Gospel as Work of Art: Imaginative Truth and the Open Text

By David Brown

A lushly illustrated, magisterial exploration of the imaginative truth of the gospel

In the modern academy, truth and imagination are thought to be mutually exclusive. But what if truth can spring from other fonts, like art, literature, and invention?

The legacy of the Enlightenment favors historical and empirical inquiry above all other methods for searching for truth. But this assumption constrains our theological explorations. Though the historicity of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is important, it is not the only thing that matters. For instance, is John’s Gospel any less “true” than the Synoptics just because it’s less historically accurate?

David Brown challenges us to expand our understanding of the gospel past source criticism and historical Jesus studies to include works of imagination. Reading Scripture in tandem with works of art throughout the centuries, Brown reenvisions the gospel as an open text. Scholars of theology and biblical studies, freed from literalism, will find new avenues of revelation in Gospel as Work of Art. This volume includes over one hundred color illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781467465991

David Brown

David Brown has 40 years of experience as a pastor and church planter in France, with a dozen books published in French. He is leader of the Church Revitalisation Network run by the European Leadership Forum, teaching seminars and mentoring pastors across Europe.

Book preview

PART I

Foundations

1

Religious Control and the Spiritual Imagination

In a recent newspaper article, the director of Scottish Museums used a common trope to speak of museums and galleries. He described them as the secular equivalent of churches in providing spaces for open-ended reflection, though he was careful to add, in the light of woke protests, that all their artifacts now require careful contextualization. ¹ It is indeed a commonplace in the modern world to identify the arts as the primary vehicle for spiritual reflection, replacing the dead hand of religion, now almost always viewed in essentially negative terms. Although easily seen in a wider historical perspective to be grossly unfair, it remains necessary for a proper understanding of what has gone wrong to appreciate the historical reasons why Christianity finds itself in its current predicament. In the introduction I suggested that the influence of Enlightenment values has played a key role. ² While the next chapter will explore how this affected academia and so in turn how Scripture might be liberated from such narrow criteria, the present chapter looks more generally at the tensions between the churches and the artistic world. I shall contend that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is more that unites them than divides, especially in the role both have traditionally assigned to the imagination.

RELIGION, FUNDAMENTALISM, AND CONTROL

In contemporary English, spirituality is generally used in a positive sense and religion with negative connotations. Although to some degree justified by the etymology of the two words, with spirit suggesting freedom and religion that which binds or controls,³ any attempt to identity Christian practice as wholly negative and art as unqualifiedly positive would be tendentious in the extreme. Yet such a temptation does pinpoint common suspicions that need to be addressed before a more balanced view of their relation to one another can be offered at the end of this chapter. Ironically, Christian theologians are themselves partly to blame for the negative connotations of religion, inasmuch as the term is often used by them to signify, in contrast to divine revelation, purely human seeking after God.⁴

In that negative account of religion, the dogmatic and fundamentalist tendencies of many Christians is often pointed to as the explanation. Yet, technically, what is now known as fundamentalism only came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century, and as such is strictly only a Protestant rather than also a Catholic movement.⁵ But there is virtue in spreading the net more widely, in order to comprehend better what has happened in the history of Christianity. It is a commonplace to remark that of all religions, it is the one most concerned with the definition of belief. While true, the point can be exaggerated. In particular, it is often forgotten that it was only really with the doctrinal disputes of the sixteenth century that detailed catechisms were produced.

For too long it has been assumed that the New Testament was already primarily concerned to offer a set of doctrines as the way to salvation. Although the sense of faith meaning trust was duly acknowledged, equally important was held to be some form of propositional belief (the Christian faith, in another sense of the Greek pistis). From such a perspective it became inevitable to regard the expression to believe in the gospel as a natural anticipation of Augustine’s later distinction between fides qua creditur (faith as the act of believing) and fides quae creditur (faith as the content of belief).⁶ Indeed, even Bultmann assumes that wider sense for pistis and its cognates: Faith has a dogmatic character insofar as it is acceptance of a word…. Hence faith can also be called … faith in the gospel.⁷ However, in a detailed study of usage of the term in both Scripture and in the wider pagan world, Teresa Morgan has recently convincingly argued that this is far from being correct. The basic notion is one of relationship with God (mediated where appropriate through Christ).⁸ Nor is this the sort of faith that is often today glibly contrasted with reason. Instead, appeals to experience and other such signs as miracle are perspicacious.⁹ In short, we need to think of the evangelists building on assumptions about a relationship with the divine, not attempting to forge in stone a particular dogmatic structure.

Equally, historians are now largely agreed that the early councils of the church were more concerned to provide negative boundaries for belief rather than precise definitions. The Council of Nicaea (325), for example, left open whether we think of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of numerical or generic identity.¹⁰ Again, Chalcedon (451) insisted on Christ being fully human and fully divine but without requiring any particular account of how this might be possible.¹¹ There was also a richness to scriptural interpretation that allowed a wide variety of approaches that included several senses other than the narrowly literal.¹² While there was certainly a narrowing in the medieval West, partly because of growth in the prestige of canon law (where precise answers are expected),¹³ and partly because of secular rulers also coming to see heresy as a threat to their own stability, even with a council like the Fourth Lateran (1215), a more nuanced interpretation of what was intended is possible. The council may have been less concerned to elevate a numeral account of the Trinity, more to exclude two other opposed positions, Joachim of Fiore’s successive ages for the three persons and Amalric and the Brethren of the Free Spirit’s collapsing of all distinctions between human and divine. By using the terminology of Peter Damian, the council effectively shot down both positions.¹⁴

However, leaving such arguments to one side, what is incontestable is that a decisive change took place at the Reformation, with the various contending denominations, including Rome, all now producing very detailed creedal requirements.¹⁵ Precise tests for correct belief were enforced on all sides.

