Quote Anthology
Nathan Vonnahme
The Christian Imagination
Regent College
31 March, 1999
Of all the reading I did for this class, the most fun and striking was The Dyer's Hand by W. H. Auden. One of its strengths was especially noticeable in contrast with some of our other reading. Auden makes no effort to qualify, disclaim, or even really defend his statements, but rather (reminiscent of Nietzsche) provides short paragraphs baldly asserting his ideas manifesto-style and allowing the reader to judge and connect them (note to Wolterstorff's editor: make the second edition of Art in Action twice as readable and half as long by eliminating the word "characteristically" and the phrases "I believe/suggest that" and "it can be seen that"). Of the many quotable passages in Auden's work, one has stayed with me as an especially useful metaphor for artistic composition:
The subject matter of a poem is comprised of a crowd of recollected occasions of feeling, among which the most important are recollections of encounters with sacred beings or events. This crowd the poet attempts to transform into a community by embodying it in a verbal society. Such a society, like any society in nature, has its own laws; its laws of prosody and syntax are analogous to the laws of physics and chemistry (Auden 67).
The metaphor of community-making easily extends to the other arts: in painting, colors, shapes and images are selected out of the vast crowd of possibilities and formed into a society, which the painter hopes will embody a community--that is, be united "by a common love of something other than themselves" (Auden 64).
Auden also had a lot to say about the relationship between art, science, and modernity:
The Two Chimerical Worlds1) The magical polytheistic nature created by the aesthetic illusion which would regard the world of masses as if it were a world of faces. The aesthetic religion says prayers to the Dynamo.
2) The mechanized history created by the scientific illusion which would regard the world of faces as if it were a world of masses. The scientific religion treats the Virgin as a statistic. "Scientific" politics is animism stood on its head.
Without Art, we could have no notion of Liberty; without Science no notion of Equality; without either, therefore, no notion of Justice.
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods (Auden 62).
Art is compatible with polytheism and with Christianity, but not with philosophical materialism; science is compatible with philosophical materialism and with Christianity, but not with polytheism. No artist or scientist, however, can feel comfortable as a Christian; every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist; every scientist in the same position that he could be a philosophical materialist. And with good reason. In a polytheist society, the artists are its theologians; in a materialist society, its theologians are the scientists. To a Christian, unfortunately, both art and science are secular activities, that is to say, small beer (Auden 456).
Physics, geology and biology have now replaced this everlasting universe with a picture of nature as a process in which nothing is now what it was or what it will be. Today, Christian and Atheist alike are eschatologically minded. It is difficult for a modern artist to believe he can make an enduring object when he has no model of endurance to go by; he is more tempted than his predecessors to abandon the search for perfection as a waste of time and be content with sketches and improvisations (Auden 78).
I see this attitude in much of the work of my generation, but I had never made this connection before.
The one obsession in modern art has come to be not perfection or even quality but originality. Auden wrote, incisively:
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art? (Auden 19)
This preoccupation with originality has drastically affected the way the modern or postmodern artist relates to his tradition.
Originality no longer means a slight modification in the style of one's immediate predecessors; it means a capacity to find in any work of any date or place a clue to finding one's authentic voice. The burden of choice and selection is put squarely upon the shoulders of each individual poet and it is a heavy one (Auden 80).
Sayers also critiques this typically modern idea:
The demand for "originality"--with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work--is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare's time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed (Sayers 121).
There is a common idea, though I could not find it in any of the readings for the course, that art should always be made for its own sake, and that making it for any other reasons, especially financial, didactic or political reasons, is inferior, "selling out." Luci Shaw said that the true artist doesn't operate because of assignments or commissions. Auden and Wolterstorff agree, however, that there is more to the picture:
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work "comes" to him. Among those works which are failures because their initial conceptions were false or inadequate, the number of self-commissioned works may well be greater than the number commissioned by patrons (Auden 15).
