Ascending Grace: A Movement Back into the World
by Maeve Louise Heaney, FMVD
Lecturer in Theology, Australian Catholic University.
The image of Orpheus looking back and losing Eurydice leaves us with that tragic sense of an irrevocable mistake resulting in loss of life and love. The reproach surfaces: “You were almost there. . . . Why did you doubt?” And, perhaps due to the direction my own research is taking of late, I relate this felt image to the role of art, or rather, of artists, in religion and theology: look forward, not back! What is their role? What is our role?
In his paper for the SARTS session in Baltimore, Frank Burch Brown speaks of “a rich and sustained dialogue between those who study and practice theology more or less full-time, often with the arts in mind, and those who have undertaken a sustained engagement with the arts, conditioned by theological awareness.”1 I confess to still not knowing which of these two I fully belong to, and I have a third: that of being a member of a young Catholic institute of consecrated life dedicated to evangelization. Life feels like a kind of “hyphenated existence”: the initial call to make music “interrupted,” in the words of Lieven Boeve,2 by a particular form of discipleship, and then onward into theological thought and teaching. Is one a musical-theologian or a theological-musician or a missionary who does both? I am sure this is an experience with which most of those who read ARTS will identify. I could avoid or apologize for this personal entry point to our theme, but like Orpheus, it would feel like doubting, or looking back, rather than pushing forward in one direction that current “faith seeking understanding,”3 I believe, demands: if the arts are to lead theology anywhere, then we must seriously consider the nexus between faith and life in the very life or, rather, lives of artists, thinkers and communities who create, or make art. This is not to undermine all that theology can and should listen to and receive from art that is not explicitly born of a confessional faith or religion, but rather this is to place it in dialogue with art that is confessional, and to pay attention to how the people making such art and thinking about it experience and understand revelation, spirituality, and the artistic calling as precisely that: vocare/vocation.
From a theological perspective, such a focus would find an echo and parallel, I believe, in the attention given by twentieth-century theologian Bernard Lonergan and those who develop his thought to “the person of the theologian in conversion” as foundational to theological method. “Conversion,” here, is understood in a much wider sense than that of spiritually “coming back to faith,” but rather entails exploring the precise epistemological, religious, moral, psychic, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of the person “doing theology.” Similar attention to artistic creativity and the interconnection between the disciplines of theology, religious studies, and the arts would necessitate building a methodology to do so, but could be fascinating.
By way of converging intuitions, Italian theologian (musician and composer) Pierangelo Sequeri has some interesting writings around the theme. In the recognition that the broken nexus between art, culture, and religion affects the spiritual quality of all three, he speaks of what he calls a terza via, a “third way” between these worlds. This “third way” is the notion of creative thought as the “director” of an encounter between the sacred and art, a “thought” or creative impulse which is neither simply destined to prayer, nor necessarily estranged from religion.4
Creative thought, in the form of poetic invention, of reflective seeking and hermeneutical variation has generated a new space of aesthetic culture, focused on the bond between freedom and the sacred.5
Australian Redemptorist theologian Anthony J. Kelly underlines the intrinsic link between artistic creativity and theological thought within the creative process itself:
Artistic creativity is not simply an illustration of faith in an intrinsic sense, but more an inner dimension of resurrection-faith itself . . . where a phenomenologically attuned theology and contemplative Christian art meet. . . . Art is, as it were, an inner moment in the phenomenality of the resurrection, be it in music, painting or even poetic expression.6
If artistic creativity is “an intrinsic moment” of resurrection faith, and we were to read even the biblical text in this way, faith taking form in images, words, and stories, then where artistic creativity leads us is to a dimension or expression of what the Church calls “the development of doctrine.”7 In what way could we speak of art as developing or enriching doctrine? Let me name a couple:
puts structurally in practice the oxymoron that represents the background of that truth of the Christian logos, but also its necessary effect: the senses are also intelligent, not only obtuse; the spirit is also sensitive/sensible, not only incorporeal. The Christian logos is not a naked truth without style.10
This is not only an affirmation of the importance of style in revelation, which as recent scholarship points out, is not only about what God says but how God says it, as well.11 It is also a way of expressing the sacramental principle: matter is shot through with the glory of God; Christian truth will never fit in a word; Christian thought will never be solely conceptual.