The nineteenth century, however, finally ruptured those claims. The desire for a greater range of options, scientific discoveries, and biblical criticism all led to battles in which defenders of the status quo in general lost.¹⁶ So, for example, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were progressively weakened over two centuries until in the contemporary church their subscription is purely nominal.¹⁷ In reaction, new groups and denominations were formed to defend the past, in particular the Bible as an absolutely reliable guide to truth. However, rather than a defense being sought in the religion’s earliest roots, as the introduction noted, the very standards that had become part of Enlightenment thinkers’ armory against Christianity were now adopted by its defenders. As a mirror image of their strongest opponents, advocates assumed that there was only one way to truth: the strictly historical and scientific. To take the obvious example, the opening chapters of Genesis had to be scientific and historical if they were to lay any claim to truth whatsoever.

It is of course possible to put a more positive spin on this rearguard action, for undoubtedly one motivation was to secure the honor of God in always speaking the truth. Any compromise was thought to lay the Bible open to the charge of being a purely human construct. Yet there was also one decidedly negative aspect: the felt need for various strategies of control in order to bolster the position. It was the dark underbelly of a legitimate religious impulse, the desire for order and structure that could give meaning to human life. While that more positive side is most evident in the huge number of conversions to evangelical Christianity in the favelas of Latin America,¹⁸ at the same time such desire for order could all too easily slide into various forms of authoritarian control, powerfully portrayed in the classic account of the Plymouth Brethren by Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) in Father and Son (1907) and the more recent, justifiably hostile account by Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) of her adoptive Elim Pentecostal mother in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).¹⁹ Such powers have, as we shall shortly note, now reaped a whirlwind.

But not to be forgotten is how parallel to such developments within the Protestant churches was what happened within Roman Catholicism. The nineteenth century was a traumatic period of almost constant change, with the papacy finding itself subject to forces that humiliated and frightened the institution.²⁰ Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, it became profoundly reactionary, first with the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned almost all liberalizing movements in the modern world, then with the declaration of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and finally the suppression of modern biblical criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century.²¹ In marked contrast to the First Vatican Council, the Second (1962–1965) did at least concede the necessity for change. While some have argued that all it achieved was to make the decline in Catholic practice more rapid,²² its deliberations did at least exhibit a church wrestling with how most appropriately to respond to a changing world. The Catholic Church, though, remains a community that has yet to come to terms with its own past pronouncements, in claiming infallibility both for Scripture and for its own teaching.²³ One result of that continuing dilemma was the way in which the encyclical Humanae Vitae refused to countenance change on contraception despite the recommendation of the advisory panel;²⁴ another, more recent, was John Paul II’s condemnation of a female priesthood, which allowed some to interpret his words as an instance of a new application of papal infallibility.²⁵ Pope Benedict XVI declared that he would be happy with a much smaller but loyal church, whereas Pope Francis has been described as heretical by a large number of leading Catholics precisely because of his relatively modest proposals for change.²⁶

All this indicates a quite complex situation. I do want to underline, however, that it is no part of my intention to launch a wholesale attack on all religiously conservative Christians. There are many millions who successfully resist indulging in any such strategies of control, and indeed some of the most godly and holy individuals I have ever known have been individuals from just such a background. Nonetheless, the potentially corrosive character of such belief should not be ignored. Moreover, because of widespread ignorance about the more complicated character of Christianity, especially among younger people, most Christians effectively become tarred with the same brush, though it is not just the conservative who can be dogmatic about religion. This can be no less true of the liberal, whether the person in the pew or the professional theologian. Take the two great rivals of the twentieth century, Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). The conservative Barth is seen as the great advocate of the otherness of God, of divine revelation breaking in like lightning into the corruptions of the human world;²⁷ Bultmann, as the great listener to the world as it is, in taking seriously humanity’s existential concerns and finding an answer to them in a reinterpreted gospel. Many of their points were well put, but the intriguing thing is that Bultmann was no less dogmatic than Barth. In deliberate contrast to the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the nineteenth century’s greatest German theologian, Barth began his Church Dogmatics with the doctrine of the Trinity, but in a way that suggested, unlike Nicaea, that only one account of that doctrine was allowed.²⁸ Similarly, Bultmann did not hesitate to declare that miracles were impossible and that Jesus’s resurrection was just another way of preaching the significance of the cross.²⁹ Both sounded as though they were closing down options in a way that is not made easily consonant with Scripture. We need an openness that goes beyond both, just as much as it goes beyond the dogmatism of fundamentalism.

It is, though, with the latter that images of oppression have come to be particularly associated. The artist John Bellany (1942–2013), who was reared in just such a context, offers an image seen by many as powerfully encapsulating precisely what has gone wrong. As a child he was expected to attend church three times on a Sunday in the small fishing village of Port Seton, near Edinburgh. Although his childhood was not unhappy, he did eventually rebel against what he saw in retrospect as its excessive constraints. The process began after a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp, when he found it no longer possible to believe in divine love. A harrowing artwork reflects the fact: three severely mangled bodies are hanging on crosses while the nameplate on the central one, instead of recording Jesus’s titles, reads Resurrection?³⁰ But such experiences also led him to look back on his past and see it rather differently, as oppressive and restrictive, and this is reflected in another important canvas from about the same time, Scottish Family (1968).³¹ At one level it records the harsh living conditions of fisher folk, while at another, given the similarity of the yardarm to a cross, it evokes the oppressive character of the religion that accompanied such a life. Although much later in life a more positive attitude emerged when a liver transplant enabled him to survive the consequences of alcoholism,³² throughout his life he displayed a real engagement with every aspect of religion.³³ In this particular canvas, it is a decidedly more negative side that we must hear.

