Christian Wisdom and the Visual Arts
by Graham Howes
Graham Howes is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and author of The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief. He is a trustee of ACE (Art and Christianity Enquiry). This article was originally published under the same title in Theology, 114.3; 189-197. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
Where and how, in our own day, do we relate the visual arts to Christian Wisdom, and Christian Wisdom to the visual arts? It is, of course, not exactly a new question. It was, for example, integral to Byzantine aesthetics—not least at the time of the Iconoclastic controversy—and central to the thinking behind French Gothic (one recalls how Abbot Suger described his St. Denis as “where God is worshipped most highly in his attributes of light, measure, and number.”1It also powered Baroque theatricality (what Bernini called “hearing through the eyes”),2 and strongly motivated some, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites. Indeed it was their champion, John Ruskin, who, in the third volume of his Modern Painters (1856) put the question most trenchantly of all. “How far,” he asked his readers, “has Fine Art in all or any ages of the world, been conducive to the religious life?”3 His readers then would, no doubt, have still—just—have been able to supply a positive answer.
But today it is surely far more difficult, especially if we are Christians, to see with any clarity or certainty, where we stand in relation to Ruskin’s leading question.
Yet even today one can still encounter strong trace elements of the ideological assumptions that have traditionally informed “Christian” art. Underpinning these are usually three presumed commonplaces. One, to quote from Richard Harries, is that “all works of art, whatever their context, have a spiritual dimension.”4The second, from the same source, is that “at the very least art, in all its forms, keeps the possibilities of faith alive.”5 The third, as Wilson Yates has framed it, is that “the visual arts and the Christian message are intrinsically related and mutually dependent upon one another in the midst of their unique autonomy and distinctiveness.”6
In some ways, however, this matrix of assumptions worries me. Indeed, as we move into the twenty-first century, we may have to ask ourselves, honestly and self-critically, how convincing are the underlying premises today? And here some real difficulties present themselves. One is that it is far easier to attribute a broadly theological import to art objects than to establish, empirically, the precise “theological” messages that such objects communicate to individuals. If the latter were possible (and very few psychologists are, alas, interested in attempting it) then a Nobel Prize in Religious Aesthetics would probably be there for the taking! In any case, history, too, is no longer on our side. We cannot, can we, seriously seek to reinhabit Abbot Suger’s world? For one thing, the cultural revolution known as the Reformation, when the common religious foundations of Western Europe, and its accompanying visual culture, were seriously fractured, essentially reactivated the central problematic of “how to define Christian art.” As a consequence, the traditional recognition, if not employment, of “sacred art” as art for corporate worship and religious inspiration was undermined by a pluralism of Christian attitudes towards image, incarnation, and ritual.
A second, more contemporary constraint on recreating the Suger scenario is, of course, that it may now be far more difficult for individuals to identify, let alone, embrace, Christian wisdom, knowledge, and experience through art in a so-called post-modern culture where religious consciousness—indeed all consciousness—is so fractured and diffuse. One result of this is the contemporary paradox of a highly visual culture in which Christian imagery has itself become increasingly invisible. Such a paradox may, of course, be a symptom of post-modernity itself, one of whose features is the so-called “crisis in representation” whereby we no longer view artistic form as a repository of perceptual customs and experiences shared by the artists and ourselves. This is not only becuase of the current critical tendency—which has also made its impact on theology—to view the form and content of a work of art as essentially structured by its readers and perceivers. It is also because today, as James Alfred Martin has put it, “all the frameworks of narrative description employed in the history and interpretation of both art and religion as well as all previous identifications of beauty and holiness as categories of interpretation . . . are dissolved in the acids of modernity.”7 Although one may perhaps regard the post-modern interpretation of contemporary culture as somewhat oversold and under-critiqued, it nonetheless exposes a culture which may be witnessing what Arthur Danto, following Hegel, has called “the philosophical disenfranchisement of art” and in which, therefore, “religious art has no presence and no function.”8
A third constraint is perhaps the process of secularization itself. Here, without getting into the usual protracted and complex academic debates about its definition, or the evidence for so-called “European exceptionalism” or the precise dynamics of “believing and belonging,” secularization clearly has three serious, identifiable consequences for Christian art today. One is the declining power and efficacy of traditional Christian symbolism. At its most mundane the process involves the willful appropriation of sacred symbols by secular institutions, not least the mass media, and their apparent de-sacralization to serve material rather than spiritual ends. One example might be how, for many young people, the singer Madonna enjoys iconic parity with the Madonna. The second consequence, and at a rather deeper level, is a reduction in the spiritual voltage of traditional Christian sacred symbolism to the extent that such symbols can no longer function to bind people to each other within a common relatedness to God through Christ. Put differently, are such symbols still able to stir the imagination and to convey wisdom, vision, and prophecy in our own and succeeding centuries—or must they be abandoned in favor of others? And, if not abandoned, must they be drastically reconceived and reformulated in order that they may become a real power within post-Christian society, serving to relate human experience to ultimate mystery? Or is it already too late, as Christian iconography is currently experienced by the majority as a dead language—like Sanskrit or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—rather than as part of a living faith?