In conclusion, though, we must come back to insist on the opposite point, so often denied in the contemporary arts--namely, that one can find joy in carrying out one's responsibilities to one's fellows. Indeed, is it not true here too that he who loses himself will find himself? And is it not precisely the artist narcissistically concerned to find himself who will at last discover that he has irretrievably lost himself? The Byzantine artist placed himself humbly at the service of the church, invoking the presence of the departed saints by depicting them, so that the liturgy could take place in their presence as well as in the presence of men on earth. Is it likely that he found less joy in his work than does the contemporary artist who sets himself his own problems in the hope that in solving them he will find joy? And is it not a specious concept of integrity that is used when it is said that for the artist to bend his talents to the service of others is to sacrifice his personal integrity? (Wolterstorff 83)
Closely related to the issue of commissioned art is the question of functionalism. Harold Best summarizes it well:
Both positions, art for art's sake and functionalism, when taken to extremes, are problematic. The concept of art for its own sake often leads to snobbery, arrogance, and convoluted intellectualism. It also overlooks the facts of history, namely that much of the art that now stands alone was once meant to function along with, or even be backgrounded by, other activities. However, art as function can easily end up in mediocrity and a cheapened sense of utilitarianism. And many functionalists hide good art so completely in the functional that the viewers/listeners have no idea of the real significance of the art (Best 27).
The inspiration behind and necessary to artistic creation is hard to define. Both Annie Dillard and W. H. Auden write of the fear that on sitting down to write, the writer may discover he has nothing else to say.
The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked. This mood arises from various causes, physical generally, as good health or state of the air or, prosaic as it is, length of time after a meal (Hopkins 130).
The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful (Auden 57).
One of the most interesting themes to me in the reading I did was the relationship of the arts to Christian worship. Part of the reason for this is that worship music is the media I have been most interested in for the last year or so. The way the typical church uses music these days is not what most would call "artistic," and it is obvious that many Christians don't even regard worship music as art. I think that part of this is in healthy reaction to excesses of the church and secular culture toward art. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns against the first, idolatry in the church:
'Sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord' (Eph. 5:19). The new song is sung first in the heart. Otherwise it cannot be sung at all. The heart sings because it is overflowing with Christ. That is why all singing in the church is a spiritual performance. Surrender to the Word, incorporation in the community, great humility, and much discipline--these are the prerequisites of all singing together. Where the heart is not singing there is no melody, there is only the dreadful medley of human self-praise. Where the singing is not to the Lord, it is singing to the honor of the self or the music, and the new song becomes a song to idols (Bonhoeffer 58-59).
Wolterstorff warns of the second, the way that secular society tends to worship art directly:
Thus works of art become surrogate gods, taking the place of God the Creator; aesthetic contemplation takes the place of religious adoration; and the artist becomes one who in agony of creation brings forth objects in absorbed contemplation of which we experience what is of ultimate significance in human life. The artist become the maker of the gods, we their worshipers. When the secular religions of political revolution and of technological aggrandizement fail their devotees, when they threaten to devour them, then over and over the cultural elite among modern secular Western men turn to the religion of aestheticism (Wolterstorff 50).
Auden brings up several hard questions about "Christian" art which are especially difficult for worship music writers. Most memorably, he essentially questions the appropriateness of art for worship:
Poems, like many of Donne's and Hopkins', which express a poet's personal feelings of religious devotion or penitence, make me uneasy. It is quite in order that a poet should write a sonnet expressing his devotion to Miss Smith because the poet, Miss Smith, and all his readers know perfectly well that, had he chanced to fall in love with Miss Jones instead, his feelings would be exactly the same. But if he writes a sonnet expressing his devotion to Christ, the important point, surely, is that his devotion is felt for Christ and not for, say, Buddha or Mahomet, and this point cannot be made in poetry; the Proper Name proves nothing (Auden 458).
There are many hymns I like as one likes old song hits, because, for me, they have sentimental associations, but the only hymns I find poetically tolerable are either versified dogma or Biblical ballads (Auden 458).
This is to some extent like his urge to authenticity instead of originality: the hymn writer should not be too concerned with getting artistic but should make sure his poetry covers only subjects proper for worship.
