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A Philosophy of Christian Art A Philosophy of Christian Art Daniel Gustafsson PhD The University of York Department of Philosophy March 2014 Abstract This thesis offers an original and comprehensive philosophical approach to the understanding of Christian art. It draws on a range of sources, from analytic and theological aesthetics, philosophy and theology, to interpret and articulate a vision of the aims and prerogatives of Christian art. Works by William Blake, David Jones, and R. S. Thomas are among those receiving close attention; works which yield a picture of art and creative labour as deeply implicated in the central mysteries and practices of the Christian faith. In five chapters, the thesis addresses the nature and the implications of the Form, the Beauty, the Good, the Ontology, and the Love of Christian art. It is the aim of Christian art to manifest God under the particular forms and beauty of the artwork. These forms are realised and discerned in the context of a Christian life. The artwork’s beauty invites a response of delight, gratitude, and the reorientation of our desires and dispositions towards the infinite beauty of God. As a sacramental object, the Christian artwork is positioned in a Christian ontological narrative, in which we humans are entrusted with transformative stewardship of the world. Outside this conceptual and ontological context, the work will not be experienced as what it is. Ultimately, the Christian artwork begs to be perceived and engaged with – as indeed it is created – as an object of love. Thus the artwork finds its place within an understanding of Christian faith as the striving for a personal union with God. Above all, Christian art is made, received and loved as part of our calling to grow in the divine likeness. In presenting this vision, the thesis breaks new ground, and not only makes significant contributions to analytic and theological aesthetics, but also offers material with implications for philosophy and theology more widely. 2 List of contents page Preface 6 Acknowledgements 9 Author’s declaration 10 Synopsis 13 Chapter 1: The Form of Christian Art 27 1.1 Form and Appearance 29 1.1.1 Recognising Christian art 30 1.1.2 Negative icons 34 1.2 Form and Life 46 1.2.1 Form in context 46 1.2.2 The Christian pursuit of form 51 1.3 Form and Reality 61 1.3.1 Communicating the real 62 1.3.2 Form and presence 66 Chapter 2: The Beauty of Christian Art 74 2.1 Delight and Gratitude 77 2.1.1 The pleasure given 77 2.1.2 The acceptance of the gift 80 2.2 Discernment and Desire 85 2.2.1 The trained and luminous eye 86 2.2.2 Becoming what we see 90 2.3 The gift not made by hands 98 2.3.1 Beauty’s gratuity 98 2.3.2 In the likeness of God 101 2.3.3 A Trinitarian model 103 3 Chapter 3: The Good of Christian Art 109 3.1 Ends and Instruments of the Good 110 3.1.1 Good ‘in itself’ and good for 111 3.1.2 Doing and making good 115 3.2 Particular and Transcendent Goods 120 3.2.1 The good and the real 122 3.2.2 Integrity and openness 125 3.3 The Good and the Beautiful 128 3.3.1 Resemblance and likeness 130 3.3.2. God as co-appreciator and co-creator 131 3.3.3 Love of the good 133 Chapter 4: The Ontology of Christian Art 138 4.1 Christian Art for the Christian Imagination 139 4.1.1 Ontological context 139 4.1.2 Beliefs in and about the work 146 4.1.3 Psychological and ontological transformation 150 4.2 Making Other and Making New 158 4.2.1 Man the artist 158 4.2.2 Art and Sacrament 164 4.2.3 Golgonooza 173 Chapter 5: The Love of Christian Art 180 5.1 Works of Love 182 5.1.1 We love therefore we see 183 5.1.2 Dialogue and metanoia 187 5.1.3 Union and communion 194 5.2 Imaginative Custodians 199 5.2.1 Art and oikophilia 200 5.2.2. Conservation and transfiguration 204 5.2.3 Love against the machine 212 4 5.2.4 The challenges of love 218 5.2.5 A home in but not of the world 224 List of references 231 5 Preface It has been my aim here to give an account of Christian art on its own terms; that is, not in terms imported and imposed from a remote philosophical discourse, but in terms consonant with the beliefs and conceptions of those who make this art and of those who receive it. The reader should expect a work, strictly speaking, neither of analytic nor theological aesthetics; while I borrow, widely, from both philosophy and theology, I engage with these disciplines insofar as they may serve to interpret, and re-articulate, the visions and presuppositions of Christian artworks and artists themselves. It is my hope that the confluence of different approaches will not confuse and obscure matters, but rather illuminate both the art in question and the ways of engaging with the forms, the meanings, and the beauty of this art. I am wary, in general, of philosophy’s presumption of a vantage from which to pronounce sentence on all things according to its own criteria. This apprehension is most keenly felt, perhaps, in the application of philosophy to the practice and experience of art; hence I feel with Robert Bridges, How in its naked self Reason wer powerless showeth when philosophers Wil treat of art, the which they are full ready to do, Having good intuition that their master-key May lie therein: but since they must lack vision of Art (for else they had been artists, not philosophers) They will miss the way (Bridges 1934, pp.69-70). Philosophy, I believe, is bound to more severely misconstrue art the more reluctant it is to allow its own methods to be informed by the languages of art and those who love it. I am acutely aware of Blake’s indictment of certain brands of Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination 6 Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus (Blake 2000, p.302). I have been at pains, therefore, to articulate the hopes and assumptions of Christian art as I have found them, implicit or explicit, in the artworks themselves. I have eschewed – as far as is permissible in an academic philosophical work – undue abstractions and technicalities, for the sake of an idiom more fluently dialogic between the various disciplines and, crucially, more pliantly responsive to the artworks under discussion. In particular, I have sought to take seriously the very original visions and proposals of the art that has most deeply moved and inspired me, such as the work of Blake, of David Jones, and the tradition of icon painting. Work on this thesis has confirmed my initial intuition that to engage with Christian art is not to attend to one category of art among others, but to engage an original tradition with its own prerogatives and aims, both aesthetic and ontological. What should concern us, in an exploration of Christian art, is the nature and role of art within the life of man as understood by Christianity. We should ask, with David Jones, “What is the nature of the thing called art? What sort of thing is it [and] how does this activity stand vis-à-vis the creature said by Christians to be a rational animal with a supernatural end?” (Jones 1959, p.145). If indeed this life is properly understood from the start as that of man-the-artist, no less than that of man the communicant with God, we may find some commanding reasons why a Christian conception of art should give us cause, not only for serious enquiry, but for confident exposition. From the contributions of Jones, Blake and others, what we get is an account of art’s essential implication in the central practices of Christianity. For Jones writes that “the Christian religion is committed to Ars in the most explicit, compelling, and integral manner” (p.167); while Blake, with poetic licence, exclaims that A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian (Blake 2000, p.403) 7 Thus I propose a model of understanding Christian art as deeply committed to the regeneration of the material and spiritual world; I hold that the Christian artwork is, ultimately, an object of love, the aim of which object – and the aim of which love – is the manifestation of the form and beauty of God. I have proceeded in the conviction that Christian art addresses us as an invitation, not to enquiry or speculation, but to worship and praise; indeed, that all Christian art speaks to us in some variation on these words of T. S. Eliot’s from “Little Gidding”: You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid (Eliot 1944, p.36). A philosophical account of Christian art may only be justified, it seems to me, if it manages to re-issue this invitation in such a way as to guide the reader to a transformative encounter with the artworks themselves. Thus the mode of presentation of this thesis may perhaps be described as more discursive than dialectical; though opponents are identified and engaged, it has been my aim here to present a personal, but comprehensive – and I hope persuasive – vision of Christian art.
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