At times, the secular world comes to our aid, or challenges us to move quicker in the development of our thought. In the “publish or perish” world academics live in, Australia is moving in an interesting direction. Pushed forward by universities who take the arts seriously, the government, in their definition of “Excellence in Research in Australia,” or ERA (the instrument for evaluating university-level research output for funding purposes) have begun to include the category of “non-traditional creative outputs.” Although still in the early stages of finding out exactly how to assess this, (they ask for a statement, albeit short, explaining “why” a given work of art contributes to original thought), it is a statement of recognition that creative works are, in themselves, a contribution to the advancement of thought and research.12
I have written elsewhere, drawing on the thought of Clemens Sedmak, on the arts as thought that stretches, enriches, and expands our understanding, giving us deep, thick, and fresh sounds to lead our thinking forward.13 But where will they lead us? This is the question underlying the title of this session that I find most interesting: why is it so important that Orpheus not look back? Where are we to go, in the company of the arts? Is there a specific doctrine they are going to help us “develop”?
Here I would highlight a convergence of voices I sense emerging around a Christian doctrine that drew my attention when I set my sights on developing a foundational theological discourse on musical symbolism. Passing through the maze of musical semiotics, musicology, ethnomusicology, and epistemology, I “found myself” in the ancient truth of Christian faith of the Ascension. This may not sound surprising—as much writing on art suggests its capacity to help us “transcend” both ourselves and this world to what is beyond. However, I confess to not liking the word “transcendence.” To my mind, it evokes other-worldliness, even where we qualify it with the descriptive “immanent,” when in fact, God in Christ came to inhabit our world, and change it from within.
Arthur Poulin, Ascension, 12″ x 48″, © info@fatherarthurpoulin.org; used with permission of the artist.
The recently painted image of the Ascension by Camaldolese artist, Arthur Poulin, points (or even leads) us in a different direction. Most artistic representations of the Ascension, in their depiction of Jesus going “up” to heaven, evoke absence for contemporary viewers: “up, up, and away.” This was not what ascension meant for the early Church, for whom God, the risen and ascended Christ, inhabited the universe, albeit in the highest place, present and powerful, even though they could not “see” him. But our way of perceiving and inhabiting the universe has left us out of touch with that presence. Poulin’s image refocuses our awareness, suggesting Christ’s presence as expanding the very world we live in. Where does Orpheus lead us? Not away from the world, but into it, where Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) is to be found. The ancient yet under-estimated truth of the Ascension, or to express it differently, the Body of Christ—the Mystical body of Christ, “the dispersed body of Christ,”14 “the Interrupted Body,” and continuing, on-going humanity of Christ,15 the ‘expanding Incarnation”16—rather than an addendum of the resurrection is the truth through which “the permanent significance of our humanity for God was thereby effectively declared.”17 The reality is the body of Christ (Col 2: 9). Hence, the Ascension is an example of how art can develop and lead thought, opening doors and windows not only outwards, but also inwards, and into a greater understanding of the faith we profess.
A note of what could be called “interesting Catholic trivia” in relation to this truth. In the spirit of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as “the democracy of the dead,”18 perhaps the call is to “look backwards so as to move forward.” The growing tradition of re-engagement between the Catholic Church and the world of the arts is well known, marked by John Paul II’s well-known Letter to Artistsin 1999, and followed up by Benedict XVI in 2009 with a meeting and message at the Sistine Chapel. However, perhaps less known is that this movement was kick-started by Paul VI with a gathering of artists before the end of Vatican II in the Sistine Chapel, on May 7th, 1964—on the feast of Ascension Thursday. Artistic work, he said: “transfuses the invisible world into accessible, intelligible formulae. . . . It is your profession, your mission; and your art is precisely that of wresting its treasures from the heaven of the spirit and clothing them in word, in colors, in forms, in accessibility.”
