Sham Pearls for Real Swine
Sir Winston Churchill issued a commentary regarding British public schools. He condemned valueless and irrelevant teaching, and the resulting unprepared students, by coining the phrase, Sham Pearls for Real Swine. Franky Schaeffer takes a hard look at the church's attitude toward creativity in this classic commentary (Sham Pearls for Real Swine). Franky is the son of Francis Schaeffer:
My father always encouraged artists' aspirations. And my mother saw to it that instead of pocket money, I had art supplies and lessons when I was a child. This encouragement to create continued over the years. I well remember my father, on a trip to Florence, Italy, hiring a model, out of his meager funds, for me to use as part of an experimental movie I was shooting as a fifteen-year-old "director." I also remember him as someone who defended freedom of expression, including the artistic freedom necessary to experiment and make mistakes.Yet as I have learned to my sorrow, people in the Christian church, both evangelical fundamentalist and Roman Catholic, are often far from sharing my father's enlightened appreciation of the arts, let alone supporting those of us pursuing artistic careers.
Most contemporary American church buildings are symbolically ugly, accurately reflecting the taste of pastor and people alike. In Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas, for example, one finds a number of so-called superchurches, churches with five thousand to ten thousand members. These churches house congregations with the money, power, and means to build contemporary Chartres cathedrals, if they had the vision. The profound ugliness of these churches is not the result of budget priorities. These buildings are expensive; studied ugliness does not come cheap. Many of these church buildings seem to express the same sense of aesthetics as that of the living-room/kitchen set from the old "Dick Van Dyke Show." They constitute an assault on the senses: a nightmare of red velvet and prefab ceiling "tile," StainWare carpet in pastel shades from hell and the Easter Bunny, a Mt. Everest of canned sweet corn and lime Jell-O.
Distorted echoes of a now-pacified Christianity ring out in an electronic
clarion call to middle America. These churches are the elevator music of
religion, the counseling rooms in which the latest psycho-babble is used to assuage the anxieties of the pre-and-post-mid-life crises menopausal
congregation. They provide childcare facilities to assist families in staying apart. In Christian bookstores, greeting cards and wall plaques decorated with pious sayings compete for space with the latest cassette tape
wisdom of the local Protestant "pope" of the superchurch ministry outreach,
worldwide international evangelism, counseling/suicide prevention hotline, daycare, elementary school, high school, senior citizen center, Bible school, fund raising, youth center, parking lot ghetto. If these churches
were food, they would have a shelf life of one hundred years — all sugar an preservatives, the two basic evangelical fundamentalist intellectual food groups. They are giant cash registers in which sham pearls are fed to the enlightened who in turn excrete money to feed the machine. Here, the artist has as much chance of thriving as the plastic plants do in the artificial light of the "sanctuary."
The arts ask hard questions. Art incinerates polyester/velvet dreams of inner healing and cheap grace. Art hurts, slaps, and defines. Art is interested in truth: in bad words spoken by bad people, in good words spoken by good people, in sin and goodness, in life, sex, birth, color, texture, death, love, hate, nature, man, religion, music, God, fire, water, and air. Art tears down, builds up, and redefines. Art is uncomfortable. Good art
(which, among other things, means truth-telling art) is good in itself, even when it is about bad things.
Good art expresses an interest in everything. Art, like the Bible, is not
defined by one period of history. Art explores immorality and immortality.
There are no taboo subjects for good art, any more than there is taboo news for newspapers, because art is unafraid of the truth. Art, like Christ, comes to sinners in an imperfect world. People who imagine themselves to be
perfect do not like art. The middle-class church, living in a cocoon of
false expectations, resents people who wield sharp razor blades or worse, disturb their sleep. Art is fleshly yet eternal. Art is human.. Art is a mirror to the world. Art is the bridge between flesh and soul. "Art, is
science in the flesh," as Jean Cocteau wrote in Le Rappel a l’Ordre.
Because art destroys a false sense of security, it is looked on with
suspicion, even perceived as an enemy by the middle class and its
spokespersons in the church, who, through ignorance, subdue ' artists and discourage talent. "Do not offend your brother" is a Bible verse often misused to intimidate the artist in the same way as "turn the other cheek"
is sometimes taken out of Biblical context to justify "Christian" pacifism. There is a Bible verse handily available for every tyrannical cause, to be exploited by those who use the Bible as an ideological weapon.