Figure 1.1 John Bellany, Scottish Family

So we need to take seriously the distortion that such ordered belief potentially represents, in something potentially so good as the desire for meaning and order in life slipping easily into its opposite, an inherently evil and jaundiced form of manipulation. Nor will it do to characterize those at fault as just a tiny minority. There are all too many clergy who lack the necessary self-knowledge to appreciate that their ministry is essentially one of claustrophobic control over others, where claims to a better knowledge of Scripture or the tradition are presumed always to give the decisive vote to their own view: the typical Father knows best within the Catholic tradition, or Scripture says so in the evangelical.

Of course, it would be altogether too simplistic to lay the blame for all the sexual abuse scandals of recent years at the door of such implicit acceptance of controls: the seepage of one form of control into another. No doubt, the explanation is multifaceted, but there does seem to be a connection, inasmuch as the problems have proved most deep-seated in conservative branches of the church. Indeed, this is even reflected in as amorphous an institution as the Church of England, where most perpetrators have come from its conservative wings, whether evangelical or Anglo-Catholic.³⁴ A culture of suffocating and controlling power has made it easy for this to extend to the misuse of minors and other vulnerable groups. A pertinent but sad example of how one type of control can pass into another may be seen in the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States. Several prominent campaigners in the 1980s against any public role for women in worship were several decades later found to have sexually abused women in their own congregations.³⁵ Significantly, one abusing English diocesan bishop even informed one of his victims: I have the power to give you everything you want, and the power to take it away.³⁶ There was a terrible irony in the way in which those most prominent in imposing conservative moral values on their followers were themselves found guilty of double standards, as one televangelist after another has fallen from grace.³⁷

Although in the Roman Catholic Church other factors unique to its own tradition have sometimes also been in play,³⁸ there seems little doubt that it is frequently a case of control of mind extending into control over body, a conclusion surely corroborated by how often the abuse has been perpetrated by senior clergy in positions of authority.³⁹ Significant numbers have been teachers or bishops and even cardinals, with not even nuns exempt.⁴⁰ Of all countries, it is surely Ireland that speaks most powerfully of how badly things have gone wrong. Over a relatively short period of a few decades, the country moved from being the most observant and conservative Catholic country in Europe to now among the most liberal in its social institutions. Its citizens were no longer, as in the past, willing to take directions about how to vote from their clergy, given how extensive and severe the abuse had proved to be.⁴¹ A culture of control had permitted various forms of self-justification, with even the otherwise innocent determined to preserve the reputation of the institution, itself of course another form of control.⁴²

In short, I would see the abuse scandal not as just a minor blip on the surface of Christianity but as symptomatic of a deeply rooted evil that still pervades much of Christian belief and practice, particularly on its more conservative wings. Scripture and church tradition continue to be used to shut down religious exploration and real imaginative engagement with the full range of possibilities. So we need not only to be suspicious of those who commit these shameful betrayals of trust but also aware of the much wider problem of the use of manipulative strategies by clergy and others in positions of authority to gain intellectual control over those in their charge. Part of the aim of this book is to help achieve that wider liberty that is the right of all.

I want to again emphasize that it is no part of my intention to condemn all those on the conservative side of the church. In fact, that is where its greatest enthusiasts and likely future prospects lie. There is, for instance, the phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism, now estimated to have 500 million adherents worldwide despite its modest origins at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁴³ Nor is its form necessarily always intensely conservative.⁴⁴ While precise figures are difficult to obtain, it is believed that, despite persecution even in Communist China, there could be as many as 70 million practicing Christians, mostly, it is said, conservative evangelicals.⁴⁵ Equally on the Catholic side, Pope Francis is working hard to try to counter the continuing tendencies toward control, as with the abortion argument in the United States or the refusal to take responsibility for abuse in the archdiocese of Cologne.⁴⁶

Whether the more tolerant side in Pope Francis or in some varieties of Pentecostalism will eventually prevail is at the moment anyone’s guess. What we can say is that more self-reflection would undoubtedly help, and that some of this could be stimulated by the world of the arts, for, although parody of conservative belief is quite common, it is by no means universal. One attempt to portray a more complex reality was the brilliant work of Robert Duvall (b. 1931) in The Apostle (1997), where he acted as both director and in the starring role as a southern charismatic preacher. Despite being characterized as both a womanizer and a heavy drinker, we are allowed to see the principal character genuinely struggling to realize his vocation, though he proves better at helping others than he does himself.⁴⁷ If only that were the typical film subject to examination in fundamentalist churches! Unfortunately, instead the slide projector continues to be used to enhance a particular message, not to raise difficult issues. So, although there are in fact quite a few novels and films that could open up individuals on both the evangelical and the Catholic sides in this way,⁴⁸ the paradox remains that for the most part the two worlds are seen as quite distinct. How we got to that situation and what it might mean for spirituality is the topic of the next section.

SPIRITUALITY IN MODERN ART

Given that the history of Western art is very largely the history of Christian art, largely mediated through patronage by the church and others acting on its behalf,⁴⁹ it is astonishing how sharp a divorce is now presumed to exist between religion in the churches and spirituality in the arts. It becomes even more astonishing when one recalls the numerous books still being written on the theme of Christian spirituality. But for the most part, these are viewed from the outside as simply subscribing to the old rules rather than taking advantage of the true freedom that the arts can offer. In this equation, it is fascinating to observe how that past history is in fact treated both by professional art historians and by modern practitioners. Instead of conceding its explorative character (a major theme in subsequent chapters), it is treated as though what is of real interest is either the changing history of techniques or else their mediation of purely human values. Occasionally, even Christian scholars conspire with such an estimate, as in the attempt by John Drury (b. 1936) to make Christian painting more accessible to the general public.⁵⁰ But the phenomenon is found everywhere.

Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) was one of the great historians and interpreters of Romanesque art. Yet part of his project was to suggest that it marked a move away from the supernatural and toward a humanism that included anxiety and doubt and so anticipates the secularism of the Renaissance.⁵¹ But why should we not instead see the undoubted changes that were occurring as new versions of an equally strong religious belief? Or consider a more recent and indeed more conspicuous instance, how the distinguished Irish essayist and novelist Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) chose to review a recent exhibition of works by Tintoretto (1518–1594).⁵² These were repeatedly reduced to purely human concerns.⁵³ For instance, talking of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande in Venice, he declares: It can hardly be called religious since its interest is in the ordinary … in what the Crucifixion might have felt like at the time rather than what it came to mean in the pages of the New Testament. Again, of figures in a painting of Christ’s flagellation he writes: they are not posed to illustrate a moment from the New Testament but they are caught in this untidy moment, filled with their own human concerns. Finally, of a Last Supper: This has all the aura of a secular scene, with nothing holy or graceful about it. Yet this is said of an artist who chose to paint almost exclusively religious subjects, choosing deliberately to focus on divine identification with the poor and humble. Nonbelief can thus be seen at times as just as dogmatic as belief.

Of course, theologians are also not immune to similar critiques of their own approach, where attempts have been made to reduce what they see as art’s exaggerated pretentions, some much less fair than others.⁵⁴ Yet, balanced against such prejudice on either side are numerous examples of an intrinsic openness in art, with many a painting or poem offering an intrinsic pluralism that might also bode well in reinforcing the potential openness of Scripture and tradition that we suggested in the previous section was once common. To see how this might again be so, I propose offering a brief survey of current trends first in the United States and then in different parts of the British Isles.

In the United States

In the English-speaking world, America has the highest percentage of churchgoers. Whether that fact is a stimulant or an inhibitor to the flourishing of art is moot. Certainly, the twentieth century’s most commonly produced conventional image of Christ came from an American artist.⁵⁵ While it is true that modernism engaged widely with religious issues,⁵⁶ it is especially in abstract art that the search for the spiritual has been most observed.⁵⁷ The names of Newman and Rothko are most commonly mentioned from an earlier generation, while in the present day the two most frequently mentioned names in the United States are perhaps the Irish-born Sean Scully (b. 1945) and the Canadian-born Agnes Martin (1912–2004).⁵⁸ Other approaches, though, have also had their impact, as in the land art of James Turrell (b. 1943) or the video installations of Bill Viola (b. 1951).⁵⁹ To survey that range is impossible here. Instead, a narrower focus is required.

The black minority community is perhaps the most interesting group to consider, historically devoutly religious but now engaging in other forms of spiritual quest including the arts. Although during the twentieth century it sought to liberate itself from gospel music, with jazz, soul, and rap being new independent forms, numerous links continue. John Coltrane (jazz) (1926–1967), Aretha Franklin (soul) (1942–2018), and Kanye West (rap) (b. 1977) are by no means exceptional.⁶⁰ It is also true that the black preaching tradition in its use of word, image, and gesture is more like an open-ended artistic exploration than the typical Caucasian sermon. The famous speech of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 is an obvious case in point. I have a dream ended by speaking of a day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’⁶¹ Indeed, so powerful has been its influence that the veteran campaigner, the preacher Al Sharpton (b. 1954), felt the need to echo King in his own moving address on the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.⁶²

Yet the subsequent assassination of King and indeed the relative failure of the political interventions of the first black president, Barak Obama (2009–2017), do raise acutely the question of how successful black religion has really been in securing justice for its fellow citizens, and so help explain why attention might continue to be directed to alternative forms of spirituality. Not that this is an entirely recent phenomenon. One of the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901–1967), in his poem Harlem, written a decade before King’s speech (in 1951), was already quite pessimistic about the possibility of change:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?⁶³

The highly innovative forms in the poem helped to lay down the gauntlet in one direction.⁶⁴ But Hughes also experimented with a world that might turn out very differently, in some of his more explicitly Christian poems, one of which we will examine in some detail in chapter 4.

Langston Hughes, though, died more than a half century ago. So it is interesting to note the same conflicting pulls in a more recent representative of American minorities,⁶⁵ the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), one of whose paintings in 2017 became the most expensive work ever sold at auction by an American artist.⁶⁶ Although in his short adult life he does not seem to have practiced any version of Christianity, it would be quite wrong to infer a lack of interest in religion. A significant minority of his paintings have some religious reference, sometimes to Christianity and sometimes to other religions such as Nigerian Yoruba.⁶⁷ An intriguing example of misunderstanding of his purpose is the argument over how his 1981 work Untitled (Head) should be labeled (fig. 1.2). When it first entered the Broad in Los Angeles, it acquired the description Skull, which was eventually corrected by a long campaign by Basquiat’s erstwhile friend and advocate Fred Hoffman.⁶⁸ His point was that the brain could still be seen to be functioning, sometimes in relation to sensory organs, sometimes not. So far, therefore, from Basquiat’s intention being to subscribe to some form of materialism, instead the work’s aim was to emphasize the importance of the mind’s internal life and not just its external expression.

