In this short passage, Bernard summarizes an attitude that continues to resound in the church as well as the wider society. For Bernard and his spiritual descendants, art is too frivolous for serious people to fool around with, and much too expensive in both time and money when there are more important needs crying out for our attention. For Suger, however, through art and the light that art could reflect and reveal, God could be apprehended directly.
Three hundred years later, the unresolved tensions over the appropriateness of the arts in Christian worship became evident again in the iconoclastic excesses of certain portions of the Reformation. While stories of whitewashed churches and disfigured statues are familiar, it is important to remember that there were significant differences among the various reformers with respect to the arts. Luther, for example, advocated leaving the churches as they were, converting the use of whatever religious art existed to didactic rather than devotional means. He was horrified to discover that Andreas Karlstadt had encouraged the wholesale destruction of religious statuary during his absence from Wittenburg in 1522. Zwingli, on the other hand, was, like Augustine, all too aware of his own tendency to get so carried away by music that he forgot about God and banned even hymns from the worship of his church.
Despite these differences among the reformers and among the ecclesial traditions that derive from each, effective patronage of the arts was no longer seen as a legitimate role for the Protestant churches. The Roman Catholic Church did continue to commission important artworks for a long time. However, the widespread secularization of society in the ensuing centuries led to developments in serious visual art, music, and drama that made the practitioners of each of these art forms less and less interested in providing works that were appropriate for Christian worship and edification.
One strand of development that was particularly important in the divorce of the arts from the church can be traced to the eighteenth century, often referred to as the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. In his 1974 Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Jacques Barzun notes that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau “pointed to the spectacle of nature. Its beauty and harmony gave warrant for the feeling of awe which he then said that men experience natively like the promptings of conscience.”23 As Enlightenment rationality removed more and more of the mystery from the Protestant churches, in particular, the Romantics continued the elevation of the artist from humble craftsperson to prophetic visionary and priest that had begun with the Renaissance invention of the idea of artistic genius. Eventually, art—especially music, poetry, and painting, but encompassing other arts, as well—became for many a substitute for religion. Barzun continues,
Like other religions the religion of art promised the individual not only the peace of harmonized feeling and understanding but also the bliss of spiritual ecstasies. For Wordsworth and Goethe, Beethoven and Berlioz, Turner and Delacroix, great art—including their own work—produced all the effects of religious fervor—enthusiasm, awe-struck admiration, raptures and devoutness. Great artists constituted the Communion of Saints. Walter Scott, hardly an extravagant mind, writes in his Journal that love of the great masters is “a religion or it is nothing.”24
Over the course of the next two centuries, a rebellious persona became associated with artists, as they became increasingly involved with those who believed that organized religion was primarily a tool with which the powerful coerced the powerless to submit in mindless obedience. Barzun goes on to suggest that the French Revolution added to the artists’ sense of themselves as the true priests and prophets. He notes, “Artists could no longer think of themselves as entertainers or craftsmen serving the leisured. They were now the interpreters of life.”25 Art and religion, once inextricably bound to one another, had become mutually antagonistic. Art itself, rather than any particular art work, became—depending on one’s perspective—either the very embodiment of spiritual sensibility or an idol.
By the latter part of the twentieth century, the notion of art as idol seemed so self-evident to many Protestants in the United States that making church buildings harmonious and gracious was frequently considered completely unimportant. Any old cinder-block building was good enough, the simpler the better, as long as it could hold all the worshippers. And among certain segments of Christian society, some kinds of art—especially rock-and-roll music, dancing, and movies—were seen as agents of the Devil.
This demonization of the arts continues. In recent years, it is often couched as controversy over works that seem, at least to some, to be sacrilegious, obscene, or anti-American. Such controversies often also involve concern that the works, or the institutions that exhibit them, are supported through public funds. Examples include the 1989 exhibition of Mapple-thorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which was partially funded through the National Endowment for the Arts; the NEA grant given to Andres Serrano in 1988, the year that he created his notorious photograph, Piss Christ; Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999; and, more recently, David Wojnarowicz’s video, A Fire in My Belly, which was removed from an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in February, 2011.
Often, the people who object to these artworks identify themselves as Christian, and the nature of their objection is the perception that the works are, in one way or another, offensive to Christian sensibilities. While each of these works is admittedly disturbing, all of them have artistic merit, and all are more complex than the simplistic interpretation offered by their critics. Indeed, at least some of the works condemned as sacrilegious grow out of the sincere, if questioning, faith of the artists who make them. Following such events, the non-Christian art world remains confirmed in its dismissal of Christianity as antithetical to the arts. When Christians demonize the arts by refusing to engage difficult works in a spirit of inquiry, they tell artists that they, along with their efforts, are not welcome in the church.
Trivializing Art: Art as Play
It is both curious and telling that, by and large, when people in the church talk about making art, they tend to use words like play, self-expression, creativity, fun, or release. All of these are, of course, important factors in healthy development and living a rich, full life. In suggesting that seeing art as play trivializes art, I do not want in turn to trivialize the importance of play as a restorative, healing, explorative, expansive, imaginative activity. However, professional artists tend to feel discounted when church members make no distinction between art as recreation and art as vocation.
Michael Sullivan’s Windows into the Soul: Art as Spiritual Expression, carefully makes this distinction, unlike many other similar books. Even so, this volume is representative of a popular genre which invites Christians to explore various art media as a way to reconnect with the childhood creativity they let go of in the process of growing up. Sullivan, a pastor, recounts his own discovery that working with clay helps him deal with the unexpected death of a young parishioner:
I knew that signs, symbols, and metaphors of art could free the soul. Art helped me to explore places within that I had never imagined or acknowledged—creative places where the person in me burst out in new songs with words and phrases only I knew but with melodies that others seemed to understand. Being creative with art allowed me to let go of inhibitions and embrace a radical love of God’s creation and my place in it as a beloved creature.26
Sullivan goes on to say that his intention is not to teach people to become world-class artists, but rather to connect more deeply with God.
Elsewhere, however, such distinctions are often blurred or, more commonly, simply ignored, implying that the kind of insights gained from long hours of practice in the studio are equally available to everyone in brief, free-form sessions. For instance, a practice called InterPlay was developed
