By PAUL KRAUSE
What is the role of art and the artist today? As far as I can see it, there are two dialectically opposed visions of art and the artist. And Christians should be especially concerned and engaged in art and its future.
The first, which is now all but commonplace and rather depressing, is art in service to zeitgeist politics. The product of Walter Benjamin’s monumental revolution in aesthetics, the subjugation of art to political causes, invariably destroys art as it becomes the shallow platform of the prevailing ideological directive despite the veneer of an avant-garde mask.
The second vision, which was commonplace but now altogether destroyed, is art in service to enchantment and the transcendental yearning in man.
Christians have a long and storied relationship with art, culture, and the humanities. Yet in our desolate wasteland, Christians, it seems, have deserted this well of life and inspiration to those who present muck and mud as the spirit of ascent. From the anonymous poets of Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and Poem of the Cid, to the Troubadours of France, Dante, Tasso, to Milton, Swift, and T.S. Eliot, notwithstanding Shakespeare or Tolstoy, Christians have been at the forefront of the arts, culture, and literature.
Even in more recent times Christian luminaries like G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien inspired generations and produced magnificent works of art that have stood the test of time. Among the great legacies of Christianity is its artistic spirit of inspiration.
One of the sad realities that we live under is the Christian desertion of the arts to forces entirely antithetic to the good, true, and the beautiful. In the bid to be socially and politically “relevant,” Christians have wholesale embraced the ideologies of their enemies: human rights, socialism, and feminism, in hope to be accepted by the decadent and dying city of man instead of proclaiming the goodness, truth, and beauty which the heavens hold and which call man up to communion.
Moreover, aspiring Christian artists and critics find themselves in a lonely world indeed. Their teachers are hostile to the Christian religion and regard religiosity and creativity to be mutually exclusive. All the prominent journals and magazines of the arts, debased as they are, are generally — if not explicitly — hostile to Christianity. The Christian artist is lost in the wasteland.
Being stranded in this desolate and lonely wasteland eats away at the Christian artist in several ways. First it destroys their spirit and leads to their abandonment of art as a sacred project of engagement. Second is how acceptance into the artistic world requires the abandonment of faith. Third is the politicization of art and aesthetics, following Walter Benjamin, wherein artistic and literary creativity is definitively uncreative and uninspiring, where everything is read and crafted to promote the zeitgeist of post-Marxist cultural revolution and the only worthwhile writers are the litany of left-wing saints and heroes like Benjamin, Adorno, Sontag, Bhabha, and others.
The world of the Christian artists is lonely because it is lonely. The Christian artist is deliberately shunned by the mainstream artistic and literary presses and, regrettably, Christian magazines and newspapers rarely give encouragement or support for the important work of art and enchantment in our contemporary world. Those that are nominally Christian generally lose their authenticity and become crypto-secular artistic and literary journals with a gloss of Christianity over them.
We must now ask a more fundamental question: What is art? The astute reader will recognize I have listed mostly writers; this is not to ignore the contributions of sculptors or painters through the ages, but there is something all-encompassing about the artist as writer since the writer creates visual imagery and an auditory aesthetic and conversation through the craft of dialogue, description, and the written word.
I take art to be the creative endeavor to communicate human desire and hope which has an unmistakable aesthetic cornerstone to it. Any work of picturesque art, sculpture, or painting, has a visible aesthetic. Any of work of music has an audible aesthetic to it. Any work of literature has an imaginative aesthetic to it which, in some ways, can be regarded as the Queen of Art, given its encompassing nature.
Literature has the quality of the audible aesthetic, especially through song, poetry, or even conversational dialogue. Literature also has a visible aesthetic to it through the use of imagery, archetypes, and symbols that paint pictures for the reader. Literature, then, is the imaginative enterprise that ties all aesthetics together into one monumental construction that then serves to inspire generations to carry on this creative pilgrimage. After all, many of the great sculptors, painters, and composers were influenced or inspired by preceding works of literature for their magnificent creations.
The Christian is the artist par excellence because Christian theology is the theology of art. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This creative spirit was then made flesh, died and rose again, ascended, and shall return.
The cosmic drama of good and evil, salvation and damnation, sanctification and conversation, all owe their aesthetic dynamism to the Christian who then honors True Genius through imitatio Dei in the form of art which points the soul to Him who is Love, Creator, and Redeemer. Christians should not only be inspired to reclaim their artistic heritage, they should be inspired to pilgrimage to the very source of that creativity. The future of art remains in the hands and minds of Christians as it always has.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress