The Power of the Image to Effect Change
by David Brown
David Brown is Wardlaw Professor in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he has broadened his scholarly agenda from the intersections between continental philosophy and theology to theology’s relationship with the arts and culture more generally. He published the fruits of this intellectual endeavor in five books published by Oxford University Press between 1999 and 2008—which were largely the focus of Dr. Frank Burch Brown’s introductory reflections to which this essay is responding.
I am very grateful to Frank Burch Brown for the obvious care with which he has read my works, and also clearly identified the distinctive contribution I have sought to make. There is only one point at which I would wish to modify his outline, and that is where I am presented as more radical than perhaps I am. While I certainly do not want to retreat from my view that the imagination has the power to correct both scripture and any current Christian consensus, I may have misleadingly suggested in the process that I thought that Bible and Church were thereby simply bypassed or surpassed. That was not my intention. Rather, the phrase was used, as its expansions indicated, to suggest the overthrow of where the great weight of Scripture or Church might seem to be pointing, but not the abandonment altogether of any overall arching scriptural or ecclesiastical principle under which the change could still be gathered.1 This is in no way to deny that on my approach to scripture contentious cases might still be, and indeed are, quite commonly generated, but that the pattern has some intuitive plausibility is well indicated by how modern positions on slavery or the equality of the sexes also deviate from where the great weight of scriptural texts would seem to point.
In generating such changes, I have argued that the imagination, and thus the arts in general, can and do play an important role, and I would like to comment by illustrating this with Frank’s own example of Orpheus. But first let me provide a broader context, first by making a couple of observations about my own project, and then saying something about why the contribution of the arts to theology has become more important, rather than less, in our own day. Although the canvas with which I begin is very broad, towards the essay’s end, I will narrow the focus to what is often treated as the least significant for such change: the visual.
In his survey of approaches to Christian aesthetics over the last half century or so, Frank rightly observes two widespread, near universal, phenomena: first, the tendency to produce general theories rather than look at specific instances; and secondly, where actual instances were explored, the tendency to treat those instances as illustrative rather than as saying anything new to theology. It was precisely to challenge those two trends that the five volumes that I published with Oxford University Press were written.2 I thought that for far too long theologians had made general pronouncements on the arts without serious engagement with the empirical details, and so my intention became deliberately to reverse my own order of writing: to explore the phenomenology first, as it were, before generating a theory. So, while of course I could not entirely escape theory in the course of writing, it emerges incidentally rather than as a carefully worked out project. That is why terms like revelation, natural theology,
sacramentality or enchantment, though endorsed, have as yet received no precise definition, though my hope is that this will now follow in two books currently being written. Secondly, while some art is undoubtedly intended to be merely illustrative, I doubt whether this is true of any great art because so much more is usually in play, no less than the real engagement of reader, listener, or viewer with the material concerned. To achieve that aim, the artist cannot simply copy even something as engaging as the biblical record. He or she has also to reflect on how their new medium might achieve a similar impact, and that inevitably entails some changes, rightly made or not.
My reason for believing that imagination and the arts are more important for theology now than at any other time in the history of Christianity concerns what might link us with the sphere that is God’s. It would be a truism to observe that few contemporary intellectuals now believe in the conception of ourselves that dominated most of Christian history and which we inherited from Platonism, and that is the sense of us already inhabiting the two worlds of material, earthly reality and the spiritual and immaterial dimension that is God’s. Technically known as dualism, it spoke of human beings as consisting of two substances, mortal bodies and immortal souls, and thus of us inhabiting the visible earth as the home of matter and an invisible reality that is the home of minds, ours and God’s. The notion was so deeply embedded by the time of the Reformation that the assumption even became one of the articles in the Calvinist Westminster Confession.3 Now, however, we have been returned to a very different account but what is in any case the more common biblical picture, of us as psychosomatic unities, mind and body entirely interdependent, with us only surviving death thanks to divine action and not because of anything inherent in the way we have been made.
If such a conclusion excludes any sense of us already linked to heaven (the invisible world that is God’s), the question then of course becomes acute of whether there might be any alternative way of making the connection. I would suggest that there is through appeal to the sacramental imagination, that is, an appeal no longer to the fundamental nature of our minds but rather to how those minds work.
