Faith and the Artistic Vision

I sometimes wonder what Christians are afraid of. I think Matthew Arnold wondered the same thing when he decided he’d rather have sweetness and light than the hideous hunchback seated on his shoulders that Dr. Pusey told him it was the main business of life to hate and oppose.

George Eliot must have wondered, too. Reflecting on her few years as an evangelical Christian, she pictures for us a cramped and prim Mary Ann Evans boiling currant jelly and asking to be useful in her lowly and obscure station, “doing the most trifling duty as the Lord demands.” Does the Almighty God really want his children to lead a grim life, forever fighting hunchbacks for his glory?

George Eliot and Matthew Arnold were not alone in their unlovely portrayals of the consequences of Christian faith. A surprising number of literary giants of the nineteenth century had early intimate associations with the evangelical church and then left it. George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, John Ruskin all lived for a while under the colors of the Christian flag, knew the fervor of evangelical Christianity, and turned back, George Eliot to the thundering bravery of atheism, Thomas Carlyle to the mystic reaches of transcendentalism, John Newman to the splendor of the High Church and at last to Romanism, John Ruskin to the Spirit of the Kingdom of Art. All these knew, and left, the evangelical faith. And while the reasons for their departure are varied and complex, grounded in free moral choice, there is among the variables one constant worth noting for its consequences for the Church today: creative souls in love with beauty, light, truth, they had no time for hideous hunchbacks.

Increasing concern over the confusion of creative, artistic believers on Christian college campuses today—not about their salvation but about their ultimate relation to the evangelical church—prompts me to write. I want to suggest that the precedent set by these literary giants can be reversed. Modern evangelicals need to reaffirm the compatibility of Christianity with creativity, the incompatibility of “grimness and sparseness” with the merits of the Gospel. If there is an area in which the Church has not explored the full implications of life in the Spirit, it may be in the beauty that emanates from the Bible, from Eden to the Isle of Patmos. And while an emergency in the nineteenth-century church, coincident with the lives of these writers, may in part explain this neglect, the consequent loss to the Church of an important aspect of full vision makes it important that in the twentieth century we restore the balance.

The tragic withdrawal of George Eliot is a case in point. That strict and meager faith she learned from the evangelicals in her early teens took no account of her capacity for life, her comprehensive sensitivity. When inner turmoil and mounting questions came she was ripe for challenge and when the challenge came she made her irrevocable choice. (Admittedly, that choice was made on deeper spiritual and philosophical grounds.) She turned to a group of heady thinkers who convinced her of the inaccuracy of Scripture and stimulated her to break her bonds, gladly relinquishing the sparse way of life associated with the old faith. Fired by a different vision then, she became in time what she always had to become: a clairvoyant, perceptive novelist, alas preoccupied with the littleness of the evangelical faith she had once espoused, and firm in her conviction that she had been rescued to stand alone, a whole brave being. An acquaintance, F. H. Myers, movingly recalls an encounter with George Eliot:

I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls,—on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God [quoted by Basil Willey in Nineteenth Century Studies, Harper Torchbooks, 1966, p. 204].

Her tone is triumphant in a way it never was in the older faith. Long before her brilliant mind had translated Strauss’s Life of Christ and imbibed the spirit of Charles Hennell’s intellectually elite circle of free-thinkers, her joyless confinement to putting up currant jelly, emulating the staid schoolteachers Misses Franklin and Lewis, and pleasing God as a “mere cumberer of the ground” had fallen far short of wholeness. Fierce and frightening in her denial, she certainly suggests that she shows little regret for a world view that seemed to her limited and sterile.

Thomas Carlyle’s evangelical excursion was of far longer duration. It began as he learned the Bible at his Calvinist mother’s knee and extended into early manhood, where at last, giving up a calling to the ministry and hating his occupation as a mathematics teacher, he lapsed into severe depression and nearly into mental breakdown. Ultimately doubting everything, he emerged at last with his new and transcendental faith—a doctrinal disaster.

But Carlyle never forgot the biblical motifs of childhood, pictures that recur in the rich biblical imagery of Sartor Resartus, although that childhood faith somehow never served him for the larger questions. And while a biblical faith has all this potential, his own experience of it failed to be comprehensive. He found it insufficient to counter real despair, to handle the integration of reason and intuition, to fire the moral imagination with zeal for the kingdom of righteousness, to slake his gargantuan thirst for a comprehensive victory over life.

Yet the remarkable thing is that all the trumpet blasts of Carlyle’s transcendental faith as he emerges from despair in Sartor Resartus, though theologically offensive to orthodox faith, are but a rekindling of the evangelical spirit he learned in his boyhood: “Belief is … to feel it in thy heart”; the seer has “looked fixedly on all Existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hull and garnitures have all melted away, and now to his rapt vision, the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed.” His highly animated “natural supernaturalism,” though unacceptable as a theological offspring of evangelical Christianity, does what the older faith, fully drawn, can also do: charge a man’s soul to sense his relations to the Creator and the created, and in this redemptive vision to come alive.

A markedly similar zeal for beauty and unity beset John Henry Newman in his quest for the perfect house of faith. John Henry Newman, with his equally famous atheist brother Francis, began his pilgrimage in the evangelical stronghold. As a boy enamored of myths, fairy tales, and secret ritual, John, his imagination unfed, soon abandoned evangelicalism, though never its faith. He moved slowly toward the high-church wing of the Church of England, while his brother, doubtless for other reasons, began his long trek to disavowal.