The fourth consequence of secularization for Christian art is even more profound, although its roots go far further back. It springs from a—perhaps the—theological problem that has perennially challenged Christian art: the expression of an invisible reality by the visible. How, in stone and on walls and on wood, can we articulate Christian wisdom? This question has, of course, been given serious contemporary resonance by George Steiner in Real Presences. There, he argues that “where God’s presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where His presence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, [and] certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable . . . we must [read] as if.”9 For Steiner, therefore, we must look upon the world as if created, and respond to it as if to the “real presence” of the transcendental. But in a secular, post-modern society, to what extent can this “as if” substitute for faith, and for how long can the “as if” be sustained when the honest certainty of God’s existence has departed from so many of us?
All I have said so far is intended to offset some of the more facile twenty-first century answers to what one might call the “wisdom” dimension to Ruskin’s mid-nineteenth-century question—“How far is Fine Art conducive to the religious life?” It also leads to a second question. What means, what mechanisms, are currently available to maximize the aesthetic expression of that wisdom? In what sort of shape is the available delivery system? In some ways the signs are not very propitious. On this side of the Atlantic at least, it is evident that in a predominantly post-Christian culture like our own any fully functional, didactic relationship between religion and the visual arts remains at best problematic. We know that, with a few honorable exceptions, today’s artists are unlikely to be keyed into religious culture because there is no identifiable religious culture for them to be keyed into. To be more precise, in a largely dechristianized Western world, sacred wisdom remains very difficult to deliver visually, especially when the essential exchange between artist and audience may no longer operate in the religious sphere. Instead both find themselves in a world where, as Andrée Hayum puts it, “established religion has lost its place as a dynamic and broadly-based tradition, and liturgical practice has been tamed and even trivialized.”10 In any case a chronic dissonance may now persist, at many levels, between religious institutions and religious art. It is not simply that the organic relationship of art to Church has been lost, and perhaps can never again be fully recovered. Within Protestantism, of course, such a relationship has rarely been properly established. Here the primacy of word over image has been almost hegemonic. As the late John Tinsley, Bishop of Bristol, once commented, “Protestants have surrendered with amazing ease to the notion that the image is a lower form of truth than the concept.” One can, he says, “detect a secret preference for language, words, speech, writing, as the appropriate and only appropriate way of expressing theological truths and communicating the Gospel.”11
Within European Catholicism the story is slightly different. Here we find evidence of works of art commissioned by the Church, but ultimately rejected by it as somehow lacking in some important respect from the point of view of faith. Assy in Eastern France is perhaps the best known and most revealing case. There, in 1950, a church was constructed and dedicated largely through the stimulus of the French Dominican, Père Couturier, who knew the artists personally, and persuaded them to collaborate in a large enterprise of religious painting and sculpture. His idea of commissioning artists who were not primarily concerned with religious art for a project of religious decoration and expression met with great resistance within the French Roman Catholic Church. The main objection was not that those who executed them were atheists or communists (although some were in fact both) or that their perceptions of religious themes were somewhat notional. It was rather that in a deeper sense they were unable, because of their commitment to a modern style of art, to approximate to an idiom of religious art that had arisen under very different conditions and which had its own values and tradition of representation and symbolism. For example, it was objected that the Christ on the Cross, by Germaine Richier, “suggested nothing of redemption or of the spiritual meaning of Christ’s suffering on the Cross.”12 In a similar vein, it was said that the work of Georges Rouault “was itself so ugly that it would evoke in the pious observer a disturbing sense of the body and its deformation rather than transmit a spiritual message.”13 It is worth noting that Rouault, almost the one painter of the twentieth century who was a deeply religious man and who almost alone among the advanced painters of his time continuously represented religious themes—especially from the life of Christ—received no recognition from his own Church, apart from a few isolated individuals. In contrast, Cézanne, who in the last fifteen years of his life was a faithful churchgoer, never undertook a religious theme. Hence, on the one hand, we observe art with a religious content produced by men who were not identified with religious institutions while, on the other hand, we have the indifference of such institutions to members of their own faith who, in a sincere way, undertook to produce works of religious art.
