[IR 10.2 (2007) 189–210]
Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463–9955
Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743–1697
doi: 10.1558/imre2007.v10.i2.189
Review Article: What is Christian Art?
MICHAEL AUSTIN
Archbishops’ Advisor for Bishops’ Ministry (retd.)
Email: [email protected]
The Art of the Sublime: Principles of Christian Art and Architecture by Roger
Homan. Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2006. ISBN 0 7546 5073 1. Hbk. 213pp.
£50.00.
Roger Homan’s book The Art of the Sublime: Principles of Christian Art
and Architecture poses an immediate problem for a reviewer writing for a
journal committed to the study of implicit religion. How does one evaluate, constructively and sympathetically, such an explicitly and conservatively religious volume for a readership that might be expected to
be critical of—or at least unsympathetic to—explicit and conservative
religion? I am far from sure that I have worked my way out of this
predicament!
Orthodoxy and morality
Yet, even taking the book on its own terms, for me it still fails to deliver
what its title promises. This is because the author imposes very tight
parameters. He sets these out clearly. He tells us that the usual measures
which (however problematically) are employed to define something as art
(and therefore, one supposes, ‘Christian’ art), that is, criteria for evaluation, methods of study, the study of the developments in techniques,
the classification of schools and movements and the disciplines of art
history, are ‘not appropriate in the religious context’. This is because
Christian art is ‘sacred art’, and ‘sacred art is appreciated first as sacred
and then, if necessary, as art’. Now this is questionable on logical, academic and theological grounds. Logically, because sacred art is necessarily art; academically, because how can religion maintain its place as
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an academic study if it makes itself immune from the kind and range of
critical analysis to which every other subject is exposed; theologically,
because if the Christian religion does not inhabit this world where such
analysis and questioning takes place, and submit itself to it, then how
does it witness to the incarnation of God that it professes? In any case,
are not paint, canvas, stone intrinsic to the religious meaning of an artwork?1 Can these materials not be, as Aquinas said, ‘corporeal metaphors for things spiritual’? But Homan admits that his definition of the
term ‘religious art’ is inadequate because of its exclusiveness. In his book
‘that which lacks a religious theme does not belong to the category of
religious art even though it may have an overwhelmingly spiritual purpose’. This admission damages his case. Is Christian art only art that
has an ostensibly Christian theme?
Professor Homan then lays out his key theme: ‘The principle of Christian aesthetics that is inherent throughout [the book]…is a moral one: it
has to do with the theological beliefs and devotional attitudes of the
painter, sculptor or architect and of the intended receiver’. The receiver
is crucially important, but only because the artwork is produced for ‘the
satisfaction of the spiritual needs of the devotee’. Now receivers of an
artwork are crucially important. They are active participants in it. But
whether or not their ‘spiritual needs’ are satisfied thereby is irrelevant.
What if faith is challenged and undermined by confrontation with an
artwork?
Homan goes further: his position is a ‘moral’ stance because the ‘persistent principles’ of Christian art are ‘truth and integrity’ to the Christian faith, but (it seems, though this is not spelt out) only as the Church,
be it Catholic and universal or Protestant and denominational, defines
authoritatively what is acceptable to that faith. Homan adds a further
moral factor. In one chapter Homan considers ‘the relationship of the
artists’ reputations and personal lives to the value of the sacred art they
produce’. He concludes that ‘the connection of artist with product may
diminish the devotional value of the art’. But what if one does not know
about an artist’s personal life—or wrongly assumes that one does? In
these cases an artwork’s ‘devotional value’ rests, at best, on no more than
trust or evasion. Homan takes the latter course. While acknowledging
that God moves in mysterious ways, Homan’s solution to the problem
is merely to recommend that the viewer steers clear of it altogether by
accepting ‘the obligation…to avoid as far as possible a connection’
between an artwork and ‘the personality of the artist’ when using the
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artwork for ‘devotional purposes’. This is highly contentious, not least
theologically!
It follows (or seems to me to follow) that only a clean-living artist
working from a position of definite Christian credal orthodoxy for a
community whose ‘spiritual needs’ are institutionally defined, and
where both artist and community are under obedience to the Church,
can produce ‘moral’ Christian art.
This being so, Homan tells us, ‘art is incidental to the purpose of
religion’. That is to say, Christian art is essentially functional and utilitarian. Effectively it functions as propaganda in that its purpose is to
promote the Church’s teaching and spirituality. In doing this ‘in the
context of Christian faith’ art possesses ‘spiritual properties’ which
enable it to further or promote ‘the connection between the interior life
of the individual and the remote ideals and unattainable states to which
he or she may only aspire’. These spiritual properties are the ‘idealism
and aspiration evident in Christian art’ which enable this connection to
be established and maintained. And what are these properties, these
‘forces of the spiritual’ conveyed in Christian art’? They are ‘upwardness
and inwardness’. These, too, are the properties of Christian architecture
which must ‘invade the soul and elevate the spirit’.
While he admits that his position prompts a number of critical
questions Professor Homan omits the key one. The assumption that
‘the criteria of art criticism are not appropriate in the religious context’
compels the question that I have already touched on: Is this position
theologically valid on its own terms? We will return to this later. But even
given the parameters imposed by his overriding principles Homan still
omits much. While this is inevitable, given the book’s very broad time
span (his citations range over at least a thousand years) and its comparatively brief length, the explanation for the omissions seem to have less
to do with space and much more to do with doctrinaire considerations,
both theological and aesthetic. For this reason his book is less a study
of the principles of Christian art and architecture per se and more a
description of, in the main, the two styles of Church iconography and
architecture that fit with the author’s principles.
