Theology's Influence on Art

Last week, I cleansed the palate (so to speak) by insisting that God has not revealed any rules for good fiction. This means there is no Christian formula for "correct" art. Really, this should come as no surprise to anyone. We might talk about "writing from a Christian worldview," but that's a broad category. When it comes down to details of craft, it offers relatively little direction. That doesn't mean, of course, that our beliefs do not influence our work. They do, on every level: content, form and style. The question is, "How?" To get to the bottom of it, I've been wandering like a blind man with a lamp through Athens. Actually, it wasn't Athens at all, but somewhere a bit closer to Jerusalem: Westminster.

That's right. I've been rubbing shoulders with theologians, asking the tough questions, so you don't have to. Not that asking the questions isn't fun. It's a blast. Only, before you can ask them, you have to identify the famous dead theologians hanging on the walls throughout the seminary -- and if you do this correctly, as I did, you are ushered into a small office where a series of smaller portraits hang for the "bonus round," where I scored about fifty-fifty, getting Bavinck, Van Til and Dabney, but missing Thornwell and every member of a treacherous little group portrait. In the end, I posed my question -- how would the specifics of Reformed theology influence the creation of literature? -- and received several answers, mainly in the form of a shrug.

But a theologian's shrug is a more nuanced thing than that of a mere mortal. It does not signify ignorance -- there is no such gesture in the theological repertoire, after all -- so much as epistemic humility. It suggests either that (a) the question is unanswerable; (b) the question was phrased incorrectly; or (c) the answer can only be given in book-form. Sometimes (a) and (c) are both applicable, which is why so many nine-hundred-page theological tomes end with -- you guessed it -- the literary equivalent of a suggestive shrug. That's fine. I'm not complaining. I like to read books. In this case, one of several that was recommended happened to be a title I've been interested in for a while: Calvin Seerveld's A Christian Critique of Art and Literature.

My adopted tradition (in contrast to the one I started out in, which I lamented last week) has been pretty good about providing such critiques. We've given the world Schaeffer, Rookmaaker and their successors -- in addition to bequeathing the whole Christian worldview concept in the first place. Where we haven't been so helpful, though, is moving beyond critique to contribution, to practice. We've offered more criticism than creativity, in other words. In his essay on "Subject and Theme" in It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, Edward Knippers sums up the value and limitations of the Reformed contribution in this regard. Someone Knippers singles out as particularly valuable to him is Calvin Seerveld.

In a section of A Christian Critique titled "Earlier Reformed Guidelines," Seerveld makes two observations about the style and subject of Christian art that seem particularly applicable to writing. I'm not putting these forward as rules. Rather, I hope to illustrate how one's theological outlook might influence artistic work. You may have a different outlook than I do, but I hope these examples help you find connections between your own beliefs and the practice of your art. Seerveld appeals to two authorities: John Calvin on style, and Abraham Kuyper on subject.

Based on Calvin's advocacy of "a terse, rough-edged simple style" suited to the edification of the faithful, Seerveld derives some aesthetic guidance:

....whenever art is decorative it is decadent -- rococo porcelain, the enormous affected frescoes of Tiepolo and sons, late eighteenth century English comedy of manners -- whenever art is ornamental, made to entertain or stupefy, you have unchristian art, and bad art period. A christian style will be honest, self-effacing, serious in its gaity, fresh, candid and confident in its naive immediacy. Calvin wanted an exhilarating style.

In grad school, I took a class where we studied late nineteenth century Decadence (a term the movement's founders adopted for themselves, not a pejorative applied by critics), so Seerveld's idea that decorative art is decadent reminded me of Des Esseintes' jewelled tortoise in Huysmans' book À rebours -- translated Against the Grain, although the Penguin edition I read is more precisely (though less accurately) titled Against Nature. Said tortoise had so many precious gems affixed to his shell that he eventually died. This is an extreme form of the baroque tendency Seerveld is talking about, but a memorable one. As a stylistic guide for Christian writers, I find Seerveld's description worthwhile: "honest, self-effacing, serious in its gaity, fresh, candid and confident in its naive immediacy" and even "exhilarating." This is the antithesis of decadence.

From Kuyper, Seerveld derives some insight into the subject matter of Christian art. He writes:

....anyone dominated by the truth of Sovereign God electing humans in this world for eternal life, says Kuyper, will notice the meaningfulness of little things, will restfully understand one's own peculiar work as a calling before God, and will know where to seek comfort when the muffle of earthly pain gets too tight.

Applying this focus on "the meaningfulness of little things" to Christian art, Seerveld adds:

....if dramatists of our day cannot find anything big enough to stage beyond pathos and despair, and if Salinger's world of a bathroom is what writers are being driven to, where one rummages interminably on and on through the contents of a glass medicine chest above a stinking toilet bowl, if art has become so small, maybe we Christians who can see microscopically with the spiritual dimension Kuyper talks about, maybe we have an opening to obliterate the beady mana, the tiny graceless objects of twentieth-century life..., and then gradually resurrect the depth of daily life again in art for an age practically blind even to the commonplace, excruciating tragedy of a scarlet letter.

I don't know about you, but that speaks to me. Taken together, this encouragement to adopt a simple, exhilarating style and focus on the meaningfulness of little things makes for a solid starting point for literary art. In fact, as I flipped through the book in the seminary library, putting the pieces together, I kept thinking of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and how this rubric could be applied to that novel. It is simple, deceptively so, building the story layer by layer in an accretion of small, meaningful events. What is it if not the story of a small, meaningful life? Based on what I know about her book of essays, The Death of Adam (which I've mentioned here before), Robinson's theological framework seems to be in keeping with these observations. In a recent interview, she agreed -- guardedly -- that Gilead is a novel about "'being Christian,' about what it might mean to live a Christian life," and she described the Protestant imagination along the following lines:

The Reformation rejected [the Thomist] model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception.

It's a weighty, serious interview -- well worth the time it takes to unpack.

In Theology of Culture, Paul Tillich writes that "every style points to a self-interpretation of man, thus answering the question of the ultimate meaning of life":

Whatever the subject matter which an artist chooses, however strong or weak his artistic form, he cannot help but betray by his style his own ultimate concern, as well as that of his group, and his period. He cannot escape religion even if he rejects religion, for religion is the state of being ultimately concerned.... It is one of the most fascinating tasks to decipher the religious meaning of styles of the past...and to discover that the same characteristics which one discovered in an artistic creation can also be found in the literature, philosophy, and morals of a period.

Our work -- even on the level of style -- is shaped by cultural influences. We are products of our time. But more than that, we are products of God's providence, reflections of his work in creation and redemption. By asking how theology might influence our art, we are doing nothing less than working out yet another aspect of our salvation in fear and trembling. I hope these observations will prove as helpful to you in your artistic struggle as they have proved to me in mine.