God and art

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.