Only by giving the Bible a devotional spin when we read it, by taking isolated verses out of context and ignoring the raw whole, by filtering and
interpreting, do we "civilize" it. Civilized, the Bible has become a
devotional prop of middle-class values instead of being the rude challenge
to false propriety it actually is. The Bible is 'a dangerous, uncivilized, abrasive, raw, complicated, aggressive, scandalous, and offensive book. The
Bible is the literature of God, and literature — as every book burner knows — is dangerous. The Bible is the drama of God; it is God's Hamlet,
Canterbury Tales, and Wuthering Heights. The Bible is, among other things,
about God, men, women, sex, lies, truth, sin, goodness, fornication,
adultery, murder, childbearing, virgins, whores, blasphemy, prayer, wine,
food, history, nature, poetry, rape, love, salvation, damnation, temptation,
and angels. Today the Bible is widely studied but rarely read. If the Bible
were a film, it would be R-rated in some parts, X-rated in others. The Bible
is not middle class. The Bible is not "nice." The Bible's tone is closer to
that of the- late Lenny Bruce than to that of the hushed piety of some ministers.In some centuries, the church did not allow the common people to read the Bible. Now by spiritualizing it and taming it through devotional and theological interpretations, the church once again muzzles the book in a
“damage control” exercise. We now study the Bible but through a filter of
piety that castrates its virility.
When the unfiltered power of Biblical understanding has occasionally broken
into the open, there have been cultural results. The powerful, Biblically based Dutch paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer serve as examples with their
reflections of raw, genuine life. For instance, there are the exquisite nude paintings of Rembrandt's wife. We see portraits of friends, simple scenes
from everyday life, as in Vermeer's Girl Interrupted at Her Music, in which
common events of life are portrayed as luminous events. Odd, earthy moments
are depicted as well; an old man and woman urinating by the roadside is
captured in a Rembrandt etching. Life as a whole — the good, the bad, the indifferent, the odd, the funny — was painted by great artists who were
believing Christians. These were artists who loved Jesus and looked to Him
for salvation, who understood the cultural and artistic basis that Biblical belief gives to those in the arts.
The painters, scholars, sculptors, and philosophers were not the only Christians and Jews who shaped our culture. Consider Shakespeare, the
truth-seeker, the glory of the English-speaking peoples; Shakespeare, who
created both that saint of chaste Christianity, Desdemona in Othello, and
the ribald sexual humor and double meanings in The Comedy of Errors;
Shakespeare, who gives us truth about life — life theatrically painted as lovingly, humorously, and truly as it ever will be. His was drama based on a
sense of Jewish-Christian morality, drama that today the ignorant, a-cultural church would reject as un-Christian if it were reproduced in
language we understood. Un-Christian because it does not reflect
middle-class nicety and propriety. Yet in Shakespeare's life and writing, we
see a testimony to the Christian faith and its cultural fruit. S.
Schoenbaum, Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English at Northwestern
University and one of the most world-renowned Elizabethan scholars, writes
of Shakespeare's Christian faith:
Inculcated from the formative years of, early childhood, the Bible and Book of Common Prayer . . . profoundly nourished Shakespeare's imagination. One
learned Biblical scholar, ranging through all the works ... has identified
quotations from, or references to, forty-two books of the Bible — eighteen
each from the Old and New Testaments, and six from the Apocrypha. Scarcely a
phrase from the first three chapters of Genesis escapes allusion in the
plays. Job and Ecclesiastes were favorite books, but Cain left an especially powerful impression — Shakespeare refers to him at least twenty-five
times.... Shakespeare's range of religious reference is not limited to the
Bible. Sometimes he quotes Scripture by way of the Prayer, Book, as when the
Fifth Commandment becomes "Thou shalt do no murder," and the words, of the Psalmist, '.'We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told"
("We have spent our yeeres as a thought," in the Genevan Bible) metamorphose
into the "tale told by an idiot." . . . Our most thorough student of the
Homilies takes' them to be "A New Shakespearean Source-Book," and concludes
that the dramatist derived his ideas of the divine right of kings, the
subject's duty to obey, and the mischief and wickedness of rebellion — ideas
that so powerfully inform the English history plays-not from his narrative
sources . . . but either directly or indirectly from the [Christian-Anglican] politico-religious creed set forth in the Homilies. The services at Holy Trinity, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, Baptism and
Holy Communion — indeed all the occasions of worship — remained with
Shakespeare, and echo through the plays. (From William Shakespeare, A
Documentary Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975], 48-49) The breast of the church once also nurtured the composers: Vivaldi, Mozart,
Bach, Corelli, Albinoni, Handel, Verdi, to name just a few of hundreds. Many
looked to the historic Jesus for their personal salvation; all worked in an
atmosphere informed by Jewish-Christian sensibilities. The Bible, the truth,
set many free to be the people they were created to be, to use the talents
God gave them. The traditions of the church provided a moral framework
which was the foundation of the great artistic achievements of Western culture.
