Art as divine revelation
Sunday June 8, 2008
Categories: Religion (general)
Tobias Wolff has a lovely short essay in the new issue of The New Yorker, in which he discusses aesthetics as a doorway into the divine. Specifically, he recalls a time as an Oxford undergraduate that he and a drinking...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Your column this morning really struck me, esp. as I get ready to leave for Italy with a group of Baylor students.
It's funny, but what tended to give me a sense of awe in my first trip to Europe (Italy, in my case), wasn't the big, grandiose places (I really got sick of Baroque, much to my surprise), but the simple. I found I much prefered older, romanesque churches, if one could find one that hadn't been "baroque'd", as a priest of my acquaintance put it. I found that simple, quiet places, that had a tasteful minimum of ornamentation, that had been used as prayerful places for centuries, moved me much more than the showy places. I'm a devout Catholic, and St. Peter's just didn't move me that much, at least spiritually. On the other hand, singing the "Pange Lingua" and "Adoro te Devote" with a group of fellow Reggie Foster students in the room Where St. Thomas Aquinas died, at Fossa Nova, moved me more that words can say.
I guess structures themselves tend to move me less than the history and associations of the structure. I'm not sure I'm articulating that well, but I think you know what I mean.
***
On another oil-related matter, my sister told me yesterday that she is getting rid of her Jeep and getting a Prius, because she just can't keep paying through the nose for gas. She said she wants to sell the Jeep while she still can. She lives in Oregon, and she said some car dealers there are already refusing to take SUVs as trade-ins!
I don't know that I've experienced anything life-changing: Having grown up in a fundamentalist home and since found my way into a traditional Anglican congregation, I often wonder anymore whether I actually believe in God. It's not the tenets of my faith that cause me problems so much as it is just the question of God's existence. But what allows me to hang on is often art, music, and poetry. I second Wolff - the tradition of English religious poetry is life-giving, Herbert and Hopkins especially. Beyond that, though, is Bach, without whom I can no longer imagine life or hope or faith. His solo cello and violin works encompass just about the whole of the human experience, of course, but in recent years it has been his cantatas. No wonder Schweitzer, I believe, called him the Fifth Evangelist.
This is not directly on topic, but is occasioned by your comments on how beauty can sometimes open people to the divine. Regarding Chartres, you write:
But ultimately, it hit me with the force of revelation, that beauty. I had nothing in my experience of religion to compare it to. It made Christianity new to me again.
I have had similar, though not quite life-changing reactions--the little church of Santa Fosca on the Venetian islan of Torcello; the interior of San Marco; the mosque at Abiquiu, NM. But I think to be intellectually honest, if you admit the possibility of a Christian cathedral acting as a revelation of sorts, you have to admit the possibility of this happening with a Moslem mosque or a Buddhist temple. And if you agree that nothing exists without a sufficient cause, i.e., that the beauty of Chartres is not accidental but arises from something essential in Christianity, you may have to admit the same about, say, Islam or Buddhism. One of my father’s favorite sayings was, Nemo dat quod non habet, No one gives what he hasn’t got; nor does a religion or spiritual path build something of beauty without having something within it that can give rise to this beauty. This, it seems to me, is an argument for a certain degree of validity ( I won’t argue for anything further) of, say, Buddhism or Islam. I bring this up only because I keep running across comments on this site denigrating Islam, which is a narrow, unnecessary, and unworthy stance to take, though understandable in the current climate and given the position of so many Muslim extremists.
You can always tell an American in a cathedral because he or she is the one staring slack jawed up at the beauty of it all. I think Europeans must sometimes get a little jealous of that first-time view.
For me, the most numinous and spiritual sights are sights of nature. The shoreline is absolutely mesmerizing and gives life to the Psalmist's words, "Deep calls unto Deep." But the night sky tops it all. The sight of the Milky Way, or the Pleiades, especially through a telescope - well they put me right out of my skull, is the only way I can put it in words.
Seek Him who made the Pleiades and Orion And changes deep darkness into morning, Who also darkens day into night, Who calls for the waters of the sea And pours them out on the surface of the earth, The LORD is His name.
And Marie, I have to back you up on what you say about Islam. You can disagree with its tenets, of course, but it is only unfamiliarity with its art, architecture, prayers, worship rituals, and above all, its practioners which can lead people to denigrate the faith. If only the militants and terrorists understood how much they were undermining Islam, in our minds and in the minds of their victims.
I second DJ White to some extent. I'm always unimpressed by cathedrals - they are so obviously about power. The mediaeval ones (eg. York Minster) are impressive, I guess, but I find all those baroque cathedrals, especially in Italy, to be actually ugly. I don't like aesthetic bombast.
I much prefer little village churches. To the extent that I have any religious beliefs, they belong somewhere in the realm of quietness - old churches that have settled into the landscape for 1,000 years, that sort of thing - the peace of God that passes all understanding. I like stone circles, as well, though.
I believe I've mentioned this before on this blog, but I don't tire of saying that the final movement of Mozart's symphony no. 41 struck me with such force when I first became familiar with it as a college sophomore that it made the agnosticism I'd slipped into quite untenable. Only within the last year or two did I learn that Woody Allen has said that this symphony proves the existence of God. Rejoice in the Author of beauty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcly8-RGhgw The sidebar from the guy who posted this is worth reading.
For me it was Notre Dame de Paris, the first European cathedral I ever saw, and still one of the two or three most beautiful buildings I know.
Was your Chartres tour guide Malcolm Miller? He was still giving tours there -- and good ones -- when I visited about five years ago.
Regarding Marie's comment above, and the comments about cathedrals in general, I believe that Frithjof Schuon wrote more or less that
"When you are in St. Peter's, you simply feels you are in Europe; but when you are in a Gothic cathedral, you feel you are in the center of the universe."
This idea of being very close to the center of things, or to use another metaphor, that you are near the beating heart, seems to be a common experience. I've had this experience at Pueblo Indian dances, where it's the combination of the arid, often high desert setting combined with the anonymously powerful masked dancers and the chthonic (ha! had to use that word) chanting and pounding of the feet; I've had it also at divine liturgy, particularly at the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts in the orthodox liturgy, with the candles, beeswax and smelling of honey, the icons, the vestments all combine in a wonderful blend.
I'd like to think (and suppose I sometimes do think) that aesthetic response these dynamic settings is a combination of like being known by like: iin f we put away our foolishness, and act in communion with fellow-believers, we are open to something that comes from above us, which touches us; we brush against it, however briefly.
By the way, there's numerous typos, when my computer did something weird and posted a comment I was in the process of editing. So apologies for the typos. For example, "feels" should be "feel"; and "aesthetic response these dynamic" should be "aesthetic response *in* these" and so on.
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