The Only Comment that Doesn’t Matter
On the common threat to the last bastions of the beautiful
“There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” - G.K. Chesterton
I’m a pretty open person. At least I like to think so. As I write this fear rises in me that someone from my past will emerge to discredit this, but I’m pretty sure I’m an open person because I’ve had to be.
When I speak openly about my faith in artistic spaces, the response is often an even-keeled: “That’s very nice for you; just, you know, don’t go overboard.” When I speak passionately about the arts in Christian spaces, the response is identical: “That’s very nice for you; just, you know, don’t go overboard.” The one thing I find the two groups have in common is a suspicion of the other. So when telling friends and colleagues I’ve started a blog on theological aesthetics, their natural response has been, “Who is this for?” A perspective informed by biblical creeds and propelled by artistic purpose ensures that some will find my views either too prescriptive or too woo-woo. Still if one group of friends thinks you’re too fat, and another thinks you’re too skinny, it could very well be that you’re neither.
What the church finds so strange about the arts is this kind of emotional abandon. Artists tend to be impulsive, freewheeling, and deeply in touch with their inner counsel. What the arts find so strange about the church is their unified chanting. Church people tend to be submissive, uniform, and overly bound to rituals. But could it be that the qualities they find so strange about one another, are those very qualities they have lost in themselves?
The church seems to forget that an encounter with God’s divine presence is an irrational one. It defies explanation. Its reason is visceral. When she restrains her charisma, therefore, she represses the childlike impulse of her heart to run to God. Likewise, today’s hyper-individualistic self-determined artists miss that the excellence of past traditions was rooted in a reverence for something greater than themselves. Dance began in a circle. Today it takes place in a mirror. Still, the greatest artistic experiences are always the kind that are self-forgetful.
In 2015, Lucas Hnath’s play The Christians debuted at Playwrights Horizons in NYC. I went to see it with my guard up. Plays involving Christians tend to be one-sided (notice I didn’t use preachy). I was pleasantly surprised to find it depicted a genuine crisis of faith. Hnath is himself an ex-vangelical. When asked why he wrote his play The Christians, he replied that “the church is a place where the invisible can become visible, if even for just a moment. I believe the theater can be that too.” Before my church friends balk at the comparison (as I once did), let me add these words from Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper:
“Is it fair to concede that, threatened with atrophy by materialism and rationalism, the human heart naturally seeks an antidote against the withering process in its artistic instinct. Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and barren intellectualism would reduce the life of the emotions to freezing point.”
Kuyper recognizes that the arts have the power to liberate the experience of the inner life, which ancient thinkers for centuries connected to spiritual realities. It is only recently that humans closed their universe, and in doing so, they posed a threat to both the church and the arts: indifference to the invisible. The church and the arts are among the last bastions of the beautiful, called to direct human eyes to see a higher reality, and to declare that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The only comment that doesn’t matter is the comment that it doesn’t matter.
As I alluded to in my last post, there need not be conflict between what faith teaches us and what reason teaches us. There are truths that can be reached both through the means of the Christian faith and through our innate or natural reason. In the coming weeks (that is, coming every-other-weeks), I will introduce a series of posts that pull from both faith and art traditions, in an endeavor to distinguish what art is, by what art does. The main thrust of these posts is to define artists as agents of beauty, legitimately gifted to provide a means of human flourishing that only they can provide. Artists see themselves as called to a higher purpose. The church can, and should, get behind that.