Orpheus Revisited: Can Arts Ever Lead Theology? And Where?
by Frank Burch Brown
Frank Burch Brown is Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. He is also a teacher, author and musician. Frank holds degrees from Georgetown College and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in Religion and Literature. He is author of many articles and of five books, including Religious Aesthetics, the award-winning title Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (OUP, 2003) and his more recent Inclusive, Yet Discerning. He is also editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts. In this essay, he poses questions that grow out of his own work as a musician and as a scholar of aesthetics. He does so particularly in conversation with the work of David Brown.
This essay is among several the author is dedicating to the memory of Mary Harter Mitchell, whose life was suddenly taken by unsuspected disease three months after he and she wed four years ago.
Orpheus, in ancient mythology, used music and poetry to exercise sacred powers, with consequences sometimes marvelous, sometimes tragic. As depicted in a wide array of stories and images from the sixth century BCE onward, this legendary hero, a son of Apollo and of the muse Calliope, was a singer, poet, religious teacher, and prophet. Orpheus accompanied his songs on a lyre, moving and enchanting all within the reach of his music. Even wild animals listened transfixed, or else moved in rhythmic response. Tragically, when Orpheus married, his bride Eurydice died the same day from a serpent’s bite. Grief-stricken, Orpheus descended to the underworld and with his music managed to move the god of the underworld, Pluto, to tears. Pluto agreed to allow Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living, on the one condition that he not look back at her along the way. Just how long the ascent took, we’re not told. But as the two were about to emerge from the underworld, Orpheus turned to make sure Eurydice was following. She was there. But by looking back, Orpheus lost his wife to death a second time, and forever.
For the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) and many others in antiquity, Orpheus became the epitome of the singer-poet. Christians of the patristic and medieval eras adopted him as a symbol or “type” of Christ, the New Orpheus, whose descent into Hades and whose powers of resurrection would succeed where his pagan predecessor had failed. In later centuries, with the creation of opera, the story was set to music over and over again—most famously by Monteverdi and Gluck. Harkening back to Ovid’s version of the story, where Orpheus and Eurydice are reunited in death, in the Elysian fields, Monteverdi’s revised version of L’Orfeo (1609; originally 1607) culminates in a final apotheosis of Orpheus. Joining his father Apollo in heaven, he will forever behold the sun and the stars and, in their beauty, see the likeness of Eurydice. It is perhaps relevant that, when Monteverdi opted for the happier ending two years after the premier of the opera, his own beloved wife had suddenly died, which was only six months after the first performance of the opera.
It was almost exactly fifty years ago that Nathan A. Scott, Jr., entitled a major collection of essays by various authors of his day The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic. In his introduction, Scott refers not only to a search for a Christian “poetic,” but also to a search for a Christian “aesthetic” that would be “consistently elaborated on the premises of an Incarnational theology.”1 And in the separate essay that Scott contributes to that same collection, he can be found questioning the tendency of literary critics and theorists in his time to treat even literary art as an artifact that is so self-contained in its means and ends as to have no intrinsic relation to what Scott terms “the circumambient world,” thereby depriving art of any “extramural affiliation,” and theorizing as though writers of poetry and fiction are not engaged in any real thought or reflection, so that even the work of poetic art can appear to mean nothing beyond itself.2 “A poem should not mean / But be.” (Archibald MacCleish, in the poem—ironically—“Ars Poetica.”)
Scott goes on to call for a criticism that, while aware of what is distinctive about art, dares to engage in metaphysical and theological valuation, and to discern a work’s embodiment or disclosure of what the theologian Paul Tillich terms “ultimate concern.”3 One is not surprised when Scott invokes the name of Tillich. But it is puzzling that neither in his introduction to The New Orpheus nor in this later chapter does Scott make any mention of Orpheus, new or old, as far as I can tell.
In proposing to re-visit Orpheus, it seems to me it would be hard to think of a more fitting symbol of the transformative, and indeed thoughtful, powers of art—or of certain kinds of art, at least. Both the story and the music of Orpheus have to do with the realms of the living and the dead, with love and mystery, with tragedy and transgression, and, in later centuries, with the way in which artistry can both shape and be reshaped by Christian tradition and theology.
Those of us engaged in theology and the arts have thought a great deal about such things, and a few are assembled here for a session devoted to the theme. Maeve Heaney has, in fact, recently published a whole book on Music as Theology.4 Russell Re Manning has begun to write on musical theology with reference to Tillich, and has published a revealing, book-length study of Tillich’s theology of culture and art.5 Larry Bouchard, in books and articles, has given special attention to ethical and tragic dimensions of story and drama, ancient and modern, and to their theological and cultural implications.6 Our respondent David Brown—who exemplifies in part the continuing Anglican emphasis on Incarnational theology—has at times interpreted art and music in terms of sacrament.7 In a whole series of theological studies, moreover, Prof. Brown has given serious and extensive attention to the arts as fully engaged in the shaping and reshaping of Christian tradition, and as potentially integral to Christian discipleship.8 For my part, I can’t help noticing that I’ve followed at least indirectly my late mentor Nathan Scott’s wish so many years ago for more work in theological and religious aesthetics, although I’ve not kept strictly to the Christian tradition in doing so.9
Despite much labor, however, it can’t really be said that the promise and ambition of The New Orpheus has been entirely fulfilled. I’m thinking of the promise 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.
One way of getting at this point is to ask a deceptively simple-sounding pair of questions: Can arts ever lead theology? And where? Notice that the implied answer to the first question is “yes,” which deserves some explanation. Exactly that possibility of a leading role of art in relation to theology is something that traditionally raises many questions.