Human beings learn the use of words in application to the sensible world. So clearly, if the jump to the divine is to be made, language will need to be stretched in analogies, images, and metaphors, what are in effect the common tools of the imagination. Perhaps the relevance of the point to all the imaginative arts can be expressed most clearly by making explicit the parallel between symbol in action, metaphor in writing, and image in the visual arts, and how the theological notion of sacramentality is based on a similar structure. Consider first the traditional sacraments. Each involves an action that by doing one thing intends another: the consecration of bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ, the exchange of rings to establish a permanent relation between two individuals, the anointing of a dying person’s body to prepare for life in another world, and so on. Works of the imagination, irrespective of the medium, appear very similarly founded. The metaphors of the poet are intended to take us from one sphere of discourse to another, the images of the artist for the most part from one visual image (suitably modified for expression on a flat surface) to another (what exists in the actual world), while a medium like ballet is full of symbolic acts under which gestures of the body are intended to imply acts performed quite differently in ordinary life.
Even prior to his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, T. S. Eliot had already detected the importance of metaphor in helping to interconnect what might otherwise seem an unintegrated, uncreated world. Thus in a famous essay on “The Metaphysical Poets,” he observes:
David Brown is Wardlaw Professor in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he has broadened his scholarly agenda from the intersections between continental philosophy and theology to theology’s relationship with the arts and culture more generally. He published the fruits of this intellectual endeavor in five books published by Oxford University Press between 1999 and 2008—which were largely the focus of Dr. Frank Burch Brown’s introductory reflections to which this essay is responding.
I am very grateful to Frank Burch Brown for the obvious care with which he has read my works, and also clearly identified the distinctive contribution I have sought to make. There is only one point at which I would wish to modify his outline, and that is where I am presented as more radical than perhaps I am. While I certainly do not want to retreat from my view that the imagination has the power to correct both scripture and any current Christian consensus, I may have misleadingly suggested in the process that I thought that Bible and Church were thereby simply bypassed or surpassed. That was not my intention. Rather, the phrase was used, as its expansions indicated, to suggest the overthrow of where the great weight of Scripture or Church might seem to be pointing, but not the abandonment altogether of any overall arching scriptural or ecclesiastical principle under which the change could still be gathered.1 This is in no way to deny that on my approach to scripture contentious cases might still be, and indeed are, quite commonly generated, but that the pattern has some intuitive plausibility is well indicated by how modern positions on slavery or the equality of the sexes also deviate from where the great weight of scriptural texts would seem to point.
In generating such changes, I have argued that the imagination, and thus the arts in general, can and do play an important role, and I would like to comment by illustrating this with Frank’s own example of Orpheus. But first let me provide a broader context, first by making a couple of observations about my own project, and then saying something about why the contribution of the arts to theology has become more important, rather than less, in our own day. Although the canvas with which I begin is very broad, towards the essay’s end, I will narrow the focus to what is often treated as the least significant for such change: the visual.
In his survey of approaches to Christian aesthetics over the last half century or so, Frank rightly observes two widespread, near universal, phenomena: first, the tendency to produce general theories rather than look at specific instances; and secondly, where actual instances were explored, the tendency to treat those instances as illustrative rather than as saying anything new to theology. It was precisely to challenge those two trends that the five volumes that I published with Oxford University Press were written.2 I thought that for far too long theologians had made general pronouncements on the arts without serious engagement with the empirical details, and so my intention became deliberately to reverse my own order of writing: to explore the phenomenology first, as it were, before generating a theory. So, while of course I could not entirely escape theory in the course of writing, it emerges incidentally rather than as a carefully worked out project. That is why terms like revelation, natural theology,
sacramentality or enchantment, though endorsed, have as yet received no precise definition, though my hope is that this will now follow in two books currently being written. Secondly, while some art is undoubtedly intended to be merely illustrative, I doubt whether this is true of any great art because so much more is usually in play, no less than the real engagement of reader, listener, or viewer with the material concerned. To achieve that aim, the artist cannot simply copy even something as engaging as the biblical record. He or she has also to reflect on how their new medium might achieve a similar impact, and that inevitably entails some changes, rightly made or not.