In general, commentators seem happy to endorse the view that Basquiat was concerned with a spiritual dimension to life while noting that he failed to find this in Christianity. Perhaps his Untitled (Baptism) encapsulates those failed hopes: the vigor of new life that baptism might be thought to bring but usually does not is duly represented.⁶⁹ Basquiat used the halo in an untraditional way: to identify not saints or holy figures but rather people he admired, such as musicians, footballers, or influential figures of the past. So probably the halo on the left is ascribed to some black Pentecostalist minister whom he knew to be effective in transforming lives.

One of his mentors was Andy Warhol (1928–1987). It was only at his funeral and subsequently that the general public became aware that not only had Warhol been a regular communicant and helped weekly in a church soup kitchen but he had also built up over the years his own corpus of religious works.⁷⁰ One will be considered in a later chapter.⁷¹ Although his engagement with religion was by no means untypical of American artists of his generation and earlier, here his secrecy about his religious practice may be used to underline the supposed difficulty in claiming to be innovative at the same time as adhering to traditional patterns of Christian belief. Presumably, Warhol thought that his audience would perceive a profound conflict. It is precisely that conflict that this book seeks to overcome.

Figure 1.2 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Head), The Broad, Los Angeles, California © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

In England

Despite some recent signs of religious retreat,⁷² the United States still enjoys a much higher base than does Europe, where the headlong decline in Christian belief can scarcely be doubted.⁷³ It is a steep decline that was more noticeable in the Celtic nations of the United Kingdom than in England. Irish figures only started to plummet with the sex abuse scandals, while Scottish attendance figures on the whole held up until the 1960s. By contrast, in England the process of decline had been more gradual, ever since the end of the First World War.⁷⁴ The secularization thesis, as it was called, used to maintain that such decline was inevitable in advanced industrial and postindustrial societies. Their characteristic rationalism and instrumentalism inevitably sounded the death knell for the sorts of ideas that might be more naturally associated with an enchanted world.⁷⁵ More recently, however, factors more specific to the 1960s and later have been noted, such as the move in the wider society toward greater stress on experience over against intellectual belief and the greatly changed aspirations and status of women. On both points, it was argued that the church failed to keep pace with changing attitudes. Women were no longer content to stand on the high but narrow pedestal that traditional Christian values had assigned them,⁷⁶ while worship and church pronouncements failed to respond adequately to the kind of experiential values that were now being emphasized.⁷⁷ So drift was the inevitable result, with such attachments as survived now taking the form of believing without belonging, a sort of loose association that no longer included active membership in any specific Christian body.⁷⁸ I leave a proper evaluation of such questions to professional sociologists.

Figure 1.3 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Baptism), private collection © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

Meanwhile, it is undoubtedly true that a rearguard action is being fought to maintain some connection between art and religion. One particular triumph was the Seeing Salvation exhibition organized to celebrate the millennium by the National Gallery’s director at the time, Sir Neil MacGregor (b. 1946). It achieved considerable success in opening up the religious dimensions of the gallery’s religious art.⁷⁹ Meanwhile, cathedrals have expended much energy in commissioning new work that has sought to relate art and religious experience.⁸⁰ Tom Devonshire Jones (1934–2015) was instrumental in founding the journal Art and Christian Inquiry,⁸¹ while, more recently, thanks to an initiative from Ben Quash at King’s College, London, an online visual commentary on Scripture has been created.⁸² Perhaps most surprising of all proved to be the religious element found in two of the bad boys of the genre, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) and Damien Hirst (b. 1965), for, despite their shared atheism, both seemed obsessed with religious imagery.⁸³ Indeed, little difficulty was discovered in detecting the raising of significant religious questions in their work, even if usually unintended on their part.⁸⁴ The point is that meaning in something like a painting or installation cannot by its very nature be tightly controlled. So, even if the work is created as an object of contempt, something quite different can sometimes emerge.

Perhaps such observations can be made more focused by taking one particular English work of art from recent years, The Upper Room by Chris Ofili (b. 1968). Brought up and educated at Catholic schools in Manchester, he subsequently traveled widely, with major influences on his art including an African American, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a Trinidad-based Scot, Peter Doig (b. 1959), who was one of his teachers as well as a friend. Although his father returned to his native Nigeria when Ofili was eleven and Ofili only occasionally directly engaged with African art (as in his visit to Zimbabwe in 1992), knowledge of that wider background does help explain one controversial element in his art. His Holy Virgin Mary (1996) created much controversy in New York when it was exhibited. Mayor Rudy Giuliani demanded its removal partly because of the inclusion of small photographs of female genitalia in the shape of angels’ wings and partly because of the use of elephant dung, which he deemed disrespectful. (Ironically, there was already an example available in New York, in the Brooklyn Museum of Art: a mask made from dung, honey, metal, and wood.) While the transgressive character of both elements was almost certainly intended to challenge any conventional, neat separation of a figure like the Virgin Mary from the despised or vulgar, knowledge of African attitudes to elephant dung can open the viewer’s eyes to how the apparently transgressive can also become transformative. Once commonly used both in Hinduism and in African religion to ward off evil spirits, nowadays apart from its use as fertilizer and fuel it is also deployed as a mosquito repellent, as well as sometimes still adorned with beads as in the past in village works of art.

