American and Christian Art

Toward a Revival of Identity and Beauty

Introduction

It truly is necessary for a nation to develop an art and an aesthetic sensibility all their own.  One of the greatest faults of the world we live in now and especially the protestant side of things is the enchantment with theories and little to no relation to reality or particularity.

This is the case with art from the Calvinist tradition.  I have heard and read and studied the relation of Calvinism to art and I am always disappointed.  I could never figure out why, though.  There was always a theory presented on how art should be beautiful and done to the glory of God.  There was always conversation on modes of expression and artistic renewal.  Deep and long essays on leaning into life as the grounds of the creative act.  But then the examples would come out.  And works that were clearly inferior and superior were presented side by side as equal.  Why?

I am not sure if my assessment is accurate but the problem may be that their theory of art is a universal theory of art which attempts to transcend national barriers and customs and that, as we have seen so often in these past few years, is a recipe for a loss of identity, majesty, flavor and true aesthetic punctuation that grasps at the divine.  Modern Christian art and artistic theory is attempting to be a theory founded on dogmatic identity and a universalist social commentary.

My goal is to point out a few ways in which the Christian artist lost his identity and classic aesthetic theory and has clung to theories shared with the universalist left.  They do this because to be an American Christian artist is not a legitimate or even righteous thing to desire.  They have been aesthetically duped in a way.  Christians will tend to steadily align their insights on art and philosophy of art towards a leftist framework and away from a classically Christian one.  They start agreeing with the left on what is and isn’t beautiful. 

This is a serious matter.  The task of building a Christian society is multifaceted and complex and involves more than just getting people to go to church.  If we are to desire a land and nation that points people to Christ as its first priority then we need to get art and aesthetic theory right.  It needs to be a part of the revival.

The Breakdown

I have no timeline of events but rather touchstones where Christians have strayed and gave up what they once held.  First is the loss of the substantial existence of nationality and religion and the elevation of the gift of artistic talent to the level of essence.

The breakdown of national identity meant that Christian artists had to find their identity in other places.  Some chose to be “Christian” artists, trying to find pure identity in the content of the faith.  A sort of kitsch.  Some tried to be “artists who were Christians” trying to find expression from within their life of faith. They tended to be into social issues and expressions of raw emotions and analyzing the relation of faith to modern culture.

The artists of the past had easier times figuring these things out.  A man was a Spanish Catholic artist or he was a Dutch Calvinist artist.  What happened when religion took the primary identity?  The Scottish presbyterians destroyed art because the Bible, as the reformation there understood it, superseded their Scottish identity as Catholics.  But today to be Scottish is to be presbyterian and to have churches with beautiful stained glass windows. In the American conservative presbyterian churches there is a jealousy to have stained glass somewhere because the Scottish presbyterian identity had been established.  Many conservative presbyterian ministers are wannabe Scottsmen and stained glass is their art.   

If a nation goes into exile, even while still living within their home land, they cannot produce an art.  As nations go into exile the more they will have to rely on theories to bind their artistic identity together and gradually they will adhere to universal theories like socialist theories or a Christianity that replaces national identity with doctrinal identity.  An Ethiopian Christian is not the same as a Christian who is an Ethiopian.  One has two intentional identities, the other has one identity and one accident. Something God allows him to be and enjoy for a time. In Aristotelian terms Ethiopian ethnicity and Christian faith are substances.  They are not accidents that can be maneuvered around.  But being an artist is an accident.  Talent is a gift not a substance of essence.  So the only way you can parse out your true identity is to be an Ethiopian Christian who is an artist.  The ethnicity and the faith are substantial to that man’s essence.  He could not make good art if he is trying to create out of mere accidents of ethnicity or faith.  The same rings true of the modern artist.  If you view the faith as mere content that you as a person of no real identity believes in then your art will reflect that.  If you believe the faith is something that God is letting you be for a time, how could you create art that reflects the glory of God?

That the faith is the substance of reality is a factor that is often left out of the Christian artist’s worldview.  The faith is often viewed as a package of content or a lifestyle that yields human thriving.

It is not that the faith’s content does not correspond with reality, or that true faith will produce true life, it is that the catholic faith established the universe.  The colors of baroque ceilings are the colors of Genesis one.

