Art as Incarnation

In a time when the menace of the years is forcing many into an undue emphasis on the sciences, it is well to remind ourselves of the tremendously important place of the creative arts in our total culture. Of course science is also creative. At its best it is man thinking God’s thoughts after him. Science is a way of discovering and expressing the truth about the physical universe in exact formulas, while the arts are ever seeking to express the beauty of truth in enduring forms.

All significant art is an attempt to give form to the chaotic, disorganized elements of experience, and to give a measure of permanence to the evanescent, the fleeting elements of experience. It is the God-like, creative energy of man, shaping a lump of clay and blowing the breath of life into it; turning water to wine; making of things that are seen a glory that never was on land or sea.

Art, like science, is a many-mansioned realm. Although this discussion is based primarily on the verbal arts, it is relevant to the others also, since all the arts are interrelated. The plastic arts exist in space, the musical arts in time, and the verbal arts unite both spheres. We need to remember what we are often tempted to forget, that the verbal or literary arts, like those more obviously sensuous, must appeal to the senses. The Idea must be expressed in words, in concrete terms. The Word must become flesh. This sounds almost self-evident. But how is this done, and what does this mean for the Christian artist? What is his task?

There are for him basically three areas of responsibility.

Responsibility To The Faith

The Christian artist has first a responsibility to his faith. All great art springs out of an inner vision. It is prompted either by a mighty faith or by a deep despair. It arises either from Carlyle’s Everlasting Yea or from his Everlasting No. It can never be the product of indifference. It may grow out of tormenting doubt, but never out of a glib and thoughtless credo. For the Christian, certainly, a glowing and triumphant faith will be his finest inspiration. But doubt, genuine doubt, agony of soul, may also be creative, as in the mighty drama of Job.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the Christian faith has been the fountainhead of the great stream of Western art in all its forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, drama, fiction. To call the roll of Christian artists in all these fields is virtually to call the roll of the greatest artists, men animated by the Incarnation, the central concept of the Christian faith, moved by the Crucifixion, and inspired by the Resurrection.

Dante, in creating his medieval cathedral of song, and later the supreme artists of the Renaissance—Palestrina in music, Michael Angelo in sculpture, Leonardo da Vinci in painting—all worked within the frame of the Roman Catholic faith. With the Reformation came a loosening of dogma and the flowering of a variety of credos, and with this breakdown of the basic unity there grew up a diversity of beliefs, a diversity that brought many values but which contained dangers also.

To some, the Reformation brought a more dynamic, a more real faith, gripping heart and mind. Simply to review the chief names in English literature is to feel the force of the Christian faith in the shaping of great poetry. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, that massive, complex, and lovely allegory, is informed throughout by Christian thought. And though his greater contemporary, Shakespeare, is not so specific, most of Shakespeare’s serious works are built on the foundation of the Christian view of man’s nature and destiny and of the moral order to which man is responsible.

Beginning in the Elizabethan period, but writing chiefly in the early years of the seventeenth century, there was a group of poets we call the Metaphysical School, and of these one of the most influential in his own time and now in ours was John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. We can still read many of his sermons, but he is now more famous as a poet. One of the most moving of his religious poems is “Good Friday: 1613 Riding Westward.” Within the imagery, within the startling conceits and paradoxes, the deeply felt emotion is conveyed, is incarnate.

Hence is’t that I am carried towards the West

This day, when my soul’s form bends towards the East.

There I should see a Sun, by rising set,

And by that setting endless day beget;

But that Christ on this cross did rise and fall,

Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad I do not see

That spectacle of too much weight for me.

Who sees God’s face, that is self life, must die:

What a death were it then to see God die?

It made His own lieutenant Nature shrink,

It made His footstool crack and the sun wink.

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,

And tune all spheres at once, pierc’d with those holes?

Could I behold that endless height which is

Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,

The seat of all our souls, if not of His

Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

By God, for His apparel, ragg’d and torn?

The passionate meditation on the mystery of our Lord’s suffering and humiliation turns into a passionate appeal to Him:

O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree,

I turn my back to Thee, but to receive

Corrections, till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.