The aethetic consequences of this institutional response—both Protestant and Catholic—are both widespread and unfortunately still with us. Gilbert Cope’s harsh judgment—delivered in a 1964 BBC Radio talk—that “too much ecclesiastical (to call it sacred would be an exaggeration) art is escapist, imitative and bloodless”14 has nearly equal resonance today. Such art remains predominantly characterized by what Paul Tillich so caustically called “sentimental, beautifying naturalism” where “the feeble drawing, the poverty of vision, the petty historicity of our church-sponsored art is not simply unendurable, but incredible . . . it calls for iconoclasm.”15 It will not suffer it, however. For one thing we continue to live at a time when the normative forms and images of the Judeo-Christian tradition remain primarily accessible to many at the level of nostalgia, or as Volkskitsch, rather than as a living presence in their lives. For another, and especially, if not exclusively within the Roman Catholic tradition, religious art still seems to carry its own crude inner logic. Such art must be useful to the Church and art useful to the Church must be unambiguously catechetical. A third reason, common to all denominations, is more overtly sociological. It is that churches are in one sense social institutions, and many artists tend to employ an idiom that is not socially acceptable. For clergy and laity alike the work of contemporary artists can sometimes shock in relation to its sincerity. Hence the Churches can find themselves asking to what extent would the adoption of these new styles of art, created in contexts so foreign to the interests and mode of thinking of our church, be a kind of counter-infection, a virus, introducing into religious thinking and feeling secular conceptions that could easily be perceived as incompatible with basic religious beliefs? It has not always been so. In art-historical terms new styles of art were often if not always produced by artists who developed those styles in tasks for the Church. Gothic architecture arose in the course of constructing churches. Similarly, it was not in secular art but in religious art (i.e., new programs of church decoration) that Romanesque sculpture arose, and the same may be said of the art of stained glass. But in our own time, in contrast, most of the important developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture seem to have taken place outside the religious sphere. This remains both a challenge and a problem for “religious” art.
One final observation must be added to this unduly pessimistic appraisal of the role of the visual arts in communicating Christian wisdom to a post-modern culture. It is simply that its fortunes and functions may now turn increasingly on two cultural mutations that are essentially beyond the influence of Christian institutions themselves. The first might be called the de-sacralization of religious art itself. Here one might assign a critical role in the process to the modern museum. As Andrée Hayum, taking her cue from Walter Benjamin, has written, “as the movable picture entered the museum, earlier examples—religious art in particular—were stripped of their former affective power . . . and aesthetic veneration could supplant religious devotion.”16 Her argument is suggestive, if not wholly persuasive, because it is difficult to see precisely why such paintings should be stripped of their “religious” subtexts simply because they are no longer in a formally devotional setting. In any case such debate about the de-sacralization (or secularization) of religious art-objects in museum settings is itself part of a stronger and more pervasive cultural trend. It is the process whereby, to paraphrase André Malraux’s well-known aphorism, today’s churches have become our museums and our museums have become our churches. The process is not itself a by-product of modernity. In 1824, to go no further back, William Hazlitt could write of London’s newly opened National Gallery that “a visit to this sanctuary, this holy of holies, is like going on a pilgrimage—it is an act of devotion performed at the shrine of art,”17 while in 1954 Kenneth Clark, its former director, could describe the museum as “a place for spiritual transformation and restoration.”18 There remains much more to be explored about this process. Suffice to say that one critical adjunct to any contemporary debate about visual art and Christian wisdom is to ask whether religious experience, sentiment and activity are now being relocated—exponentially—within museum (and maybe “heritage”) culture, or whether the latter have already effectively displaced the former? Put slightly differently, is it likely that our museums, whether they display religious art or not, now also function as what W. B. Yeats once called “artifices of eternity”19 through which the numinous is disclosed, but without the ritual processes that are so often involved? In some cases such experiences may be transferable back into localized church contexts. But more often one suspects not.