Where I do think there’s long been agreement is in according a limited and subordinate kind of leading role to the arts. Arts are seen as leading not in the sense of going ahead of theology and showing the way, but rather in the sense of preparing the ground. In the first place, almost from the very beginnings of Christianity, it has been recognized that images and music, for example, are especially efficacious with those unable to read, or lacking in education, and that music and visual art and poetry can all serve as pleasing and powerful aids to memory. But the assumption is that the more mature one is, in mind and faith, the less dependent one will be on art, which tends to rely on senses and emotion and pleasurable forms. Today, a richer appreciation of the uniqueness of art, especially music, can be found in Jeremy Begbie’s theology of music. There, he interprets the phenomenon of music, and especially its ways of existing and creating in time, as theologically suggestive. But Begbie, although at one time fond of the phrase “theology through the arts,” is leery of claiming normative status and revelatory capacity to human artistry.
Second, as Christian thinkers have long agreed, it is a good thing, up to a point, that things that are artistic can touch the heart. That means arts can move the will in ways formal theology and even preaching cannot always do. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles and John Wesley, and the makers of modern gospel music all concur that musical art in particular, by moving the emotions, can affect the will, attune the soul, and open one up to the movements of the Holy Spirit. Here art is allied with rhetoric, the power of persuasion. This, then, is another way one can safely say theology is assisted and sometimes led by art, broadly speaking: theology’s aims depend in part on artifacts or creative processes that are beautiful, expressive, or imaginative, and appreciable for aesthetic reasons, among others. Today, students of material culture and lived religion often pay attention to visual culture for some of those very reasons, which cross over distinctions between elite and popular, for instance.
Thus we can say that art can lead theology by being a means to education and a motivation toward devotion, by offering fertile fields for nurturing theological concepts, and as a kind of felt or effective theology “on the ground,” so to speak. But to what extent does art actually get into theology as faith seeking understanding in a more formal and reflective way? Or does it?
One way to answer is to say that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” That’s, of course, the well-known phrase from Paul Ricoeur, which he, in turn, had drawn from Kant, Jaspers, and others. And Ricoeur did not mean to suggest, as thinkers such as Hegel might, that, once art delivers its goods to the more philosophical kind of theology, its work is done. For Ricoeur, symbol and metaphor are not exhaustible in that way. Yet it seems to me one could easily exaggerate the role of art as a delivery system of truth or insight for theology, as something either to encounter as event and proclamation or to accept as manifestation. There are literally countless ways in which experience, both raw and intense, or perhaps subtle and deep, can enter into language and more abstract thought. And the more artistic forms of that (we might as well admit) are not exactly pervasive and well accounted for in the works of folks we call theologians.
Thomas Aquinas lived in the great age of cathedrals and Gothic art, but included scarcely a reference to that artistry in all his voluminous works. While Thomas does formulate a theory of beauty, he does not offer it as a theory of art. And that is true for most of the thinkers now being cited and retrieved in many discussions of theological aesthetics. Beauty does not equal art in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy and theology. Nor should it necessarily in ours, though much art is beautiful. For all his massive and profound works in theological aesthetics and in theo-drama, Hans Urs von Balthasar has relatively little to say about the arts themselves. And that’s not least because it seems he seldom thinks of human art as intimately involved in divine revelation or the drama of redemption, which are his primary concern. Karl Barth makes space for Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and, even more so for Mozart, whose music, he declares, got there ahead of the theologians when it came to responding to darkness and suffering without being overcome by it. But Barth’s devotion to Mozart is not something he expands, laudable as it is. As for the Eastern forms of Catholicism, theological defenses of icons are likewise selective, at least as originally formulated. Traditionally, icons as windows onto eternity and as quasi-sacramental in character neither exemplify art in the usual sense nor stand for what other kinds of art can aspire to. And that’s not to deny the quite different view of the matter on the part of the late British composer John Tavener, who composed what he calls choral icons. Nor does it deny legitimacy to the theology of the Roman Catholic theologian Aidan Nichols, whose very theology of art unites icon and Incarnation in ways not sanctioned formally in Eastern Orthodoxy.10
Again, turning to the Protestant side, Jonathan Edwards’s remarkably central treatment of beauty focuses above all on primary beauty, which is moral and spiritual beauty, and its analogues in experience. Edwards pays scant attention to human art. Edward Farley’s recent and very fine book on theological aesthetics, indebted as it is to Edwards, likewise says almost nothing about art.11 Even Schleiermacher, so influential on modern theology of culture, feels much freer to talk about parallels between artistic experience and religious experience than to show how some artistic experience actually is religious in a special way. The closest Schleiermacher comes to that is in pondering music in his very brief Christmas Eve Dialogue.12 And if we come back to a Catholic context in recent times, it can take a while to recognize that, when David Tracy holds up the idea of the classic, including the artistic classic, as a way of understanding a major approach to doing theology, he seldom treats classic works of art themselves as religious classics. Instead, Tracy says that the combination of religion and art at the level of the classic is rather rare, given the different aims of art.13
I don’t mean to complain or criticize, especially given my own indebtedness to the theologians I’ve named. I mean to explain why Orpheus may need to be re-visited in a new way. And I want to make it plain that, in my judgment, it is mostly in recent years, and in a different kind of theological aesthetics, that art has begun showing up more consistently in theological works as potentially not only revelatory in ways not interchangeable with others, but also as genuinely theological in modes that aren’t merely preparatory or illustrational. It would be embarrassing and awkward, and in fact impossible, to try to list all those involved in this shift, because I would inevitably commit many sins of omission. For some documentation of the change, I commend Gesa Thiessen’s still-recent anthology called Theological Aesthetics: A Reader.14 And, if I may be so bold, I also suggest consulting a book I’ve edited: The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts.15
Among theologians active in the academy today, I would suggest that David Brown exemplifies, in particular, a change that calls for fuller exploration and manifestation in theology and the arts more widely. In numerous theological works he’s published over the past decade and a half, art is no longer treated as a junior partner to theology, nor as simply a preparation for theology, nor as a rung rather low on a ladder ascending toward spiritual maturity. Nor is art regarded mainly as a sign of the times or as a symptom mostly of the messes human beings find themselves in, nor even as providing questions from culture that the theologian can answer simply on the basis of revelation—as though art weren’t part of that, too, in some sense. In David Brown’s work, art is not valued only as it is subservient to theology, as it is in John Henry Newman’s ideas of education and in so much that had gone before. Art is indeed honored as adding to human flourishing and as part of divine blessing and a cause for thanksgiving, as Nick Wolterstorff and Jeremy Begbie have been emphasizing, along with others indebted to modern Calvinist theology. And, in Brown’s theology, as in their work, art is not treated as simply one kind of thing, nor idealized as something necessarily and fundamentally religious, wherever it is found.
