The Land of Unlikeness

If the Enlightenment and subsequent periods of modernity have done anything to alter what it means to be human, they have set humanity at a distance from the world, positing a radical degree of separation between the created order and Aristotle’s rational animals. Where God factors into this rift, and how one structures the dialogue between Philosophy and Theology, depends largely on how one schematizes God in relation to Being. It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who adroitly drew out the ramification of the human mind’s prodigality when he said, “[T]he human person himself would stand as the synthetic element, not only between [Church and world/Faith and Reason], but secretly above both.”¹

Yet, while the debates over modernity and its theological consequences drew on, the distance between humanity and world stretched ever wider, matched only by modernity’s maw, engulfing the world quicker than Christianity could respond and, some would argue, in ways Christian scholars and clergy didn’t know how to respond to. Christian (sub)culture was born, an enclave of fear of and loathing for the secular, an a-theism which Christian subculture bore to life and gave authenticity and integrity to the more it removed itself form the world.

The frequently brutal dismissal of the Church’s authority also in worldly matters of politics, of the planning of the world, and above all in matters of the spirit and science, does indeed correspond in part to an increasing falling away of the educated and of the masses from the Christian faith, but in part also to a process (acknowledged and justified by the Church herself) in which the natural orders and areas of knowledge assume autonomy, as was demanded by the Vatican Council itself in clear distinction between the natural and supernatural orders: duplex ordo cognitionis, proprio objecto, propria methodo.

In the most recent Books & Culture, and his new book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie argues that, while the Christian subculture removed itself from the world, the world is not so easily shaken off, as if it were an old coat or bad dream. In fact, at the heart of the Christian truth is the deep understanding of the world as a gratuitous and ex nihilo “expression of divine love.”² As such, interaction with this world, this given reality, is sacramental, inasmuch as it is a graced reality. For the arts, this demonstrates a truth that reformed thinkers in the Dutch tradition like Begbie and Wolterstorff have been declaring for nearly the past 3 decades, that the experiences of the arts and artistic making are fundamentally “ways we engage the physical world… physical things… [that] have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love- they are part of the ordo amoris.”

As the church shrunk back from the world, both Catholics and Protestants had difficulty articulating this Christian view on the arts and the world. Begbie points out that the retreat from the physical often took the form of looking for an underlying spiritual value or meaning: “Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond the material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value.” Later, even the spiritual would lose cred, and the hermeneutic tendency would look for meaning in the individual’s psychological experience of art - think here of those like Clive Bell and Sylvia Plath.

As art become more abstract, so too artists and the public alike more often practiced abstraction in seeking the underlying essence of the artifact from its physical boundaries. Even theologians programmed this dichotomy of the physical from the meaningful and spiritual.³ Yet all of this misses or regrets what is most characteristic of art, that it plays with and in the physical realm, that it is transmitted to us not by spiritual means, but by and through creation: “[B]earing in mind the long-standing legacy of thinking about music … which has arguably suppressed a great deal of music and led to unnecessarily negative attitudes toward it (not least in the church), we might do well to regain a sense of music’s profound physicality - its embeddedness in God’s given material world.” Although Begbie is addressing music in particular here, his argument easily extends to the other arts.

Furthermore, re-situating our relationship to art as physical helps us relearn the physical world in general as well as the human body itself, the last act of the original creation: “Our own bodies… are intrinsically part of musical experience. To insist that Christians are to be spiritual is indeed quite proper, but to be spiritual is not to renounce the body per se.” The acceptance of the body as creation and thus necessarily and constitutively part of this thing we call art has a dual fecundity. First, as it emphasizes not only artistic creation, but rather experience in general as a physical act, it leads us to an intimacy with art we may have hitherto reserved for the artist herself. And second, it explodes the individual nature of art, emphasizing the communal aspect of physicality, the “koinonia” of the created order. Begbie draws on the thought of Bonhoeffer to explicate the image of the Christian community, one not of cheap harmony, but of polyphony, sometimes difficult to grasp, but always rewarding. The emphasis is relatedness being part of the overall aesthetic creation, rather than the Romantic image of the artist as sole-creator in defiance of the heavens and the masses. “True enough, the self is always and already a social product… and yet the self is centered when addressed and treated as a distinct you by another person or other persons… Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God in which we are invited to share.”

I would add that it is not only the community of believers or simply humanity that we join when we participate in creation and acknowledge our place within the created order. For, if even the stones would cry out in praise should humanity fall silent (Luke 19), it seems only “natural” that they also welcome our joining in the polyphony of the worldly community. The elements of creation seem to be actively awaiting commune with the other members, a vision that the land artist Andy Goldworthy seems to have focused on with his lens. His work carries a sense not only of an order or form inherent to nature, to physicality, but also the yearning of the natural for the supernatural koinonia to which Begbie alludes. The question is if and how one might speak of stones and wood and leaves singing in the polyphony.

1. HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.↩
2. B&C (September/October, 2007): 28-31.↩
3. Begbie cites P. T. Forsyth here.↩