Half of the book is devoted to these two styles: to mediaeval Gothic,
nineteenth–twentieth century Gothic revival church architecture and to
the nineteenth century English mediaevalists, and to Puritan (mainly
Quaker and Shaker) aesthetics. The imposition of his parameters allows
Professor Homan to make no reference (as one of so many examples) to
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the greatest painter of the Protestant age, and one of the greatest in the
history of art, Rembrandt van Rijn, but to devote eight pages to the
20th century Quaker painter Joseph Southall and to 15 of his artworks—
even though Homan admits that this artist’s ‘most powerful spiritual
works’ do not qualify as religious (and therefore, supposedly, Christian)
art, because they employ pagan imagery!
Very many artists of many periods who have produced profoundly
Christian artwork of the greatest significance are thus excluded from a
book dedicated to Christian art and architecture. This is because their
artworks were either not produced as the preached art of the Church for
the Church’s didactic and devotional purposes, or, if they were, they
were not produced during the periods and in the styles favoured by
Professor Homan. Homan strongly implies that to be called ‘Christian’
an artwork must be sacred, and that a sacred artwork (whether it is good
or bad art) is art serving the Church. Thus ‘Christian art and architecture’ is Church art and architecture—or rather some of it: Gothic but
not baroque, spires but not (some) domes, and selected Renaissance but
(apparently) no post-Renaissance art. Popular contemporary religious
artefacts (‘a plastic Madonna with a halo of flashing lights’) may ‘deserve
honour as serving a devotional purpose’ but, as we will see, a wood and
plastic crucifix does not deserve honour if it has been photographed
suspended in the artist’s urine (Andres Serrano’s Piss Light) even if, as I
will show, this particular artwork passes Homan’s moral tests of ‘integrity, honesty and motive of production’, which commercially produced
flashing Madonnas will inevitably fail!
Christian art as protest
Can such a position be maintained? Can ‘Christian art’ be kept within
the dogmatic boundaries that Professor Homan places around it? Surely
not. For example, great art by Christianly orthodox artists has often
been executed to rebuke the Church either directly or by scarcely veiled
allusions. It has certainly not been art sponsored by the Church and
devoted to serving its didactic and devotional—and, not to be separated
from these, its political and economic—ends. To take a few of many
examples. Professor Homan, in discussing the ‘high and inclusive sense
of human responsibility’ in Gothic art and architecture mentions, in
passing, The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30–69).
Homan rightly notes that the scant attention that passers-by pay to
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Icarus’s fall is similar to the ‘oblivion of bystanders in the event of tragedy’ which is evident in Hieronymous Bosch’s Calvary. This is true of
course. But much more can be said. Bruegel was the most important
Dutch satirist after Bosch. His The Sermon of John the Baptist (1566),
and The Conversion of Saul (1567) and above all his The Massacre of the
Innocents (1565–67) are paintings which almost certainly contain veiled
allusions to the Spanish repression of Protestantism in the Netherlands
during the Duke of Alba’s reign of terror. Here is a Christian artist
employing a most powerful Christian image to make a political and
theological statement against the Church of his day and place. Bruegel
may have remained a Roman Catholic (though he died in fear of persecution), but he came nearer to a Protestant theological and social worldview than all but a handful of the great painters of his century. Does his
The Massacre of the Innocents not qualify as Christian art because it was
produced as a protest against the Church, rather than to serve its didactic
purpose as a sermon in paint? And what of Bruegel’s contemporary,
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543)? Was he a Christian artist producing sublime art when he made altarpieces extolling Catholic dogma
but not when he made woodcuts in which, using biblical imagery, he
bitterly denounced a corrupt Church?
In his paintings Bruegel made the poorest of the poor represent all
humanity. Three and a half centuries later Georges Rouault did the
same. For example, in his Christ in the Suburbs (1920) Jesus visits the
industrial slums.‘Children crowd round him. Christ mingles with men.
He is at one with them, Rouault, who sees him, who exalts his presence
and who lives the Gospel, is a painter of a new Christianity and of the
Church of the poor’.2 Rouault’s images of Christ, and of the clowns and
prostitutes, the dancers and the ‘square-headed’ judges that inhabit his
world, are Christian art of a most profound and direct kind. But, earlier, he had written of the Church he loved: ‘The Catholics have killed
me…at a moment when I am seeking profound consolation. They have a
horror of any action, as well as the certainty (and the mad pride inspired
by that certainty) that they are in possession of the truth… They will be
living more and more in a narrow circle, which will go on shrinking’.3
Is art which is executed from a position of Christian faith to confront,
as prophets confront, a Church which its makers regard as corrupt, not
merely Christian art, but art which is sacred to those who are inspired
by it? Surely, sacred is as sacred does. ‘Christian art’ which is so defined
as, seemingly, to exclude art executed by Christians as protest against the
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Church is badly in need of redefinition. If Puritan art is included, and
certainly that is art as protest, then why is, say, Bruegel’s and Holbein’s
and Rouault’s art excluded? May it be that the former is consensual art
while the latter is not? The question that Professor Homan’s position
raises is this: what issues are engaged when it is asserted or denied that
an artwork is Christian—or even religious? As we have noted, Homan’s
book is founded on one ‘principle of Christian aesthetics’ —that Christian art and architecture springs from ‘the theological beliefs and devotional attitudes of the painter, sculptor or architect and of the intended
receiver’ (my italics). If so, then Christian art as protest and witness cannot
be excluded—even in a short book.
The theology of Gothic
We can explore this further. As we have noted, Homan believes that
Gothic art and architecture exemplifies the upwardness and inwardness
of the Christian’s spiritual quest: it is the Christian art. But both on
theological principle and in devotional practice this search is encouraged as much by, say, a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Cézanne landscape
(for Cézanne, nature is, ‘if you prefer, a show which the Pater Omnipotens
Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes’), or, for that matter, a cycladic
figure carved in marble five thousand years ago, as by a Fra Angelico
Annunciation. All depends not on the artefact itself, its theme, its medium
or even the intention of the artist, but on the grace of God, the theological imagination of those who engage with the artwork, and the stage
of the spiritual journey upon which they are each embarked.