Yet Brown, in ways I’ve hinted at already, goes farther, and in ways that would probably cause many of my Catholic colleagues to squirm, and that, if misconstrued, might cause some of the rest of us to be fired. Brown argues that artists, styles, and aesthetic works can contribute to an ongoing process of continually revised and revisable Christian tradition. Some kinds and themes of art deepen and transform the Christian sense of the very meaning of Incarnation, for example. And that’s even true in holidays such as Christmas, with much that is so commercial and seemingly foreign to the spirit of Christmas. Brown openly argues that it is simply not true that the Bible always knows best. Or that the church does either, at any given time. And while works of art must be approached with critical awareness, and not idealized and Romanticized, they can and do participate in an ongoing process of revelation.
It is not that art and artists are just their own norm, their own law. Brown does not advocate complete autonomy for the arts. In the last portion of Discipleship and Imagination, Brown describes norms. But those norms aren’t just on one side or another of the relationship between theology and art. They have to do with revelatory truth, with historical criteria, empirical criteria, conceptual and moral criteria, with Christological and Ecclesial criteria, with the degree of comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of imaginative engagement. Some of this is easier to see in relation to ostensibly sacred art than in nominally secular art. In his earlier book Tradition and Imagination, Brown mostly considers art that is identifiably Christian and even biblically based. But he argues even there that some art in the Christian tradition creates a new awareness of possible meanings, and of new meanings and truths the theologian can affirm, in relation to scripture. We might think of Rembrandt’s famous painting in the Hermitage, The Return of the Prodigal. Or, as Schleiermacher pointed out, one could note that some Christians never hear certain passages of scripture the same way again after especially inspired performances of Handel’s Messiah—which by the way was not originally meant to be church music. And which also, by the way, doesn’t end with the Hallelujah chorus.
Not all of this line of thought would go over well with more orthodox and evangelical forms of Christianity. Brown is well aware of that. Jeremy Begbie, for one, has already offered a substantial critique in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, edited by Russell Re Manning.16 As something of a pluralist who probably spends more time than I should in building bridges, and in advocating for aesthetics and theologies that can be both more inclusive and more discerning, I’m not urging everyone to take the same leap. Or if you do, don’t forget your theological parachute.
But I’ve promised myself and my colleagues I would start declaring myself more explicitly on these matters. Accordingly, in the name of reintroducing Orpheus, both new and old, I underscore several things I want to emphasize, along with Brown, and themes I’d apparently push even farther than he.
First, recalling that Orpheus had multiple uses for his music and poetry, I think it’s time, at last, to resist making declarations that all art is religious—while recognizing such utterances have had a point and may still, at times, have a place. To say that all art is religious sounds too similar to saying that all philosophy is religious. Or to saying that all attempts to live and think morally are religious. There’s a deep truth in there somewhere.17 From a certain perspective, all of life is religious, after all. And there is a long theological tradition of affirming that ultimately, in God, truth and beauty and goodness are fully united. But that’s not the way it is on earth. And that kind of claim regarding the ultimately religious or inevitably faith-filled character of all art violates the right of secular art to have its own integrity. Or else, to the contrary, it is often accompanied by the feeling that artists, if true to themselves and their vocation, would never have reason to listen and respond to the more conceptually reflective forms of faith.
Yet there is important truth embedded in the misleading claim that all art is religious. And one such truth is that even art created for rather narrowly aesthetic purposes can sometimes resonate spiritually, as part of a larger context, and that much art we call secular is of remarkable religious import, at least potentially. By the same token, much art labeled religious rarely functions that way, or does so only conventionally. Tillich saw that, and we should not forget it.
But I want to return to what is actually newer: a serious consideration of David Brown’s crucial acknowledgment that art typically deals with truth and experience in ways that cannot be translated entirely into the kinds of conceptual reasoning processes characteristic of theology’s endeavors to understand the realities of faith. And yet neither is visual art or poetry or story-telling simply a world to itself. That rules out some ways of doing narrative theology, for example, which treat story as immune to conceptual critique, no matter how sensitively attuned. There are many narratives that challenge other narratives, in the end, and we’ve already acknowledged that art can respond to thought; so there’s no reason why narratives, likewise, could not be subjected to thoughtful critique.
