What might theology have to do with art? I am sure if you have been a Christian and dabbled in some form of art for any length of time, you have given thought to this question already. And rightly so, since after all artistry is a derivative of the mind, and the mind is influenced by external forces, whether cultural or spiritual. Where a Christian artist must begin is not in studying the art of his time, without a bedrock of belief, or else through the influence of one style or another he may be swiftly caught up in the shallow rushes of the mainstream. This is not to say that one should not study and imitate certain aspects of contemporary art forms, but that he must understand his own stance in a broader context of the world – that is, his place in God’s world. Therefore to begin to answer the above question, it may help to conduct a survey of the development of Western thought in order to trace the parallel courses of both the secular and the Christian mind. In so doing, we see that art has not only followed the religious, philosophical and intellectual developments in the history of civilization but has oftentimes been a leading influencer. I will not delve into the criticism or theories on literature and art, but rather draw from history the mind of a Christian as it relates to artistic expression, and this from the insight not of artists themselves but theologians. Six prominent figures come to mind whose stance was in direct conflict with the blight of popular culture. But I must apologize at the outset if this comes across merely as a cursory look at what really deserves more time and study than I am able to put in here.
First Century, A.D. – The Apostle Paul
At the end of Old Testament history, false teaching infiltrated the church of God. Even after the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, that remained the case. From every side opponents of Christianity endeavored to subvert the gospel. We see this especially in the self-righteous religious elite who vied for the allegiance of God’s people. Early Christians would have been all too familiar with the veils of their culture during the Roman occupation; they themselves were not free from the luring trends of magic and the occult, or calling upon angels for help and protection from evil spirits. Christians were tempted at every hand by the prominent thread of philosophy that promised life apart from Christ.
The epistles of the apostle Paul openly challenge this pagan way of life. The first-century church was to be set apart as holy and not aligned with the popular culture. The life of any member was not to reflect that of his pagan neighbors – those that “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth,” as illustrated in the book of Romans. God’s eternal power and divine nature have been manifest in Creation since the beginning of time. Rather than honoring God, the unrighteous “became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” God therefore left them in darkness, wherein “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:18-25).
Such paganism was inculcated in art as in everything else. Homer’s Greek epics drew upon polytheism, and so did the works of the Roman poet Virgil. Theatrical arts in the Roman world would have aligned with the Greek playwrights of tragedy such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides who put to stage themes of the gods and heroes from their mythologies. Even the architecture of Roman cities reflected the worship of many gods, as evidenced by the temples erected in the glory of particular deities.
The famed poet Horace, who sat with kings and witnessed the turning of Rome from a Republic to an Empire, was a major contributor to the ideas of Epicureanism, the pursuit of a peace of mind by way of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The Romans adopted the aphorism Carpe Diem, one of Horace’s own devices, which meant “seize the day” and embodied the spirit of living in the moment upon one’s own power.
Caution was demanded of first-century Christians, to avoid walking the path of the pagans, “in the futility of their minds” (Ephesians 4:17). Assuming they were taught in the truth of Christ, they were implored not to harden their hearts and remain in ignorance. They were not to be taken captive by “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8). For a Christian is a child of light, and “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9); and from his lips flow “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” for his brethren (5:19). He ponders whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and things that are excellent and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8). With this new Spirit in their hearts, Christians were able to recognize that beauty and truth are rooted in God himself, where all else is darkness.
Third to Fifth Centuries – Augustine
In the third century and on to the fifth, the religion of the Manichees (Latin Manichaei, after the Mesopotamian Gnostic Mani) held influence over many well-meaning philosophers, since there could be drawn from it a reasonable explanation of good and evil. Stemming from Platonic ideas of the mutability of Forms, if the reader is familiar with these things, this position ultimately determined all physical form to be meaningless. It expressed disgust in the physical world and especially in procreation, which trapped souls in matter and thus to evil. In the mind of the Manichees, the physical was hostile to goodness and light. Their view of God, in effect, was of a divine who was good but not omnipotent, and unable to defeat or subdue the evil of his creation. Original Sin was rejected for a doctrine of man as having two minds, one good and one evil, his will divided.