Our own time of studied indifference and ignorance toward the arts and
humanities by Christians is fortunately not typical of church history --
Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox. In contrast to our own era, one
thinks of the High Middle Ages or the Florentine Renaissance led by the
Medici family, or the pious Marsilio Ficino and his Platonic Institute. Christian belief informed the quest for knowledge in what was then
understood as an orderly created universe. Therefore, as Leonardo dissected
cadavers and illustrated his anatomy drawings, he could assume he was
involved in a valid quest for knowledge. The pious and sublime frescos of
Fra Angelico and the power of myth renewed by Venus as she comes to us in
her seashell, led to the shore of our desire by the hand of Botticelli, were
all inspired by the light of a rational, Biblical understanding, even when
the subject at hand was an interpretation of a classic Greek myth.
Yet today it seems that truth expressed through the arts is at war with a
false spirituality which pervades the church. The servants of hypocrisy,
found in abundance in the bosom of Christianized middle America, are not the
friends of the arts or Western culture. Loneliness is a constant reality for Christians who seriously pursue an artistic career. We are caught on the horns of a miserable dilemma. On the one hand is the church; on the other is the larger world and its art community. The nonbelieving art community, be it in the field of painting, theater, writing, film, music, or dance, has little interest in those who
would express orthodox Jewish-Christian themes through their personal lives
or their artworks. Yet the church is no better; it has lost vital contact
with art and culture and has even lost the cultural vocabulary to discuss
art and the humanities, let alone encourage artists.
To better understand the dilemma faced by believing Christian and Jewish
artists, let us look at an analogous example. There are some African
languages in which the future tense does not exist. (This linguistically reflects a theological belief in animistic fatalism.) Thus for some tribes
there is no way to discuss the future as we would understand it; what the
ancestors did of old will be done again tomorrow. An African health-worker
who is confronted by such linguistic barriers to progress and tries to
explain some future project, for instance changing a tribal custom in a way
that will be of benefit hygienically, has a nearly impossible task. The very
words do not exist with which to describe a different future reality.
Many Christians in the arts face the same frustrating dilemma today. Because
Christian contact with the arts has recently been so minimal and hostile,
the artist cannot discuss his or her art with fellow believers in a way that
will be understood. There is no common vocabulary.
The contemporary, middle-class church is living in a historical vacuum. The
church, both Protestant and Catholic, is largely unaware of its own cultural
past. With each successive split and realignment within Protestantism, the
church has moved further away from its cultural inheritance. Within the
Catholic community, liberal theology and leftist politics have served to
undermine its traditional commitment to the arts as the church has focused
on its "political relevance" at the expense of spirituality and culture. Today, with only a few exceptions, the church and church-related educational
institutions are not centers of interest in history of any kind, let alone
the history of art and culture. Nor are church institutions mounting a
coherent defense of Western culture against the anti-Western tide that is
sweeping the intellectual world.
The church is now thoroughly divorced from its historic culture. While
claiming to wish to "reach mankind," it often fails because our culture
cannot be reached from outside by outsiders who do not even bother to learn
the cultural language. Ironically, because the church does not understand or
even care about its own cultural artistic history, it does not understand
its own finest, nonreligious creation: Western culture. In this way, the church is like a bad parent who has abandoned its child. Robert Nisbet writes, "Western philosophy can be declared a series of footnotes on St. Augustine" (History of the Idea of Progress [New York: Basic Books, 1980],
71). Nisbet expresses a sentiment as a secular scholar that many Christians
seem to have forgotten: Western art and culture are Jewish-Christian at
their roots.
Believing Christians who work in the secular art community are not only misunderstood by the church, because of its ignorance about art, but worse,
are often rejected as "unspiritual" for concentrating on a "worldly" pursuit
instead of a "spiritual" or "humanitarian" one.
The modern church, when it sees a contemporary Christian's artwork, has little knowledge and negligible historical perspective with which to judge it. It simply passes judgments based on current middle-class ideas of what is "appropriate" or in "good taste" of what represents ideological "right thinking."