Brown does not belong, therefore, in the company of philosophers and theologians for whom, when the artistic symbol gives rise to thought and theology, the process is done once and for all. He acknowledges that, to the extent that the symbol gives rise to thought, something vital is inevitably left behind at the symbolic level. The poetic cannot fully be paraphrased. To be sure, that can lead to the sense, which the poet and theorist Christian Wiman expresses, for example, that the real religious action takes place in the poetry, not in what we think of as religion.18 Yet the gifts of theological reflection are not superfluous, Brown would say. Theological reflections have a kind of clarity, and a capacity to analyze, and to evaluate and systematize intellectually. So, in my own application of what I gather from this, the theologian doesn’t simply take at face value, so to speak, the most gruesome crucifixes of the New World’s adaptation of Hispanic forms of Christian expression. Something seems to go wrong there, if all one does is stare one’s way into the grisly gore of the corpus of Christ, which can turn into something close to an immersion in sheer violence. But the startling and strange sense of the hope of liberation and the reality of divine solidarity with human suffering that those crucifixes can also convey—a theme that Brown argues is not inherent in the biblical story—can never fully be conveyed in words, let alone in relatively abstract theology. In the face of those, the clear-cut alternative between substitutionary atonement, for instance, and exemplary love, seems too neat and clean. How, then, to attend theologically to what is so elusive yet real? Especially if theology is typically conducted away from artistic immediacy? That is not Brown’s question, mainly, but Burch Brown’s.
Fortunately and significantly—from my own point of view—Brown’s epistemology and his ideas of the nature and forms of revelation do not foreclose on the possibility that, when the symbol gives rise to thought, there is more to the story. For, when contemplating and living with the symbol, thought may discover new insights and ways of construing and configuring. Going a bit beyond Brown, let’s take note of musical examples. It could be a little hard to imagine that, in Handel’s Messiah, the chorus “All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray” had begun its life, musically speaking, the previous summer, as a secular love duet composed by Handel and sung in Italian. In the choral version that we hear in Messiah, however, and in its musical handling of scripture, the twists and turns of the voices, which originally suggested erotic playfulness, now suggest a heedless and deluded indulgence in the seeming fun of sinfulness. The sheep go astray almost gleefully but waywardly. After much indulgence of that sort, it is with a sudden, dramatic turning to slow music, and a conversion to a minor key, at the very end—all of which is newly composed, by the way—that Handel imbues grave significance to the words “and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Even those of us who may be theologically uncomfortable with aspects of a theology of substitutionary atonement can suddenly feel the fatal downward pull of the impact of sin, and the horrible feeling that our heedlessness can contribute to death and destruction, except for the grace of God. This is theology through music, and music as theology. It also hints that some of us can sing teachings and sayings that we might have trouble affirming in plain speech. And if that’s true, the act of affirming or believing or assenting may be more complex than we usually think, allowing more than one level.
The notion that this could be music that is unreflective, and that hasn’t absorbed any theology, is completely untenable. The theology is palpable in the music and as the music. But what is one to do about that, theologically? As we’ve already noted, it is not as though the combination of music and words, when contemplated by the theologian, translates completely into words. It is not as though the music is transubstantiated into words transparent to the transference of guilt from us, the silly sheep, to Christ, the Lamb of God, and that this would somehow show up as a clearly describable difference in doctrine or creed. The Lamb of God isn’t even named at all, in this passage from Messiah. It is part of the context, reverberating simultaneously in the musical, scriptural, and theological atmosphere. Yet in fact, the Lamb comes back in a later chorus: “Behold the Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world.” And the Lamb of God returns climactically, in a major way, literally, in the astonishing penultimate chorus of Messiah. There’s an ecstatic musical outcry of praise, in the next to the last chorus of the entire work: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power and riches and honor and glory and blessing.” And all that is left, after that, is an “Amen” that emerges slowly from all that came before, and that grows, seemingly without end, world without end.
What is the theologian to do? Perhaps, at the time, to join in the “Amen.” But here I am, musically and theologically, not even knowing what to make of the theory of substitutionary atonement, but also hearing, later, in my mind’s ear, and in what one could call the soul’s musical space and time, the final aria of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, sounding both mournful and infinitely accepting and grateful as it petitions the Lamb of God: “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. . .” And that solo is followed by the concluding choral fugue: a strangely familiar but previously unimaginable blessing, opening into transcendence of a specific gravity and bestowing divinely peaceful elevation and benediction: “Dona nobis pacem.”
It is musical art shaped to the core by theological meaning. And yet it is music also leading theology into meaning and beauty of another order. Surely the theologian alive to such art will turn toward it in search of faithful understanding, and return to it, and later transform it as well.
It is, I think, a fact of our creaturely finitude that artistically embodied theology needs immediacy of exposure and experience to the whole living, thinking being, individual and communal, if new meanings are to take root and grow. Perhaps the day is coming when those of us imagining a New Orpheus can allow for a reciprocal leadership: a dance of theology and the arts together that, unavoidably, recognizes ways art will fall short, theology will fall short, both turning toward the tragic loss of Eurydice; but, beyond loss, can both also discover, and mysteriously recover, gracious ways the meaning, the marriage, can be transfigured: in time, and now and again, out of time. z
NOTES
Frank Burch Brown is Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. He is also a teacher, author and musician. Frank holds degrees from Georgetown College and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in Religion and Literature. He is author of many articles and of five books, including Religious Aesthetics, the award-winning title Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (OUP, 2003) and his more recent Inclusive, Yet Discerning. He is also editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts. In this essay, he poses questions that grow out of his own work as a musician and as a scholar of aesthetics. He does so particularly in conversation with the work of David Brown.
This essay is among several the author is dedicating to the memory of Mary Harter Mitchell, whose life was suddenly taken by unsuspected disease three months after he and she wed four years ago.