O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,

Burn off my rusts and my deformity;

Restore Thine image so much, by Thy grace,

That Thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face.

No one can question the love and gratitude, the awe and adoration out of which the poem arose. The crucifixion of our Lord was to John Donne no theological proposition merely. It was an awesome reality fixed as it were forever against the sky, forcing the most stubborn sinner to his knees.

Along with the voice of Donne we can still hear the voices of Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan, and George Herbert. But a little later, Milton, that great organ-voice of England, arose, alone of Protestant poets worthy to match Dante. John Milton was the most learned poet in all English literature, and he ransacked all the realms of human knowledge to compose his epic on the fall and redemption of man.

In the nineteenth century Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, the greatest poets of the century, arose to bear their witness. In this country during the same period the chief names, aside from Whitman and Emerson, were those of Christian poets—Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Lanier.

And so even in this our own time the most influential poet is a Christian, T. S. Eliot.

In fiction, too, some of the greatest works are by men of faith. Of these there is none greater than the work of Dostoievski, the Shakespeare of the novel, who in like manner has explored the deepest recesses of the human soul. To gain some idea of the depth and power in the works of this man, particularly in The Brothers Karamazov, it would be well to read a little book about him by the very significant Russian philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev. In his foreword, this great Christian thinker says of the novelist:

Dostoievski has played a decisive part in my spiritual life. While I was still a youth a slip from him, so to say, was grafted upon me. He stirred and lifted my soul more than any other writer or philosopher has done.… The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in particular, made such an impression on my young mind that when I turned to Jesus Christ for the first time I saw him under the appearance that he bears in the Legend.

This tribute by the philosopher Berdyaev is powerful evidence of the profound insights that can be communicated within the art of the novelist. And there could be no clearer demonstration of the creative power of faith, for Dostoievski said of his own experience, “It was not as a child that I learnt to believe in Christ and confess his faith. My Hosanna burst forth from a huge furnace of doubt.” Russia has never raised up a more truly prophetic voice. He foresaw what was coming in the triumph of atheistic materialism in the land he loved, and its implications for the world. How different might be conditions in our time had the Russian people and the Russian intelligentsia given heed to that voice instead of to the deceptive fallacies of Karl Marx.

Thus there is laid upon the Christian artist this first responsibility to ground deeply his knowledge of human life in the divine revelation about man and his relation to God. An insecure and timid faith, or a naïve and unquestioning faith, will never do. Men of little faith can do no mighty work.

Responsibility To Art

Closely allied with this necessity is another responsibility imposed upon the Christian artist. It is his relation to his art. The truly Christian artist must be a committed and intelligent Christian, knowing not only what but Whom he believes. But he must also be an artist. Now this involves another sort of commitment, another type of supreme dedication, not only to God, but to one’s chosen art, to the service of God through one’s art.

Every art has its own unique disciplines, its own almost terrifying demands. The longing for the ideal is merciless. The true artist is never satisfied. We know something of the endless hours of self-denial and self-discipline imposed upon the musician. But so it is also in painting and sculpture. And so it is in the verbal or literary arts.

There has grown up sadly in our time a school of automatism, a product of our neo-romanticism, depending on the inspiration of the moment, like children doing finger paintings, smudging color about on a board until some strange and unexpected arrangement emerges from the mixture. In this activity, there is no painstaking effort, no slow and painful working toward a preconceived idea. But true art is the attempt to give form to the chaotic elements of experience. It is not mere self-expression, not the mere releasing of emotions, the juggling of images. It demands discipline.

The high service of God demands absolute dedication, and in like manner the true artist must be absolutely dedicated to his art. There should be no real conflict between these two masters, for in serving the lower the artist should be serving the higher, indeed serving the higher through the lower. Of course there will be varying degrees of consecration to one’s art, for some may not be able to devote their full time to it. But this very limitation may impose the greater demand for dedication upon the artist. He who is truly devoted to his art will allow nothing finally to crush his desire to fashion out of the unformed stuff of his experience images of beauty and truth and goodness. He can never rest until he has given expression to his moments of high encounter with all lovely things.