Such dung was again used in his Upper Room, which was eventually purchased for Tate Britain under controversial circumstances in 2005.⁸⁵ In it, thirteen paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys are set against a softly lit, varnished wall. Twelve face inward and raise their chalices toward the golden monkey at one end. Ofili’s friend, the architect David Adjaye (b. 1966), designed the room and also the approach to it, which was along a dimly lit corridor. Both painter and architect seem to have been concerned to create an atmosphere that would draw people into contemplation and out of themselves. Depending on one’s background knowledge, the work is clearly open to a wide variety of interpretations. Rhesus monkeys are boisterous and intelligent and care for one another, and are given special respect by some religions.⁸⁶ Is Ofili trying to encourage us toward a more inclusive perspective? Or are the glitter and bright colors meant to suggest a more joyous atmosphere at Mass, the ritual that stems from the Upper Room? While admitting to having envisaged the scene countless times and it being important for him that the space feel akin to a space of worship, Ofili nonetheless observes that it’s exciting for me that things have an apparent narrative with many potential narratives within it.⁸⁷

Figure 1.4 Chris Ofili, The Upper Room, Tate Britain, London

To introduce a more personal dimension, on one visit to Tate Britain I found myself profoundly moved by the installation. No doubt the preparatory silence played its part, but so too did the juxtaposition of beautiful colors, expressions of a shared identity and offering of chalices, and the title’s evocation of a long ritual history, both good and bad. The rigidity of Christianity’s primary ritual was flung open in new challenges to explicate its relevance both at a personal level and in relation to concerns for the wider world (those rhesus monkeys). Religion and spirituality effectively met, in this highly charged stimulus, to look at things anew.⁸⁸

In Scotland

Although one might expect the precipitous decline in religious practice in Scotland from the late 1960s onward to be mirrored by decreasing interest in spiritual questions from the arts, this has not proved to be the case. Admittedly, despite once close relations with the Kirk,⁸⁹ earlier in the twentieth century more hostile comments had already become quite common. One thinks, for instance, of the repeated condemnation of Calvinism as inimical to imagination and innovation in art in the discussion of Scottish colorist J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961), in his Modern Scottish Painting,⁹⁰ or the familiar lines of the poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959):

The Word made flesh here is made word again,

A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.

See there King Calvin with his iron pen,

And God three angry letters in a book,

And there the logical hook

On which the Mystery is impaled and bent

Into an ideological instrument.⁹¹

Yet, it was not that an overlap with religion disappeared altogether. Rather, it seemed to take new forms. If in Fergusson this was represented by engagement with alternative pagan imagery,⁹² his fellow colorist Francis Cadell (1883–1937) repeatedly painted the pilgrimage island of Iona, and like many another artist, sought a spiritual dimension in Scotland’s Celtic past. Of course, a few continued to work within a church setting, such as Sir David Young Cameron (1865–1945),⁹³ or in our own day Peter Howson (b. 1958), an example of whose oeuvre will be considered in a later chapter.⁹⁴ But perhaps more typical is art that raises the issue without specifying any particular answers. Two examples may be given.

Nathan Coley (b. 1967) is an installation artist who is perhaps best known for his miniature cardboard reproduction of all 286 places of worship in Edinburgh under the title Lamp of Sacrifice.⁹⁵ Although often interpreted as an implicit critique of the wasted resources of a past age, placing another work alongside it suggests a different view. His Tate Modern on Fire refers not to an actual fire but simply raises the question of what would be lost if there were such a fire; so, similarly with the other instance, a question of value and aspiration is set rather than answered.⁹⁶ Below, though, is a rather different image, dating from 2007.

It currently stands in the grounds of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) in Edinburgh and is based on a seventeenth-century royal proclamation aimed at curtailing the stream of pilgrims to the French village of Modseine, which had laid claim to frequent miracles. These claims were to stop, by order of the king. In short, the authorities in France feared losing control of a situation of heightened religious excitement. But, of course, without that background knowledge, it is likely to be read quite differently by visitors to the gallery. Perhaps most will interpret it as an ironic commentary on the unwillingness of many to expect anything unusual in the art they are about to see, whereas the more spiritually inclined might see it as a challenge: reflection of an altogether too conformist society, against which it is only proper to rebel. So, ironically, the image even has the ability to take us back to the time of Jesus, and his own village of Nazareth, which too proved unwilling to accept any miracles from him.⁹⁷

Figure 1.5 Nathan Coley, There Will Be No Miracles Here, Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Alison Watt (b. 1965) is roughly the same age as Coley but works in a very different medium. Initially she won a reputation for portrait painting and life-model nudes. However, during 2006–2008 she became the seventh artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London. The result was further developments in an already growing fascination with the language of fabric. Particularly noteworthy was her painting Phantom (2007), which was ultimately derived from reflection on the mysterious Saint Francis in Meditation (1635–1639) of the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurburán (1598–1664), in which the saint’s face is virtually hidden by shade under his hood. Phantom thus used fabric to suggest a presence that is also an absence. But the pattern had already been developed in an earlier work that now hangs in the Memorial Chapel of Old St. Paul’s Church in Edinburgh. The wall facing a visitor on entry records a long list of war dead, and, if truth be told, it was always a rather bleak place. Watt’s Still (2004) has, however, transformed the chapel’s atmosphere, not in the sense of guaranteeing presence but in at least opening up the possibility of such hope. It does so by taking advantage of the fact that folds in fabric usually suggest a living bodily presence beneath.⁹⁸

Once again note, however, the lack of compulsion in either installation. To some the garment folds might suggest all the bodies lost in war and now long gone, just as for some visitors to the Gallery of Modern Art the declaration of no miracles is no doubt a welcome sign of an institution turning its back on religion. Although both accounts effectively block any path back toward religion, they do so at a cost, in ironically making art’s present spirituality just as dogmatic as religion of old. The more interesting question for us here, though, is whether religion will continue to commit its past mistakes in offering a similarly closed system.