Orpheus, in ancient mythology, used music and poetry to exercise sacred powers, with consequences sometimes marvelous, sometimes tragic. As depicted in a wide array of stories and images from the sixth century BCE onward, this legendary hero, a son of Apollo and of the muse Calliope, was a singer, poet, religious teacher, and prophet. Orpheus accompanied his songs on a lyre, moving and enchanting all within the reach of his music. Even wild animals listened transfixed, or else moved in rhythmic response. Tragically, when Orpheus married, his bride Eurydice died the same day from a serpent’s bite. Grief-stricken, Orpheus descended to the underworld and with his music managed to move the god of the underworld, Pluto, to tears. Pluto agreed to allow Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living, on the one condition that he not look back at her along the way. Just how long the ascent took, we’re not told. But as the two were about to emerge from the underworld, Orpheus turned to make sure Eurydice was following. She was there. But by looking back, Orpheus lost his wife to death a second time, and forever.
For the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) and many others in antiquity, Orpheus became the epitome of the singer-poet. Christians of the patristic and medieval eras adopted him as a symbol or “type” of Christ, the New Orpheus, whose descent into Hades and whose powers of resurrection would succeed where his pagan predecessor had failed. In later centuries, with the creation of opera, the story was set to music over and over again—most famously by Monteverdi and Gluck. Harkening back to Ovid’s version of the story, where Orpheus and Eurydice are reunited in death, in the Elysian fields, Monteverdi’s revised version of L’Orfeo (1609; originally 1607) culminates in a final apotheosis of Orpheus. Joining his father Apollo in heaven, he will forever behold the sun and the stars and, in their beauty, see the likeness of Eurydice. It is perhaps relevant that, when Monteverdi opted for the happier ending two years after the premier of the opera, his own beloved wife had suddenly died, which was only six months after the first performance of the opera.
It was almost exactly fifty years ago that Nathan A. Scott, Jr., entitled a major collection of essays by various authors of his day The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic. In his introduction, Scott refers not only to a search for a Christian “poetic,” but also to a search for a Christian “aesthetic” that would be “consistently elaborated on the premises of an Incarnational theology.”1 And in the separate essay that Scott contributes to that same collection, he can be found questioning the tendency of literary critics and theorists in his time to treat even literary art as an artifact that is so self-contained in its means and ends as to have no intrinsic relation to what Scott terms “the circumambient world,” thereby depriving art of any “extramural affiliation,” and theorizing as though writers of poetry and fiction are not engaged in any real thought or reflection, so that even the work of poetic art can appear to mean nothing beyond itself.2 “A poem should not mean / But be.” (Archibald MacCleish, in the poem—ironically—“Ars Poetica.”)
Scott goes on to call for a criticism that, while aware of what is distinctive about art, dares to engage in metaphysical and theological valuation, and to discern a work’s embodiment or disclosure of what the theologian Paul Tillich terms “ultimate concern.”3 One is not surprised when Scott invokes the name of Tillich. But it is puzzling that neither in his introduction to The New Orpheus nor in this later chapter does Scott make any mention of Orpheus, new or old, as far as I can tell.
In proposing to re-visit Orpheus, it seems to me it would be hard to think of a more fitting symbol of the transformative, and indeed thoughtful, powers of art—or of certain kinds of art, at least. Both the story and the music of Orpheus have to do with the realms of the living and the dead, with love and mystery, with tragedy and transgression, and, in later centuries, with the way in which artistry can both shape and be reshaped by Christian tradition and theology.
Those of us engaged in theology and the arts have thought a great deal about such things, and a few are assembled here for a session devoted to the theme. Maeve Heaney has, in fact, recently published a whole book on Music as Theology.4 Russell Re Manning has begun to write on musical theology with reference to Tillich, and has published a revealing, book-length study of Tillich’s theology of culture and art.5 Larry Bouchard, in books and articles, has given special attention to ethical and tragic dimensions of story and drama, ancient and modern, and to their theological and cultural implications.6 Our respondent David Brown—who exemplifies in part the continuing Anglican emphasis on Incarnational theology—has at times interpreted art and music in terms of sacrament.7 In a whole series of theological studies, moreover, Prof. Brown has given serious and extensive attention to the arts as fully engaged in the shaping and reshaping of Christian tradition, and as potentially integral to Christian discipleship.8 For my part, I can’t help noticing that I’ve followed at least indirectly my late mentor Nathan Scott’s wish so many years ago for more work in theological and religious aesthetics, although I’ve not kept strictly to the Christian tradition in doing so.9
Despite much labor, however, it can’t really be said that the promise and ambition of The New Orpheus has been entirely fulfilled. I’m thinking of the promise 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.
One way of getting at this point is to ask a deceptively simple-sounding pair of questions: Can arts ever lead theology? And where? Notice that the implied answer to the first question is “yes,” which deserves some explanation. Exactly that possibility of a leading role of art in relation to theology is something that traditionally raises many questions.
Where I do think there’s long been agreement is in according a limited and subordinate kind of leading role to the arts. Arts are seen as leading not in the sense of going ahead of theology and showing the way, but rather in the sense of preparing the ground. In the first place, almost from the very beginnings of Christianity, it has been recognized that images and music, for example, are especially efficacious with those unable to read, or lacking in education, and that music and visual art and poetry can all serve as pleasing and powerful aids to memory. But the assumption is that the more mature one is, in mind and faith, the less dependent one will be on art, which tends to rely on senses and emotion and pleasurable forms. Today, a richer appreciation of the uniqueness of art, especially music, can be found in Jeremy Begbie’s theology of music. There, he interprets the phenomenon of music, and especially its ways of existing and creating in time, as theologically suggestive. But Begbie, although at one time fond of the phrase “theology through the arts,” is leery of claiming normative status and revelatory capacity to human artistry.