Art, artists don’t take us out and up, but bring heaven’s treasures down and in.
In this manner of yours, in your ability to translate into the radius of our understanding . . . and to make perceptible to the senses the things which only an intuitive vision can grasp . . . you are ‘maestri.’ Were we to be deprived of your help, our ministry would become stammering and uncertain. . . .19
NOTES
Lecturer in Theology, Australian Catholic University.
The image of Orpheus looking back and losing Eurydice leaves us with that tragic sense of an irrevocable mistake resulting in loss of life and love. The reproach surfaces: “You were almost there. . . . Why did you doubt?” And, perhaps due to the direction my own research is taking of late, I relate this felt image to the role of art, or rather, of artists, in religion and theology: look forward, not back! What is their role? What is our role?
In his paper for the SARTS session in Baltimore, Frank Burch Brown speaks of “a rich and sustained dialogue between those who study and practice theology more or less full-time, often with the arts in mind, and those who have undertaken a sustained engagement with the arts, conditioned by theological awareness.”1 I confess to still not knowing which of these two I fully belong to, and I have a third: that of being a member of a young Catholic institute of consecrated life dedicated to evangelization. Life feels like a kind of “hyphenated existence”: the initial call to make music “interrupted,” in the words of Lieven Boeve,2 by a particular form of discipleship, and then onward into theological thought and teaching. Is one a musical-theologian or a theological-musician or a missionary who does both? I am sure this is an experience with which most of those who read ARTS will identify. I could avoid or apologize for this personal entry point to our theme, but like Orpheus, it would feel like doubting, or looking back, rather than pushing forward in one direction that current “faith seeking understanding,”3 I believe, demands: if the arts are to lead theology anywhere, then we must seriously consider the nexus between faith and life in the very life or, rather, lives of artists, thinkers and communities who create, or make art. This is not to undermine all that theology can and should listen to and receive from art that is not explicitly born of a confessional faith or religion, but rather this is to place it in dialogue with art that is confessional, and to pay attention to how the people making such art and thinking about it experience and understand revelation, spirituality, and the artistic calling as precisely that: vocare/vocation.
From a theological perspective, such a focus would find an echo and parallel, I believe, in the attention given by twentieth-century theologian Bernard Lonergan and those who develop his thought to “the person of the theologian in conversion” as foundational to theological method. “Conversion,” here, is understood in a much wider sense than that of spiritually “coming back to faith,” but rather entails exploring the precise epistemological, religious, moral, psychic, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of the person “doing theology.” Similar attention to artistic creativity and the interconnection between the disciplines of theology, religious studies, and the arts would necessitate building a methodology to do so, but could be fascinating.
By way of converging intuitions, Italian theologian (musician and composer) Pierangelo Sequeri has some interesting writings around the theme. In the recognition that the broken nexus between art, culture, and religion affects the spiritual quality of all three, he speaks of what he calls a terza via, a “third way” between these worlds. This “third way” is the notion of creative thought as the “director” of an encounter between the sacred and art, a “thought” or creative impulse which is neither simply destined to prayer, nor necessarily estranged from religion.4
Creative thought, in the form of poetic invention, of reflective seeking and hermeneutical variation has generated a new space of aesthetic culture, focused on the bond between freedom and the sacred.5
Australian Redemptorist theologian Anthony J. Kelly underlines the intrinsic link between artistic creativity and theological thought within the creative process itself:
Artistic creativity is not simply an illustration of faith in an intrinsic sense, but more an inner dimension of resurrection-faith itself . . . where a phenomenologically attuned theology and contemplative Christian art meet. . . . Art is, as it were, an inner moment in the phenomenality of the resurrection, be it in music, painting or even poetic expression.6
If artistic creativity is “an intrinsic moment” of resurrection faith, and we were to read even the biblical text in this way, faith taking form in images, words, and stories, then where artistic creativity leads us is to a dimension or expression of what the Church calls “the development of doctrine.”7 In what way could we speak of art as developing or enriching doctrine? Let me name a couple:
- Art and biblical studies: Many have sought biblical and doctrinal grounds to defend the validity of artistic endeavor, but what if it works the other way around? What if we could read and understand the Bible as “artistic,” as an exercise in poetic and poietic thought, with a greater understanding of what that means and less kneejerk impulse to justify and explain that parts are not “historical” or are simply more difficult to grasp. It seems to me some strands of theopoetics8 and biblical scholarship are moving in this direction.
