Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brown
Symbol, for the sake of context, is the lens through which Brown sees painting and architecture. As previously noted, he is committed to divine interactionism and human freedom, but balancing God’s agency with human freedom is challenging, to say the least, as God’s intervention might well encroach upon human freedom, or, if one gives priority to human freedom, frustrate the divine purpose.26 Brown’s solution is to explore the role of symbols with reference to divine dialogue.27
George Pattison, who advocates a ‘dialogue between art and religion … with each partner seeking to appreciate the specific contribution of the other’.32 This
Thus it is surely no accident that the rise in systematics has gone with a corresponding decline in study of worship and preaching, with liturgy now almost unknown as an academic discipline in British universities, though the history of spirituality fares somewhat less badly. Where the situation has changed for the better in both British and American universities is in an increasing interest in the arts, with a number of centres focusing sometimes on the arts in general but, more commonly, on one or another in particular (for example, literature, film or the visual arts).
Yet to my mind the process has still not gone far enough, for the assumption still prevails that the role of the arts can be at most illustrative and not innovative, that is, with their contribution perceived as entirely subject to conclusions that have been reached elsewhere. This
Why else does the Bible open with the creation of the world, while periodically we find interactions extending well beyond the community of faith, as in the stories of Balaam’s ass and Job, or again in the rebuke to Jonah for his attitude to the people of Nineveh.2
So I end this part of the book as I began, with a generous God seen at work in human creativity that always bears the potential to speak of the divine, and sometimes does indeed do so.
of art, the incarnation functioning as a visual image for God, and music a potential vehicle for divine presence.
representation.1 So it is no less a doctrine than the incarnation itself that legitimates the visual arts. Of course it does not follow from this that religious visual art is thereby given carte blanche to pursue its own ends. Although not always observed in practice, Orthodoxy has always been much stricter about this than the Western tradition. Prayerful preparation was still to be required of icon painters, and certain subjects were precluded: depictions of the Father, for instance, and extremes of suffering in Christ.2 Although
Fpundations in Revelatipn - Boble and visual arts confirmed as good!
It was a position taken up in the twentieth century by the Dutch historian of religion and politician, Gerard van der Leeuw (d. 1950). In his massively erudite Sacred and Profane Beauty,21 he argued that primitive creativity in the arts was always directed towards symbolising and interpreting the holy, and that it is only in modern times that religion and art have pursued different paths. Against his fellow Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, he argued that words, and especially the scriptures, are inherently the bearer of images, and as such religion and art can expect a new eschatological
...more
Sadly, however, equally today theological discussion of the arts is more often than not plagued by prior presuppositions, as though theologians knew themselves to be already in possession of criteria for judging the arts rather than having first to enter into creative dialogue with them. So, for example, is it really the case that all great art must be in some sense redemptive or transformative in order to be great art? Might
In other words, theology needs to cease to regard the arts as only appropriate when illustrative of truths already known through Scripture or tradition and instead carefully explore meanings first and with the expectation that the arts too can operate as independent vehicles of truth.
Good reason to not oy do Bible journaling
Indeed, some writers went further and questioned whether it was meaningful even to talk about experience of God at all, not just in Bonhoeffer’s sense of a world where the appropriate conditions no longer held but in the stronger sense of logical incoherence: God was just not that sort of being.34 But if in one obvious sense it was a victory, in another it was not, for in effect what happened over the same time period was the rise of ‘spirituality’ and with it the resultant widespread conviction among artists that a vaguer deity now operated in their world whose precise relationship to the
...more
Rather, as in Augustine’s familiar analogy, God is already everywhere in the world like the water in a sponge, and so it is more a case of tapping into that presence than it having to be brought directly to bear upon the world.38
But I do want to protest against the alternative, which is either to shunt God into the ghetto of more obvious religious experience such as prayer and worship or to get rid of the notion altogether. Of course all such experience is sullied with other extraneous factors. But those who prefer to deny, for example, architecture any such power and instead to focus on the presence of centuries of prayer need to be reminded that prayer is no more or less pure than the architecture itself.