Professor Homan applies here a theological criterion which many
artists cannot but fail to meet. There are ‘certain components’ of the
‘upward’ and ‘inward’ quest which truly Christian, sacred, art pursues.
Although Homan at this point identifies only one of these components
it is crucial to his thesis: it is ‘the rejection of the material world’. This
is not as anti-incarnational as it sounds, although a strong flavour of
rejection of the world and all its vanities persists. Cited in support are
dominical sayings about treasures on earth and treasures in heaven; a
verse from 1 Pet. 3.3-4 (penned, in Professor Homan’s judgment, by the
Apostle Peter himself, and quoted twice) which contrasts ‘the outward
adorning of the plaiting of hair’ with ‘the ornament of a meek and quiet
spirit’; together with an interpretation of the purpose of Dante’s Divine
Comedy. But what if these tawdry vanities are portrayed in art either for
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what they are (in which case the artist properly stands in judgment)
or for the genuine comfort they give, however transitorily, to those
who have so little (which may be the value of inexpensive flashing
madonnas)?
It follows from the application of Professor Homan’s principles that
the sweeping upward lines of Gothic architecture, the spirituality of
mediaeval art, and the plain lines and reserved appointments which
mark the Puritan (and particularly the Quaker and Shaker) aesthetic,
alone win his approval. They are his principal examples of Christian,
world-denying, art and architecture. He gives much space to Gothic.
Homan includes an interesting and worthwhile (if somewhat overblown,
limited and uncritical) description of the meaning and spirit of Gothic,
both mediaeval and revival. As to the latter, a substantial proportion of
the works cited in the book are buildings by the nineteenth and twentieth century British architects who advocated neo-Gothic. Augustus
Pugin is inevitably quoted at considerable length, for he ‘vehemently
affirmed Pointed or Gothic architecture as the truly Christian style’.
But Pugin’s obsession with Gothic transformed what Peter and Linda
Murray describe as ‘a literary and dilettantish architectural vogue into a
creed which dominated English architecture’4 and bequeathed, not least
to the Church of England, along with some noble buildings, not only
much all-too-solidly built pastiche but also mock-Gothic alterations
and additions. Many mediaeval church towers were topped with spires
in the nineteenth century, not a few of which, on the principle of the
higher the more spiritual, are out of proportion to the towers, rendering
the buildings top-heavy. Noting this, Richard Sennett points out that
‘the association of height with faith is not uniquely Christian, nor is the
contrary of depth and evil’5, and that the striving for physical height
showed a misunderstanding of the mediaeval vision: ‘height as it was
originally conceived was a matter of looking up from within, in the act
of prayer, and so having a visual experience of the Ascension’. As
worshippers looked up to the roof of what was often a nave or chancel
of modest height they saw ‘vaulting…perfectly calibrated in scale so
that the eye looking up travels very far indeed, but arrives at a destination, an inner roof, still legible in detail. You can see the bottom of
heaven’.6
But Gothic, for Pugin and Roger Homan, must be the pre-eminent
Christian architectural style because it is the spire that points to God.7
It follows that, for Professor Homan, the worship of God cannot be
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worthy unless it is conducted not only in a Gothic church (or an equally
moral but plain Puritan meeting house) but in a building designed by
a devout Christian. It also follows that ‘Christian’ architecture—the
Church’s built environment—is only Christian when it is physical,
emphatic, explicit, exaggerated, Church theology; when it is buildingas-symbol.
Against this mediaeval Gothic theological standard Homan inevitably judges very harshly what he describes as the ‘baroque aftermath’
which supplanted it and the ‘back to baroque’ movement which threatened the Gothic revival in the nineteenth century. As to the latter,
writing of Martin Travers, the designer who produced much work for
Gothic revival architects, Homan says: ‘Alas, he was a charlatan: it
transpires that he was an agnostic and a cynic…and it was as an unbeliever that he was so influential in the “back to baroque” movement on
the Church of England’. As to the former (and seemingly to ignore the
fact there was no abrupt diametrical contrast between Renaissance and
baroque) he dismisses baroque out of hand. ‘The moral agenda of
baroque’, Homan says, ‘is one of indulgent materialism and self-satisfaction… What passes for the spiritual, we contend, is little more than
the material’. ‘The dome’ he tells us, ‘is a statement of self-importance…
Sir Christopher Wren’s dome is the crowning glory of Ludgate Hill
but, unlike the spires and pinnacles of Gothic churches, it points to
nothing beyond itself ’. The baroque church has ‘no arches to lift the
spirit and project it beyond the building, no stained glass to convey the
illuminating power of the unseen God’. Why? Because ‘the celebration
of the baroque is not of the spiritual but of the temporal’. Baroque ‘has
little place for conscience or charity and barely connects, for example,
with the beatitudinal virtues. Its exaggerated passions are at best channelled into service of the state rather than ministry to the poor. In particular, it is unashamedly complacent’. This should apply equally to,
say, the simple and severe Il Gesù in Rome, a baroque building designed
by Giacomo della Porta, who received explicit instructions as to its
design from the Society of Jesus, whose first church this was. While the
much earlier Byzantine dome ‘has the function of conveying the sense of
the infinitude of God’s created universe’, Michelangelo’s and Giacomo
della Porta’s dome for St Peter’s in Rome is no more than ‘a symbol of
Catholic supremacy’. Together with that of St Paul’s in London, these
domes ‘insist that all that is sought in devotion is contained within the
walls that support them’. Athough the cathedral in Florence is ‘distin-
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guished’ by Brunelleschi’s dome, in general ‘the [baroque] dome and
the semicircular arch bring us only back upon ourselves’.8
In short, Professor Homan has it in for the late Renaissance. Even
that consummate Renaissance figure, Michelangelo Buonarroti, does
not escape his criticism: ‘Distinctive though the merit of Michelangelo
might be, it has to be said that the study of the human form diverts
from the spiritual theme of the subject matter’.9 He is writing of The
Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He continues:
‘If…we are to regard Adam’s body as an expression of the vitality that
God wondrously injects by the touch of a finger, we must ask why the
accompanying cherub is looking vacantly in the other direction. Giotto
would not have allowed such a diversion’.10 Well, perhaps, though it is
worth noting that, as Michelangelo’s God stretches out his arm and right
forefinger to Adam, his other arm is thrown around an angel with his
left thumb and forefinger placed firmly on the shoulder of this, apparently inattentive, cherub. In one gesture Michelangelo’s God embraces
bored heaven and expectant earth.
