long been part of the discipline of the Christian community.

Traditionally, the Christian community has assumed that it gives glory to God through the exercising of its talents and artistic capacities. Since the early Middle Ages and earlier yet, it built libraries containing the knowledge and research of all the known world; it cultivated the artistic abilities needed to produce magnificent books beautifully illustrated and decorated; it erected churches, cathedrals, and monasteries, all of which evidenced the artistic capacities and aesthetic sensibilities of the community. This labor of the heart and mind, labor that extended far beyond the reach of the ordinary and that which was functionally necessary, was done to the greater glory of God. The flourish that marked such labor was not taken as mere vanity but as a joyous expression of the bounty of the human spirit dedicated to God, the giver of all good gifts. This dedication to excellence of mind and refined craft was understood as a proper part of the spiritual life of the community, along with the community’s prayers and spiritual readings. The liturgy of the church was itself a thing of beauty. The Gregorian chant of the chapels and monastic choirs resounded in beautifully constructed spaces, with alters and naves resplendent with carved and painted figures, and scenes depicting the saints of the church and the biblical narrative. Whether in a simple country chapel or a magnificent cathedral, the life of faith was given expression in the worship of the church—a worship that exhibited the artistry of the church and the community as part of its spiritual service and witness to the glory of God. The work and life of the church has been formed and colored by poetry, literature, music, painting, architecture, and the combination of these various arts in the ritual of the church throughout its history and across cultures.

As we shall see in our subsequent examination of beauty theory, and particularly in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the Christian community has long held the view that participation in the beautiful constitutes action that is good. While most of the philosophical community has long abandoned the language of the beautiful and the concept of beauty as a quality ...