- Art and systematic theology: Frank Burch Brown at one stage in his paper suggests that “some of us can sing teachings and sayings that we might have trouble affirming in plain speech” (11). Faith itself, being human, holds within it space for doubt, questioning, and growth. Attention to the creative process can enrich a theology of faith, both in our understanding of the content of faith and the process of the believing subject (fides quad, fides qua respectively). Theology is top-heavy with explicit verbal and discursive discourse; the artistic process, in general, is not. This is essential given that, in the realm of doctrine, the very truths that we believe in can sometimes “defy” conceptual formulation, by which, in the attempt to express them, words either fail or over-explain, and “suddenly the theological word pronounces something it shouldn’t, and the conscience feels something it shouldn’t.”9 Art, (and in particular music):
puts structurally in practice the oxymoron that represents the background of that truth of the Christian logos, but also its necessary effect: the senses are also intelligent, not only obtuse; the spirit is also sensitive/sensible, not only incorporeal. The Christian logos is not a naked truth without style.10
This is not only an affirmation of the importance of style in revelation, which as recent scholarship points out, is not only about what God says but how God says it, as well.11 It is also a way of expressing the sacramental principle: matter is shot through with the glory of God; Christian truth will never fit in a word; Christian thought will never be solely conceptual.
At times, the secular world comes to our aid, or challenges us to move quicker in the development of our thought. In the “publish or perish” world academics live in, Australia is moving in an interesting direction. Pushed forward by universities who take the arts seriously, the government, in their definition of “Excellence in Research in Australia,” or ERA (the instrument for evaluating university-level research output for funding purposes) have begun to include the category of “non-traditional creative outputs.” Although still in the early stages of finding out exactly how to assess this, (they ask for a statement, albeit short, explaining “why” a given work of art contributes to original thought), it is a statement of recognition that creative works are, in themselves, a contribution to the advancement of thought and research.12
I have written elsewhere, drawing on the thought of Clemens Sedmak, on the arts as thought that stretches, enriches, and expands our understanding, giving us deep, thick, and fresh sounds to lead our thinking forward.13 But where will they lead us? This is the question underlying the title of this session that I find most interesting: why is it so important that Orpheus not look back? Where are we to go, in the company of the arts? Is there a specific doctrine they are going to help us “develop”?
Here I would highlight a convergence of voices I sense emerging around a Christian doctrine that drew my attention when I set my sights on developing a foundational theological discourse on musical symbolism. Passing through the maze of musical semiotics, musicology, ethnomusicology, and epistemology, I “found myself” in the ancient truth of Christian faith of the Ascension. This may not sound surprising—as much writing on art suggests its capacity to help us “transcend” both ourselves and this world to what is beyond. However, I confess to not liking the word “transcendence.” To my mind, it evokes other-worldliness, even where we qualify it with the descriptive “immanent,” when in fact, God in Christ came to inhabit our world, and change it from within.
Arthur Poulin, Ascension, 12″ x 48″, © info@fatherarthurpoulin.org; used with permission of the artist.
