God and art

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?