In Ireland

Finally, let us turn to Ireland, and one of the most familiar poems of the twentieth century, The Second Coming, by perhaps her greatest poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).⁹⁹ In his poetry he explored what might seem to some readers a bewildering variety of approaches to religious belief.¹⁰⁰ Writing not long after the end of the First World War, he ponders a worrying future:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?¹⁰¹

Figure 1.6 Alison Watt, Still, Old St. Paul’s Church, Edinburgh

It is usually only the first verse that is quoted, but even from this verse alone, with its famous lines, it is clear that Yeats did not welcome the fact that the gyre or spiral with which the poem begins was moving ever further away from its firm center, in the collapse of any shared objective standards. The second verse’s allusion to the Sphinx and a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun does raise the question of what is likely to take the place of that center.¹⁰² Not only something much worse, Yeats seems to imply, but also something detrimental to Christianity, the onetime center of the gyre: as the last line observes, slouching to Bethlehem. Most commentators detect in the phrase a strong indication of Yeats’s pessimism about the future, as the end of the First World War appeared to herald not a new dawn but only fresh troubles in continental Europe and Ireland. Bethlehem then becomes in their view a means of alluding to an alternative non-Christian second coming. However, given Yeats’s engagement with religion throughout his life, I am unconvinced that he would have so firmly closed down options in this way. No doubt, the poem was primarily intended to warn of the possibility of future disintegration. But the fact that hitherto Bethlehem had had little or no place in Christian conceptions of the second coming suggests,¹⁰³ at least to me, that the poem was intended, either explicitly or subliminally, to also open up an alternative possibility: that a new birth or beginning of a transformed Christianity might answer the threat. Whether a plausible interpretation of Yeats’s actual intentions or otherwise, the proposal does at least underline the power of creative imagery, in never completely closing down options and in sometimes even making new moves possible. The poem thus surely echoes the novelty that lies at the heart of Bethlehem, in the incarnation itself.

IMAGINATION UNITING THE ARTS AND RELIGION

What I hope the surveys of the previous section have demonstrated is the extent to which visual art and poetry are open to alternative interpretations. The religious is never entirely excluded even by those who profess themselves atheist. But are the Gospels like this, and the subsequent Christian tradition, or were they only intended to close down options? In the first section of the chapter I suggested that tightening of dogmatic controls was in fact a relatively modern phenomenon, most conspicuous during the sixteenth century and then again from the late nineteenth. It is that earlier relative freedom that I want to recover for the church, and which a closer alliance with the arts might make easier. In the next chapter we will explore what has gone wrong in the academic study of religion, but here I want to end by drawing attention to two ways in which the aims of religion and the arts nicely parallel each other.

First, there is the question of general aims, with art and religion both employing similar techniques and to a degree also having similar objectives. Then, second and perhaps more surprising, a link also seems to be suggested by the extraordinary popularity of fantasy literature. This is not to propose that entertaining belief in fairies and related phenomena is anything like religious faith. Yet such literature can very effectively, as we shall see, at least open up the possibility of alternative worlds. So it is perhaps no accident that so many distinguished fantasy writers have in fact been practicing Christians.

General Parallels between the Arts and Religion

Here two basic points of comparison may be made: first, that, like religion, the arts seek to take their audience to somewhere other than where they are at present situated, and with similar means to those deployed in the Gospels (image, metaphor, and so on); second, because of the open-ended ways in which the Gospels tell their story (usually in outline and with many features left free to be developed by the reader’s imagination), new approaches and emphases remain possible. A few general observations along these lines may be offered by considering one of the most fascinating and original works by the Australian poet Les Murray (1938–2019), his Poetry and Religion.

Religions are poems. They concert

our daylight and dreaming mind, our

emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.

Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words

and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,

may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night

to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;

like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete

with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;

you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:

mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally we call it religion,

and God is the poetry caught in any religion,

caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry

is in the poem, a law against closure.

There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,

as the action of those birds—crested pigeon, rosella parrot—

who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.¹⁰⁴

Given that Murray was an adult convert to Roman Catholicism from the Presbyterianism of his youth,¹⁰⁵ it would be easy to suppose that it was the dogmatic character of Catholicism that attracted him, but this was in fact very far from the case. He had found Presbyterianism too set in its ways, whereas Catholicism seemed to be more comprehensive in its attitudes both to humanity and to the natural world. Indeed, although very willing to face the tragic dimensions of human existence,¹⁰⁶ much of his poetry is characterized by a certain earthiness and irreverence toward established positions, as well as a lively sympathy for the life of animals. It is within such openness that the poem above needs to be placed. Religion, like poetry, is seen not as limiting options but instead as governed by a law against closure, which means that whatever is dreamed out in words must be inexhaustible in its range of potential meanings. Many commentators have spoken of the sacramental quality of Murray’s poetry. One can see why since what he especially values is the ability of religion to secure a world that not only embeds belief in the natural world but also points to, or actively participates in, a quite different realm. Metaphors and images in the hands of artists and poets seek in a similar way to draw their respective audiences into alternative worlds.¹⁰⁷

Admittedly, for the most part the alternative worlds of poet and artist are still firmly within the material order. Their aim is usually strictly limited: to encourage readers or viewers to use their comprehension of one aspect of the material world to inform another where their knowledge is less firmly grounded, or even wholly absent. Even so, there remain at least two respects in which the comparison with religion invariably holds: first, there is still movement to a new area; second, because that process is by analogy and not literal predication, not only will every detail of the relevant term not carry over, but also there will be an inherent openness about the possibilities of which aspects of the literal meaning continue to be most relevant (that is, metaphors can be interpreted in more than one way). In other words, Murray’s law against closure will continue to apply as much in religion as in ordinary secular poetry, and for similar reasons: while not every aspect of the meaning of image, analogy, or metaphor will apply in the new case, a plurality of possibilities will be the norm.