The recently painted image of the Ascension by Camaldolese artist, Arthur Poulin, points (or even leads) us in a different direction. Most artistic representations of the Ascension, in their depiction of Jesus going “up” to heaven, evoke absence for contemporary viewers: “up, up, and away.” This was not what ascension meant for the early Church, for whom God, the risen and ascended Christ, inhabited the universe, albeit in the highest place, present and powerful, even though they could not “see” him. But our way of perceiving and inhabiting the universe has left us out of touch with that presence. Poulin’s image refocuses our awareness, suggesting Christ’s presence as expanding the very world we live in. Where does Orpheus lead us? Not away from the world, but into it, where Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) is to be found. The ancient yet under-estimated truth of the Ascension, or to express it differently, the Body of Christ—the Mystical body of Christ, “the dispersed body of Christ,”14 “the Interrupted Body,” and continuing, on-going humanity of Christ,15 the ‘expanding Incarnation”16—rather than an addendum of the resurrection is the truth through which “the permanent significance of our humanity for God was thereby effectively declared.”17 The reality is the body of Christ (Col 2: 9). Hence, the Ascension is an example of how art can develop and lead thought, opening doors and windows not only outwards, but also inwards, and into a greater understanding of the faith we profess.
A note of what could be called “interesting Catholic trivia” in relation to this truth. In the spirit of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as “the democracy of the dead,”18 perhaps the call is to “look backwards so as to move forward.” The growing tradition of re-engagement between the Catholic Church and the world of the arts is well known, marked by John Paul II’s well-known Letter to Artistsin 1999, and followed up by Benedict XVI in 2009 with a meeting and message at the Sistine Chapel. However, perhaps less known is that this movement was kick-started by Paul VI with a gathering of artists before the end of Vatican II in the Sistine Chapel, on May 7th, 1964—on the feast of Ascension Thursday. Artistic work, he said: “transfuses the invisible world into accessible, intelligible formulae. . . . It is your profession, your mission; and your art is precisely that of wresting its treasures from the heaven of the spirit and clothing them in word, in colors, in forms, in accessibility.”
Art, artists don’t take us out and up, but bring heaven’s treasures down and in.
In this manner of yours, in your ability to translate into the radius of our understanding . . . and to make perceptible to the senses the things which only an intuitive vision can grasp . . . you are ‘maestri.’ Were we to be deprived of your help, our ministry would become stammering and uncertain. . . .19
NOTES
- Frank Burch Brown, “Orpheus Revisited: Can Arts Ever Lead Theology? And Where?,” in ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, 25.2 (2014), 6.
- Cf. L. Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, Louvain Theological and Pastoral monographs, 30 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
- St. Anselm’s foundational definition of theology.
- Cf. P. Sequeri, Musica e mistica: Percorsi nella storia occidentale delle pratiche estetiche e religiose (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), 507-8. All translations of Sequeri’s work are my own.
- Sequeri, Musica e mistica, 508.
- A. Kelly, The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian life and Thought (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008), 35.
- Cf., Alongside or even as a result of J. H. Newman’s famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, much work is currently being done on this notion.
- Cf. By way of example, the work of the Theopoetics Group at http://theopoetics.net/ (accessed 01/14/2014).
- SEQUERI, Anti-Prometeo. Il Musicale nell’Estetica Teologica di Hans Urs von Balthasar (Milano: Glossa, 1995), 107.
- SEQUERI, Anti-Prometeo, 107.
- An example, albeit not in relation to the arts can be found in historian John O’Malley’s recent writings on the style of Vatican II as essential to its understanding. Cf., J. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
- This is filtering down into the education system: in a recent document on curriculum in Australia, ACARA version 4, Australia has moved against the Western current of some countries it normally emulates and insisted in including the arts as an intrinsic part of its development (comprising dance, drama, media arts, music and the visual arts); (accessed 14/01/2014).
- Maeve Louise Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 286-300.
- Clive Marsh and Vaughan S. Roberts, Personal Jesus: How popular music shapes our souls (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2012), 168-9.
- Cf. O. Davies, in Transformation Theology, Church in the World (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 2007), 37-59.
- Cf., Kelly, A.J., “The Body of Christ: Amen!,” in The Expanding Incarnation in Theological Studies 71 (2010), 792-816.
- Brown, D., Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 127.
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Hodder and Stoughton: Great Britain, 1999), 63.
- Cf., Paul VI, AAS 56 (1964), 439-440; translation mine.