Since today's middle American ideas of virtue are not those that have historically inspired great art, there is a conflict between members of the
middle-class church and those who would be serious artists. For instance,
current middle American, post-Victorian ideas of propriety hold that all nudity in art is "bad." Yet an artist who does not draw the nude figure
cannot learn the traditional, accumulated skills of thousands of years of
figurative Western art history — much of it church-supported, Christian art
history — and pays a severe artistic price for such willful ignorance. However, there are much deeper problems preventing the church from having a
positive cultural influence. The church, both "liberal" and "conservative,"
is now living in a historical vacuum; it wants instant results when it seeks
to change culture. The idea of a historical unfolding such as the
Renaissance, that took four hundred years to mature, is totally foreign to
the modern church that measures everything in TV "sound bite" increments.
Hans Rookmaaker, the late Dutch evangelical Christian art historian and head
of the art history department at the Free University of Amsterdam, has explained that any significant influence believing Christians in our time might have in the arts would take generations. This idea does not play well to a church that wants its problems solved in one weekend retreat, wants the
world converted in one evangelistic rally, or sees its mission as encouraging the redistribution of wealth between people to achieve instant "justice."
Middle America, politically left and right, in cutting itself off from a historical understanding of Western culture, has become an aesthetic nightmare. Thus, even when it comes to personal taste, individuals in the church are rarely sympathetic to good art. Middle America knows what it likes, and it's awful!
In this tasteless world, the artist is condemned for being "secular" by the church and is ostracized by his or her nonbelieving contemporaries for being
foolishly "religious." In the smooth world that is Christianity in America
today, how many people can feel the poignancy of Emily Dickinson's immortal
line, "I died for beauty" or the depth of the artistic struggle described by Graham Greene in what he called "the despair of never getting anything right"?
Visual, as well as literary, expression is foreign to most of today's church. This lack of understanding is exacerbated by the fact that few leaders in the church come from a background that would give them any particular knowledge of, or sympathy for, the visual arts. As a result, we have a legion of theologically trained but artistically boorish Christians who are the leaders of evangelical fundamentalist and Roman Catholic Christianity.
Some Christians have called for more involvement in the culture by the
church. However, usually when Christian leaders have called for a Christian
presence in the arts or media, what they have actually had in mind is the making of gospel propaganda or so-called family entertainment that embodies
what they are pleased to call "traditional values." More often than not,
what these offerings turn out to be is middle-class pablum that will offend
no one, cause no one to think, mean nothing, and leave its audience as
comfortable and mindless as before they were fleetingly entertained by it. In other words, the "traditional values" turn out to be the values of the
1950s middle America, not the far more robust traditions of Western culture.
What most Christians seem to crave when they call for a Christian presence
in the arts is a return to middle American sentimentality, the kind of sentimentality that confuses virtue with niceness. This is a long way from the expressionist realism we find in the Bible itself, a long way from a
concept of truth that traditional Jesuit and Calvinist scholarship once
would have defended as the basis for a self-confident Western civilization.
Christians are threatened by the aggressive secularism of our time, often with good reason. Unfortunately, our reaction to disturbing trends of
secularization has led to the creation of defensive Christian ghettos in
education, the church, and the mind. Our own confused reactions in this respect are not much different than those of Christians in the fourteenth
century, a similarly convulsed period of history, of which the late historian Barbara Tuchman wrote:
Times of anxiety nourish belief in conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid.... The Church was on the defensive, torn apart by the schism~challenged in authority and doctrine by aggressive movements of dissent, beset by cries for reform. Like the ordinary man, it felt surrounded by malevolent forces. (A Distant Mirror [New York: Knopf, 1978], 514-515)
No better description could be written with reference to the attitudes of
many Christians in our own day to the secularist onslaught. In the most unfortunate reaction possible, many Christians find false security through
collective ignorance and deny rather than affirm, run rather than shape,
endlessly say no rather than present good alternatives. The Christian who is
serious about being an artist occupies, in this reactionary ghetto, a place as comfortable as that of a live fish placed in boiling water.
The church is ugly when it begins to defend itself rather than truth. This
ugliness is not unique to our day. Looking back in history, it is easy to understand the distress Moliere must have felt when some of his "brothers"
in the church plotted to have him burnt for blasphemy because he wrote a play, Le Tartuffe, in which a character dressed as a priest was portrayed as devious and hypocritical. Ironically, the play itself was intended as a corrective satire to help reform the institution of the church. In another instance of religiosity perverting art, when Botticelli came under the spiritual influence of the fiery priest, Savonarola, he, at the fevered priest's bidding, burnt some of his earlier "nonreligious," "sinful" artwork! He then painted a gloomy series of second-rate religious paintings. Bad art but right-minded theology. Savonarola was gratified; the human race became a little poorer.