A once avid follower of this religion was the bishop of Hippo Regius, St. Augustine himself, who in his thirties turned to Christianity and wrote extensive disputations against the Manichees. In one of his confessions to God he passionately laments being a part of them and offers a eulogy of God’s beauty and truth:
I fell in with men proud of their slick talk, very earthly-minded and loquacious. … They used to say ‘Truth, truth’, and they had a lot to tell me about it; but there was never any truth in them. They uttered false statements not only about you who really are the Truth, but also about the elements of the world, your creation. On that subject the philosophers have said things which are true, but even them I would think to be no final authority for love of you, my supreme good Father, beauty of all things beautiful. Truth, truth: how in my inmost being the very marrow of my mind sighed for you!1
Augustine’s convictions ran in direct contrast to the prevailing trends of his day. He even denounced the reading of the poets and fictitious prose for its allure to sin. Although only a sparse variety of literature has been preserved from his time, we know that the subject of magic continued to be a major theme in written and performing arts, as with the Latin poet Apuleius. One would not have to look far to see obvious traces of Stoicism, the philosophical system that assured one of his own self-confidence. Solace in the face of difficult circumstances was to be found in one’s own self, in one’s own power and character. The Roman playwrights such as the Stoic philosopher Seneca produced works for the stage that examined a dark side of love through tales of family drama and murder. From these grew the suspicion of love itself as a sin.
Augustine would have regarded those who were preoccupied with these stories, as well as the lauded actors who performed them, as being “swept along by vanities”2 and would himself have preferred to recite the Lord’s praises expressed through the Scriptures. His allegation of the Manichees could have just as well been directed toward the artists of his day:
About the creation they say many things that are true; but the truth, the artificer of creation, they do not seek in a devout spirit and so they fail to find him. Or if they do find him, although knowing God they do not honor him as God or give thanks. They become lost in their own ideas and claim to be wise, attributing to themselves things which belong to you [God]. In an utterly perverse blindness they want to attribute to you qualities which are their own, ascribing mendacity to you who are the truth.3
The neo-Platonist philosophers in his time would have believed in the unity of the beautiful, the good, the true and the real. Yet Augustine identified this unity as being in and from the one true God. While battling the great thinkers, his aim, in alignment with Holy Scriptures, was to remove anything from the Christian life that would hinder him from the sight of God.
Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries – Thomas Aquinas
Greek and Arabian philosophers continued to inform the minds of men far into the thirteenth century and beyond. From Plato and Aristotle branched many competing philosophical traditions; and the basic errors of these traditions could be attributed to a common thread traceable back to Platonic ideas of existence. Three prominent issues are detectable within the framework of such traditions, namely, the nature of being, the nature of man, and the nature of knowledge.4 However one interprets the facets of Platonic thought in all its absurdity, the inescapable underpinnings of such world view pertain to a separation of man from physical matter around us and a striving to obtain some ultimate “essence” as the model for existence. Of course, these unbiblical abstractions could only be fashioned by a mind that in its creativity claims divine wisdom. In other words, these ideas would have to “transcend the world of sensible things as the Creator transcends his creatures.”5 While this mindset prevailed in Europe, the Western world witnessed a sustained descent into secularism. From the elite schools, for instance the Latin Averroists in the Faculty of Arts, Christianity was being challenged at every angle. The Islamic philosopher Averroes taught that one is required to study philosophy in order to come to a proper understanding of religion. Whether inadvertently or not, this claim puts reason and human thought at a higher level of authority than the Word of God.
In a discourse on thought and religion against the Averroists, the prolific Italian philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas refuted the popular notion that any necessary truth excludes the possibility of faith. They would deny that even God could bring about faith or that the ears of the faithful could bear it. Such philosophers, he has written, do not “lack the high temerity to presume to discuss what does not pertain to philosophy but is purely of faith, such that the soul suffers from the fire of hell” or matters of “the Trinity, the Incarnation and the like, concerning which he speaks only in ignorance.”6 Aquinas believed firmly in a separation of the authorities of human reason and the revelation of God’s Word.
It is interesting to note that all the while religious themes dictated much of the art of the medieval periods when the Roman church grew to power over the state. Christian pageantries became more popular than Greek and Roman plays. Yet the medieval era was a dark age of illiteracy, and there are very few preserved works of literature from such time in the Western world besides epics, romances and poems of heroism, as in the Icelandic tale Beowulf and the French Song of Roland. Such legends would have been passed on orally by minstrels and bards, not read from a written record. So there would have been a contrast of themes between the pageantries and the tales brought by the minstrels. In one the accounts of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection would have been presented, while in the other the prevailing subject would have been the might, power, valor, inherent goodness and the glory of men.
Aquinas knew on the contrary that the goodness of man was not inherent, and man was not to receive all the glory. He taught as follows: “In God, to be, to live, to be wise, to be happy, and whatever else is seen to pertain to perfection and goodness, are one and the same in God, as though the sum total of His goodness were God’s very being.”7 Humans created in God’s image and furthermore transformed unto the likeness of Christ glean from and reflect this beautiful relationship.
Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries – John Calvin
Advancements in scientific discovery, particularly by Nicolaus Copernicus, brought about a revolution of learning and led to a flourishing of art and culture in the Renaissance. A great shift occurred from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that bridged the gap between the Middle Ages and the modern day. Fueling this embrace of human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science was a cultural movement known as humanism, the idea that man is the center of his own universe. Notable contributions to literature in this period were Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and the plays of Shakespeare. Whereas Dante dealt with religious themes, the focus of Chaucer and Shakespeare was more upon human character and virtue, but of a sort devoid of biblical truth and wisdom.
While humanism was erroneous in its approach to life on this earth, it did awaken European society to question the role of the Roman church and thus ripen society for what was to be a reformation of the Church. Among the renowned theologians of the sixteenth century who would come to be known as Protestant Reformers was John Calvin, whose teaching and writing brought about a great transformation in the lives of the people of God. His most influential work was the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was to be a practical guide for Christian life and piety. Here are the very first words of the publication:
True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves. But, while these two branches of knowledge are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other, is not easy to discover. For, in the first place, no man can take a survey of himself but he must immediately turn to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28); since it is evident that the talents which we possess are not from ourselves, and that our very existence is nothing but a subsistence in God alone. These bounties, distilling to us by drops from heaven, form, as it were, so many streams conducting us to the fountain-head.8
In such expression we find a direct repudiation of humanism. Calvin then warns against the Christian conforming to such worldly wisdom in the following:
For as long as our views are bounded by the earth, perfectly content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and strength, we fondly flatter ourselves, and fancy we are little less than demigods. But, if we once elevate our thoughts to God, and consider his nature, and the consummate perfection of his righteousness, wisdom, and strength, to which we ought to be conformed, – what before charmed us in ourselves under the false pretext of righteousness, will soon be loathed as the greatest iniquity; what strangely deceived us under the title of wisdom, will be despised as extreme folly; and what wore the appearance of strength, will be proved to be most wretched impotence.9
If this had been a truth grasped by the writers, sculptors, and painters of the day, you can imagine the effect it would have had upon their work, and upon the whole scope of artistic expression. This and much more as has to do with a biblical worldview can be mined in the deep treasure troves of the written works of the reformers.
Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries – J. Gresham Machen
In the aftermath of a counter-reformation, Enlightenment thinkers led society in questioning traditional authority and believing it was possible to improve humanity through rational change. The Scientific Revolution was a precursor to vast societal and moral revolutions in the Western world. These together cultivated the world for the destructive ideologies of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The idea of evolution by natural selection and the methods of psychoanalysis both attempt to explain human behavior apart from Original Sin and a Creator who gives his grace and sustains life by his providence.
Ideas of the Enlightenment brought artists and writers to express a fascination with nature, subjectivity and the self under the frame of Romanticism. In so doing they suppressed the traditional Christian notions of beauty and instead brought about a rediscovery of human sensibility. Then art entered the Modern period as the Industrial Age and advances in technology drove the subject matter toward real-life issues and experiences. Those experimenting within the structure of Modernism produced secondary movements such as Impressionism, Cubism and the like.
At least one man at the turn of the twentieth century would recognize the degeneration that occurred even among artists, and he interprets the change in this way:
Despite the mighty revolution which has been produced in the external conditions of life, no great poet is now living to celebrate the change; humanity has suddenly become dumb. Gone, too, are the great painters and the great musicians and the great sculptors. The art that still subsists is largely imitative, and where it is not imitative it is usually bizarre. Even the appreciation of the glories of the past is gradually being lost, under the influence of a utilitarian education that concerns itself only with the production of physical well-being.10
This man was J. Gresham Machen, a Christian New Testament scholar and educator who faithfully upheld the lordship of Christ and the authority of his Word. By assessment of the situation he concluded there was a “narrowing of the range of personality” and a “limitation of the realm of freedom for the individual man.”11
Obviously Christianity suffered under the weight of these moral changes, and in and among the faithful churches grew the poisonous sprouts of liberalism. Men’s outlook of the material world began to be judged by modern standards, which were defined by present circumstances and leveled only by the surface. All rational thought was brought under the vise of scientific naturalism. As such, Christianity as once the dominant groundwork of society and belief in the West was being overturned. In truncated terms liberalism sought “the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God in connection with the origin of Christianity.”12 The result became a watered-down system of belief with a touch of “Christian” morality and terminology.
What this boiled down to, as Machen made out, was that “the dominant tendency…which [had] formerly prided itself on its freedom from bureaucratic regulation of the details of life, [was] toward a drab utilitarianism in which all higher aspirations [were] to be lost.”13 Christianity, in other words, like all other systems grounded in the past and upon ancient writings had no viability with the modern mind. Liberalism argued that Christianity cannot be maintained in a scientific age.