The other cultural shift is perhaps even more critical for the role of the visual arts in Christian communication in general, and for the communication of Christian wisdom in particular. It is, at its broadest, no less than an increasing transition from a religious to an aesthetic validation of experience. More specifically, it is clear that, from about 1750 onwards, art, rather than supporting and articulating church-based theology, often began to separate itself from most religious institutions. “Art,” wrote Goethe in 1804, “has consolidated its status as an independent cult, sometimes more flourishing than the churches themselves and Christian theology.”20 And in 1919, looking back at the same phenomenon, Max Weber (another German intellectual giant) could write, “Art became a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values that exist in their own right . . . taking over the function of this-worldly salvation,” competing directly with religion and “transforming judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste.”21 Through such a process art surely becomes a manifestation, in Tillich’s phrase, of “one form of the latent church.”22It comes to be treated as a source of the prophetic in its own right. Through art we see not only certain connections with our culture and its traditions but also (as Ruskin saw before us) aspects of a prophetic judgment on that culture. As the American cultural historian, Morse Peckham, describes it, “from the late nineteenth century . . . art itself becomes the mythological explanation which subsumed the self. Art itself becomes redemptive.”23
The consequences of this for today’s relationship of the visual arts to Christian wisdom (and vice versa) are already profound. Should we try to re-calibrate, for the twenty-first century, the historical relationship of art to faith—and faith to art—within the Christian tradition, or should we start again “from where we are”? What would be the consequences for clergy and laity, for artists and viewers, and for theological and art education? The answer is probably “both . . . and” rather than “either . . . or.” Two things seem already clear. One is that with the advent of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cultural matrix that has been the foundation of traditional Western Christianity has finally begun to fragment, accompanied by a movement away from religion and towards spirituality. This is surely a major turning point in our definitions of religion, society, and art. The consequences of this for “religious” and indeed “Christian” art are already far-reaching. One is an identifiable movement away from a narrowly and exclusively Christian art towards what Rosemary Crumlin has described as “works which are only implicitly religious in their inspiration, and so without identifiable religious themes or traditional symbols.”24 A mutation, in short, from religion to spirituality, itself a major shift in cultural history. A second consequence is that today’s artists now seem to search increasingly for meaning within themselves rather than from supernatural stories or the rituals of institutional churches. As Diana Apostolos-Cappadona has put it, “modern artists now have the singular opportunity of presencing the spiritual significance of the totality of human experience in their recognition of the foundational necessity of the religious imagination.”25 Unsurprisingly, therefore, many contemporary “religious” artists deliberately side-step any literal depiction of the gospel, not least because their art school training and its prevailing, indeed, dominant, aesthetic is usually too narrow to permit it. It tends to proceed, instead, away from all literary or narrative content and towards the “universal” art of abstraction. Such abstraction, so long as it remains a—even the—dominant cultural mode will continue to present to most religious institutions an art largely without symbols or imagery (and with any ambiguities “de-symbolized” out of it) and therefore without any specific doctrinal allusions whatsoever.
Yet such art is not necessarily antithetical to Christian wisdom. Indeed there isone way in which contemporary abstraction may also carry with it genuinely credal, if not overtly theological, resonance. It is one to which Hans Küng repeatedly draws our attention in his Art and the Question of Meaning. “What,” he asks, “if in the course of modern development the idea of a pre-existing divine order of meaning has been increasingly shattered, and this meaning itself has become more questionable? Can the work of art still be meaningful when the great synthesis of meaning no longer exists?” Küng’s answer is that “in a time of meaninglessness, the work of art can symbolize meaninglessness very precisely in a way that is aesthetically completely meaningful—that is to say inwardly harmonious—and does so to a large extent in modern art.”26 If he is right, then one of the most appropriate role models for today’s “religious” artists (and maybe one to be encouraged further by today’s clergy, art teachers, and theologians) is not necessarily to profess a specifically confessional commitment, nor to try to lift the current aesthetic taboo against specific narrative content. It is rather to profess a self-guided religious imagination which no longer merely reflects existing religious tradition but creates and expresses new spiritual perceptions which we are all invited to share. Such an approach not only offers a daunting and creative challenge to contemporary art and theology alike but also it seems—at least to this non-theologian—to add a potentially transformative ingredient to our own existing stock of “Christian wisdom” itself.
NOTES
1. Abbot Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. E. Panofsky, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 51.
2. Victor Lucien Tapié, The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe, trans. A. Ross Williamson (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), 65.
3. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, v. III (London: George Allen, 1898), 61.
4. Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of God (London: Mowbray, 1993), 101.
5. Ibid., 132.
6. Wilson Yates, “Reflections on the Arts and Theological Disciplines,” in ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, 4/3 (Summer 1992), 2.
7. James A. Martin, Beauty and Holiness (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 192.
8. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 184, 187.
9. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber, 1989), 229-231.
10. Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision (Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 7-8.
11. John Tinsley, “Art and the Church: A Theologian’s Viewpoint,” in P. Burman and K. Nugent, eds., Prophecy and Vision (Bristol: Committee for Prophecy and Vision, 1982).
12. William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 55. See also Charles Pickstone, “Germaine Richier, Secular Theologian of Sacred Space,” in Theology CX.853(January/February 2007), 31-47.
13. Rubin, Sacred Art, 95.
14. “The ‘Sacred’ in Contemporary Religious Art,” The Listener (17 November 1964), 216.
15. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 74.
16. Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 47.
17. William Hazlitt, Sketches of Principal Picture-Galleries in England (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), 44.
18. Kenneth Clark, Moments of Vision—the Romanes Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 6.
19. W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1955), 218.
20. J. W. von Goethe, in Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion, 2009), 288.
21. Max Weber, From Max Weber, trans. and ed. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1946), 342.
22. Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. John and Jane Dillenberger (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 207.
23. Morse Peckham, Romanticism and Behavior: Collected Essays, II (Durham, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 94-95.
24. Rosemary Crumlin, ed., Beyond Belief: Modern Art and Religious Imagination(Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 9.
