God and art

God and Art.

The philosopher whose thought brought the middle ages to an end was William of Ockham. He did this by arguing that universals, the Platonic ideas that were more real than things did not have independent existence.

Since universals simply reduplicated individual things they were redundant. This shaving off of universals produced what is known as Ockham's razor. Furthermore, if universals only existed in the mind as ideas they did not really exist.

This conflict between the ideal and the real continues in our time between those who understand ideas as being more real than things and vice versa. For example, those who regard sensory experience of the real world to be unreliable will opt for the ideas being more real than things in the world.

Those who in our day are likely to have been trained in natural science will believe that particular things are more real than ideas. Examples in the history of philosophy abound. Thomas Hobbes was an extreme materialist for whom ideas were mere phantoms. At the same time, in England, there existed the Cambridge Platonists who understood the truths of the mind to be superior to sense knowledge, as did Bishop Berkeley.

Thus there is a tendency to emphasis either the life of the mind or the reality of the world. Our time is characterised by an oscillation between the ideal and the real.

While this is evident in many areas of our culture, politics and economics come to mind, it is writ large in the visual arts which are bounded by the real on the one hand in photorealism and the ideal on the other in conceptual art.

Photorealism, an imitation of the work of the camera give us the surface appearance of things and that alone. I am thinking especially of a group of painters here in Western Australia that paint detailed images of beachscapes that may be instantly attractive but soon become dull to the eye. This is because once one has seen the image there is little more to explore.

Conceptual art, on the other hand, jettisons the objective in order to present an idea. However, once the viewer has got the message the work itself is of no consequence and may be discarded. Where is Duchamp's original urinal now?

This movement, in its "look at me" ethos, has become desperate in its effort to attract attention and has resorted to shock tactics. My favourites are all scatological: Piss Christ, the poo machine at MONA, and the tinned artists shit at the Tate.

Where do we place abstraction on the polarity between idealists and realists? Kandinsky wrote that abstraction was a representation of the soul, in which case it would seem to be firmly in the camp of the idealists being to do with the interior world of the mind. But do abstract works represent the soul, or is that mere pretension? What does he mean by "soul"? Does he mean the thoughts and feelings that play in our consciousness, or does he refer to the soul of mind body dualism, whatever that is?

Although I have at times enjoyed abstraction, and particularly a painting by Kandinsky, I experience no feeling that something profoundly soulful is being evoked, merely a skilful application of paint to produce a pleasing picture.

Here is the rub, since abstract art (from what is it abstracted?) refers to no objective reality and, let us be honest, to no ideal it relies entirely on the subjectivity of the viewer. Thus it panders to the disconnection of the self from the real, an aspect of the oscillatory character of the modern self. (are we bodies or minds?)

Abstraction does not fit either the category of idealist or realist since it represents neither. If anything, it may be seen as realist in that it is itself a material object. Abstraction is an object to itself; it is entirely without external reference.

These examples from the visual arts illustrate the quandary of our time. There is nothing in our minds that filiates the ideal and the real and we oscillate between the two.

It was the genius of Israel that it held the ideal and the real together; the real being the historical events it experienced and the ideal the meaning of those events. This meant that Scripture could not wander off into a fantasy world that was disconnected from the real and the real could not be celebrated at the expense of the ideal as is the case in our time with scientific or economic rationalism.

Neither Tolkien nor Dawkins would have been accepted as Scripture. Rather, Israel meditated upon its history and came up with more than a list of times and places, the ultimate reduction of history to the real. History became legend that carried an understanding of the world. Such an understanding counted as an experience of God.

The New Testament follows this ethos most notably in the incarnation. For in the incarnation the Word (idea) becomes flesh (real thing). The council of Chalcedon insisted that Christ had two natures, the divine and the human (ideal and real).

The elements of the Mass are at once bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. The central event of Christianity is the death and resurrection of Christ.

The death, an historical point in time is the real and the resurrection is the ideal. These are not separate events; the resurrection is the truth of what is hidden in the crucifixion. One cannot exist without the other.

The filiation of the ideal and the real results in theological language; the only language that is capable of truth since truth exists only when the ideal and the real are integrated.

The dichotomy of the real and the ideal coincides with the creedal language of the visible and the invisible. In a time dominated by the insistence of the real above the ideal, fostered by the success of natural science, the danger to us is blindness. We refuse to countenance the invisible and the world becomes a world of surfaces, as wanting of ideas as an abstract or photorealist painting.

This is how we can give credence to a scientism that reduces the world to causation.

It is significant that biblical literalism has loomed so large in our time. This movement is essentially a result of a realist approach to Scripture, i.e. that all of the events described therein actually happened. However, writers of the New Testament were already immersed in the process of integrating the real and the ideal by elaborating the meaning of the historical. Thus biblical literalism is the product of our modern failure to hold the visible and the invisible together.

There is a contradiction that runs though much of late modern thought. Our minds are not cameras; as soon as we open our eyes we see things and these things are automatically associated with ideas. Seeing the visible and the invisible is central to our natures.

While we may think we are scientific rationalists, acceding only to proven realities, this is a fantasy. The structure of experience is grounded in subject/object relations and there is no such thing as pure objectivity. Even though the unity of the ideal and the real; the visible and the invisible are central to our nature as human beings, the invisible is, as the name suggests, hidden from us.

Scripture proclaims that the whole world glorifies God; the invisible is all around us. The big mistake that was made in the seventeenth century was that this proclamation was taken to indicate evidence for the physical act of God in the world. Thus when we look at the world we see the handiwork of God.

This made God a part of the world and produced natural theology, a concept that was easily done away with as natural science became more competent to explain causation in the world.This mistake is the basis of much atheism, and rightly so. But the invisible is not a species of the visible, just as the supernatural is not a species of the natural or the immaterial a species of the material.

The visible and the invisible both relate to Being but they say different things. The visible proclaims that Jesus is a dead man and the invisible proclaims him alive and present.To see the invisible grounded in the visible is to see God.

It is the role of the artist to present just this whether it be a Madonna, a crucifix, a still life, a nude or a landscape. It is always a search for the truth in the filiation of the visible and the invisible.

God is not only encountered in wordy theological argument but in music, poetry, rhetoric or painting. As Karl Barth famously said: "God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog."

It is now a long time since artists proclaimed that their work was "To the glory of God." But what other kind of art is there? Strictly speaking there is no other kind, there is only the pretence of art. Art that is dedicated to the ego of the artist or to the ever new, or to the shocking and transgressive is not art. Be sure that all art is dedicated to something; our hearts are a factory of idols. Similarly, language that is not formed from the awareness of the visible and the visible is not language at all but inarticulate groaning.

Evangelism consists in coaching people to see the invisible in the visible. The decline of the authority of the church is the result of the church's failure to do this.

All we can say to modernity is: there, do you see? Can you make the connection that St. Paul makes when he sees that there is more nailed to the cross than the body of Jesus? Do you see that Christ is with us still in the logic of the triune God? Do you see how the ideal and the real are held together in Him?

The greatest curse that the prophet can summon up is that the eyes and the ears of an unfaithful people be stopped so that they will no longer see nor hear. Is this not a description of our time? Does this not explain so much in our culture; the noise and the money, the blandness and boredom and worse, the absence of hope?