My reason for believing that imagination and the arts are more important for theology now than at any other time in the history of Christianity concerns what might link us with the sphere that is God’s. It would be a truism to observe that few contemporary intellectuals now believe in the conception of ourselves that dominated most of Christian history and which we inherited from Platonism, and that is the sense of us already inhabiting the two worlds of material, earthly reality and the spiritual and immaterial dimension that is God’s. Technically known as dualism, it spoke of human beings as consisting of two substances, mortal bodies and immortal souls, and thus of us inhabiting the visible earth as the home of matter and an invisible reality that is the home of minds, ours and God’s. The notion was so deeply embedded by the time of the Reformation that the assumption even became one of the articles in the Calvinist Westminster Confession.3 Now, however, we have been returned to a very different account but what is in any case the more common biblical picture, of us as psychosomatic unities, mind and body entirely interdependent, with us only surviving death thanks to divine action and not because of anything inherent in the way we have been made.
If such a conclusion excludes any sense of us already linked to heaven (the invisible world that is God’s), the question then of course becomes acute of whether there might be any alternative way of making the connection. I would suggest that there is through appeal to the sacramental imagination, that is, an appeal no longer to the fundamental nature of our minds but rather to how those minds work.
Human beings learn the use of words in application to the sensible world. So clearly, if the jump to the divine is to be made, language will need to be stretched in analogies, images, and metaphors, what are in effect the common tools of the imagination. Perhaps the relevance of the point to all the imaginative arts can be expressed most clearly by making explicit the parallel between symbol in action, metaphor in writing, and image in the visual arts, and how the theological notion of sacramentality is based on a similar structure. Consider first the traditional sacraments. Each involves an action that by doing one thing intends another: the consecration of bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ, the exchange of rings to establish a permanent relation between two individuals, the anointing of a dying person’s body to prepare for life in another world, and so on. Works of the imagination, irrespective of the medium, appear very similarly founded. The metaphors of the poet are intended to take us from one sphere of discourse to another, the images of the artist for the most part from one visual image (suitably modified for expression on a flat surface) to another (what exists in the actual world), while a medium like ballet is full of symbolic acts under which gestures of the body are intended to imply acts performed quite differently in ordinary life.
Even prior to his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, T. S. Eliot had already detected the importance of metaphor in helping to interconnect what might otherwise seem an unintegrated, uncreated world. Thus in a famous essay on “The Metaphysical Poets,” he observes:
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter fails in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.4
In other words, as symbol is to action, metaphor to language, and image to art, so sacrament is to religion. Each is trying to move us analogically, to take us to a different place, and so establish new wholes. Of course, in most uses of the imagination, that other place remains firmly in our present world. Nonetheless, the imagination has already accepted the principle of a move elsewhere, and so it may well be asked, why not then to a vastly different world? As Jesus’ use of parables illustrates, or some of the extraordinary imagery and word play found in the prophets, similes and metaphors when well used can draw us from the material world into quite a different order of existence. As already noted, this is not at all to claim that every exercise of the imagination even implicitly evokes God, but it is to observe that the imagination is deploying precisely the same kind of tools that make talk of God possible. So, however hostile to faith individual artists may be, they are at least moving humanity onto the same terrain that legitimates talk of God.
The sacramental can thus be seen to build upon the symbolic and metaphorical inasmuch as, though the latter are not sacramental as such, it is not hard to see how the process which they utilize might extend to the more explicitly sacramental participation of one thing in another where too there is both similarity and difference, as in earthly light and heavenly light, running water and living water, and so on. Indeed, that very fact of difference that is opened up in analogical language and action helps identify another key contribution that the imagination can make towards an encounter with the divine, and that is in the essentially open-ended character of all imagery and symbol. That is to say, the interpretation of such devices can be pulled in quite a number of different directions, and so the question of an alternative religious world can be raised even when such a thought was far removed from the intention of artist or speaker. This is because once we move beyond the literal, the multivalent character of possible comparative allusions cannot be strictly controlled, and indeed one might argue that it is the mark of a great poet or artist to welcome such allusive richness. So the transition to the immaterial can sometimes be imaginatively made even where such thoughts were far from the creator’s mind, and perhaps even from most of his audience or viewers.