It is Harold Best, though, who has the most helpful things to say about the use of music in a worship setting. First, he emphatically denies the common heresy that worship is music or that somehow music creates worship:
Therefore, there can only be one call to worship, and this comes at conversion, when in complete repentance we admit to worshiping falsely, trapped by the inversion and enslaved to false gods before whom we have been dying sacrifices. This call to true worship comes but once, not every Sunday, in spite of the repeated calls to worship that begin most liturgies and orders of worship. These should not be labeled calls to worship but calls to continuation of worship. We do not go to church to worship, but, already at worship, we join our brothers and sisters in continuing those actions that should have been going on--privately, familially, or even corporately--all week long (Best 147).
Those who truly want to worship, as an ongoing condition of the heart, should not credit music with the power to bring worship about. They will worship irrespective of music (Best 57).
It is in this sense that Christian musicians must be particularly cautious. They can create the impression that God is more present when music is being made than when it is not; that worship is more possible with music than without it; and that God might possibly depend on its presence before appearing. Faith, in its proper scriptural definition, does away with these errors without doing away with music. It puts music in its proper place, along with every other act and offering: giver before gift and worship containing, not being contained by, acts of worship (Best 153).
Instead of seeing worship as a certain kind of music, Best sees all music as worship, a potential offering:
Therefore, all things done, whatever they comprise--all work, all handiwork, all of everything--can only be one act of worship after another. True worship is to love God so much that an offering is the only possible action, even though a world full of such actions can never suffice. So while it is entirely possible for Christians to worship truly without music, it is impossible for them to make music truly without worshiping (Best 149).
And the most amazing thing about our offerings of music or anything else to God is the way in which he hears them:
There is only one way to God, through Jesus Christ, author and finisher. . . . This means that God sees and hears all of our offerings, perfected. God sees and hears as no human being can, all because our offerings have been perfected by the giver. The out-of-tune singing of an ordinary believer, the hymnic chant of the aborigine, the dance of a Barishnikov, the open frankness of a primitive art piece, the nearly transcendent "Kyrie" of Bach's B Minor Mass, the praise choruses of the charismatic, the drum praise of the Cameroonian--everything from the widow's mite to the poured-out ointment of artistic action--are at once humbled and exalted by the strong saving work of Christ. While the believer offers, Christ perfects. It is all of Christ and it is all by faith (Best 155-156).
Best's enjoyment of the "pied beauty" of music is obvious in his book and helped convince me that God indeed rejoices in all manner of offerings.
Finally, Best makes a quick remark about liturgical dance that I found describes a lot of the impressions behind my discomfort with it:
As to liturgical dance, unless it is allowed to be itself it can turn into a limited, simplistic, asensual, unbodied activity, in which an otherwise rich repertory of gesture is turned into the adult equivalent of children's motion choruses (Best 210).
Many of the writers we read wrote about fairy tales, but Frederick Buechner summed up most clearly the relationship between fairy tales and the gospel, the most amazing fairy tale of them all, made even more amazing because it is true. He sums up his book:
Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in that silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have (Buechner 98).
This reminded me of reading I was doing for another class, where Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a 17th century Jesuit mystic, wrote of the constant authorship of God in every moment:
[God's purpose] leads souls far more ingeniously past mortal perils, past monsters, hell-fire, demons and their snares and carries them up to heaven. All are the subject of mystical tales far more beautiful and amazing than any invented by the crude imagination of mortal men (de Caussade 24).
Auden, W. H.. The Dyer's Hand. New York: Random House 1962.
Best, Harold M.. Music Through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1993.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1954.
Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1977.
Caussade, Jean-Pierre de. The Sacrament of the Present Moment. San Francisco: Harper & Row 1982.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Hopkins: Poems and Prose. New York: Knopf 1995.
O'Siadhail, Michael. "Wise in Words: Art and Spirituality." Crux December 1997 pp. 2-15.
Peterson, Eugene. Subversive Spirituality. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing 1997.
Sayers, Dorothy. The Mind of the Maker. San Francisco: HarperCollins 1941.
Wilkinson, Loren. "'Art as Creation' or 'Art as Work'?" Crux March 1983 pp. 23-28.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1980.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. "Evangelicalism and the Arts." Christian Scholar's Review XVII:4, pp. 449-473.