In contrast to baroque, Homan asserts, Gothic has ‘inner moral qualities’ and (at this point ‘the disciplines of art history’ evidently do become
appropriate in a religious context) ‘each of the phases of its architecture
corresponds to a distinctive devotional temperament’. For Pugin the
spires and pinnacles of Gothic churches are ‘all directed towards heaven’ and ‘the cross [is] raised on high in glory…crowning the sacred
edifice and placed between the anger of God and the sins of the city’.
Homan develops this theologically dubious premise at length. Gothic
painters and sculptors possessed both a moral inspiration and a spiritual and devotional purpose. Their task was to remind men of their mortality; to present for contemplation models of virtue and perfection; to
engage emotionally and spiritually with the subjects of their work; to
‘dwell upon human spirit, not upon human anatomy’; and ‘normally
[to] meditate upon a particular spiritual moment’.
Artists as artisans
While fully appreciating the glorious radiance of high Gothic, this
uncritical acceptance of its high moral and theological virtues is challengeable at many points. As just one example, one might assume from
this book that, human as he was, and as sinful as the next man, the
Gothic artist or architect was, uniquely, an inspired agent of the spirit
of God working in the service of the Church but making ab initio
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contributions to its life. However, extraordinarily gifted as the Gothic
architects, engineers and artists were, their work was carefully prescribed
and superintended. The mathematics and liberal arts of the Schoolmen
determined the nature and quality of the architecture that Gothic designers and craftsmen produced. Writing of such religious structures as Freiburg Minster and Chartres, Richard Sennett notes that ‘in exquisitely
crafted structures like these churches, set seemingly at random in relation to other more indifferently built secular structures, engineering
became part of religious effort. Precision took on a spiritual meaning’.11
That is the point: we cannot omit ‘the study of the developments in
techniques’ from a consideration of an artwork’s ‘religious context’, yet
we would be hard put to it to describe Gothic architecture as ‘Christian
engineering’, still less as ‘Christian precision’.
So why is Gothic art and architecture pre-eminently ‘Christian art’?
Homan makes the assertion (itself very contentious) that the rise of ‘the
cult of the artist’ resulted from ‘the post-Renaissance occupation of artists with surface rather than spirit’. We might suppose from that that
while the early mediaeval artist was anonymous in his service to the
Church, the Renaissance humanist artist, producing work for a private
patron or for the Church (or even for himself ), was not. We might
assume that the mediaeval artist was anonymous because he was a humble, self-effacing servant of God. Perhaps he was, but there is more to be
said. Homan rightly admires the French art historian Emile Mâle, whose
major work The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth
Century was first published in 1913. For Mâle, Homan tells us, ‘thirteenth century France was the fullest conscious expression of Christian
thought’. But Mâle also pointed out that it was not artist and architect,
but theologian and priest, that determined this expression. Noting this,
and quoting Mâle, Sidney Alexander observes: ‘the artist was simply an
artisan who executed orders. Who but a theologian would know that
the ass who bears the implements for Abraham’s sacrifice “is the blind
and undiscerning Synagogue”? Or that “…the wood that Isaac bears on
his shoulder is the very Cross itself ”?’12 If this was so, then the artist/
artisan was responsible for execution but not for intention, for design
but not (or certainly not solely) for vision.
Thus it was the wisdom of the Church and (ideally) the piety of the
priest, and not exclusively that of the artist, that is the key to Gothic
art.13 Similarly, as Homan notes, it is the piety of the faithful community that is the key to Quaker and Shaker aesthetics. Again, on this
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assumption Christian art, to be Christian, must be at the service of the
Church as the Church determines. It must be a functional and utilitarian instrument of the Church’s work. And it must, ideally, be Gothic.
Vision and reality
Yet the state of the average parish church, its ornaments and its ministry, in the supposedly golden age of the Gothic thirteenth century, was
by no means as ideal and aspiring as seems to be assumed in Homan’s
book. Many years ago J. R. H. Moorman noted that:
‘Worn out’, ‘inadequate’, ‘broken’, ‘missing’—are words which recur
far too often in…visitation returns from typical English parish
churches during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover
some the churches were themselves in so terrible a state of dilapidations that it was impossible to use them at all in wet weather while
others were desecrated by being used for purely secular purposes.14
The mediaeval religious ideal was by no means always expressed in
religious practice. Further, the body of evidence that much artwork was
given to the Church as ‘purchase for paradise’—one of the immediate
causes of the Reformation and a sponsor of the Puritan aesthetic that
Professor Homan so admires—is a not unimportant fact to set against the
acknowledged magnificence of Gothic and its supposed moral integrity.
Art and magic
In addition, it is well to recognize that religion functions as magic.