Given the emphasis within Judaism and Christianity on the verbal, my point is most likely to be accepted in respect of verbal imagery, and indeed some have seen the development of the biblical canon largely in terms of the development and transformation of existing metaphors.5 So, for example, in his classic 1948 work, Austin Farrer argued that this is how Jesus was able to work within an existing Jewish tradition, in giving new life to its existing metaphors. Even so, painting might seem to be in a quite different category, with the visual image merely repeating what is already known rather than contributing in any way to its transformation. Indeed, given biblical strictures on visual imagery, one might argue that images tend to earth us in present reality rather than carry us beyond to a transcendent God, and one might find this point amply confirmed by the way in which, in ancient Israel, images of the surrounding gods actually encouraged fertility practices rather than the move to a different order of existence.
But I would contend that such problems only arise when the visual arts are misunderstood as merely illustrative, whereas, whenever they are seen as really concerned to move us into a different world, the danger ceases. Not only that, there is some evidence to suggest that so-called primitive societies implicitly appreciated precisely this point, and were far from being as naïve as they are commonly portrayed. At least, that is one way in which to consider the wide use of aniconic imagery in ancient religions, as with the xoanon for Athena in ancient Athens, or their distortion of the human image to represent the divine, as in the common three-headed god that is found throughout the ancient world.
Even so, it may seem hard to comprehend how the visual imagination might have made, or could make, a significant contribution to Christian revelation and subsequent tradition. So let me end by offering two rather different examples: the first the transformation of Abraham’s offering of Isaac in Genesis 22 into the Akedah or “Binding” of Isaac in the Jewish tradition, into a “type” of the sacrifice of Christ within the Christian tradition, and to the self-offering of Ishmael in the Muslim tradition; and the second, the myth of Orpheus and its impact on human regard for animals.
In respect of the former, largely under the influence of biblical criticism and Kierkegaard’s focused attention on the tale, Christians have gone back to reading the story as essentially Abraham’s dilemma. To my mind, that seems unfortunate, since the story dates from a period in which attitudes to children were quite different, with them seen more like a form of property entirely under their parents’ discretion. So in the re-writings that occurred in all three religions rather more was at stake than simply a search for precedents for later actions. It was also a matter of lively imaginations engaging with the story and seeing its deficiencies in terms of what it suggested about God. Instead of people being urged to offer themselves self-sacrificially, what was presented was a story of an individual offering another in place of himself, even if that offer was also of someone loved. So, in my view, the early church fathers rightly suggested that it must be Isaac himself that makes his own self-offering even as Christ did, just as the Jewish tradition used ingenious arguments to conclude that Isaac was in fact aged 37 at the time.6 Because the following chapter opens with the death of Sarah, this was taken to indicate that she had died through shock at what had nearly happened. So, in order to determine Isaac’s age at the time of the attempted sacrifice, all one had to do was deduct her age at the time of her death from her age when she gave him birth (Gen. 17.17); hence 37 (127-90). Equally, the Islamic tradition insists that such a model of self-offering must have been made by the ancestor of the Arabs and thus of the Muslim religion. Ishmael then firmly emerges of an age to decide for himself.
In our modern context it would be all too easy to be patronizing about such arguments but that would be, I believe, a huge mistake, for underlying them were profound moral concerns. Yet it seems unlikely that such concerns would ever have arisen with sufficient force had it not been for the power of the visual imagination. Not of course that there were paintings available at the time that confronted the full horror of a tortured child, but it is still possible for us today to feel something of the power of that visual objection if we turn away from idealized versions like Rembrandt’s two versions and look instead at artists such as Titian and Caravaggio who force us to confront the full horror of the incident in the face of a screaming child.7 To use the language of “correction” for which I have been so criticized, it is the same capacity as gives rise to painting that helped generate (rightly, in my view, for most of the history of the Christian tradition) the rejection of the way in which the narrative was originally told, though still with a more ultimate principle in view, that the sacrifice of Christ should be seen as the appropriate model for all other sacrifices.