25. Ibid., 22.
26. Hans Küng, Art and the Question of Meaning (London: SCM Press, 1981), 30-31.
Graham Howes is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and author of The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief. He is a trustee of ACE (Art and Christianity Enquiry). This article was originally published under the same title in Theology, 114.3; 189-197. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
Where and how, in our own day, do we relate the visual arts to Christian Wisdom, and Christian Wisdom to the visual arts? It is, of course, not exactly a new question. It was, for example, integral to Byzantine aesthetics—not least at the time of the Iconoclastic controversy—and central to the thinking behind French Gothic (one recalls how Abbot Suger described his St. Denis as “where God is worshipped most highly in his attributes of light, measure, and number.”1It also powered Baroque theatricality (what Bernini called “hearing through the eyes”),2 and strongly motivated some, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites. Indeed it was their champion, John Ruskin, who, in the third volume of his Modern Painters (1856) put the question most trenchantly of all. “How far,” he asked his readers, “has Fine Art in all or any ages of the world, been conducive to the religious life?”3 His readers then would, no doubt, have still—just—have been able to supply a positive answer.
But today it is surely far more difficult, especially if we are Christians, to see with any clarity or certainty, where we stand in relation to Ruskin’s leading question.
Yet even today one can still encounter strong trace elements of the ideological assumptions that have traditionally informed “Christian” art. Underpinning these are usually three presumed commonplaces. One, to quote from Richard Harries, is that “all works of art, whatever their context, have a spiritual dimension.”4The second, from the same source, is that “at the very least art, in all its forms, keeps the possibilities of faith alive.”5 The third, as Wilson Yates has framed it, is that “the visual arts and the Christian message are intrinsically related and mutually dependent upon one another in the midst of their unique autonomy and distinctiveness.”6
In some ways, however, this matrix of assumptions worries me. Indeed, as we move into the twenty-first century, we may have to ask ourselves, honestly and self-critically, how convincing are the underlying premises today? And here some real difficulties present themselves. One is that it is far easier to attribute a broadly theological import to art objects than to establish, empirically, the precise “theological” messages that such objects communicate to individuals. If the latter were possible (and very few psychologists are, alas, interested in attempting it) then a Nobel Prize in Religious Aesthetics would probably be there for the taking! In any case, history, too, is no longer on our side. We cannot, can we, seriously seek to reinhabit Abbot Suger’s world? For one thing, the cultural revolution known as the Reformation, when the common religious foundations of Western Europe, and its accompanying visual culture, were seriously fractured, essentially reactivated the central problematic of “how to define Christian art.” As a consequence, the traditional recognition, if not employment, of “sacred art” as art for corporate worship and religious inspiration was undermined by a pluralism of Christian attitudes towards image, incarnation, and ritual.
A second, more contemporary constraint on recreating the Suger scenario is, of course, that it may now be far more difficult for individuals to identify, let alone, embrace, Christian wisdom, knowledge, and experience through art in a so-called post-modern culture where religious consciousness—indeed all consciousness—is so fractured and diffuse. One result of this is the contemporary paradox of a highly visual culture in which Christian imagery has itself become increasingly invisible. Such a paradox may, of course, be a symptom of post-modernity itself, one of whose features is the so-called “crisis in representation” whereby we no longer view artistic form as a repository of perceptual customs and experiences shared by the artists and ourselves. This is not only becuase of the current critical tendency—which has also made its impact on theology—to view the form and content of a work of art as essentially structured by its readers and perceivers. It is also because today, as James Alfred Martin has put it, “all the frameworks of narrative description employed in the history and interpretation of both art and religion as well as all previous identifications of beauty and holiness as categories of interpretation . . . are dissolved in the acids of modernity.”7 Although one may perhaps regard the post-modern interpretation of contemporary culture as somewhat oversold and under-critiqued, it nonetheless exposes a culture which may be witnessing what Arthur Danto, following Hegel, has called “the philosophical disenfranchisement of art” and in which, therefore, “religious art has no presence and no function.”8
A third constraint is perhaps the process of secularization itself. Here, without getting into the usual protracted and complex academic debates about its definition, or the evidence for so-called “European exceptionalism” or the precise dynamics of “believing and belonging,” secularization clearly has three serious, identifiable consequences for Christian art today. One is the declining power and efficacy of traditional Christian symbolism. At its most mundane the process involves the willful appropriation of sacred symbols by secular institutions, not least the mass media, and their apparent de-sacralization to serve material rather than spiritual ends. One example might be how, for many young people, the singer Madonna enjoys iconic parity with the Madonna. The second consequence, and at a rather deeper level, is a reduction in the spiritual voltage of traditional Christian sacred symbolism to the extent that such symbols can no longer function to bind people to each other within a common relatedness to God through Christ. Put differently, are such symbols still able to stir the imagination and to convey wisdom, vision, and prophecy in our own and succeeding centuries—or must they be abandoned in favor of others? And, if not abandoned, must they be drastically reconceived and reformulated in order that they may become a real power within post-Christian society, serving to relate human experience to ultimate mystery? Or is it already too late, as Christian iconography is currently experienced by the majority as a dead language—like Sanskrit or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—rather than as part of a living faith?