Magic, like religion, is a communal construct. As such, and also like
religion, magic is dialectical in that it functions only in the relationship
between one person or group and another. For these reasons the dividing line between pious devotion and magical practice is by no means
always clear. This was so with mediaeval piety, not least the popular
piety officially encouraged by the Church, as the existence of cults that
were established, often spontaneously, around the images of saints, and
the use of charms associated with symbolic artefacts, illustrate.15 The
more conservative the religion, the more it relies on magic: ‘When religion clings to the past’, Earle J. Coleman notes, ‘it reverts to magic, that
is, [to] control or manipulation of the status quo’. Citing Martin Buber
that ‘religion is true as long as it is creative’, Coleman argues that ‘conservatism, ever the enemy of creativity, is responsible for failed religion
as well as failed art’.16
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In a classic study, R. C. Collingwood wrote in 1938 of religious art—
an art ‘falsely so-called’, in his view—functioning as magic:
The case of religious art eo nomine, with its hymns and ceremonies
and ritual acts, hardly needs analysis. Obviously its function is to
evoke, and constantly re-evoke, certain emotions whose discharge is
to be effected in the activities of everyday life. In calling it magical I
am not denying its claim to the title religious. Now that we have
given up using the word ‘magic’ as a term of abuse, and have decided
what it means, no one need fasten it upon things because he dislikes
them, or hesitate to use it for things which he respects. Magic and
religion are not the same thing, for magic is the evocation of emotions
that are needed for the work of practical life, and a religion is a creed,
or system of beliefs about the world, which is also a scale of values or
system of conduct. But every religion has its magic, and what is commonly called ‘practising’ a religion is practising its magic.17
There is much truth in this observation. Although ‘hymns and ceremonies and ritual acts’ seem to fall outside Homan’s definition of art, it
would be unwise for any of us with religious sensibilities and commitments, and especially (as with me) a priestly role, to ignore that religious artworks and buildings and rituals, have and are being used as
devices or venues for the operational magic of religion, often in deeply
unchristian ways and from very dubious motives. It would have been
helpful for Roger Homan to have examined this in the context set by
his thesis. There is, for example, no discussion of superstition and iconolatry in his book.
Totalitarian aesthetics
The ‘close-focused allegorising resulting in appropriate imagery…
invented and controlled by the Church and only executed by the artist’,18
as Alexander puts it (with similar controlling influences in Puritan art)
was, effectively, not merely a functional art promoted by a kind of clericalist theological gnosticism, it was also a totalitarian aesthetic. If a community has (or is supposed to have) social, political or religious needs
(or rather an interconnection and interweaving of all three) and art is
made to serve those needs, then art is purely social. It has no other purpose than to serve the needs of the community. This is a well-occupied
and heavily defended position. So, for Leo Tolstoy,
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art is not…the manifestation of some mysterious Idea or beauty, or
God; it is not…a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up
energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs;
it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not
pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in
the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards wellbeing of individuals and of humanity.19
For Tolstoy art’s function is to unite men ‘in the same feelings’
towards a universal brotherhood. Tolstoy believed that brotherhood
was founded on a common ‘religious sense’ and that art was instrumental to its achievement: ‘In every age, and in every society, there exists a
religious sense, common to that whole society of what is good and what
is bad, and it is this religious conception that decides the value of the
feelings transmitted by art’. Of course, for Tolstoy, ‘true Christianity’,
that is, the religion of Jesus, taught ‘the immediate relationship of each
man to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all men,
and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence’, but ‘Church Christianity’ had betrayed its foundations and made
‘blind faith in the Church and its ordinances the essential point of its
teaching’.20 But whether ‘true Christianity’ or ‘Church Christianity’, the
art of Christianity serves its community. It promotes, in the one case,
the brotherhood and equality of all men under God, and, in the other,
it consolidates the authority of the institutional Church. Similarly, if
we follow Professor Homan, the function of Christian art is to serve
particular expressions of the Christian faith, Catholic or Puritan, by
welding together the faithful, by didactic or devotional means. It is an
equally functionalist aesthetic. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is as alien to Professor
Homan’s aesthetic as it was to Tolstoy’s.
It is, of course, matched in Marxist aesthetics. So, N. I. Bukharin
argues that:
Art is a means of ‘socializing the feelings’… The hearer of a musical
work expressive of a certain mood will be ‘infected’, permeated, with
this mood; the feeling of the individual composer becomes the feeling of many persons, has been transferred to them, has ‘influenced’
them, a psychic state has been ‘socialized’. The same holds good in
any other art; painting, architecture, poetry, sculpture, etc.21
For Ernst Fischer, ‘the work of art must grip the audience not through
passive identification but through an appeal to reason which demands
action and decision. The rules according to which human beings live
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together must be treated in the drama as ‘temporary and imperfect’, so
as to make the spectator do something more productive than merely
watch…for ‘art is necessary in order that man should be able to
recognize and change the world’.22
Here we have, juxtaposed, examples of functionalist aesthetics of a
Christian religious socialist and a Marxist political socialist caste. Both
understand art as ideology: the art of the one expresses and presents the
Church as authority, and of the other, Marxist collectivism as authority,
with both operating in the same way for the same reasons—to persuade,
teach, confirm and retain the faithful. This is art as propaganda.
One can see a religious totalitarian aesthetic operating in Professor
Homan’s book. In it, he says: ‘we set out from the position of faith and
adumbrate a religious aesthetic as the product of a number of principles
internal to that faith’. For, again, ‘art is incidental to the purpose of
religion’. So it is that he is concerned, he says, ‘with the usefulness of
religious art to the faithful’. To this end, the mediaeval artist was
anonymous because he served ‘the dominantly didactic purpose of art’.
