catapult magazine

[i’m putting this in “visual art” but there’s not really a clear spot in our categories for this discussion…]

i ran across “”http://communionofthearts.blogspot.com/“>the communion of the arts” the other day and wanted to get reactions to the “”http://communionofthearts.blogspot.com/2005/03/theology-of-art.html">theology of art" that was posted.

here’s a grab from the beginning of it (click the link above for more):

I distilled all I had learned into a three point theology of art (sorry not a story). Here it goes:

1. Art is a glimpse of the ineffable beauty of God

2. Art is a glimpse of the true soul of humanity

3. The artist is a servant motivated by love for his audience, who through a difficult process of training and apprenticeship acquires the heart and skill to be able to produce either singular works of power or works of craft or multiple replicatable designs in order to give his audience number 1 and/or 2 above, and this is good.

…

One of my main goals is to understand why all art is suffering in our day. I believe that ?secular? artists are being debilitated by false views of art just as much as Christians are debilitated by false views of art.

The T=G=B thing deserves much more attention. If it weren’t for some of the Reformed and neo-Kuyperian thinkers, we might still only have this Greek equation to go by.

The problem with the Greek equation is that beauty has become tied to rational “truth”. According to Greek sensibilities, if you use “truth” as your guide, you will experience “the good”. The “good” life, which means control over the body (Socrates was the best man in The Symposium because he had the utmost rational control over himself—he never got soused), makes you the most beautiful and desirable and gets you the best looking young boys at all the Ancient Greek parties. According to this Greek equation, certain music is considered dangerous because it causes you to lose control of your senses and your body, unless of course the music is beautiful, which means harmonious symetrical reasonable refined balanced and logical (tied to language).

This Greek aesthetic continues to dominate today, as is evident when people say good music is “excellent” music (meaning that it adheres to some objective rational form for excellence) or that we are moved by an artwork because it is true. As Christians, we know that there is much artwork that moves us precisely because it is so false. False not because it is irrational, but because it is not of God’s Spirit. So, instead of making categories for art, we must learn to experience art with Christian ears and eyes, with our bodies (not just our minds). Discerning truth from falsehood, goodness from evil, beauty from ugliness is a spiritual discipline, not a rational practice. Trying to make art theological, then, is akin to this Greek method of categorizing and controlling, of making equations for God’s nuanced cosmos. What you’re trying to do, however—supporting artists with good theological language—can be very helpful. I know many Christian artists who don’t feel supported by the church. Some of them really need words to articulate what they are feeling. We need people to do that in the church because artists might not be so good at it themselves.

So here are a few people who give some very good words to help artists. It’s my own short list of books. It might overlap with geoff3, judging from what I’ve seen from him so far. I’m sure lots of *cino-ites could contribute many additional names and titles.

1. A Christian Critique of Art and Literature, Calvin Seerveld (Do you know Albert Pedullah? He’s an artist in New York affiliated with All Angels Church. He can get you a copy of this book). More Seerveld: “Rainbows for the Fallen World”, “Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves”.

2. Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, Hans Rookmaaker (student of Schaeffer, I think.)

3. The Challenge of our Age, Hendrik Hart (this is not specifically music-related but it is a great book that can be used to understand how we are to do our work in the Spirit of Christ in this North American context)

4. The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger (this is the essay in which Heidegger shows that poetry is necessary to, and better than philosophy at subverting technicism…very relevant to our topic.)

5. I haven’t read too much of his stuff, but I think Lambert Zuidevaart tends to think along the same lines as Seerveld. Lambert is coming at art from Kant’s Critique of Judgment—a very fruitful place to start… pertaining to this idea of the relationship between taste and reason.

honorable mentions: “Art and Soul”, “In the Twilight of Western Thought”, “The Sacrifice” Andrei Tarkovsky (a film)

ps.
geoff3: I can’t believe you exist! I just came out of a philosophy masters program thinking that my dream of a Christian “aesthetics of aesthetics” was a lonely fantasy. Seerveld goes far but there is still much to be done. I’ve been set on this path ever since I read Kant’s ideas about a community of taste or a “common sense”. And I’ve experienced this common sensing in my band and with a few others. I’d like to see the Christian church develop a more unified aesthetic and believe it can only happen by doing and experiencing art together while trying to feel it truthfully. Maybe then, when the church develops more of a Christian taste, we’ll start to have better theology and believers will better understand how to hear God speak in Scripture!