None of this is to deny that in most cases Rembrandt would prove to be the most spiritually enlightening of the three painters mentioned. But sometimes loyalty to an older way of reading can mislead, and this would seem no less true of how the myth of Orpheus has been treated, with his lyre able to unite the animal world in a spirit of harmony and reconciliation in general taken as a lesson for humanity rather than of significance for the animals in their own right. Perhaps the point can be seen most clearly if we turn to the related images with which Americans are now probably most familiar, the various versions of Edward Hicks’ famous painting The Peaceable Kingdom.8 One such was used on the front cover of Stanley Hauerwas’ book of the same name. Yet, despite the numerous ethical insights that Hauerwas has given the contemporary church, surprisingly the painting is nowhere discussed in its own right within the book’s covers, but instead it is used to argue for Christians living peaceably as a means of representing an anticipated future for humanity of such reconciliation and peace. Nor were Hicks’ own intentions significantly different since he intended his paintings to speak both of the overcoming of differences in human temperament more generally and in particular between two strands of Quakerism.9 As such, his work neatly reflects a pattern that has dominated most of Christian history, with animals seen purely instrumentally. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, they were viewed at least by monks in largely symbolist terms, lions for example as representations of the resurrection and so forth, as various Bestiaries indicate.
Yet the Orpheus legend was one way in which artists could challenge the near universality of such a perspective. Take the minor seventeenth-century Flemish painter, Roelandt Savery. He produced no less than twelve versions of the incident, and the reason is not hard to find.10 He lived in a world still dominated by the demand that artists paint great themes of Bible, history, or myth, but what really interested him was the animals themselves which he depicts with great delight. But perhaps a better example comes from a little further north and from a Dutch Reformed elder, Albrecht Cuyp.11 Here, too, we see delight in the scene, but, if we turn to some of his other paintings, we can also discern something rather more. His repeated theme is of local cows, bulging with fat because they reflect the prosperity of the people. But they are also strangely graced by light; indeed, I would suggest, by a divine light. In short, Cuyp, is, I believe, enticing his viewers to see the ordinary cow transfigured, as also something valued and esteemed in God’s eyes in its own right: a revolution in Christian attitudes, were it but heeded, with the humble cow no longer simply an instrument for human satisfaction. So such paintings seem to me no less significant and revelatory than the way in which the nineteenth-century painters in Germany and America (such as Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and the Hudson River School in the United States) enabled many Christians to see for the first time the beauty of the wilderness in its own right, and with that insight its potential to mediate experience of God.13
I have deliberately avoided here some of the larger claims I make in my books, for example about the nativity or kenosis, or divine identification with human suffering, partly because these are more difficult to explain in so a brief compass, but mainly because I think that smaller examples can make my point equally well. Art can lead theology, and that includes the visual arts. Nor is it hard to see why. Intellectual propositions do, of course, lay claim to truth, but it remains a truth without any necessary impact upon us, whereas the artist’s metaphors and images invite engagement and interaction, and so theology becomes what it should fundamentally be—in service of a practiced religion. Therefore, so far from being frightened by controversial images or metaphors, it behooves us at least to give them serious consideration. Perhaps the earliest hymn to survive from the post-biblical period is to be found in the writings of the third century writer, Clement of Alexandria.14 In that hymn Christ is compared to a horse’s bridle, and God himself to a woman with lactating breasts at which we suckle. If earlier generations were that open to new images and change, so too should we be. z
NOTES
The sacramental can thus be seen to build upon the symbolic and metaphorical inasmuch as, though the latter are not sacramental as such, it is not hard to see how the process which they utilize might extend to the more explicitly sacramental participation of one thing in another where too there is both similarity and difference, as in earthly light and heavenly light, running water and living water, and so on. Indeed, that very fact of difference that is opened up in analogical language and action helps identify another key contribution that the imagination can make towards an encounter with the divine, and that is in the essentially open-ended character of all imagery and symbol. That is to say, the interpretation of such devices can be pulled in quite a number of different directions, and so the question of an alternative religious world can be raised even when such a thought was far removed from the intention of artist or speaker. This is because once we move beyond the literal, the multivalent character of possible comparative allusions cannot be strictly controlled, and indeed one might argue that it is the mark of a great poet or artist to welcome such allusive richness. So the transition to the immaterial can sometimes be imaginatively made even where such thoughts were far from the creator’s mind, and perhaps even from most of his audience or viewers.