But associated with training and discipline must be a proper understanding of art in general, and of the particular art one is seeking to develop as a means of communication. If he is to succeed as an artist, the Christian must recognize the proper methods of art. Art is in a very real sense a sort of incarnation. It is communicating truth or experience to the senses and through the senses.

Here we must recognize a basic distrust some Christians have for the sensory nature of art, as if sensuous and spiritual were antithetic. Sensual and spiritual are opposites, it is true. But most of our experience comes through the senses, and we do not glorify God the Creator and God the Supreme Artist if we do not rejoice in the senses he has given us and the wonder and beauty of all that he has made to appeal to them. We are amphibious creatures, as it were, not yet angelic beings nor yet intended to be.

What is the place of human art in God’s economy? It goes much beyond mere reproduction. It is representation. Perhaps this explains the directions God gave to Moses for the construction of the portable Tabernacle in the wilderness, even in the Hebrews’ primitive and nomadic state. Everything was symbolic. There was beauty indeed, but beauty incarnated meaning.

The symbol is the essence of art. It is art’s means of communicating. A physical object or a concrete word stands for, represents, embodies something non-physical, ideal, spiritual.

Obviously there is a difference between the method of communicating in the Book of the Acts and that in the Book of Revelation. One is a historical account in literal terms; the other is a magnificent prose-poem written in symbols. If one were to attempt to reproduce literally on canvas the word-picture of the risen Lord in the first chapter of Revelation, the result would be ludicrous, for the figures are symbolic, representative; they cannot be literally reproduced.

By this and other means art suggests more than it says. It selects what is most suggestive. It reveals on a number of levels. It teaches by indirection. It is not didactic, directly pointing a moral.

The method of teacher or preacher is quite rightly the direct method of instruction and exhortation. But this is not the method of art. In art truth is revealed by being concealed, as Paul wrote that in Christ, the Revealer of God, are “hid” all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. The spirit is clothed in flesh. It is revealed by that which conceals it. This is the central paradox of the Incarnation of our Lord, and it is the paradox at the center of all true art.

So the artist must be forever seeking to incarnate, to make real the spiritual in physical terms. This presents enormous difficulties, of course. Milton wrestled with the problem in his mighty epic in which he was seeking to deal with the tragic plight of Man caught in the midst of a vast spiritual conflict of cosmic proportions. In Book V of Paradise Lost the angel Raphael, in trying to explain to Adam the spiritual struggle in which he is involved, expresses his dilemma in terms that can be applied to Milton’s own problem as an artist or to that of any Christian artist:

… how shall I relate

To human sense the invisible exploits

Of warring spirits …

how last unfold

The secrets of another world, perhaps

Not lawful to reveal? Yet for thy good

This is dispensed, and what surmounts the reach

Of human sense I shall delineate so,

By likening spiritual to corporal forms,

As may express them best, though what if Earth

Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?

There Milton’s Platonism is showing. Earthly reality is but a shadow of heavenly ideality. And there is the artist’s problem.

But this is the task of the artist—to find the symbols, the signs, which will image forth his vision. And for the Christian artist that must be a Christian view of life, of man’s nature and destiny as revealed in the Scriptures and in human history. Of course the Christian artist need not always use a subject specifically religious. He is under no compulsion to be strictly concerned with religious themes in his work, but everything he does must spring out of a total view of reality which is Christian. And everything he creates (or which as appreciative students or critics of the arts we hear or view) must be judged ultimately by the divinely revealed standards, the revelation on the three mounts: the mount of the Law, the mount of the Sermon, and the mount of the Cross.

It is indeed difficult for the Christian artist to combine properly his loyalty to the Faith and his integrity as an artist. Often these conflicting loyalties seem almost irreconcilable, but the masterful success of the greatest artists proves that they are not.

Responsibility To The Times

However, there is a third responsibility imposed upon the Christian artist which makes his task still more difficult: his relation to his time.