So too with the two central principles informing Puritan aesthetics:
‘the one is a consensual ethic of plainness and the other a sectarian rejection of the world and of established religion’ (italics mine). In the styles
of Church art and architecture favoured in this book, Gothic and Puritan (although baroque artists were also serving the Church’s didactic
purpose), a totalitarian religious ethic is the dominant force. Church art
must, by definition, be at the service of the Church. And it is for this
reason that both credal religion and ideological politics have accorded
to art such a dominant role. ‘It is interesting to observe in this context’,
writes Eliot Deutsch, ‘that it has been the totalitarian-minded political
and the puritanical-oriented religious that have accorded to art the
deepest social efficacy’.23 What Professor Homan seeks to persuade us
to do is to restrict Christian art and architecture to totalitarian Church
iconography.
How persuasive is his position both as an aesthetic theory and as
theology?
Different perspectives
The description ‘Christian art and architecture’ can be employed, using
different criteria from Roger Homan’s. For example, Peter and Linda
Murray in their The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture,
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are concerned not with the control the Church has exercised over its
artists but with the stimulus artists have derived from the Christian
faith. Their task is ‘to explore the Christian tradition in western art’.
They tell of ‘the inspiration and creative drive provided by the Christian religion from its beginnings to the present day’, whether or not it
is Church art. So, in their book, ‘dogmas, rites, and liturgical matters
are defined and explained only if they have a bearing on the arts’.24 For
Homan, art and architecture, to be Christian, must be at the service of
the Church. For the Murrays Christianity has been the beneficiary of
the arts. Homan selects artworks and architecture to serve his interpretation of what Christianity is. The Murrays suggest that changes in
the way that art was appreciated and valued, reflecting cultural change,
influenced the Church and its patronage of the arts. Theirs is a much
more open approach than that of Professor Homan and allows them to
cover a far wider range of artwork. What would happen if we broadened
the definition a little?
Christian art and church iconography
Homan draws a distinction between ‘religious’, ‘sacred’, ‘devotional’
and ‘liturgical’ Christian art. A critic might say that his distinctions
seem rather arbitrary and that Homan does not always stay within his
own definitions. But that is by the way. What if we added ‘non-Church’
to the list? Suppose that a deeply Christian artist produces work which
is unorthodox or heretical or even, at first sight, non-Christian? Would
this artwork thereby cease to be worthy of notice by Christians, or subject to their opprobrium? And what of artists who take Christian symbols or figures and present them in ways which church people found
disturbing or even disgusting? Does this make them unchristian?
Homan cites work by Chris Ofili, Andres Serrano, and Michele Coxon.
He could have listed many others, notably Francis Bacon and Gilbert
and George. Can artwork which judges the Church or even ridicules the
Church, or presents, say, Jesus in unconventional ways not be regarded
as Christian? And what of non-figurative art? The great figures of twentieth century abstraction believed that they were on a path to a visual
absolute, and often described their search in profoundly spiritual terms.
Can their work not be interpreted theologically as staging posts on an
‘upward’ and ‘inward’ journey, simply because it does not employ
ostensibly Christian imagery (and how can it, if it is abstract?).
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It is instructive that Homan should select Andres Serrano’s Piss Light
for criticism. Here is an artist, he tells us, who takes a religious symbol
and develops it, ‘but not for a spiritual purpose’. Piss Light (1987) is a
Cibachrome showing a small crucifix made of wood and plastic suspended in the artist’s urine—hence the title. The viewer of this very
large (60 inches by 40 inches) and beautiful photograph would not know,
had the artist not told us in the title he gives to it, how it was made.
Homan acknowledges that the image ‘is easy on the eye’ but, even
though (perhaps because) Serrano is a practising Roman Catholic, ‘it is
difficult to suppose that such a work is intended to be constructive of
the kingdom of God’. What disturbs Homan (and very many others
when this artwork was first shown), is not the image as such but the
materials from which it was made. These, apparently, are materials that
can corrupt the viewer—though they are as natural as the egg tempera
that James Southall employed. Because of the materials the image
becomes corrupt. So, on this view, it is the medium and the context and
not the image itself that determines how it should be viewed. In fact,
Serrano asserted that this artwork was created not to ridicule the Christian religion but to denounce its institutions and to illustrate how our
contemporary culture is cheapening this central symbol of the Christian religion.25 This artist’s intention, so he himself recorded, is the
opposite of what Homan assumes that it is! It follows that what is being
attacked here is not the artwork but the context which it is assumed
that the artwork occupies. It is irrelevant whether an artwork is great, or
even good. To condemn it is sufficient only to take for granted, wrongly,
the artist’s intention.
And what of non-Christian artists, using Christian images, who have
produced work of extraordinary power? What of, says Marc Chagall, a
Hasidim Jew, whose great White Crucifixion (1938) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago? Chagall painted a number of crucifixions. The date of
this one is significant of course. Christ hangs there, with the inscription
in Hebrew over his head: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’. A black
and white prayer shawl is wrapped around his body. Jesus was a son of
Israel. In a pulse of movement around the crucified, sons and daughters
of Israel, brothers and sisters of his, escape from a synagogue set alight
by brown-shirts, women wail, men run away, the Torah is burned, the
menorah burns brightly with extraordinary stillness. But although from
outside and above the picture a shaft of light bathes the cross, this is the
crucifixion of a persecuted Jew: as Franz Meyer put it: ‘…any notion of
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salvation is absent from Chagall’s conception of Christ’.26 But, even if
this is the case (and the young Chagall records asking a rabbi ‘what he
thought about Christ, whose pale face had been troubling me for a long
time’),27 Chagall’s conception does not inhibit me from believing that
to confront that picture is to experience a salvific event. Is such work as
this ipso facto outside any consideration by Christians as salvific because
it is not only not Church art but is not even painted by a Christian? But
does this work not ‘transport and elevate the senses’; which is Professor
Homan’s definition of the word ‘sublime’ in his title?