Protestants being concerned with the idea of the faith being that which established the universe is not surprising.  The quotes from Ignatius of Loyola may come to mind, “if she (the church) shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.”  But this is not what a Protestant would be required to mean.  That the faith established the universe does not necessitate that the Christian or the church on earth can make only true claims despite evidence otherwise.

The collapse of Roman Catholic art is partially because of an overbearing interpretation of authority and definition.  For the Roman Catholic the ability to see and to declare became one.  Their scholasticism eventually arrived at the collapse of existence and essence.  In essence existence is included.  Spirit is flesh and now transubstantiation is made dogma.

That was an unfortunate event for the Roman church but for protestants common grace had a massive effect and Kuyper had much to do with it.  The Calvinism of the Dutch allowed the artist to portray any figure as equal in dignity and equal at the end of a paint brush.  Kuyper also, as an analyst, saw that the reformed tradition split the spheres of life and each one became important in and of itself.  While he never would have advocated that each sphere was upheld by anything other than their service to God the sphere sovereignty thing made it easier for modernists to eventually view the artist as an essence of identity.  People were artists or they weren’t.  The talent did not matter, the vision did.

What vision was this?  Here we get to some deeply corresponding theories between the left and the Christian artists of today.  The vision was the ability to see utopia.  For the Christian today.  The purpose of art is to unveil the Kingdom of God.  And the most important relation is that both of these ideas are based on a reordering of social relations.  The Kingdom of God, to many Christians, has become a utopian endeavor.  And the separation the artistic and religious spheres has made it all the worse.  Modern Christian artists can be some of the most pernicious foes of religion because artists are seen as open to the Kingdom as it is laid out in parables and songs.  While religious people practice a rule based moral code that brings limitations to human flourishing.

As for its relation to leftist theory, the idea of art bringing forth a socially reordered utopia is almost no different than the aesthetic theories of the Russian Constructivists, the Soviets, and the fathers of all things critical theory, the Frankfurt School.  The final analysis of these groups have them praising a utopia which is beyond any form which the mind can comprehend.  A sort of absolute reintegration of man with the essence of life itself.  Malevich portrays this in his famous icon The Black Square.  Writing in 1919 in On the New Systems in Art he said this “All creation whether of nature or of the artist, or of creative man in general, is a question of constructing a device to overcome our endless progress.”

The utopians do see an end to progress but they do not see progress as ever making that leap from within history to outside of history.  Progress itself must be outpaced.  And art must prophesy this integration of everything into the now egalitarian social order.  Which is another way of saying a singularity where nothing is above or below.  Malevich’s painting White on White images this society of borderless boundaries and fluidless fluidity.  It is the pure potentiality of all possible existence that can be revealed beyond particular forms.  Malevich actually believed the medievals were working in this same capacity but the technological revolutions in creating paintings with great forms took over and the artist’s creatively died because of it.  His answer was for the artist to level up consciously and organize the chaotic technological progress.  The artist was to replace God and end any further development, labor or creativity.  Out of this Artist-God would arise a “white humanity” where that which exists would be free of all desire to move towards any ideal.  It is the consummation of history.

A similar theory of utopia was formulated by the Soviet Socialist Realists.  For the socialist realist the concern was with that which had not yet come to be. And what had not yet come to be was identifiable with the will of the state and socialist party rather than any sort of divine being. The artist’s duty was to prophecy the will of Stalin in how he was to create the new reality, for he was the true creator of the soviet world. He was the incarnation of the demiurge that was able to create and destroy in accord with how he envisioned the soviet society.  The painting was basically encoded with the message of the future as the artist tried to predict.

That gnostic idea strikes an odd tone to those reared in the American Christian milieu where Communists were all brute materialists and had no thoughts beyond themselves.  They were gnostics who loved the lowest god. They had many trappings of Gnosticism such as secret knowledge and the desire to transcend the physical. But where the old order Gnostics sought to reveal and overcome the deceit of the lower god known as the demiurge, the Soviet sought to unite himself to the demiurge because the Father above him had been killed by modernity.  The Socialist Realtists went from prediction of utopia to instantiation of it, much like the theological concept of bringing heaven to earth.  To build the Kingdom of God on earth.

