Vigeon Post

SOME ASPECTS OF ART AND SPIRITUALITY
(The same only different ?)

(An article written for  the Quarterly Review of the Church Society for Psychic and Spiritual Studies 2000)


Art is a powerful way of taking what is outside and bringing it deep inside ourselves" Peter Marshall. Dean of  Worcester

    "Seeing Salvation" was the title given to the exhibition in the National Gallery to celebrate the second millennium of the Christian era. Under various headings we were invited to see how artists have struggled to demonstrate the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ from the graffiti in the catacombs of Rome to the fantasies of Stanley Spencer in his Berkshire village. Some saw it as a rather daring thing for the Gallery's Director, Neil McGregor, to do. Not very often , in these "post modern" days , does a public servant placard his personal faith so openly.  But  McGregor was, of course, quite right when he stated "Christianity has been the predominant force shaping European culture".
    Yet one of the feed backs which emanated from the exhibition has been the apparently not untypical reaction of the younger generation. Often they have said
"Why have I not been told of this wonderful art; and what am I to make of it ? I don't understand what it is about".  A more damning verdict on contemporary education can hardly be imagined.
    The millennial experience is, then, asking us some pertinent questions about the relationship between art (pictorial mainly in this essay, but also of course literary and musical art) and spirituality.  And for that matter, what do we mean by "spirituality".  It is one of those words which can mean almost anything we want it to mean.  I would want to say that my spirituality is the end product of spiritual authority reacting against my personality. There are degrees of spiritual authority. So the basic scenario would seem to be in the words "God and Me". But it is more helpful to be more specific and say "What is the result of Owen encountering Jesus Christ ?" And from that point there are infinite variations as we meet great apostles of Christian living.  Benedict, Francis, Wesley, Ignatius are four that immediately spring to mind as voices that forged their particular brand of spirituality, and found their own disciples to pass on their tradition.
    And why should we forge a spirituality for ourselves ?  Simply because there is an urge for the inner soul to possess a vehicle with which to navigate our way through a problematic life with some sense of purpose and some degree of confidence. In the unfashionable words of the Book of Common prayer, "that we may so pass through the waves of this troublesome life that finally we attain to the land of everlasting light."
    A healthy spirituality will always have a proper sense of proportion and perspective - rather like a good work of art really!  My daughter, Mary Clare, was born at breakfast time on a Saturday which happened to be St Mary Magdalene's Day. I was due to celebrate the Eucharist at nine o'clock; but the midwife was still there, and things were fairly chaotic. So I nipped over to church to see if there was a congregation. There was only my devout organist. I begged to be excused and apologised to him for turning out to no avail. "Don't worry Vicar" said Kenneth, "I'll play half an hour of Bach  instead -  I always think of that as another form of Holy Communion".  In a particular sense he was wrong: but in the larger sense surely right ?  It was precisely because he was the only parishioner who could be bothered to turn up to observe a Red Letter Day, that his Eucharistic understanding enabled him to speak that way. His spirituality and his art were integrated.  When my wife once described to our cathedral organist how our baby son,Tim, would be content in his cot if she played a Bach record, he rightly replied "Then you'll have no problem with his spirituality when he grows up will you ?"
    Spirituality and Art are obviously closely related; although the more you contemplate them, the more subtle that relationship becomes.  Evelyn Underhill, that doyenne of English spiritual writers in the early 20th century once ventured her opinion that the motivation of the great artists and the great masters of prayer  sprang from the same creative source. Both are searching for truth at the deepest level.  As usual Evelyn Underhill was very near the mark.
    Let us  then consider art as an act of creativity. I believe myself that  religious doctrines of creation whichever they may be, get their inspiration from the human experience of creation. The artist brings into being something that was not there before. And its birth is a mystery. Our creations are not completely at our command. Let me be anecdotal.  In my earlier days I composed  some hymn tunes. One tune I forged as "seated one day at the organ, my fingers wandered idly".  I was rather fond of it; but the tune bore no relation to any words and was unlikely to do so as its scansion was irregular. Thirty years later, my Diocese had a hymn competition.  The first round was for new words, and was won by Fr Hilary Greenwood SSM. When they were published I found that they fitted "my tune" like a kid glove. It seemed almost as if the tune had been composed with these words in mind many years before. Something strange was going on - as the wise man said, "Coincidences happen too often to be simply coincidences."