Yet, of course, profound differences between poetry and religion will also remain. Although artistic endeavor is frequently concerned, as we have seen, with the spiritual in the wider sense of that term, it remains for the most part the spiritual expressed in and through the material, whereas religion (including Christianity) postulates something more: a reality not wholly absorbed by our present order of existence. Nonetheless, the resources deployed by poetry and art to move from the known to the unknown are not that dissimilar, though with this difference: rather than ever starting de novo (as poets and artists sometimes think they do),¹⁰⁸ religion characteristically draws on an already existing treasury of metaphor and image, with this being adapted and cajoled to provide fresh insights: hence Murray’s point in the poem about full religion being the large poem in loving repetition (repetition in remembrance of the story of the gospel and in the set formulae of the liturgy).

Why Fairies Could Be Important

Although sometimes now a source of considerable embarrassment to his modern admirers, there is no doubt that the work of England’s greatest poet and dramatist, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), displays a certain fascination with a supernatural world, but one in which God is only one element: more problematically, ghosts, demons, and fairies also occur. Although attempts to extricate him from existential commitment to any such broader world continue,¹⁰⁹ there seems little doubt that it was a conception that fascinated not only the bard but also very many of his contemporaries. Just as recent research has reestablished the centrality of religion to Shakespeare’s world, so, more controversially, much the same goes for the supernatural in its more unusual aspects,¹¹⁰ despite many modern versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Tempest that continue to underplay these features or even remove them altogether.¹¹¹

Rather than simple embarrassment, though, a more plausible approach might be to acknowledge that Shakespeare was perhaps himself sometimes conflicted on the subject. Take the fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the beginning of act 5, we hear them described as antique fables and fairy toys, with their creation seemingly ascribed directly to the poet himself:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.¹¹²

And that might seem confirmed by lines from the play’s concluding speech:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended:

That you have but slumb’red here

While these visions did appear,

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream.¹¹³

But, as a number of commentators have observed, this is altogether too weak an apology if total denial is envisaged,¹¹⁴ while the earlier challenge had come from King Theseus, who not only later seems to modify his own judgment but also has it challenged by Hippolyta.¹¹⁵ Moreover, unlike the others who had only been subject to Puck’s tricks and potions, Bottom is the only person actually to see Titania and her fairy train, and it is he who echoes Saint Paul in assessing that vision: I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.¹¹⁶

Of course, in a modern context the poet’s intention might well be interpreted as wishing to call into question Paul’s own reference to a transcendent reality, but in Shakespeare’s day the quotation was more likely to have been taken to give added weight to the dream.¹¹⁷ So, despite contemporary embarrassment on the subject, it is surely entirely reasonable to conclude that in this and the other plays mentioned above, Shakespeare’s aim was in part to reimagine an alternative reality for us, and so at the very least raise the possibility of its existence.¹¹⁸

That a fiction such as fairies could be used to point beyond themselves to a deeper and more mysterious reality that includes the divine is not as foolish as might initially be supposed. Even as late as the nineteenth century, fairies were commonly used in painting and literature to conjure a different sort of world, with some painters capable of making their living by concentrating exclusively on the genre.¹¹⁹ While part of the motivation was undoubtedly disillusion with industrialization and scientific progress, more religious motives also played a role in the work of painters such as Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901) and Richard Dadd (1817–1886) or with a poet like Robert Browning (1812–1889).¹²⁰

But perhaps this can be seen most clearly in one slightly later writer, George MacDonald (1824–1905). Having originally trained for the Congregational ministry, he was ejected from his first parish for unorthodox beliefs and thereafter earned his living as a writer. While his novels are no longer fashionable,¹²¹ his fairy tales continue to be in print. Victorian sensibilities found some too daring,¹²² and so it was only gradually that they won popularity. In the short essay The Fantastic Imagination, he offers a justification for what he was trying to achieve: new embodiments of old truths that will appeal to the childlike of any age.¹²³ These will appeal through rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar in a way that plays on the openness of language: A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. So, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, human words cannot help falling into combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, … so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted at in every symbol.¹²⁴

Figure 1.7 Beryl Cook, Nativity

Therefore, despite his earlier reference to old truths, the genre offers a chance of opening up new ways of thinking about transcendent realities, the region of the uncomprehended.¹²⁵ Doubt defamiliarizing the familiar can prove a path to assurance,¹²⁶ just as unexpected symbols for God such as a child or a woman can enable us to think anew.¹²⁷ The application of similar techniques in his novels has led some critics to protest the lack of realism in these stories, but might that not be precisely the point?¹²⁸ A very different world can only open up if we suspend disbelief a little longer. Perhaps a parallel for Macdonald’s techniques may be drawn with the well-known image of the nativity painted by Beryl Cook (1926–2008). Its popularity in Christmas cards is partly attributable to the way in which it recalls childhood images, but is that all?¹²⁹ Does its slightly comic portrayal not also warm the heart with its openness to an alternative world?¹³⁰

Thus, so far from reducing the appearance of fairies in Shakespeare to pure comedy and nothing more, the alternative is to recognize a widespread trend in literature of a certain kind to use unusual exotic beings to hint at alternative worlds: think of Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and J. K. Rowling (b. 1965), the first three of whom were all influenced by Macdonald.¹³¹ As C. S. Lewis observes in his essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said, Supposing by casting all these things [conventional Christianity] into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not steal past those watchful dragons [childhood inhibitions against belief]? I thought one could.¹³² In part, what such fantasy literature seems to do is help readers to negotiate the possibility of a spiritual world by offering more easily imaginable beings (because more like ourselves) that are nonetheless on the other side of the divide.¹³³ Indeed, this might explain why, although few nowadays seriously entertain the reality of