The fourth consequence of secularization for Christian art is even more profound, although its roots go far further back. It springs from a—perhaps the—theological problem that has perennially challenged Christian art: the expression of an invisible reality by the visible. How, in stone and on walls and on wood, can we articulate Christian wisdom? This question has, of course, been given serious contemporary resonance by George Steiner in Real Presences. There, he argues that “where God’s presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where His presence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, [and] certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable . . . we must [read] as if.”9 For Steiner, therefore, we must look upon the world as if created, and respond to it as if to the “real presence” of the transcendental. But in a secular, post-modern society, to what extent can this “as if” substitute for faith, and for how long can the “as if” be sustained when the honest certainty of God’s existence has departed from so many of us?
All I have said so far is intended to offset some of the more facile twenty-first century answers to what one might call the “wisdom” dimension to Ruskin’s mid-nineteenth-century question—“How far is Fine Art conducive to the religious life?” It also leads to a second question. What means, what mechanisms, are currently available to maximize the aesthetic expression of that wisdom? In what sort of shape is the available delivery system? In some ways the signs are not very propitious. On this side of the Atlantic at least, it is evident that in a predominantly post-Christian culture like our own any fully functional, didactic relationship between religion and the visual arts remains at best problematic. We know that, with a few honorable exceptions, today’s artists are unlikely to be keyed into religious culture because there is no identifiable religious culture for them to be keyed into. To be more precise, in a largely dechristianized Western world, sacred wisdom remains very difficult to deliver visually, especially when the essential exchange between artist and audience may no longer operate in the religious sphere. Instead both find themselves in a world where, as Andrée Hayum puts it, “established religion has lost its place as a dynamic and broadly-based tradition, and liturgical practice has been tamed and even trivialized.”10 In any case a chronic dissonance may now persist, at many levels, between religious institutions and religious art. It is not simply that the organic relationship of art to Church has been lost, and perhaps can never again be fully recovered. Within Protestantism, of course, such a relationship has rarely been properly established. Here the primacy of word over image has been almost hegemonic. As the late John Tinsley, Bishop of Bristol, once commented, “Protestants have surrendered with amazing ease to the notion that the image is a lower form of truth than the concept.” One can, he says, “detect a secret preference for language, words, speech, writing, as the appropriate and only appropriate way of expressing theological truths and communicating the Gospel.”11
Within European Catholicism the story is slightly different. Here we find evidence of works of art commissioned by the Church, but ultimately rejected by it as somehow lacking in some important respect from the point of view of faith. Assy in Eastern France is perhaps the best known and most revealing case. There, in 1950, a church was constructed and dedicated largely through the stimulus of the French Dominican, Père Couturier, who knew the artists personally, and persuaded them to collaborate in a large enterprise of religious painting and sculpture. His idea of commissioning artists who were not primarily concerned with religious art for a project of religious decoration and expression met with great resistance within the French Roman Catholic Church. The main objection was not that those who executed them were atheists or communists (although some were in fact both) or that their perceptions of religious themes were somewhat notional. It was rather that in a deeper sense they were unable, because of their commitment to a modern style of art, to approximate to an idiom of religious art that had arisen under very different conditions and which had its own values and tradition of representation and symbolism. For example, it was objected that the Christ on the Cross, by Germaine Richier, “suggested nothing of redemption or of the spiritual meaning of Christ’s suffering on the Cross.”12 In a similar vein, it was said that the work of Georges Rouault “was itself so ugly that it would evoke in the pious observer a disturbing sense of the body and its deformation rather than transmit a spiritual message.”13 It is worth noting that Rouault, almost the one painter of the twentieth century who was a deeply religious man and who almost alone among the advanced painters of his time continuously represented religious themes—especially from the life of Christ—received no recognition from his own Church, apart from a few isolated individuals. In contrast, Cézanne, who in the last fifteen years of his life was a faithful churchgoer, never undertook a religious theme. Hence, on the one hand, we observe art with a religious content produced by men who were not identified with religious institutions while, on the other hand, we have the indifference of such institutions to members of their own faith who, in a sincere way, undertook to produce works of religious art.