So often, it seems, the greatest art is a flowering, an efflorescence of the spirit of its age. It sums up and gives expression to the thought and attitudes, the hopes and fears of the times. It is a contemporary voice, singing, sculpting, painting in a contemporary manner.

And so indeed it must be if it is to speak to its age. It must speak in the contemporary idiom. Romantic escapism and Victorian prudery and prettiness are not going to speak to a realistic age. The Bible was not written for Victorians, for it contains passages of the most shocking realism. But by revealing, it judges. The portrayal of evil is not in itself evil. The intention of the artist determines the morality or the immorality of a work of art.

The artist who would communicate the timeless Word must know his times, must know the life and aspirations, the speech and manners, the idiom and accent of his times. Moses wrote in the idiom of his day, Isaiah in the idiom of his, and our Lord appeared at a point in time, the Eternal breaking into time, taking upon himself the form of a servant, clothed in the likeness of man.

So must Christian art be clothed upon. Does our music sound like feeble echoes of the past? Does our painting merely imitate? Does our architecture copy out the Gothic or the Georgian, preserving in a new age what was once a living symbol? Does our poetry lack passion and power because it cannot feel the troubled pulse of our age, or because we dare not express what we feel? Do our fiction and drama create an unreal world of worthless illusions? It is unlikely that a man divorced from his time can speak to it.

When we consider Milton, we recognize that his masterpiece was written not only for his own time but for future generations. He knew that it would never be popular. But with what magnificent courage he spoke to his times when for twenty years he deferred his desire to write a great epic, spent his days and lost his sight in the service of the state in an effort to bring greater freedom to his countrymen. The Areopagitica, his plea for freedom of the press, is one of the great documents for freedom in the arsenal of free men.

During those years of service to his country, he wrote little poetry—a handful of sonnets, a few of them among the most powerful in English literature. Wordsworth wrote of Milton’s use of the sonnet form that “in his hands the thing became a trumpet.” One sonnet illustrating that sort of trumpet blast is the passionate outcry against the Roman Catholic massacre of Protestants in Piedmont in north Italy. It is one thing to write such a sonnet of social protest. It is another and perhaps higher thing to give as he did £2,000 for the aid of his suffering Christian brethren.

At the opposite pole of the literary scale from this most learned poet was another John: John Bunyan, a contemporary who had almost no formal education, was unschooled, unlettered—which suggests that art is not produced alone by the highly trained. John Bunyan spent twelve years in jail for proclaiming the Gospel. But just as God’s purpose was wrought out in Milton’s long delay so that he could not have written the mighty epic without the noble years of service, so out of those years of imprisonment came the world’s most popular allegory, translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible. No one can read The Pilgrim’s Progress today without recognizing at once how wonderfully this unlettered preacher knew and portrayed the life of his time and how deeply he was involved in the issues of his day.

In contemporary literature there is Alan Paton’s eloquent and moving novel of the tragic situation in South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country. Here truth is made real, it comes alive, it walks about. Here pity and fear, love and hate, joy and suffering are no longer merely words. Here the principles of social justice and the problems of injustice are no longer abstract.

Alan Paton is a Christian artist involved in one of the great issues of our time. He is not content merely to write about it. In himself he bears the burdens and carries the sorrows of the downtrodden. The beauty and pathos of his singing arise out of passionate conviction and compassionate intensity. He knows the life of which he writes. He knows and loves the people. Not out of bitterness, not out of hatred, not out of fear, but out of love and hope he fashions a thing of beauty to touch the heart as long as men can feel.

Art’s power, then, is to speak to the heart and head simultaneously through the senses and the imagination.

The way of the Christian artist is to clothe the timeless in the timely, to express in contemporary forms the Eternal Word. He will not be swept away by the sensate culture of his time, fractured into a thousand atoms. He will be in it, aware of his age, speaking to it, but also above and beyond it, concerned about embodying living and abiding truths in forms that will be beautiful, even if impermanent.

END

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.