My final analysis is of the Frankfurt School, where individualism in relation to the Kingdom comes into the artistic picture.  Theodor Adorno has a famous line “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  What he meant was that in a world that promotes a positive vision of what is good, true and beautiful and healthy, that which falls outside of it must be oppressed, even genocided.  Anything beautiful has to be made ugly because the ugly is that which is oppressed by the positive vision of the beautiful.  The beautiful image of society is an attempt to lull the masses into a stupor of oppressing the things that fall outside of it.  The aesthetic man and woman, the most basic building blocks of society, can no longer be appreciated through the lens of their particular masculine and feminine beauty but must be appreciated for anything that lies outside.  Whatever is opposite is a good starting point.  Men should therefore be feminine and women be masculine.

But what is preferred is radical individualism.  A narcissistic falling in love with oneself and becoming pointless to the machine of capitalist labor as either a worker or a partner in a heterosexual marriage producing more workers.  Once this radical individualism takes hold all relations between persons will be erotic relations.  Or becoming one with everyone.  It will be a complete disintegration of distinct forms, such as man and woman.  There will only be people.  Androgynous people.

These people will not just be in erotic relations with everyone else but also with nature itself.  Seeing no distinction between themselves and their environment.  The uniting of humanity to nature will pacify everything and thus make everything into weak realities who can do nothing but have pleasure.  A strong entity that decides not to inflict pain will not be possible.

All of this idea of the merging together of everything to avoid pain and produce a society of pure erotic pleasure is found in the free expression of individuals.  The individual who rejects tradition.  Both heterosexual life and representational art.

And a part of the reigning ideal of Christian art today is that creativity as an act of worship is best performed by the Spirit moving in the individual, unbound by religious traditions and standards.  For the modern Christian, passionate worship is the essence of the Kingdom because passionate worship is the essence of church.  It is, therefore, the producer of pleasure within that Kingdom.  If the Kingdom is breaking into the here and now and individuals make up the Kingdom then the free expression of the individual’s style of worship is the highest principle.  And all other identities fall away.  We will all be united as one in our passionate worshiping pleasure. 

That is only a possible theoretical reality when the Church’s worship style is different than it has traditionally been.  It is only traditional, liturgical worship that can sustain a theology of traditional beauty because it was traditional beauty that created it.  Anything not beautiful is set apart from it.  The artist cannot create something that falls outside.  For the range of other Protestant worship services a range of individualist art styles are not only permissible but required.  A reformed liturgy can only sustain an art that mimics the regulative principle or that which is allowed based on rules.  The non-denominational church service can range from anything goes to a very informal picking and choosing based on spirit led discernment.  All three of these styles can sustain a true theory of beauty. One denies the ability of the intellect to apprehend beauty, the other two reject beauty as objective.  It is only the traditional service that adheres to traditional and classical beauty.

Within the Frankfurt School art is an image creation of a negative.  Art is the subversive image.  Herbert Marcuse in Counterrevolution and Revolt explains that these utopian images are dreams and since they are dreams they cannot be translated into reality.  Art is the search for the aesthetic forms that can communicate this liberation of the world.  A world outside of history and completely in harmony.  The aesthetic forms will no longer be images to contemplate but realities to participate in.  Icons of utopia.  The theater will move from the stage to the streets.

And to the modern Christian artist there is an equation to the parables of Jesus, the ones about planting seeds that grow.  Christian art is the planting of seeds which seek to express the utopian, historyless, dream-reality of the Kingdom.

Conclusion

I have sought to explain in mild detail how the Christian aesthetic sensibility no longer matches what it once was.  I make no necessary claims as to whether this was a good or bad change but simply maintain that our current modes of worship and thinking on art cannot bring back the art of the first Christendom, if that is our true desire. 

I believe that the American church has a lot of hard thinking to do about art because we have been captivated by the theories of the world and the left.  We must reassess.  We must at least take note that there is a door for the world to get into the church through our art and it has been doing so for a long time.  The subversion of the arts runs deep in the church.  We dare not tell anyone what is or isn’t good art.  At a Christian college art class I had to beg for constructive criticism.  The best most young artists could do was say that they did or didn’t like it.

My desire is to bring back a culture of art that is capable of identity, beauty and rigor.  If America is a Christian people, the people need an American and Christian art.  Don’t give in to the desire to have a hazy theology of the arts, one that allows anyone to do anything.  If beauty exists and we are required to follow it, then we must forsake the ugly in art.

Image Credit: Unsplash.