The aethetic consequences of this institutional response—both Protestant and Catholic—are both widespread and unfortunately still with us. Gilbert Cope’s harsh judgment—delivered in a 1964 BBC Radio talk—that “too much ecclesiastical (to call it sacred would be an exaggeration) art is escapist, imitative and bloodless”14 has nearly equal resonance today. Such art remains predominantly characterized by what Paul Tillich so caustically called “sentimental, beautifying naturalism” where “the feeble drawing, the poverty of vision, the petty historicity of our church-sponsored art is not simply unendurable, but incredible . . . it calls for iconoclasm.”15 It will not suffer it, however. For one thing we continue to live at a time when the normative forms and images of the Judeo-Christian tradition remain primarily accessible to many at the level of nostalgia, or as Volkskitsch, rather than as a living presence in their lives. For another, and especially, if not exclusively within the Roman Catholic tradition, religious art still seems to carry its own crude inner logic. Such art must be useful to the Church and art useful to the Church must be unambiguously catechetical. A third reason, common to all denominations, is more overtly sociological. It is that churches are in one sense social institutions, and many artists tend to employ an idiom that is not socially acceptable. For clergy and laity alike the work of contemporary artists can sometimes shock in relation to its sincerity. Hence the Churches can find themselves asking to what extent would the adoption of these new styles of art, created in contexts so foreign to the interests and mode of thinking of our church, be a kind of counter-infection, a virus, introducing into religious thinking and feeling secular conceptions that could easily be perceived as incompatible with basic religious beliefs? It has not always been so. In art-historical terms new styles of art were often if not always produced by artists who developed those styles in tasks for the Church. Gothic architecture arose in the course of constructing churches. Similarly, it was not in secular art but in religious art (i.e., new programs of church decoration) that Romanesque sculpture arose, and the same may be said of the art of stained glass. But in our own time, in contrast, most of the important developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture seem to have taken place outside the religious sphere. This remains both a challenge and a problem for “religious” art.
One final observation must be added to this unduly pessimistic appraisal of the role of the visual arts in communicating Christian wisdom to a post-modern culture. It is simply that its fortunes and functions may now turn increasingly on two cultural mutations that are essentially beyond the influence of Christian institutions themselves. The first might be called the de-sacralization of religious art itself. Here one might assign a critical role in the process to the modern museum. As Andrée Hayum, taking her cue from Walter Benjamin, has written, “as the movable picture entered the museum, earlier examples—religious art in particular—were stripped of their former affective power . . . and aesthetic veneration could supplant religious devotion.”16 Her argument is suggestive, if not wholly persuasive, because it is difficult to see precisely why such paintings should be stripped of their “religious” subtexts simply because they are no longer in a formally devotional setting. In any case such debate about the de-sacralization (or secularization) of religious art-objects in museum settings is itself part of a stronger and more pervasive cultural trend. It is the process whereby, to paraphrase André Malraux’s well-known aphorism, today’s churches have become our museums and our museums have become our churches. The process is not itself a by-product of modernity. In 1824, to go no further back, William Hazlitt could write of London’s newly opened National Gallery that “a visit to this sanctuary, this holy of holies, is like going on a pilgrimage—it is an act of devotion performed at the shrine of art,”17 while in 1954 Kenneth Clark, its former director, could describe the museum as “a place for spiritual transformation and restoration.”18 There remains much more to be explored about this process. Suffice to say that one critical adjunct to any contemporary debate about visual art and Christian wisdom is to ask whether religious experience, sentiment and activity are now being relocated—exponentially—within museum (and maybe “heritage”) culture, or whether the latter have already effectively displaced the former? Put slightly differently, is it likely that our museums, whether they display religious art or not, now also function as what W. B. Yeats once called “artifices of eternity”19 through which the numinous is disclosed, but without the ritual processes that are so often involved? In some cases such experiences may be transferable back into localized church contexts. But more often one suspects not.