Second, as Christian thinkers have long agreed, it is a good thing, up to a point, that things that are artistic can touch the heart. That means arts can move the will in ways formal theology and even preaching cannot always do. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles and John Wesley, and the makers of modern gospel music all concur that musical art in particular, by moving the emotions, can affect the will, attune the soul, and open one up to the movements of the Holy Spirit. Here art is allied with rhetoric, the power of persuasion. This, then, is another way one can safely say theology is assisted and sometimes led by art, broadly speaking: theology’s aims depend in part on artifacts or creative processes that are beautiful, expressive, or imaginative, and appreciable for aesthetic reasons, among others. Today, students of material culture and lived religion often pay attention to visual culture for some of those very reasons, which cross over distinctions between elite and popular, for instance.
Thus we can say that art can lead theology by being a means to education and a motivation toward devotion, by offering fertile fields for nurturing theological concepts, and as a kind of felt or effective theology “on the ground,” so to speak. But to what extent does art actually get into theology as faith seeking understanding in a more formal and reflective way? Or does it?
One way to answer is to say that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” That’s, of course, the well-known phrase from Paul Ricoeur, which he, in turn, had drawn from Kant, Jaspers, and others. And Ricoeur did not mean to suggest, as thinkers such as Hegel might, that, once art delivers its goods to the more philosophical kind of theology, its work is done. For Ricoeur, symbol and metaphor are not exhaustible in that way. Yet it seems to me one could easily exaggerate the role of art as a delivery system of truth or insight for theology, as something either to encounter as event and proclamation or to accept as manifestation. There are literally countless ways in which experience, both raw and intense, or perhaps subtle and deep, can enter into language and more abstract thought. And the more artistic forms of that (we might as well admit) are not exactly pervasive and well accounted for in the works of folks we call theologians.
Thomas Aquinas lived in the great age of cathedrals and Gothic art, but included scarcely a reference to that artistry in all his voluminous works. While Thomas does formulate a theory of beauty, he does not offer it as a theory of art. And that is true for most of the thinkers now being cited and retrieved in many discussions of theological aesthetics. Beauty does not equal art in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy and theology. Nor should it necessarily in ours, though much art is beautiful. For all his massive and profound works in theological aesthetics and in theo-drama, Hans Urs von Balthasar has relatively little to say about the arts themselves. And that’s not least because it seems he seldom thinks of human art as intimately involved in divine revelation or the drama of redemption, which are his primary concern. Karl Barth makes space for Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and, even more so for Mozart, whose music, he declares, got there ahead of the theologians when it came to responding to darkness and suffering without being overcome by it. But Barth’s devotion to Mozart is not something he expands, laudable as it is. As for the Eastern forms of Catholicism, theological defenses of icons are likewise selective, at least as originally formulated. Traditionally, icons as windows onto eternity and as quasi-sacramental in character neither exemplify art in the usual sense nor stand for what other kinds of art can aspire to. And that’s not to deny the quite different view of the matter on the part of the late British composer John Tavener, who composed what he calls choral icons. Nor does it deny legitimacy to the theology of the Roman Catholic theologian Aidan Nichols, whose very theology of art unites icon and Incarnation in ways not sanctioned formally in Eastern Orthodoxy.10
Again, turning to the Protestant side, Jonathan Edwards’s remarkably central treatment of beauty focuses above all on primary beauty, which is moral and spiritual beauty, and its analogues in experience. Edwards pays scant attention to human art. Edward Farley’s recent and very fine book on theological aesthetics, indebted as it is to Edwards, likewise says almost nothing about art.11 Even Schleiermacher, so influential on modern theology of culture, feels much freer to talk about parallels between artistic experience and religious experience than to show how some artistic experience actually is religious in a special way. The closest Schleiermacher comes to that is in pondering music in his very brief Christmas Eve Dialogue.12 And if we come back to a Catholic context in recent times, it can take a while to recognize that, when David Tracy holds up the idea of the classic, including the artistic classic, as a way of understanding a major approach to doing theology, he seldom treats classic works of art themselves as religious classics. Instead, Tracy says that the combination of religion and art at the level of the classic is rather rare, given the different aims of art.13
I don’t mean to complain or criticize, especially given my own indebtedness to the theologians I’ve named. I mean to explain why Orpheus may need to be re-visited in a new way. And I want to make it plain that, in my judgment, it is mostly in recent years, and in a different kind of theological aesthetics, that art has begun showing up more consistently in theological works as potentially not only revelatory in ways not interchangeable with others, but also as genuinely theological in modes that aren’t merely preparatory or illustrational. It would be embarrassing and awkward, and in fact impossible, to try to list all those involved in this shift, because I would inevitably commit many sins of omission. For some documentation of the change, I commend Gesa Thiessen’s still-recent anthology called Theological Aesthetics: A Reader.14 And, if I may be so bold, I also suggest consulting a book I’ve edited: The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts.15
Among theologians active in the academy today, I would suggest that David Brown exemplifies, in particular, a change that calls for fuller exploration and manifestation in theology and the arts more widely. In numerous theological works he’s published over the past decade and a half, art is no longer treated as a junior partner to theology, nor as simply a preparation for theology, nor as a rung rather low on a ladder ascending toward spiritual maturity. Nor is art regarded mainly as a sign of the times or as a symptom mostly of the messes human beings find themselves in, nor even as providing questions from culture that the theologian can answer simply on the basis of revelation—as though art weren’t part of that, too, in some sense. In David Brown’s work, art is not valued only as it is subservient to theology, as it is in John Henry Newman’s ideas of education and in so much that had gone before. Art is indeed honored as adding to human flourishing and as part of divine blessing and a cause for thanksgiving, as Nick Wolterstorff and Jeremy Begbie have been emphasizing, along with others indebted to modern Calvinist theology. And, in Brown’s theology, as in their work, art is not treated as simply one kind of thing, nor idealized as something necessarily and fundamentally religious, wherever it is found.