Hello Grant and Jeff,

Well Grant has summed up my thoughts on truth and beauty, so I don’t need to prattle on about it Jeff, as there should be an end to words at times I think!

Books:
Seerveld’s ‘Christian Critique’, yep.
but also Seerveld’s ‘In the Fields of the Lord’, edited by my friend Craig Bartholomew.

Rookmaaker ‘Modern art…’ yep, but also The Complete Works of Hans R Rookmaaker, especially vol 6 (i Think) ‘Our Calling and God’s hand in History’. Published in Britain by Piquant. There’s other stuff in this weighty tome, such as ‘The Philosophy of Unbelievers’, which is wonderful stuff.

Michael Polanyi – ‘Meaning’ is probably an easier read than Knowing and Being and such like. ‘Meaning’ has chapters (formerly lectures) like ‘From Perception to Metaphor’, ‘Validity in Art’ and ‘Visionary Art’. Polanyi does, it seems to me, work from a creation, fall, redemption motive and has some stunning insights. There is also an article, which I have somewhere, called ‘What is a Painting? I’ll try and dig it out.

Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen edited a book called ‘Pledges of Jubilee’ which was produced in honour of Calvin Seerveld. This has some lovely chapters on aesthetics.

A great little movie, quite underestimated in my opinion, was Pleasantville, which has a wonderful way of highlighting the problem of prescriptive art, something that Grant has mentioned in his last post. Great performances by Toby Maguire, JT Walsh, William H Macy, Jeff Daniels and Joan Allen.

‘I can’t believe you exist!’ Yup, that would be me in all my madness, Grant! That’s why my wife says I’m difficult to employ!! I agree so much with what you say about Seerveld and needing to develop what he says, but there is a reticence to publish such stuff. I wrote a manuscript for a publisher, who said yes to it and then no, after a business meeting where they decided to reduce their number of titles! A simple little thing about the scriptural principles for artistic activity. Part of the marketing problem as they perceived it, was that ‘we’ already have Rookmaaker and Seerveld, implying that there was no room at the inn for ‘another’ book on the arts! Where has the publisher’s sense of adventure and cutting edge white-knuckle-ride-ism gone?

With my small group in Bristol, I’ve been made aware of this thing called aesthetic language and the desperate need we have to such a language for our art, that obviates the necessity to use someone else’s ‘forms and norms’ to produce something from a christian worldview. So, my next job will be to write an article for Club Urban, a London based group, as we have been discussing similar things. My starting point is this thought from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power…Till then the Christian cause will be a silent affair.’ [Letter and Papers from Prison’, p300.]

Geoff

I laughed heartily at your comment about the unemployableness of your skills. I feel like each year I make myself more and more unmarketable, unless of course large corporations suddenly decide that philosopher-musician types are needed to help big business. I’m looking into becoming an “existential investigator” after seeing I “heart” Huckabees on DVD recently.

I like the Bonhoeffer quote about a new language. What did he mean by this? I like to think that we don’t even need language per se. Christians just need to develop more attunement to the many ways the Spirit is communicated outside and within language. Part of the appeal of music for me is that you can put the emotion, the feeling, the spirit of Christianity—longing for the kingdom, joy, ecstacy, perserverence etc.— right into someone’s heart or feet or ass, bypassing the logical censors as it were. The problem is that people need words to help them “know” what they are feeling. Or at least they think they do. People will never understand how our band’s music is “Christian” if they’re looking for direct Bible quotation. They have to learn to feel the feelings in the Bible in order to detect that same feeling when it comes at them in music, visual art, movies etc.
I think Bonhoeffer probably became keenly aware of this deep connection when he visited the African-American church in New York. The spirit he felt in that church no doubt resonated with Bonhoeffer’s sense of the Jewish suffering in Nazi Germany. That would be a great place from which to embark on a “proof” of this non-lingual spiritual communication. Such a communication seems to have happened first in the realm of Bonhoeffer’s feelings before it came to his lips in the form of theological language.

Hi Grant,
I’ll get back to you after I’ve exercised one of the practical abilities left to me and have watched Enterprise!

But I’m serious. Today is a bad day for thinking I’ll never be employed in full-time work! It is a serious dilemma, is it not to the reformationally minded aesthetic?