The other cultural shift is perhaps even more critical for the role of the visual arts in Christian communication in general, and for the communication of Christian wisdom in particular. It is, at its broadest, no less than an increasing transition from a religious to an aesthetic validation of experience. More specifically, it is clear that, from about 1750 onwards, art, rather than supporting and articulating church-based theology, often began to separate itself from most religious institutions. “Art,” wrote Goethe in 1804, “has consolidated its status as an independent cult, sometimes more flourishing than the churches themselves and Christian theology.”20 And in 1919, looking back at the same phenomenon, Max Weber (another German intellectual giant) could write, “Art became a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values that exist in their own right . . . taking over the function of this-worldly salvation,” competing directly with religion and “transforming judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste.”21 Through such a process art surely becomes a manifestation, in Tillich’s phrase, of “one form of the latent church.”22It comes to be treated as a source of the prophetic in its own right. Through art we see not only certain connections with our culture and its traditions but also (as Ruskin saw before us) aspects of a prophetic judgment on that culture. As the American cultural historian, Morse Peckham, describes it, “from the late nineteenth century . . . art itself becomes the mythological explanation which subsumed the self. Art itself becomes redemptive.”23
The consequences of this for today’s relationship of the visual arts to Christian wisdom (and vice versa) are already profound. Should we try to re-calibrate, for the twenty-first century, the historical relationship of art to faith—and faith to art—within the Christian tradition, or should we start again “from where we are”? What would be the consequences for clergy and laity, for artists and viewers, and for theological and art education? The answer is probably “both . . . and” rather than “either . . . or.” Two things seem already clear. One is that with the advent of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cultural matrix that has been the foundation of traditional Western Christianity has finally begun to fragment, accompanied by a movement away from religion and towards spirituality. This is surely a major turning point in our definitions of religion, society, and art. The consequences of this for “religious” and indeed “Christian” art are already far-reaching. One is an identifiable movement away from a narrowly and exclusively Christian art towards what Rosemary Crumlin has described as “works which are only implicitly religious in their inspiration, and so without identifiable religious themes or traditional symbols.”24 A mutation, in short, from religion to spirituality, itself a major shift in cultural history. A second consequence is that today’s artists now seem to search increasingly for meaning within themselves rather than from supernatural stories or the rituals of institutional churches. As Diana Apostolos-Cappadona has put it, “modern artists now have the singular opportunity of presencing the spiritual significance of the totality of human experience in their recognition of the foundational necessity of the religious imagination.”25 Unsurprisingly, therefore, many contemporary “religious” artists deliberately side-step any literal depiction of the gospel, not least because their art school training and its prevailing, indeed, dominant, aesthetic is usually too narrow to permit it. It tends to proceed, instead, away from all literary or narrative content and towards the “universal” art of abstraction. Such abstraction, so long as it remains a—even the—dominant cultural mode will continue to present to most religious institutions an art largely without symbols or imagery (and with any ambiguities “de-symbolized” out of it) and therefore without any specific doctrinal allusions whatsoever.
Yet such art is not necessarily antithetical to Christian wisdom. Indeed there isone way in which contemporary abstraction may also carry with it genuinely credal, if not overtly theological, resonance. It is one to which Hans Küng repeatedly draws our attention in his Art and the Question of Meaning. “What,” he asks, “if in the course of modern development the idea of a pre-existing divine order of meaning has been increasingly shattered, and this meaning itself has become more questionable? Can the work of art still be meaningful when the great synthesis of meaning no longer exists?” Küng’s answer is that “in a time of meaninglessness, the work of art can symbolize meaninglessness very precisely in a way that is aesthetically completely meaningful—that is to say inwardly harmonious—and does so to a large extent in modern art.”26 If he is right, then one of the most appropriate role models for today’s “religious” artists (and maybe one to be encouraged further by today’s clergy, art teachers, and theologians) is not necessarily to profess a specifically confessional commitment, nor to try to lift the current aesthetic taboo against specific narrative content. It is rather to profess a self-guided religious imagination which no longer merely reflects existing religious tradition but creates and expresses new spiritual perceptions which we are all invited to share. Such an approach not only offers a daunting and creative challenge to contemporary art and theology alike but also it seems—at least to this non-theologian—to add a potentially transformative ingredient to our own existing stock of “Christian wisdom” itself.
NOTES
1. Abbot Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. E. Panofsky, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 51.
2. Victor Lucien Tapié, The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe, trans. A. Ross Williamson (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), 65.
3. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, v. III (London: George Allen, 1898), 61.
4. Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of God (London: Mowbray, 1993), 101.
5. Ibid., 132.
6. Wilson Yates, “Reflections on the Arts and Theological Disciplines,” in ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, 4/3 (Summer 1992), 2.
7. James A. Martin, Beauty and Holiness (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 192.
8. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 184, 187.
9. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber, 1989), 229-231.
10. Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision (Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 7-8.
11. John Tinsley, “Art and the Church: A Theologian’s Viewpoint,” in P. Burman and K. Nugent, eds., Prophecy and Vision (Bristol: Committee for Prophecy and Vision, 1982).
12. William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 55. See also Charles Pickstone, “Germaine Richier, Secular Theologian of Sacred Space,” in Theology CX.853(January/February 2007), 31-47.
13. Rubin, Sacred Art, 95.
14. “The ‘Sacred’ in Contemporary Religious Art,” The Listener (17 November 1964), 216.
15. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 74.
16. Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 47.
17. William Hazlitt, Sketches of Principal Picture-Galleries in England (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), 44.
18. Kenneth Clark, Moments of Vision—the Romanes Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 6.
19. W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1955), 218.
20. J. W. von Goethe, in Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion, 2009), 288.
21. Max Weber, From Max Weber, trans. and ed. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1946), 342.
22. Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. John and Jane Dillenberger (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 207.
23. Morse Peckham, Romanticism and Behavior: Collected Essays, II (Durham, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 94-95.
24. Rosemary Crumlin, ed., Beyond Belief: Modern Art and Religious Imagination(Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 9.
25. Ibid., 22.
26. Hans Küng, Art and the Question of Meaning (London: SCM Press, 1981), 30-31.