Yet, in spite of the tragic examples of intolerance of the arts by some Christians past and present, the glory of the historical church that did understand the arts stands in stark contrast to our own inward-looking time.
My father always encouraged artists' aspirations. And my mother saw to it that instead of pocket money, I had art supplies and lessons when I was a child. This encouragement to create continued over the years. I well remember my father, on a trip to Florence, Italy, hiring a model, out of his meager funds, for me to use as part of an experimental movie I was shooting as a fifteen-year-old "director." I also remember him as someone who defended freedom of expression, including the artistic freedom necessary to experiment and make mistakes.Yet as I have learned to my sorrow, people in the Christian church, both evangelical fundamentalist and Roman Catholic, are often far from sharing my father's enlightened appreciation of the arts, let alone supporting those of us pursuing artistic careers.
Most contemporary American church buildings are symbolically ugly, accurately reflecting the taste of pastor and people alike. In Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas, for example, one finds a number of so-called superchurches, churches with five thousand to ten thousand members. These churches house congregations with the money, power, and means to build contemporary Chartres cathedrals, if they had the vision. The profound ugliness of these churches is not the result of budget priorities. These buildings are expensive; studied ugliness does not come cheap. Many of these church buildings seem to express the same sense of aesthetics as that of the living-room/kitchen set from the old "Dick Van Dyke Show." They constitute an assault on the senses: a nightmare of red velvet and prefab ceiling "tile," StainWare carpet in pastel shades from hell and the Easter Bunny, a Mt. Everest of canned sweet corn and lime Jell-O.
Distorted echoes of a now-pacified Christianity ring out in an electronic
clarion call to middle America. These churches are the elevator music of
religion, the counseling rooms in which the latest psycho-babble is used to assuage the anxieties of the pre-and-post-mid-life crises menopausal
congregation. They provide childcare facilities to assist families in staying apart. In Christian bookstores, greeting cards and wall plaques decorated with pious sayings compete for space with the latest cassette tape
wisdom of the local Protestant "pope" of the superchurch ministry outreach,
worldwide international evangelism, counseling/suicide prevention hotline, daycare, elementary school, high school, senior citizen center, Bible school, fund raising, youth center, parking lot ghetto. If these churches
were food, they would have a shelf life of one hundred years — all sugar an preservatives, the two basic evangelical fundamentalist intellectual food groups. They are giant cash registers in which sham pearls are fed to the enlightened who in turn excrete money to feed the machine. Here, the artist has as much chance of thriving as the plastic plants do in the artificial light of the "sanctuary."
The arts ask hard questions. Art incinerates polyester/velvet dreams of inner healing and cheap grace. Art hurts, slaps, and defines. Art is interested in truth: in bad words spoken by bad people, in good words spoken by good people, in sin and goodness, in life, sex, birth, color, texture, death, love, hate, nature, man, religion, music, God, fire, water, and air. Art tears down, builds up, and redefines. Art is uncomfortable. Good art
(which, among other things, means truth-telling art) is good in itself, even when it is about bad things.
Good art expresses an interest in everything. Art, like the Bible, is not
defined by one period of history. Art explores immorality and immortality.
There are no taboo subjects for good art, any more than there is taboo news for newspapers, because art is unafraid of the truth. Art, like Christ, comes to sinners in an imperfect world. People who imagine themselves to be
perfect do not like art. The middle-class church, living in a cocoon of
false expectations, resents people who wield sharp razor blades or worse, disturb their sleep. Art is fleshly yet eternal. Art is human.. Art is a mirror to the world. Art is the bridge between flesh and soul. "Art, is
science in the flesh," as Jean Cocteau wrote in Le Rappel a l’Ordre.
Because art destroys a false sense of security, it is looked on with
suspicion, even perceived as an enemy by the middle class and its
spokespersons in the church, who, through ignorance, subdue ' artists and discourage talent. "Do not offend your brother" is a Bible verse often misused to intimidate the artist in the same way as "turn the other cheek"
is sometimes taken out of Biblical context to justify "Christian" pacifism. There is a Bible verse handily available for every tyrannical cause, to be exploited by those who use the Bible as an ideological weapon.