Given the emphasis within Judaism and Christianity on the verbal, my point is most likely to be accepted in respect of verbal imagery, and indeed some have seen the development of the biblical canon largely in terms of the development and transformation of existing metaphors.5 So, for example, in his classic 1948 work, Austin Farrer argued that this is how Jesus was able to work within an existing Jewish tradition, in giving new life to its existing metaphors. Even so, painting might seem to be in a quite different category, with the visual image merely repeating what is already known rather than contributing in any way to its transformation. Indeed, given biblical strictures on visual imagery, one might argue that images tend to earth us in present reality rather than carry us beyond to a transcendent God, and one might find this point amply confirmed by the way in which, in ancient Israel, images of the surrounding gods actually encouraged fertility practices rather than the move to a different order of existence.
But I would contend that such problems only arise when the visual arts are misunderstood as merely illustrative, whereas, whenever they are seen as really concerned to move us into a different world, the danger ceases. Not only that, there is some evidence to suggest that so-called primitive societies implicitly appreciated precisely this point, and were far from being as naïve as they are commonly portrayed. At least, that is one way in which to consider the wide use of aniconic imagery in ancient religions, as with the xoanon for Athena in ancient Athens, or their distortion of the human image to represent the divine, as in the common three-headed god that is found throughout the ancient world.
Even so, it may seem hard to comprehend how the visual imagination might have made, or could make, a significant contribution to Christian revelation and subsequent tradition. So let me end by offering two rather different examples: the first the transformation of Abraham’s offering of Isaac in Genesis 22 into the Akedah or “Binding” of Isaac in the Jewish tradition, into a “type” of the sacrifice of Christ within the Christian tradition, and to the self-offering of Ishmael in the Muslim tradition; and the second, the myth of Orpheus and its impact on human regard for animals.
In respect of the former, largely under the influence of biblical criticism and Kierkegaard’s focused attention on the tale, Christians have gone back to reading the story as essentially Abraham’s dilemma. To my mind, that seems unfortunate, since the story dates from a period in which attitudes to children were quite different, with them seen more like a form of property entirely under their parents’ discretion. So in the re-writings that occurred in all three religions rather more was at stake than simply a search for precedents for later actions. It was also a matter of lively imaginations engaging with the story and seeing its deficiencies in terms of what it suggested about God. Instead of people being urged to offer themselves self-sacrificially, what was presented was a story of an individual offering another in place of himself, even if that offer was also of someone loved. So, in my view, the early church fathers rightly suggested that it must be Isaac himself that makes his own self-offering even as Christ did, just as the Jewish tradition used ingenious arguments to conclude that Isaac was in fact aged 37 at the time.6 Because the following chapter opens with the death of Sarah, this was taken to indicate that she had died through shock at what had nearly happened. So, in order to determine Isaac’s age at the time of the attempted sacrifice, all one had to do was deduct her age at the time of her death from her age when she gave him birth (Gen. 17.17); hence 37 (127-90). Equally, the Islamic tradition insists that such a model of self-offering must have been made by the ancestor of the Arabs and thus of the Muslim religion. Ishmael then firmly emerges of an age to decide for himself.
In our modern context it would be all too easy to be patronizing about such arguments but that would be, I believe, a huge mistake, for underlying them were profound moral concerns. Yet it seems unlikely that such concerns would ever have arisen with sufficient force had it not been for the power of the visual imagination. Not of course that there were paintings available at the time that confronted the full horror of a tortured child, but it is still possible for us today to feel something of the power of that visual objection if we turn away from idealized versions like Rembrandt’s two versions and look instead at artists such as Titian and Caravaggio who force us to confront the full horror of the incident in the face of a screaming child.7 To use the language of “correction” for which I have been so criticized, it is the same capacity as gives rise to painting that helped generate (rightly, in my view, for most of the history of the Christian tradition) the rejection of the way in which the narrative was originally told, though still with a more ultimate principle in view, that the sacrifice of Christ should be seen as the appropriate model for all other sacrifices.