Perfect! Don't put spirituality in a box!
Theology needs to take much more seriously the ten times as many people in Britain who express belief in God as attend church regularly, as well as conspicuous cases of religious experience formed outside of contact with those of faith, as in the moving story of Etty Hillesum during the Second World War.48
So far from the scriptures offering simply a set of propositions, they paint images and tell narratives whose significance is not readily reducible
to easily formulated conclusions. They are there to inspire the human imagination, and so, while reason and analysis undoubtedly have a role to play, something will always be lost if there is not frequent return to those original resources. But,
Its role is thus seen to be at most to enhance belief, not help create it. It is that position which I wish to challenge in this essay by exploring four commonly held philosophical assumptions about the world in which we now live.
Perhaps the relevance of the point to all the imaginative arts can be expressed most clearly by making explicit the parallel between symbol in action, metaphor in writing and image in the visual arts, and how the theological notion of sacramentality is based on a similar structure.
But I would like to suggest otherwise, not only because much religious experience is thereby unnecessarily excluded but also because much of the appropriate terminology for religious experience is first learnt in aesthetic contexts. Of
In Ruskin’s view human art was at its best when imitating nature, principally because nature as a divine creation itself brought us closer to the ultimate source of all creativity. Indeed, despite his Calvinist roots he insists that nature does not merely point to God but can itself provide experience of the divine nature.14 So, for example, a seascape stretching to infinity is said not just to point to the possibility of a similar infinity in God, it allows us the actual possibility to experience such infinity as one of the divine’s own distinctive attributes. In Ruskin’s own words, ‘light
...more
radical otherness of biblical revelation, as in the language of the early Barth, of the Bible being ‘like a flash of lightning … as the dissolution of all relativity’.21 It was
the same images or symbols. Equally, such an appeal to a tradition of imaginative symbols can also help us deal with the more limited or kenotic understanding of Christ’s consciousness that has been forced on us by conclusions in biblical scholarship.
My interest was rather in what the artists did with the existing tradition, and so the related possibility that they might actually have something useful to teach theologians. Like Coakley, artists were often concerned to produce a more adequate image for the Spirit, but their desire to remain loyal to the existing tradition of representation meant that in general they adopted an alternative solution to the problem of presenting the Spirit’s equality visually. Instead,
What I have sought to argue in considering these four common assumptions in contemporary philosophy is that theology need not be afraid of any alleged consequences, provided, that is, it takes seriously the arts as one of its potential partners. And in making that claim I also intend to suggest that philosophers who write about religion also need to be more widely alert to such a potential contribution since God is mediated not just through the revelation that is inherent
but also in the way our minds work, that is, in the imagination and the undoubted contribution that it can bring.41 Notes
ourselves? Austin Farrer reminds us of how much Jesus must have owed to someone totally unknown to us, the local village rabbi at Nazareth, but of course there would have been many others. Rowan Williams puts it succinctly: Jesus ‘learned how to be human’ and that meant learning within a specific context, including of course the parental home, and so from Mary and Joseph.4 All this may seem far from our theme of what Christians can learn from the arts, but it is not. Just as the temptation to see Jesus as a totally self-contained individual must be resisted if the incarnation is to be treated
...more
Jesus' incarnation and art - his humanity is important to consider!
Learning from the Unorthodox But there is no reason to remain in the distant past in our search for pertinent examples. The twentieth century is often described as a time of loss of faith, and in many ways that is true, but a surprising number of artists continued to engage actively with the Christian faith in their art. The natural tendency of Christians has been to focus on those who are explicit believers such as Norman Adams or Mark Cazalet, James Macmillan or John Tavener, but to do so exclusively would be merely to repeat the mistake against which I have been protesting. God does not
...more
Learn from not explicit faith people
come naturally to his cynical and promiscuous nature.16 Obsessed at times by sado-masochistic desires, he also liked verbally humiliating, before his educated friends, the working-class boys whom he picked up. Yet, borrowing partly from Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (for the angle of the cord) and partly from Picasso (for the light bulb) here he is declaring that his love will live on, and indeed he continued to paint Dyer even after his death. The naked light bulb and the angle of the cord thus alike hint at continuity, at hope, at love.
Bacon believed in life beyond despite his lack of faith. His love for George Dyer revealed his true faith in something beyond.
coal mines. Although he eventually lost his Christian faith, some of his late paintings leave us in no doubt that he was still wrestling with what might constitute a satisfactory account of God’s relation to the world. Christianity he sees as too particularist and too transcendent. That is the implicit message behind his image of The Sower, where the sun forms a halo around the man as he works, or still more dramatically in his copying of Rembrandt’s Raising of Lazarus, where this time the sun is actually made to replace Christ, showing the universal healer instead of what he has come to see
...more
It was an issue with which another landscape artist from about the same time also wrestled. Van Gogh committed suicide in 1890, whereas Cézanne returned to the practice of the Catholic faith the following year.26 Throughout the last years of his life he used a local mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, to work through what the relation between God and the world might be. In a
Landscape art need not necessarily be just a mater of imitating or expressing nature. The artist can also be asking questions pertinent to theology, and for that to be so it is by no means essential that the artist should be a practising Christian. Van Gogh had lost his Christian faith, while Cézanne was clearly still struggling with his.
My general theme is, I hope by now clear: art can of course illustrate faith but to insist that this is its only appropriate role is to belittle its achievements. Whether there are specific allusions to Christianity or not, the arts can at times offer a religious vision that we need to take seriously and engage with.
Jesus Christ, though plenty of God and his care. Both his parents were children of ministers, and so it is quite likely that the title comes from an influential tract with a similar title by the Scottish minister Henry Drummond, who had insisted on the priority of love over faith.30
Certainly the glory of God was in the little child at Bethlehem but it was also in the Syrophoenician woman, pagan though she was. Art and music need to be viewed and heard and valued in their own right. The glory of God lies in a Love Supreme that speaks everywhere, sometimes confirming what we already believe but sometimes too challenging or even undermining what we suppose to be the case. Jesus learnt the value of pagan ‘dogs’; so too can we.
Nonetheless, I would suggest that the challenges continue, sometimes to ourselves as Christians to take a second look at Scripture and sometimes to the wider culture itself. So let me end with a few brief examples from contemporary British art: Tracey Emin on the horrors of abortion and Paula Rego on horrors resulting from its being banned;35 Douglas Gordon on Christian misuse of the Hebrew Scriptures;36 Marc Quinn’s celebration of the disabled in the heart of London;37 Chris Ofili on the potential for violence inherent in the story of the annunciation;38 Paula Rego on the difference between
...more
detailed consideration elsewhere, while this is less commonly so with symbol. Although it too finds a place in secular contexts, perhaps because of the primacy of its occurrence in the visual and in religious ritual, Christianity’s predominantly verbal culture has tended to think it of lesser intellectual significance.1 But
continuity. The Greek verb from which the term originally came literally means to ‘throw together’, perhaps not especially illuminating in itself, but the noun sumbolon is more suggestive. It was used to indicate the other half of a broken piece of coin or pottery which functioned as a token whereby a guest or ally could reclaim the rights of friendship or hospitality when the two participants next met. As such, in the ancient world it suggested rather more than it would for us today, inasmuch as it not only indicated something shared but also such sharing even in a context of apparent
...more
Symbols - originally from the Greek also something shared between two people - a physical token that could bind people together.
Such a background helps explain why in early Christianity creeds were referred to as ‘symbols’, as indeed they still are in some modern European languages (e.g. German: Symbolik). They were seen as constituting marks of a common identity, a shared token of a common faith, even in situations where such individuals differed otherwise in race or rank.