Only by giving the Bible a devotional spin when we read it, by taking isolated verses out of context and ignoring the raw whole, by filtering and
interpreting, do we "civilize" it. Civilized, the Bible has become a
devotional prop of middle-class values instead of being the rude challenge
to false propriety it actually is. The Bible is 'a dangerous, uncivilized, abrasive, raw, complicated, aggressive, scandalous, and offensive book. The
Bible is the literature of God, and literature — as every book burner knows — is dangerous. The Bible is the drama of God; it is God's Hamlet,
Canterbury Tales, and Wuthering Heights. The Bible is, among other things,
about God, men, women, sex, lies, truth, sin, goodness, fornication,
adultery, murder, childbearing, virgins, whores, blasphemy, prayer, wine,
food, history, nature, poetry, rape, love, salvation, damnation, temptation,
and angels. Today the Bible is widely studied but rarely read. If the Bible
were a film, it would be R-rated in some parts, X-rated in others. The Bible
is not middle class. The Bible is not "nice." The Bible's tone is closer to
that of the- late Lenny Bruce than to that of the hushed piety of some ministers.In some centuries, the church did not allow the common people to read the Bible. Now by spiritualizing it and taming it through devotional and theological interpretations, the church once again muzzles the book in a
“damage control” exercise. We now study the Bible but through a filter of
piety that castrates its virility.
When the unfiltered power of Biblical understanding has occasionally broken
into the open, there have been cultural results. The powerful, Biblically based Dutch paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer serve as examples with their
reflections of raw, genuine life. For instance, there are the exquisite nude paintings of Rembrandt's wife. We see portraits of friends, simple scenes
from everyday life, as in Vermeer's Girl Interrupted at Her Music, in which
common events of life are portrayed as luminous events. Odd, earthy moments
are depicted as well; an old man and woman urinating by the roadside is
captured in a Rembrandt etching. Life as a whole — the good, the bad, the indifferent, the odd, the funny — was painted by great artists who were
believing Christians. These were artists who loved Jesus and looked to Him
for salvation, who understood the cultural and artistic basis that Biblical belief gives to those in the arts.
The painters, scholars, sculptors, and philosophers were not the only Christians and Jews who shaped our culture. Consider Shakespeare, the
truth-seeker, the glory of the English-speaking peoples; Shakespeare, who
created both that saint of chaste Christianity, Desdemona in Othello, and
the ribald sexual humor and double meanings in The Comedy of Errors;
Shakespeare, who gives us truth about life — life theatrically painted as lovingly, humorously, and truly as it ever will be. His was drama based on a
sense of Jewish-Christian morality, drama that today the ignorant, a-cultural church would reject as un-Christian if it were reproduced in
language we understood. Un-Christian because it does not reflect
middle-class nicety and propriety. Yet in Shakespeare's life and writing, we
see a testimony to the Christian faith and its cultural fruit. S.
Schoenbaum, Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English at Northwestern
University and one of the most world-renowned Elizabethan scholars, writes
of Shakespeare's Christian faith:
Inculcated from the formative years of, early childhood, the Bible and Book of Common Prayer . . . profoundly nourished Shakespeare's imagination. One
learned Biblical scholar, ranging through all the works ... has identified
quotations from, or references to, forty-two books of the Bible — eighteen
each from the Old and New Testaments, and six from the Apocrypha. Scarcely a
phrase from the first three chapters of Genesis escapes allusion in the
plays. Job and Ecclesiastes were favorite books, but Cain left an especially powerful impression — Shakespeare refers to him at least twenty-five
times.... Shakespeare's range of religious reference is not limited to the
Bible. Sometimes he quotes Scripture by way of the Prayer, Book, as when the
Fifth Commandment becomes "Thou shalt do no murder," and the words, of the Psalmist, '.'We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told"
("We have spent our yeeres as a thought," in the Genevan Bible) metamorphose
into the "tale told by an idiot." . . . Our most thorough student of the
Homilies takes' them to be "A New Shakespearean Source-Book," and concludes
that the dramatist derived his ideas of the divine right of kings, the
subject's duty to obey, and the mischief and wickedness of rebellion — ideas
that so powerfully inform the English history plays-not from his narrative
sources . . . but either directly or indirectly from the [Christian-Anglican] politico-religious creed set forth in the Homilies. The services at Holy Trinity, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, Baptism and
Holy Communion — indeed all the occasions of worship — remained with
Shakespeare, and echo through the plays. (From William Shakespeare, A
Documentary Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975], 48-49) The breast of the church once also nurtured the composers: Vivaldi, Mozart,
Bach, Corelli, Albinoni, Handel, Verdi, to name just a few of hundreds. Many
looked to the historic Jesus for their personal salvation; all worked in an
atmosphere informed by Jewish-Christian sensibilities. The Bible, the truth,
set many free to be the people they were created to be, to use the talents
God gave them. The traditions of the church provided a moral framework
which was the foundation of the great artistic achievements of Western culture.