Geoff

Hi again Grant,
I’m sure Capt Archer will save the day for the Planet Vulcan, so here goes on the what was Bonhoeffer getting at line of thought. To quote him at length: (he is writing to Eberhard Bethge’s son, Dietrich Wilhelm on the occasion of his baptism, May 1944)

‘In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our own fault. Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking and organising must be born anew out of this prayer and action. By the time you have grown up , the church’s form will have changed greatly. We are not yet out of the melting-pot, and any attempt to help the church prematurely to a new expansion of its organisation will merely delay its conversion and purification. It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when men will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. [b:033a2d5cf4]It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power…[/b:033a2d5cf4]

The renewal that you and I long for, is still around the corner, Bonhoeffer tells us to continue to pray and act righteously, but not to hold on to the old language, the old organisation. Until then the ‘Christian cause will be silent’!

Grant >>> Part of the appeal of music for me is that you can put the emotion, the feeling, the spirit of Christianity—longing for the kingdom, joy, ecstacy, perserverence etc.— right into someone’s heart or feet or ass, bypassing the logical censors as it were. The problem is that people need words to help them “know” what they are feeling. Or at least they think they do."

Whether we paint, sculpt or play music, there is still a language behind it, if you like, but whereas poetry and preaching put these things in a linear fashion, music and art ‘speak’ instantaneously, such is the power of the medium. Wasn’t it Marshall McLuhan who wrote ‘the medium is the message’? Our mindset is still in the old ‘organisation’, framework or forms. The preacher has to say it all before people believe it!

When Jesus spoke we gather he wasn’t like the pharisees and the scribes, but spoke with authority. We can imagine the didactic teaching of the authorities, but Jesus told stories, parables and this had such a power over the people. We need the same kind of language renewal now, we need to see that the world has moved on from didactic preaching and now the ‘forms’ of communication are much more highly developed. This is the leap we have to make, in God’s good time! This has nothing to do with the sin of relevance as some might crib, but with revelation for those in need of reconciliation and redemption.

Let’s forget about self-preservation and move on to ‘conversion and purification’ and from there to renewal.

Geoff

Hi Guys, thanks for the lists.

Fortunately for me, I’m a practitioner/popularizer – so I can find ministry work. Hopefully I can, along with others, start a movement that will draw enough people to read your books and pay you fees to speak! Obscurity now – reformation leadership later!

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Well, I think Grant and I need to run a conference along the lines of ‘Creative and Unemployable?’ T’is no fun!

Geoff

Hi Grant,

All this talk of a new aesthetic language makes me think that we need to work from something as a starting point, to outline a few principles.

As I spend most of my time writing I thought I’d scribble something to see if we can bounce this thing around.

If I can take for granted that you are conversant with the creation, fall and redemption motive, then this is where I’ll start. I not only see this as a ‘groundmotive’ in the Dooyeweerdian sense, but as the narrative thread of scripture. Generally speaking in narrative terms, as a writer of sorts, I can see it being analogous with plot, plot conflict and plot resolution. In terms of the stuff of art we could see this as form, malformation and restoration (or reformation if you wanted to highlight a literary quality).

How would this have a bearing on an aesthetic language? Broad guidelines!

Creation/ Form – alludes to the stuff deposited in creation that are here for us to righteously develop. It isn’t stuff set in concrete, Dooyeweerd talks of the ‘opening process’, I can see here potentialities, things that need developing, not stuff which is already perfected, because it has God’s fingerprints all over it. Form also speaks to me of playfulness, nuances, it is the stuff we play with to create; Jeff in his art, you in your music and me in my writing. Paint, notes and words. Jeff has one up on us, as his gift produces something which has an immediate impact, our products are quite linear and need unfolding.

Fall/Malformation – This speaks to me of distortion, sins influence on everything from the human image to the things we make and break. I think this is where your notion of dissonance comes in? I can see this in paintings, music and literature, from Max Beckmann’s art, Marilyn Manson’s music or Kundera’s ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’.
It can cover themes from exploitation to alienation and beyond. It wouldn’t present such themes in a consonant way, but will reveal plot conflicts, musical tension, disturbing images with an aversion to sentimentality, sensationalism or ready-made (synthetic) resolution?