In marked contrast to sociological reductionism, for instance, Mircea Eliade (d. 1986), the Romanian historian of religion, insisted that the sacred is an irreducible and universal element in human experience that finds expression in myths and symbols that cross cultures.
Yet, even if the existence of natural symbols can be defended, this does not entail that their significance will always remain the same. Change clearly sometimes happens where only the referent is something in nature and not the symbol itself. So, for example, in the Temple the menorah appears originally to have been intended as a cosmological symbol, representing the seven known planets,16 whereas in medieval Judaism it came to represent the light of the Torah and the sciences which help support its study. But,
In the history of Christianity perhaps the late Middle Ages and Renaissance are the most marked in contrast to our own times. For us the lion is a symbol of strength and courage, but in the Middle Ages to these attributes were added watchfulness,26 the resurrection,27 evil,28 St Mark and by association the city of Venice. Again,
1 So, although Matthew did query whether such a notion could apply to what happened in the case of Christ,2 even so, this was where the primary stress of much of the early Church’s preaching seems also to have fallen3. Admittedly, John proposed a quite different emphasis, with a forward-looking aspect seen as primary,4 while Paul’s imagery appears to look in both directions.5 So things might have developed quite differently. One key development that ensured that they did not was Augustine’s insistence on baptism’s role in washing away not only actual sin but also the consequences of inherited
...more
Baptism
is Thomas Hardy’s description of the baptism of Tess’s child, Sorrow. She had pleaded with her father, Durbeyfield, to summon a priest but he refused. So, fearing that the child will otherwise go to hell, she performs the act herself over a washstand, with her siblings gathered round. Next day Sorrow dies, and, initially at least, the parson refuses the child burial.10
But can further evidence for such a way of thinking also be found elsewhere in John’s Gospel? One possibility to consider is how we read that gospel’s accounts of Jesus walking on water (and indeed the parallel passages in the Synoptics). Given the three-decker universe, it looks as if they were intended to imply rather more than just Jesus’ power over the elements. For a contemporary there would also inevitably have come to mind mastery over the forces of chaos and evil. So the event once constituted a natural argument for divinity in a way that is much less obvious to us with our quite
...more
Examplea of interpretation with symbols in the Bible - Jesus walking on water
Given such wide symbolic resonances, it should therefore come as no surprise that water is also linked elsewhere with Christ’s summons to new creation. Because of the background knowledge required, this is usually not noted in respect of the same gospel’s treatment of the feast of Tabernacles.26 But in fact Jesus’ earlier depiction of himself as living water fits perfectly with a major theme of this autumn feast: prayers for rain and the unusual rituals associated with such a plea. During
New creation - summons - Jesus as symbol
Another image that came frequently to mind was that of the Virgin Mary. Pictorial representations of her as the hortus conclusus or ‘enclosed garden’ often include a fountain as part of the complex network of allusions that built upon imagery from the Song of Songs, not least because a fountain was mentioned in the key verse: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’ (4.12).
In the seventeenth century perhaps the finest depiction of Christ’s baptism is to be found as part of Nicholas Poussin’s two series on the Seven Sacraments. Somewhat surprisingly, there are relatively few detailed discussions,45 in particular of the quite different approach he adopts between the two compositions. A
But that rather more than this seems indicated soon becomes apparent once note is taken of how darkness may even have been the primal image for God. Divine mystery will then be the primary connotation.
Primal
‘When the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said, The Lord has set the sun in the heavens, and has said that he would dwell in thick darkness’ (1 Kings 8:10–12).4 One way of reconciling these two views is to look to the more literal meaning of the Hebrew word for ‘glory’ (kabod), with its notion of a ‘weight’ or what overwhelms, for light or darkness might thus have very similar effects. Both brilliant light and
...more