The nature of the sublime
But there is a problem with Homan’s use of ‘sublime’. Although he
defines it as that ‘which transports and elevates the senses’, he attributes
his use of the word to Hegel’s hugely influential Aesthetics: Lectures on
Fine Arts in which Hegel says: ‘If symbolic art in general may already
be called Sacred, and because it adopts the Divine as the content of its
productions, the art of sublimity is the sacred art as such which can be
called exclusively sacred because it gives honour to God alone’. However, Homan’s assumptions about the nature of Christian art and architecture, the God that its artists and designers worship, and the sublime
which their work is supposed to embody or signify, would not be shared
by Hegel.
Hegel’s philosophical system, and hence his aesthetics, is complex,
often confusing and not infrequently ambiguous. His theology is far
from orthodox, and his own pupils debated whether he was a theist, a
pantheist or an atheist. Hegel frequently identifies God with the Absolute, that is, as Michael Inwood puts it, ‘he or it is transposed into the
form of pure thought’ and so ‘ “God” like “Absolute” is an all but empty
expression’ in Hegel’s philosophy. This God is in process and mutable
and known only in our experience of humankind. Religion, for Hegel,
differs from art only in that it prompts worship, but this worship is that
of the individual heart and is much closer to Protestant practice than to
Catholicism, which Hegel criticises for divorcing religion from the
world. His concept of religious art allows not only that all art, and not
merely art with an ostensible religious theme, is ultimately religious,
but that all art (even poetry, the least sensuous, the ‘inward art’) has to
give place to thought and thus to philosophy. Hegel downgrades the
‘sublime’ from the place given to it by his eighteenth century predecessors Kant and Burke to pre-classical (for him aesthetically inadequate)
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symbolic art, where, as Hegel puts it in his Phenomenology of Mind, ‘the
figuration suitable to the idea is not yet found’ and ‘the artist’s theme is
only as the abstract God of pure thought, or an effort towards him—a
restless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape
as it vainly tries to find its goal’.28 As Gary Shapiro puts it, for Hegel:
‘Symbolic art is typically sublime in so far as it testifies to a failure of
adequation and to the insufficiency of artistic means’.29 It is formlessness, non-sensuousness. So it is that, as Hegel says,
the Christian conception of truth; and more especially the spirit of
our modern world, or, to come closer, of our religion and our intellectual culture, reveals itself as beyond the stage at which art is the highest mode assumed by man’s consciousness of the absolute… Thought
and reflection have taken their flight above fine art… The beautiful
days of Greek art, and the golden time of the later middle ages are
gone by.30
Romantic (Christian) art is as incapable of expressing this ‘deeper
form of truth’ than was symbolic art in harmonising form and content.
As Andrew Bowie reminds us, Hegel ‘produced the most important systematic aesthetics of the nineteenth century at the same time announcing “the end of art” as an expression of the “Absolute”.’31 For Hegel the
truth to which Christianity pointed could not be expressed in figurative
representation. It was, in that sense, formless or sublime.
It is this kind of ‘God’ who is ‘favoured’ by this kind of ‘sublimity’ in
Hegel’s philosophy, and it seems a far cry from the God, Christian art
and architecture, and the sublime assumed in Homan’s book. If ‘sublime’ in its title is not what Hegel meant by it then it must mean something else. Does it mean sublime in the sense of pure, or far above the
ordinary, ethereal perhaps, inspired? If so, it seems, art is only sublime
when it is commissioned by or accepted by the Church for its didactic
or devotional purposes—and even then, only in some periods of the
Church’s history.
Art for Christ’s sake
It is impossible in a brief article even to outline a radically different
appreciation of what it can mean to call an artwork ‘Christian’.32 Were
there the space it would need to take full account of the fact that for at
least a century we have understood art (and architecture as artwork) in
ways quite unlike that of our predecessors. Since the Renaissance a
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work of art had been seen, broadly and to some degree (these caveats are
very important) descriptive of (or at least reminiscent of ) the natural
environment to which it conformed through the illusion of linear perspective. But, certainly since Cubism, that has not been the case. In
1926, in his Suprematist manifesto, Kasimir Malevich asserted that
‘…art, at the turn of the century, divested itself of the ballast of religious and political ideas which had been imposed upon it and came into
its own—attained, that is, the form suited to its intrinsic nature…’.33 An
artwork is now viewed as an entity in its own right—as, as George
Heard Hamilton puts it, ‘a real thing, subject to the laws of art rather
than of nature, imposing its own system of relations upon nature’.34
This changed perspective inevitably changes the way we now view
artwork, not only from our own period but from much earlier periods.
We now realize that artworks have always to some extent been independent, not only of the environment of which they were supposed to
be descriptions or (much better) illusions, but also of the intentions of
those who executed them and commissioned them and the purposes for
which they were created. It follows that any viewer of (or hearer or reader
of, or partaker in) an artwork—any artwork in any context—must accept
the artwork on its own terms. And that, in turn, requires those of us
who say that we profess it, to take the incarnation utterly seriously. It
requires us to believe, as a central article of faith, that God can and does
reveal his extraordinarily abundant and saving grace in whatever place,
and in whatever way he chooses, and therefore to stand before an artwork—any artwork in any place—with respect and sympathy.
It would be absurd to imply that, as a general theological rule, God
follows the Church’s explicit doctrinal systems and uses the Church’s
explicitly religious images in order to communicate with his world!
And, consequently, a fully contemporary Christian understanding of art
(or of anything that is truly real) would affirm, again as a central principle, that the ways by which God (or religion, if the word ‘God’ is too
problematic) communicates will invariably not be explicit but be in
what readers of this journal might regard as ways which are implicit in
the everyday. It is for this reason that modern art is revelatory; as Paul
Tillich says, ‘it shows that the reality of our existence is as it is. It does
not cover up the reality in which we are living’.35 Revelation as ‘showing the reality’ is invariably implicit, or ‘on the slant’, as John Tinsley
reminded us many years ago. He took the title of a beautifully sensitive
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article that he contributed to Theology in May 1980 from a poem by
Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies.