Our own time of studied indifference and ignorance toward the arts and
humanities by Christians is fortunately not typical of church history --
Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox. In contrast to our own era, one
thinks of the High Middle Ages or the Florentine Renaissance led by the
Medici family, or the pious Marsilio Ficino and his Platonic Institute. Christian belief informed the quest for knowledge in what was then
understood as an orderly created universe. Therefore, as Leonardo dissected
cadavers and illustrated his anatomy drawings, he could assume he was
involved in a valid quest for knowledge. The pious and sublime frescos of
Fra Angelico and the power of myth renewed by Venus as she comes to us in
her seashell, led to the shore of our desire by the hand of Botticelli, were
all inspired by the light of a rational, Biblical understanding, even when
the subject at hand was an interpretation of a classic Greek myth.
Yet today it seems that truth expressed through the arts is at war with a
false spirituality which pervades the church. The servants of hypocrisy,
found in abundance in the bosom of Christianized middle America, are not the
friends of the arts or Western culture. Loneliness is a constant reality for Christians who seriously pursue an artistic career. We are caught on the horns of a miserable dilemma. On the one hand is the church; on the other is the larger world and its art community. The nonbelieving art community, be it in the field of painting, theater, writing, film, music, or dance, has little interest in those who
would express orthodox Jewish-Christian themes through their personal lives
or their artworks. Yet the church is no better; it has lost vital contact
with art and culture and has even lost the cultural vocabulary to discuss
art and the humanities, let alone encourage artists.
To better understand the dilemma faced by believing Christian and Jewish
artists, let us look at an analogous example. There are some African
languages in which the future tense does not exist. (This linguistically reflects a theological belief in animistic fatalism.) Thus for some tribes
there is no way to discuss the future as we would understand it; what the
ancestors did of old will be done again tomorrow. An African health-worker
who is confronted by such linguistic barriers to progress and tries to
explain some future project, for instance changing a tribal custom in a way
that will be of benefit hygienically, has a nearly impossible task. The very
words do not exist with which to describe a different future reality.
Many Christians in the arts face the same frustrating dilemma today. Because
Christian contact with the arts has recently been so minimal and hostile,
the artist cannot discuss his or her art with fellow believers in a way that
will be understood. There is no common vocabulary.
The contemporary, middle-class church is living in a historical vacuum. The
church, both Protestant and Catholic, is largely unaware of its own cultural
past. With each successive split and realignment within Protestantism, the
church has moved further away from its cultural inheritance. Within the
Catholic community, liberal theology and leftist politics have served to
undermine its traditional commitment to the arts as the church has focused
on its "political relevance" at the expense of spirituality and culture. Today, with only a few exceptions, the church and church-related educational
institutions are not centers of interest in history of any kind, let alone
the history of art and culture. Nor are church institutions mounting a
coherent defense of Western culture against the anti-Western tide that is
sweeping the intellectual world.
The church is now thoroughly divorced from its historic culture. While
claiming to wish to "reach mankind," it often fails because our culture
cannot be reached from outside by outsiders who do not even bother to learn
the cultural language. Ironically, because the church does not understand or
even care about its own cultural artistic history, it does not understand
its own finest, nonreligious creation: Western culture. In this way, the church is like a bad parent who has abandoned its child. Robert Nisbet writes, "Western philosophy can be declared a series of footnotes on St. Augustine" (History of the Idea of Progress [New York: Basic Books, 1980],
71). Nisbet expresses a sentiment as a secular scholar that many Christians
seem to have forgotten: Western art and culture are Jewish-Christian at
their roots.
Believing Christians who work in the secular art community are not only misunderstood by the church, because of its ignorance about art, but worse,
are often rejected as "unspiritual" for concentrating on a "worldly" pursuit
instead of a "spiritual" or "humanitarian" one.
The modern church, when it sees a contemporary Christian's artwork, has little knowledge and negligible historical perspective with which to judge it. It simply passes judgments based on current middle-class ideas of what is "appropriate" or in "good taste" of what represents ideological "right thinking."
Since today's middle American ideas of virtue are not those that have historically inspired great art, there is a conflict between members of the
middle-class church and those who would be serious artists. For instance,
current middle American, post-Victorian ideas of propriety hold that all nudity in art is "bad." Yet an artist who does not draw the nude figure
cannot learn the traditional, accumulated skills of thousands of years of
figurative Western art history — much of it church-supported, Christian art
history — and pays a severe artistic price for such willful ignorance. However, there are much deeper problems preventing the church from having a
positive cultural influence. The church, both "liberal" and "conservative,"
is now living in a historical vacuum; it wants instant results when it seeks
to change culture. The idea of a historical unfolding such as the
Renaissance, that took four hundred years to mature, is totally foreign to
the modern church that measures everything in TV "sound bite" increments.