    True creative work must surely be thought of as taking place at that point where the barrier between the visible and the invisible is a little thinner than usual. There is something about true inspiration which we instinctively recognise - even though we may not always be in sympathy with the result. Inspiration - 'breathing in' , or 'inspiriting' - is when something more than the expected manifests itself. The Exodus story of the Golden Calf suggests something of this mystery. When accused by Moses of disloyalty to their Saviour God, Aaron reacts in words resembling the sailor's traditional excuse "It just came off in my hands, Chief !"  
"We melted the gold and this is what came out" says Aaron. It is an experience not unknown to the creative process. The end product is rarely what the artist - in whatever medium - set out to do.  If I decide that the verse I want to write is best served by sonnet form, then in some strange way, the given formula has considerable influence on the thought process, and can help me express more accurately what I am striving for.  So a sonnet which ponders an evening at the Royal Ballet can end up saying;
        'What alchemy can make us weep for art
                  And yet dry eyed behold the real world's smart ?'
    I hope this is leading us back to the relationship of art to spirituality. I would like to expand my concept of a "spirituality" by saying that it is what happens at the interface between the
    visible and invisible
    the open and the hidden
    the known and the unknown
    experience and fantasy
    reality and imagination
    finite and infinite.
    Spirituality is a term which can relate to the individual; to a community, to a church. When spirituality is healthy, it will always be a constructive force, impelling us forward, never letting us become stale or complacent.
    It might be only too easy to state the obvious - that a work of art is the expression of the artist's spirituality. That may often be true. But there seems to be a dual meaning here. For a painting may simply be the reflection of a designated spirituality as, say, commissioned by a church council or a bishop or a wealthy business man.  Our art galleries are littered with excellent nativity's and crucifixions. Not perhaps, for obvious reasons, quite so many great Resurrections and Ascensions ! But the great art forms (so it seems to me) are what happens when the artist has such a strong and creative spirituality that he can burst through and give us something new and riveting. The paintings I remember best are those that have been instrumental in changing or at least influencing my own spirituality. Some years ago, my wife and I were motoring on holiday in Alsace. Quite unaware, we visited the museum at Colmar, unprepared for the shock that awaited us inside.  There - tearing our petty souls to shreds - was the  great polyptic "Eisenheim altarpiece" ascribed to 'Grunewald' of whom little or nothing is known. The sheer power of the images - the realism of the crucifixion, the glory of the resurrection - was enough to strip away all pretence and false piety. It brought to mind the dictum of a priest friend many years ago. "I suppose that if we truly remembered  what we are commemorating at the Altar, none of us would return from the Communion rail dry-eyed".
    Or take my discovery of the work of Poussin at the Royal Academy a couple of years back. Here was someone with an original angle on all his subjects. He was able to defy traditional piety with a kind of Christian scepticism .  His depiction of Noah's Ark relegates the ship to the horizon while in  the foreground we see a depiction of a sort of 17th Century Mozambican flood.  Desperate people try to save themselves from the danger; while the Ark seems to echo (again) the sailor's riposte "Blow you Jack, I'm in the lifeboat".  It reminds me of a GP of mine who confided that he rarely looked to Christians when he wanted someone to offer some neighbourly care to a sick patient. "They are too busy worrying about their own souls" was his verdict. I obviously protested but his opinion must have been rooted in experience.
    My favourite  Poussin's  is his "Holy Family" where Mary and Elizabeth are coping with their talented boys while Joseph sits apart. One is reminded forcibly of the image of  Father with his stuffy books in the Vicarage study while the real world gets on with things in the kitchen.
     Then last year, I visited the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and was struck by a picture quite unknown to me by an artist also unknown. 'Mary Magdalene goes to the sepulchre' was the work and the artist one Giovanni Giralmo Savoldo of the early 16th Century. The figure is clad in  a voluminous dark mantle glistening with silver highlights, stooping, unsure of herself in the gloom of the early morning, weeping (probably) and carrying the spices for the burial of Jesus. She has not yet encountered the angels; but somehow you feel something very important and mysterious is on the cards. The figure haunted me and became my trail finder for Easter that year.