Mid-Twentieth Century – Francis Schaeffer
Unfortunately there was no evidence of reversal in the moral change as the twentieth century progressed. The widespread suspicion against traditional values continued to take hold as the philosophy of Marx and Freud, but also of Friedrich Nietzsche, played into all areas of society. Nietzsche derided the category of beauty as being only a product of the decadence of modern humanity. He posed instead that the only true virtue to be found is power. As such the Western world adopted a pessimistic view of life.
Art and literature basically rejected the compartmentalizing and the rigidity of modernism and espoused a mentality in which “anything goes.” Thus emerged the new postmodernism, characterized by the rejection of any outright meaning in a work of art and an embrace of multiple relative meanings, or no meaning at all.
As a distinguished theologian and philosopher, Sir Francis Schaeffer defended the Christian position with lucid and eloquent arguments against the confusion of both modernism and postmodernism. He writes:
Creativity, as opposed to mechanical construction, exists. So therefore the major theme is an optimism in the area of being; everything is not absurd, there is meaning. But most important, this optimism has a sufficient base. It isn’t suspended two feet off the ground, but rests on the existence of the infinite-personal God who exists and who has a character and who has created all things, especially man in his own image.14
Schaeffer would have bemoaned the fact that in Christian circles the view of the lordship of Christ was narrowed to a very small area of reality. On the contrary, God’s Word provides boundless riches for both life and culture. He would also write: “For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art can be a doxology in itself.”15
The portrait of a Christian artist as illustrated by Schaeffer displays one who is truly free, one “whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”16 As image-bearers of God, humans have an innate appreciation and longing for beauty. Art is a medium in which humans are able to create (we are “sub-creators”, as author J.R.R. Tolkien, living in the same time period, would write) and thereafter to contemplate and enjoy. Moreover, “the Christian’s life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.”17
Conclusion
It should come as no surprise that our world has not improved. Society today attempts by paltry preoccupations to fill the void of its present darkness. Ours is a time of confusion, chaotic pace and relativism, with all manner of efforts to replace Christianity with methods and programs that the hands of many grasp in vain, hoping they provide meaning, stability, and happiness. The irony is that these provide none – no moment of true peace or fortitude. One reason for the widespread confusion is a devaluing of beauty. The popular notion of beauty is more accurately described as “prettiness”, “glamour”, “attractiveness” or that which somehow heightens the emotions. This prettiness has replaced beauty, artificiality has replaced reality, and falsehood has replaced the truth.
What can be called neo-liberalism has seeped into art and literature today, as well as economics and politics, in which all aspects of contemporary life are driven by profit-maximizing data and governed by market analysis – hardly a fitting mentality for an artist. We are seeing as well a return to the age-old tendencies of occult practices and a fascination with the dark side of the spiritual realm. Magic and the human power that derives from its use are again prevailing in the stories being produced, as it was in ancient times. Likewise, one can easily detect modes of both Epicureanism and Stoicism today. We see in this survey that the secular mind has not altered from the time of Paul until now; though philosophy and art may put on a different face in each new era, the core of it remains one and the same. A Christian must be watchful and attuned or be indoctrinated by the mind of those enslaved to the unholy spirit of the age.
The Christian alone has an answer to the confusion of our society about the nature of true beauty, suggesting a metaphysic and aesthetic rooted in God and his creation. The beautiful is integrally tied to the good and the true, both of which are found and established in the reality of God alone. The Christian does not pursue pleasure and avoid pain for his peace of mind, and nor does he find his confidence in himself. Rather, for now, he adopts a philosophy of suffering, after his Savior. All the while his deep and profound joy is in the Lord, for all that is beautiful flows down from him, not from the artist’s imagination upwards. Like St. Augustine, the Christian goes to God and sees beauty in him, then looks at Creation and sees that it bears the mark of its Creator. Ours is a time in which the Christian ought to open his eyes to the light of the indubitable attributes of God, such as his beauty, truth, and goodness – and of course that most inscrutable of subjects: grace.
References 1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), III.iv (10). 2. Ibid., I.xviii (28). 3. Ibid., V.iii (5). 4. Anton C. Pegis, Introduction to Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (USA: Random House Inc., 1948), xvi. 5. Ibid., xix. 6. Thomas Aquinas, “On There Being Only One Intellect”, trans. Ralph McInerny in Aquinas Against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect (USA: Purdue University Press, 1993) V, 123 (143). 7. Thomas Aquinas, “The Summa Contra Gentiles” in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (USA: Random House Inc., 1948), XX (439). 8. John Calvin, A Compend of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. Hugh Thomson Kerr, Jr. (USA: Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1939), I.i.1 (3). 9. Ibid., I.i.2 (5). 10. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1923), 10. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 2. 13. Ibid., 11-12. 14. Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 84. 15. Ibid., 18. 16. Ibid., 91. 17. Ibid., 94.
Saved as a favorite, I love your website!