John Newman’s mighty intellect wrestled with the major religious questions of the day: epistemology, or how does one know what he knows; the authenticity of Scripture after the attacks of the German higher critics; the best basis for the authority of what one believes, whether inner light, Scripture, or antiquity (which he at last selects); the relation of all learning to the comprehensive kingdom of Christ. No question essential to the fullness of Christian life escaped his weighty consideration. At the same time, for sheer evangelical ardor he is almost without equal. Matthew Arnold, never an evangelical, yet longed to hear Newman’s resilient voice preaching the glories of God across the echoing Chapel of St. Mary’s, Oxford:

Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful? [American Discourse, 1883].

Says Newman of his own faith:

It is face to face “solus cum sola” in all matters between man and God. He alone creates. He alone has redeemed; before His awful eyes we go in death; in the vision of Him is our eternal beatitude [Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “1841–45”].

And of his early conversion, reflected on in later years:

I … believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious (and of which I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet) would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory [Apologia, “A History of My Religious Opinions to the year 1833”].

This was a man who bore a truly evangelical apprehension of a man’s encounter with the triune God. And yet he went to Rome.

John Ruskin, too, spent his early years in the midst of strong evangelical training, and never really forgot the lessons of faith. But he learned to love Gothic cathedrals, representational religious art, and for a little while life (despite a disastrous marriage), finally spending himself in a quest to fuse religious commitment with both the life of art and the regeneration of industrial society. He needed a strong principle of unity to encompass the disparities of this panoramic life. And since evangelicalism did not seem to him to provide it, an irrational faith much like the evangelical faith he once knew had to do it instead. The fusion of his last years took in visionary adoration, symbolism, natural beauty, abhorrence of the flesh, and a kind of spiritualism reminiscent of his childhood faith.

It is a remarkable coincidence that so many of the creative giants of the nineteenth century had an early evangelical phase. And while they had varying experiences with it and each drew away for different reasons, two things seem remarkably consistent. First, the evangelical faith, or orthodoxy, as they variously refer to it, recalls to each one a life style narrow in its approach to living and thinking, one that emphasizes denial rather than affirmation.

Yet secondly, and by contrast, each continued to seek for the kind of joy and transcendent experience that is intrinsic to full evangelical experience. For some this may have been a search for something they never really saw among evangelicals. Others may have been seeking something they had glimpsed of true evangelical faith, of life in the Spirit. Both bitter rejection and warmest nostalgia are evident in many of each author’s writings.

Despite the variegated hues of their personalities and concerns, there is another common element among these refugees from evangelicalism: a deeply sensitive and creative spirit, a mind that sees metaphor, paradox, and ambiguity and that demands of the life of faith a response to these intuitive apprehensions, some encouragement to the creative soul that the Kingdom of God understands his longings. The kind of harmonious response to life that each of these figures sought is inherent in the assets of the Triune God.

THURSDAY’S CHURCH

Pose it that no one is here,

That emptiness occupies, tax-exempt,

This otherwise rentable urban site;

Pose it that altar and wall and windowglass

Celebrate nothing but man celebrating

His flesh-made word: his language, his alphabet

As tablet, logos, holy writ; yet

What is the sense of the interceptedness of messages?

Whose is the who-ness letting itself be felt

As interceptor, sitting in Thursday’s church

As in Sunday’s? Not all that we know

Is all that there is to know of it, and its modes

Of receiving or sending back, except that prayer

Is its own medium, its ultimate means of communing.

Pose it that Thursday’s prayer comes speechless,

Non-linear, extending itself outward, down,

Upward, within: over all distances of within

And without, it is met, it is met.

NANCY G. WESTERFIELD

The full Spirit-filled life centered upon a Worthy Object, and thence turned upon the world in creative restoration, has long been one of the assets of the Christian Church. Such a heady, soul-firing concept is the heritage of Christ to the world he has redeemed; the pages of Scripture project a life full of the splendors of his victory. To tell a man he cannot fully “be” when Christ has made him for that end is unworthy of the high calling of redemption. The Gospel promises redemptive wholeness in Christ.

If the evangelical faith was in its inception this strong, inward, vitally renewing faith, why did these artists fail to see it that way? Underlying the many personal factors at work on a man as he approaches God is a historical context, which in this case provides a further key.

To preserve the bare outlines of the Gospel from the ravages of time and the temptations of the hour became the mighty task of nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity. The need of the hour was great. With a mighty roar the conclusions of German higher criticism had seemed to descend all at once upon the biblical foundations of orthodox faith. A man who wanted to believe had to believe in spite of what seemed overwhelming evidence. Matthew Arnold voices the despair of that age: “There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve” (The Study of Poetry). Against such a challenge the evangelical church chose to stand firm, and to that stand we owe a large debt. To succumb to radical scholarship would have been an irreparable mistake, and unnecessary, in the light of more recent conservative scholarship.

But this focus led somehow to a reduction of the faith to the bare rudiments, and became as well its greatest perversion. It became impossible to define faith, to define a Christian, to define the path to sanctity. The need for firm definition of the central issues somehow led to a prescriptive definition for life and a renunciation of all that the prescription did not include. It could make a man feel very cramped.

The evangelical community can lay claim to have touched, significantly, the lives of a host of creative geniuses in the nineteenth century, among them George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. Let us learn from their insights. The life of faith must speak to the full reality of the human personality. In our day we need a new and brighter balance. All the resources of Scripture cry out that the creative soul belongs to God. Standing firm upon doctrine and scriptural authority, the Church can refuse to return to that prescriptive life as “mere cumberers of the ground,” “cowering in fear of hunchbacks.” It can proclaim a wider message. A man can know in his redemption that he is made in the image of God, and there find joy.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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