Tinsley reminded us of what should have been obvious—that for
Jesus ‘awareness of God could apparently only be contained in indirect
or paradoxical language’. The Jesus of the Gospels was suspicious of
what we would call the ‘miraculous’ and ‘much more concerned with
insight and receptivity as significant ways of responding to the ordinary
and familiar’.36
Bishop Tinsley noted also these lines from W. H. Auden’s Shield of
Achilles:
Truth in any serious sense
Like Orthodoxy, is a reticence.
A Christianity whose orthodoxy is not reticent and is not ready or
able to see the things of Christ other than in its own institutions, images,
buildings and formal doctrines, is a religion that has denied the truths
of the kingdom upon which it was founded—that kingdom which is
indeed everywhere around us, not least—by no means least—in the arts.
Notes
1. In his Painting the Word (1999), p. ix, John Drury says of his discussion of ‘Christian paintings’ that ‘composition, colour, contents…and the way in which the paint
itself is handled—all are treated as part and parcel of their religious meanings’.
2. Waldemar-George and Geneviève Nouaille-Rouault, Rouault, trans. Noel Lindsay,
London: Pall Mall Press, 1971, p. 29; originally l’Univers de Roualt. Paris: Henri
Screpel, 1971, and S.P.A.D.E.M., 1971.
3. Waldemar-George and Geneviève Nouaille-Rouault, Rouault, trans. Noel Lindsay,
London: Pall Mall Press, 1971, p. 66.
4. Peter and Linda Murray, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture,
article on Pugin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
5. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities,
London: Faber & Faber, 1993, p. 15.
6. For an acute analysis of the relationship of mediaeval and Protestant religion and
architecture, see Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of
Cities, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp. 5–68.
7. As to any supposed correspondence between Gothic architectural style and
mediaeval theology, Ernst Gombrich notes that ‘there is no iron law of such isomorphism’. Nevertheless, he draws attention to Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism (Paris, 1951) and to A. O. Lovejoy’s ‘The Parallel between Deism and
Classicism’ in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
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1948), as examples of ‘the desire to demonstrate the organic unity of all aspects of a
culture’ (Ideas and Idols [1979], pp. 44–45, 47).
8. For a brilliant assessment of baroque, see Erwin Panofsky’s 1934 essay ‘What is
Baroque?’ in his Three Essays on Style, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 17–88.
9. To be fair to Professor Homan, Michelangelo was, in 1549, denounced by
counter-reformers as ‘an inventor of filthiness, who cared more for art than for
devotion’. The master himself was aware of the conflict between piety and art. But we
look at his work today with our own eyes, and not with those of the counter-reformers—
or his!
10. Giotto, incidentally, was born in the middle of the thirteenth century and not
early in the sixteenth.
11. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, p. 13.
12. Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall: An Intimate Biography, New York: Paragon
House, 1989, pp. 477–78.
13. In his The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (Yale
University Press, 1992), Eamon Duffy notes that English mediaeval religion was ‘resolutely and enthusiastically orientated towards the public and the corporate’. Mediaeval
Christians were ‘corporate Christians’. Religious artefacts may, and frequently were,
paid for by individuals but invariably donated with the agreement of ‘the worshipful of
the parish’ and with the ‘counsell and help’ of their priest, as was the case with the
Rood-screen built at Bristol All Saints in 1483 (pp. 159–60).
14. J. R. H. Moorman, English Church Life in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1945, p. 145.
15. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 266-98 passim, for a comprehensive study.
16. Earle J. Coleman, Creativity and Spirituality: Bonds between Art and Religion,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 156.
17. R. C. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938,
pp. 72–73.
18. Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall: An Intimate Biography, New York: Paragon
House, 1989, p. 478.
19. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, London: The Brotherhood Publishing Co., 1898, p. 50
(my italics).
20. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, London: The Brotherhood Publishing Co., 1898 (reprinted by Ward Lock Reprints, 1979), p. 56.
21. N. I. Bukharin, ‘Art and Social Evolution’, Marxism and Art, (ed. Berel Lang and
Forrest Williams, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1972), quoted in
Eliot Deutsch, Essays on the Nature of Art, Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1996, p. 83.
22. Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (English edn), London: Penguin Books, 1963,
pp. 10, 14.
23. Eliot Deutsch, Essays on the Nature of Art, Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1996, p. 83.
24. Peter and Linda Murray, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture,
article on Pugin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. viii.
25. See Lucy Lippard’s article on Serrano in Art in America for April 1990, discussed
in Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art?, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 17–21.
26. Quoted in Michel Makarius, Chagall, trans. Jane Brenton, London: Bracken
Books, 1988, p. 118.
27. Marc Chagall, My Life, New York: Da Capo Press, 1960, p. 128 (written in Moscow
in 1921–22).
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28. Para. 561, section 3—Absolute Mind. I am grateful to John Hey for this
reference.
29. Gary Shapiro, entry on G. W. F. Hegel in David Cooper (ed.), A Companion to
Aesthetics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 185.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, quoted in Charles Harrison, Paul
Wood and Jason Gaiger, Art in Theory 1815–1900, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 60–61.
31. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester
1990, p. 115.
32. I have attempted this in Explorations in Art, Theology and Imagination, London:
Equinox Publishing, 2005.
33. Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (1926), quoted in Herschel B. Chipp,
Theories of Modern Art, Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1968, p. 345.
34. George Hamilton Heard, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940 (1967), p. 15.
35. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Yale: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 2000 (1952),
p. 147.
36. John Tinsley, ‘Tell it Slant’, Theology LXXXIII, May 1980, no. 693: 163–70.
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