None of this is to deny that in most cases Rembrandt would prove to be the most spiritually enlightening of the three painters mentioned. But sometimes loyalty to an older way of reading can mislead, and this would seem no less true of how the myth of Orpheus has been treated, with his lyre able to unite the animal world in a spirit of harmony and reconciliation in general taken as a lesson for humanity rather than of significance for the animals in their own right. Perhaps the point can be seen most clearly if we turn to the related images with which Americans are now probably most familiar, the various versions of Edward Hicks’ famous painting The Peaceable Kingdom.8 One such was used on the front cover of Stanley Hauerwas’ book of the same name. Yet, despite the numerous ethical insights that Hauerwas has given the contemporary church, surprisingly the painting is nowhere discussed in its own right within the book’s covers, but instead it is used to argue for Christians living peaceably as a means of representing an anticipated future for humanity of such reconciliation and peace. Nor were Hicks’ own intentions significantly different since he intended his paintings to speak both of the overcoming of differences in human temperament more generally and in particular between two strands of Quakerism.9 As such, his work neatly reflects a pattern that has dominated most of Christian history, with animals seen purely instrumentally. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, they were viewed at least by monks in largely symbolist terms, lions for example as representations of the resurrection and so forth, as various Bestiaries indicate.
Yet the Orpheus legend was one way in which artists could challenge the near universality of such a perspective. Take the minor seventeenth-century Flemish painter, Roelandt Savery. He produced no less than twelve versions of the incident, and the reason is not hard to find.10 He lived in a world still dominated by the demand that artists paint great themes of Bible, history, or myth, but what really interested him was the animals themselves which he depicts with great delight. But perhaps a better example comes from a little further north and from a Dutch Reformed elder, Albrecht Cuyp.11 Here, too, we see delight in the scene, but, if we turn to some of his other paintings, we can also discern something rather more. His repeated theme is of local cows, bulging with fat because they reflect the prosperity of the people. But they are also strangely graced by light; indeed, I would suggest, by a divine light. In short, Cuyp, is, I believe, enticing his viewers to see the ordinary cow transfigured, as also something valued and esteemed in God’s eyes in its own right: a revolution in Christian attitudes, were it but heeded, with the humble cow no longer simply an instrument for human satisfaction. So such paintings seem to me no less significant and revelatory than the way in which the nineteenth-century painters in Germany and America (such as Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and the Hudson River School in the United States) enabled many Christians to see for the first time the beauty of the wilderness in its own right, and with that insight its potential to mediate experience of God.13
I have deliberately avoided here some of the larger claims I make in my books, for example about the nativity or kenosis, or divine identification with human suffering, partly because these are more difficult to explain in so a brief compass, but mainly because I think that smaller examples can make my point equally well. Art can lead theology, and that includes the visual arts. Nor is it hard to see why. Intellectual propositions do, of course, lay claim to truth, but it remains a truth without any necessary impact upon us, whereas the artist’s metaphors and images invite engagement and interaction, and so theology becomes what it should fundamentally be—in service of a practiced religion. Therefore, so far from being frightened by controversial images or metaphors, it behooves us at least to give them serious consideration. Perhaps the earliest hymn to survive from the post-biblical period is to be found in the writings of the third century writer, Clement of Alexandria.14 In that hymn Christ is compared to a horse’s bridle, and God himself to a woman with lactating breasts at which we suckle. If earlier generations were that open to new images and change, so too should we be. z
NOTES
- E.g. “correctives to the general thrust of Scripture.” See David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford University Press, 2000), 321.
- Ibid.; see also David Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford University Press, 2004); God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford University Press, 2006); God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2007); God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Presbyterian Church USA, The Westminster Confession of Faith, 3rd ed. (Lawrenceville, GA: Committee for Christian Education and Publications, 1990), ch. 23.1.
- “The Metaphysical Poets,” in F. Kermode ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot(London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 64.
- Originally published as The Glass of Vision in 1948, it is now available in an edited format (with six additional essays by commentators) as R. MacSwain ed., Scripture, Metaphysics and Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
- For a more detailed discussion, see Tradition and Imagination, 237-60, esp. 245-51.
- Rembrandt, 1635 (Hermitage, St Petersburg’s) and 1636 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich); Titian, 1543 (Santa Maria della Salute, Venice); Caravaggio, 1603 (Uffizi, Florence).
- S. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (London: SCM, 1983).
- Emphasized in C. J. Weekley, The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 51-64.
- A version from 1628 is in London’s National Gallery.
- Orpheus charming the animals, 1640 (private collection, Boston).
- For some examples, see Landscape with Herdsmen, 1650 (Corcoran, Washington); Cows in a River, 1650 (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest); Young Herdsmen with Cows, 1655 (Metropolitan Museum, New York).
- For further discussion, see Enchantment, 113-19.
- Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, 3.12.101.4.