Redemption/restoration/reformation – Changes the direction of things, points to the hope of redemption and consummation. Plot resolutions may not provide an ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ ending. All will not be well in the world when you depict such a thing in art or music or literature. There are always things left unresolved. It would suggest a starting point to redirect our development of ‘Form’, back towards God and away from satisfying our basic lusts/desires for things in this world, to replace God as the first and foremost One to serve. It stops the misdirection of a character, changes a distorted image etc., but it doesn’t then represent such things as suddenly perfected, but it should I think show signs of hope, that reformation is under way.

I think an aesthetic language should be robust enough to cope with all of these themes. It can’t be exclusively creational, malformational or reformational i.e. focussing on one of those things to the exclusion of the others. It shouldn’t be prescriptive in its application; an artist isn’t expected to put all of this into every painting, a musician into every piece or song. I think we’d all go mad! It is really I suppose offering a foundation for an aesthetic language which is the product of a Christian worldview.

From this little perception I think metaphors can grow, as we develop the practical outworkings of it. What do you think? Am I showing signs of my unemployability again? Does any of it make sense?

Peace,
Geoff
By the way Grant, what kind of stuff does your band play? A shame you can’t attach an audio file to the discussion list.

Geoff,

You can check out one of our songs on *cino right now. The band is Overhang. The name references the “rock is dead” claim (if rock is dead, then what is this that continues to hang around?). Our music might be considered a hang over after everyone’s sobered up from the sixties and seventies and eighties etc. etc.

I’m on board with how you’re talking about an aesthetic language, but I still need to work through this seemingly unshakeable notion I have that music is not a language. Perhaps I’m actually agreeing with you, though. Maybe we’re talking about the same thing, but I’m just more unwilling to call it a language. Yes, music communicates. And it has a form that we understand in our own cultured sense, but I see language as linked very specifically to logic. The Greeks linked language very closely with thinking. In fact, people considered thinking to be a dialogue with oneself, a lingual (though often silent) communication. Part of why the ancient Greeks were skeptical of music in and of itself (outside human speech), I believe, is because they valued the intellect (the soul?) as the controlling force and therefore music unfettered by language (body) was considered dangerous and perhaps even inhuman. Since we carry the weight of this history, I am reluctant to speak of music as a language.

I think of music as in the realm of feelings and very close to spirit. It is what gives life to our language. Indeed, there would be no language without music. Speech depends on a degree of musical skill, of rhythmic stops and starts, breathed vowels at various pitches, tension and release in order to communicate. Do you see what I’m getting at? So even the creation, fall, redemption narrative depends on a certain musical attunement if human beings are to relate to the words that describe people and their actions thousands of years ago. In order to keep people reading or listening to the redemptive historical narrative, their spirit must be prepared and satisfied by the tension and promise of release within the story. I’m saying that music might be considered the emotional in-spir(it)ing that opens us up to the narrative, that allows us to relate to the words as living meaningful “things”. Because without a certain “musicality” that humans bring to the words, they just remain dead signs. They need to be breath’d just as the Jews breathe the spirit of the Law when they speak those old words afresh during their worship services. I realize I’m letting my prejudice for music monopolize this discussion of aesthetic language. I don’t mean to suggest that Christians ought to learn how to speak only in music so as to truly hear the Holy Spirit. Music has its own unique creaturehood that differs in kind from visual art, but I think when we use linguistic or even visual art models for explaining all art (as I think maybe Seerveld does in Christian Critique of Art and Literature), we are not considering the true nature of music as its own unique artistic expression. We have not dealt adequately with music in our Western culture and perhaps it deserves its own philosophical discourse. But I’ll just stop right here and trust that we’ll get to that eventually.

Hi Grant,

Loved it! My kind of music! However, which ever one you are on the pic, you make me feel OLD!!!

Musical Language? – Maybe there is a difference between the creation/construction of a thing and its delivery/performance? Sure, when I listen to Overhang, U2 or Arvo Part, I’m not thinking now where’s the creation fall or redemption bit, or ah, yes I can see the dissonance equating to this or that theory. But if you analyse it, you are using langauge to do so. Perhaps there is a difference between the static arts (painting, sculpture) and the kinematic arts, if I can use that word here?

I shall give this some more thought, but I have to leave now for my Intercession Group. But thanks for the music, so good, so good!

Geoff