    Art then, is a tangible expression of its creator's spirituality and is consequently the moulder of the spirituality of those who behold it and to whom it speaks. This can be particularly true when seen against the spirituality in fashion in the artist's day. The classic case is that of the 'miracle' of the 13th century  renewal or 'little Renaissance'. The explosion of new life into the western Church which was owed to such great creative souls as Bernard , Francis and Dominic found its artistic expression in the 'return to realism' . Anyone who has visited the basilica of St Francis  at Assisi knows how one is almost overwhelmed by the exuberance of Giotto, Cimabue and their contemporaries. Their art, being representative of a fresh and living spirituality still speaks.
    There is, of course, a reverse image to all this. It finds its expression from time to time in the Christian rejection of images and therefore of pictorial art - at least religious art.  At the Reformation much ecclesiastical patronage vanished in many parts of Europe. The triumph of Calvinist theology and spirituality stimulated the development of the glories of, for example, Dutch domestic art.
    The Swiss Protestant theologian, Martin Brunner, expressed the situation like this.
"At the Reformation, the church was turned into a classroom; and the sublime mysteries of the Christian faith were mediated through the narrow cleft of the intellect".  
He is surely right in pinpointing  the intellectualisation of Christianity as being a feature and surely also a problem of the faith in Western Society.  Yet we all know how the interior of a church in plain white can seem very impressive.  There should be always an ongoing dialogue between the spirituality of plainness and embellishment; between beauty in simplicity and beauty in abundance. In the words of Martin Thornton; "Christian spirituality tends to veer towards either a cold and formal intellectualism on the one hand or to an undisciplined emotionalism on the other; to either a straitjacket for the spirit or towards sentimentality divorced from doctrine". ('The Study of Spirituality  p432).
    So let us return to our beginnings.  Spirituality is what develops when we do business with God.  I find it helpful sometimes to think of the Lord Jesus as someone who was the supreme exponent of the art of living. In a sense all good art is an effort to express truth; and it does so in its various traditional mediums.  The most important medium of artistic expression is the human life.  In Ephesians Chapter 2 verse 10, there is a phrase which is translated by the New English Bible as
        'you are all God's work of art'.
This is of course only an optional translation. But the root of the word translated 'work of art' is the verb which the lexicon defines as " to  make, to produce, especially in the field of art."  The Christian Gospel is basically about what God can do with you and for you; what God can make of you. What you can do for God and humanity follows on from this.  I find this insight attributed to St Paul quite fascinating.  It conjures up, perhaps, the picture of Michaelangelo looking at great block of marble and seeing what he can fashion from it.  As the artist works on his medium, whatever that may be, so we can glimpse the idea of the Holy Spirit fashioning us (with all the flaws of the raw material that is our humanity); and transforming us into what we can be if we will let Him get to work on us.  We can learn much from artists of all skills; but we do not need to be a painter or poet or composer ourselves.  But we do need to cultivate a spirituality which will enable the Holy Spirit to make our life a work of art . We might say that the function of  religion is to raise human existence into an art form. And like all creative processes that is (only) 1% inspiration and (mostly) 99% perspiration. St Teresa of Avila is reported to have told her novices not to think they were in the convent to indulge in  mystical experiences, but to help with the washing up !  Michaelangelo himself  is reputed to have said towards the end of his long life,  
            "still I am learning.............."
Whether we are painting or praying,  such open-ness to what is still there to know and to learn is essential for keeping us in touch with reality. Art and prayer are both a searching after truth. And it is only "then" - when it is given us to see the rich canvas of life from the other side - that, in the words of St Paul, " we shall know even as we are known".
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Additional thought.
"On a computer screen we click an IKON in order to access a programme. This is precisely the function of IKONs - they are means by which we gain access to "what is going on" behind the scenes"
{Dean of Kings College London.)