Yet Brown, in ways I’ve hinted at already, goes farther, and in ways that would probably cause many of my Catholic colleagues to squirm, and that, if misconstrued, might cause some of the rest of us to be fired. Brown argues that artists, styles, and aesthetic works can contribute to an ongoing process of continually revised and revisable Christian tradition. Some kinds and themes of art deepen and transform the Christian sense of the very meaning of Incarnation, for example. And that’s even true in holidays such as Christmas, with much that is so commercial and seemingly foreign to the spirit of Christmas. Brown openly argues that it is simply not true that the Bible always knows best. Or that the church does either, at any given time. And while works of art must be approached with critical awareness, and not idealized and Romanticized, they can and do participate in an ongoing process of revelation.
It is not that art and artists are just their own norm, their own law. Brown does not advocate complete autonomy for the arts. In the last portion of Discipleship and Imagination, Brown describes norms. But those norms aren’t just on one side or another of the relationship between theology and art. They have to do with revelatory truth, with historical criteria, empirical criteria, conceptual and moral criteria, with Christological and Ecclesial criteria, with the degree of comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of imaginative engagement. Some of this is easier to see in relation to ostensibly sacred art than in nominally secular art. In his earlier book Tradition and Imagination, Brown mostly considers art that is identifiably Christian and even biblically based. But he argues even there that some art in the Christian tradition creates a new awareness of possible meanings, and of new meanings and truths the theologian can affirm, in relation to scripture. We might think of Rembrandt’s famous painting in the Hermitage, The Return of the Prodigal. Or, as Schleiermacher pointed out, one could note that some Christians never hear certain passages of scripture the same way again after especially inspired performances of Handel’s Messiah—which by the way was not originally meant to be church music. And which also, by the way, doesn’t end with the Hallelujah chorus.
Not all of this line of thought would go over well with more orthodox and evangelical forms of Christianity. Brown is well aware of that. Jeremy Begbie, for one, has already offered a substantial critique in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, edited by Russell Re Manning.16 As something of a pluralist who probably spends more time than I should in building bridges, and in advocating for aesthetics and theologies that can be both more inclusive and more discerning, I’m not urging everyone to take the same leap. Or if you do, don’t forget your theological parachute.
But I’ve promised myself and my colleagues I would start declaring myself more explicitly on these matters. Accordingly, in the name of reintroducing Orpheus, both new and old, I underscore several things I want to emphasize, along with Brown, and themes I’d apparently push even farther than he.
First, recalling that Orpheus had multiple uses for his music and poetry, I think it’s time, at last, to resist making declarations that all art is religious—while recognizing such utterances have had a point and may still, at times, have a place. To say that all art is religious sounds too similar to saying that all philosophy is religious. Or to saying that all attempts to live and think morally are religious. There’s a deep truth in there somewhere.17 From a certain perspective, all of life is religious, after all. And there is a long theological tradition of affirming that ultimately, in God, truth and beauty and goodness are fully united. But that’s not the way it is on earth. And that kind of claim regarding the ultimately religious or inevitably faith-filled character of all art violates the right of secular art to have its own integrity. Or else, to the contrary, it is often accompanied by the feeling that artists, if true to themselves and their vocation, would never have reason to listen and respond to the more conceptually reflective forms of faith.
Yet there is important truth embedded in the misleading claim that all art is religious. And one such truth is that even art created for rather narrowly aesthetic purposes can sometimes resonate spiritually, as part of a larger context, and that much art we call secular is of remarkable religious import, at least potentially. By the same token, much art labeled religious rarely functions that way, or does so only conventionally. Tillich saw that, and we should not forget it.
But I want to return to what is actually newer: a serious consideration of David Brown’s crucial acknowledgment that art typically deals with truth and experience in ways that cannot be translated entirely into the kinds of conceptual reasoning processes characteristic of theology’s endeavors to understand the realities of faith. And yet neither is visual art or poetry or story-telling simply a world to itself. That rules out some ways of doing narrative theology, for example, which treat story as immune to conceptual critique, no matter how sensitively attuned. There are many narratives that challenge other narratives, in the end, and we’ve already acknowledged that art can respond to thought; so there’s no reason why narratives, likewise, could not be subjected to thoughtful critique.
Brown does not belong, therefore, in the company of philosophers and theologians for whom, when the artistic symbol gives rise to thought and theology, the process is done once and for all. He acknowledges that, to the extent that the symbol gives rise to thought, something vital is inevitably left behind at the symbolic level. The poetic cannot fully be paraphrased. To be sure, that can lead to the sense, which the poet and theorist Christian Wiman expresses, for example, that the real religious action takes place in the poetry, not in what we think of as religion.18 Yet the gifts of theological reflection are not superfluous, Brown would say. Theological reflections have a kind of clarity, and a capacity to analyze, and to evaluate and systematize intellectually. So, in my own application of what I gather from this, the theologian doesn’t simply take at face value, so to speak, the most gruesome crucifixes of the New World’s adaptation of Hispanic forms of Christian expression. Something seems to go wrong there, if all one does is stare one’s way into the grisly gore of the corpus of Christ, which can turn into something close to an immersion in sheer violence. But the startling and strange sense of the hope of liberation and the reality of divine solidarity with human suffering that those crucifixes can also convey—a theme that Brown argues is not inherent in the biblical story—can never fully be conveyed in words, let alone in relatively abstract theology. In the face of those, the clear-cut alternative between substitutionary atonement, for instance, and exemplary love, seems too neat and clean. How, then, to attend theologically to what is so elusive yet real? Especially if theology is typically conducted away from artistic immediacy? That is not Brown’s question, mainly, but Burch Brown’s.