Hans Rookmaaker, the late Dutch evangelical Christian art historian and head
of the art history department at the Free University of Amsterdam, has explained that any significant influence believing Christians in our time might have in the arts would take generations. This idea does not play well to a church that wants its problems solved in one weekend retreat, wants the
world converted in one evangelistic rally, or sees its mission as encouraging the redistribution of wealth between people to achieve instant "justice."
Middle America, politically left and right, in cutting itself off from a historical understanding of Western culture, has become an aesthetic nightmare. Thus, even when it comes to personal taste, individuals in the church are rarely sympathetic to good art. Middle America knows what it likes, and it's awful!
In this tasteless world, the artist is condemned for being "secular" by the church and is ostracized by his or her nonbelieving contemporaries for being
foolishly "religious." In the smooth world that is Christianity in America
today, how many people can feel the poignancy of Emily Dickinson's immortal
line, "I died for beauty" or the depth of the artistic struggle described by Graham Greene in what he called "the despair of never getting anything right"?
Visual, as well as literary, expression is foreign to most of today's church. This lack of understanding is exacerbated by the fact that few leaders in the church come from a background that would give them any particular knowledge of, or sympathy for, the visual arts. As a result, we have a legion of theologically trained but artistically boorish Christians who are the leaders of evangelical fundamentalist and Roman Catholic Christianity.
Some Christians have called for more involvement in the culture by the
church. However, usually when Christian leaders have called for a Christian
presence in the arts or media, what they have actually had in mind is the making of gospel propaganda or so-called family entertainment that embodies
what they are pleased to call "traditional values." More often than not,
what these offerings turn out to be is middle-class pablum that will offend
no one, cause no one to think, mean nothing, and leave its audience as
comfortable and mindless as before they were fleetingly entertained by it. In other words, the "traditional values" turn out to be the values of the
1950s middle America, not the far more robust traditions of Western culture.
What most Christians seem to crave when they call for a Christian presence
in the arts is a return to middle American sentimentality, the kind of sentimentality that confuses virtue with niceness. This is a long way from the expressionist realism we find in the Bible itself, a long way from a
concept of truth that traditional Jesuit and Calvinist scholarship once
would have defended as the basis for a self-confident Western civilization.
Christians are threatened by the aggressive secularism of our time, often with good reason. Unfortunately, our reaction to disturbing trends of
secularization has led to the creation of defensive Christian ghettos in
education, the church, and the mind. Our own confused reactions in this respect are not much different than those of Christians in the fourteenth
century, a similarly convulsed period of history, of which the late historian Barbara Tuchman wrote:
Times of anxiety nourish belief in conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid.... The Church was on the defensive, torn apart by the schism~challenged in authority and doctrine by aggressive movements of dissent, beset by cries for reform. Like the ordinary man, it felt surrounded by malevolent forces. (A Distant Mirror [New York: Knopf, 1978], 514-515)
No better description could be written with reference to the attitudes of
many Christians in our own day to the secularist onslaught. In the most unfortunate reaction possible, many Christians find false security through
collective ignorance and deny rather than affirm, run rather than shape,
endlessly say no rather than present good alternatives. The Christian who is
serious about being an artist occupies, in this reactionary ghetto, a place as comfortable as that of a live fish placed in boiling water.
The church is ugly when it begins to defend itself rather than truth. This
ugliness is not unique to our day. Looking back in history, it is easy to understand the distress Moliere must have felt when some of his "brothers"
in the church plotted to have him burnt for blasphemy because he wrote a play, Le Tartuffe, in which a character dressed as a priest was portrayed as devious and hypocritical. Ironically, the play itself was intended as a corrective satire to help reform the institution of the church. In another instance of religiosity perverting art, when Botticelli came under the spiritual influence of the fiery priest, Savonarola, he, at the fevered priest's bidding, burnt some of his earlier "nonreligious," "sinful" artwork! He then painted a gloomy series of second-rate religious paintings. Bad art but right-minded theology. Savonarola was gratified; the human race became a little poorer.
Yet, in spite of the tragic examples of intolerance of the arts by some Christians past and present, the glory of the historical church that did understand the arts stands in stark contrast to our own inward-looking time.