Fortunately and significantly—from my own point of view—Brown’s epistemology and his ideas of the nature and forms of revelation do not foreclose on the possibility that, when the symbol gives rise to thought, there is more to the story. For, when contemplating and living with the symbol, thought may discover new insights and ways of construing and configuring. Going a bit beyond Brown, let’s take note of musical examples. It could be a little hard to imagine that, in Handel’s Messiah, the chorus “All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray” had begun its life, musically speaking, the previous summer, as a secular love duet composed by Handel and sung in Italian. In the choral version that we hear in Messiah, however, and in its musical handling of scripture, the twists and turns of the voices, which originally suggested erotic playfulness, now suggest a heedless and deluded indulgence in the seeming fun of sinfulness. The sheep go astray almost gleefully but waywardly. After much indulgence of that sort, it is with a sudden, dramatic turning to slow music, and a conversion to a minor key, at the very end—all of which is newly composed, by the way—that Handel imbues grave significance to the words “and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Even those of us who may be theologically uncomfortable with aspects of a theology of substitutionary atonement can suddenly feel the fatal downward pull of the impact of sin, and the horrible feeling that our heedlessness can contribute to death and destruction, except for the grace of God. This is theology through music, and music as theology. It also hints that some of us can sing teachings and sayings that we might have trouble affirming in plain speech. And if that’s true, the act of affirming or believing or assenting may be more complex than we usually think, allowing more than one level.
The notion that this could be music that is unreflective, and that hasn’t absorbed any theology, is completely untenable. The theology is palpable in the music and as the music. But what is one to do about that, theologically? As we’ve already noted, it is not as though the combination of music and words, when contemplated by the theologian, translates completely into words. It is not as though the music is transubstantiated into words transparent to the transference of guilt from us, the silly sheep, to Christ, the Lamb of God, and that this would somehow show up as a clearly describable difference in doctrine or creed. The Lamb of God isn’t even named at all, in this passage from Messiah. It is part of the context, reverberating simultaneously in the musical, scriptural, and theological atmosphere. Yet in fact, the Lamb comes back in a later chorus: “Behold the Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world.” And the Lamb of God returns climactically, in a major way, literally, in the astonishing penultimate chorus of Messiah. There’s an ecstatic musical outcry of praise, in the next to the last chorus of the entire work: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power and riches and honor and glory and blessing.” And all that is left, after that, is an “Amen” that emerges slowly from all that came before, and that grows, seemingly without end, world without end.
What is the theologian to do? Perhaps, at the time, to join in the “Amen.” But here I am, musically and theologically, not even knowing what to make of the theory of substitutionary atonement, but also hearing, later, in my mind’s ear, and in what one could call the soul’s musical space and time, the final aria of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, sounding both mournful and infinitely accepting and grateful as it petitions the Lamb of God: “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. . .” And that solo is followed by the concluding choral fugue: a strangely familiar but previously unimaginable blessing, opening into transcendence of a specific gravity and bestowing divinely peaceful elevation and benediction: “Dona nobis pacem.”
It is musical art shaped to the core by theological meaning. And yet it is music also leading theology into meaning and beauty of another order. Surely the theologian alive to such art will turn toward it in search of faithful understanding, and return to it, and later transform it as well.
It is, I think, a fact of our creaturely finitude that artistically embodied theology needs immediacy of exposure and experience to the whole living, thinking being, individual and communal, if new meanings are to take root and grow. Perhaps the day is coming when those of us imagining a New Orpheus can allow for a reciprocal leadership: a dance of theology and the arts together that, unavoidably, recognizes ways art will fall short, theology will fall short, both turning toward the tragic loss of Eurydice; but, beyond loss, can both also discover, and mysteriously recover, gracious ways the meaning, the marriage, can be transfigured: in time, and now and again, out of time. z
NOTES
- Nathan A. Scott, Jr., The New Orpheus: Essays toward a Christian Poetic(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), xi.
- Scott, “The Modern Experiment in Criticism: A Theological Appraisal,” in The New Orpheus, 149.
- Scott, 162–64.
- Maeve Louise Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word(Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012).
- Russell Re Manning, Theology at the End of Culture: Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture and Arts (Leeuven: Peeters, 2005); also, “Unwritten Theology: Notes Toward a Natural Theology of Music,” unpublished paper for conference on Music and Transcendence, Nov. 29, 2011; and adaptation of that for the American Academy of Religion, Music and Theology session, Nov. 2012.
- See Larry D. Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1989); and Theater and Integrity: Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
- See, for example, David Brown, God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- See David Brown, Tradition and Imagination; Revelation and Change(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- See Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (Princeton Univ. Press, 1989); and Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Religious Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- See Aiden Nichols, The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980).
- Edward Farley, Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001).
- I take this to be implied in the declaration of a “theologically astute” character in the dialogue: “Music such as Handel’s Messiah is, for me, like a sweeping proclamation of Christianity as a whole.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation (1806), 2nd edition, 1826, trans. Terrence N. Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1967), 47.
- See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 134, 163, 172, 174, 176–77, 200-201, 380. I discuss this matter in Religious Aesthetics, 159–65.
- Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).
- Frank Burch Brown, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts (New York: Oxford University press, 2014).
- Jeremy Begbie, “Natural Theology and Music,” in Russell Re Manning, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 567–69. In the same volume, I support approaches to the art and natural theology that turn out to have much closer affinities with those of David Brown, whose work had not yet come to my attention in the way it subsequently has. See Frank Burch Brown, “Aesthetics and the Arts in Relation to Natural Theology,” especially 532–37.
- Richard Viladesau makes a case for applying transcendental philosophy and theology to aesthetics in Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- Christian Wiman, “Mastery and Mystery,” introduction to The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, ed. Don Share and Christian Wiman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 11–12.
