On the vocation of an artist: Part II

René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967)

"All art is an imitation of nature." Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD)

"Man is god over all the material elements, for he uses, modifies and forms them all." Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)


If you haven't done this exercise yet, I'll go ahead and encourage you to do it now (and I'll keep persisting till this series is completed because I think something valuable might be gained in doing it). Before reading the following post, fill out the following sentence:

"The vocation of an artist is...."

Now that you've filled it out, I'll continue part two of my series on the vocation of an artist.

Part one concluded with this statement: "When you enter into discussion with fellow Christians, the situation unfortunately isn’t much better...especially when we encounter the all-too-ready appeal to the notion of artist as prophet."

Our good man Cole Matson launched a fine salvo on the topic, and while I'm tempted to plunge into the question of "artist as prophet," I'm going to hold off at least one more entry. For now, I'll survey a range of ways in which Christians have conceived of an artist's vocation. While not comprehensive by any means, the views I've included are generally representative of the kinds of comments one will find throughout Christian history. I begin with an Inkling.

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) once identified the distinguishing feature of an artist as the capacity to "co-create," in a fashion, that is, analogous to God's creativity (the verb is intentionally placed in quotation marks), and few declarations have stirred up as much feeling in 20th century discussions of art, though perhaps especially in Protestant circles, as this one.

While Madeleine L'Engle ran with the idea in her book Walking on Water, the Dutch Reformed philosopher Calvin Seerveld felt that it led dangerously to elitist notions about the vocation of artists with respect to other human vocations. In its stead he encouraged us to view the artist as a co-cultivator. Working within a similar theological tradition, Nicholas Wolterstorff, who expressly operates with the "royal" imagery of the book of Genesis, argues that the artist should be seen as a responsible gardener of the world.

Jeremy Begbie, in Voicing Creation's Praise, advances the idea of artist as "priest of creation." Through the artist, he writes, "the inarticulate (though never silent) creation becomes articulate.” Four ways in which artists function as priests, he suggests, are these. First, it includes a discovery of and respect for the mysteries of creation. Second, it involves a development of the hidden treasures and structures of the created world. Third, there is a redeeming of disorder, “a renewal of that which has been spoiled,” which is what he would call the negative dimension of creativity--that is, the pronouncement of judgment on all that disfigures the world and an exposing of the ugliness of sin. And finally, our creative priesthood takes place within a corporate context, mirroring the creative activity of the Trinitarian God.

Moving in the direction of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI, in his "Address" at the Sistine Chapel, Nov. 21, 2009, paraphrasing Pope John Paul II, talked about the artist's calling as that of "rendering accessible and comprehensible to the minds and hearts of our people the things of the spirit, the invisible, the ineffable, the things of God himself.” While Flannery O'Connor would have been sympathetic to this view of things, she stated the matter more plainly: "If writing is your vocation, then, as a writer, you will seek the will of God first through the laws and limitations of what you are creating; your first concern will be the necessities that present themselves in the work."

This way of orienting the vocation of an artist is one that she owes, in part, to the mid-twentieth century French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain.  Over the course of his writings, in particular in Art and Scholasticism, he emphasized the delicate distinction between the Christian as Christian and the artist as artist, which O'Connor in turn sought to embody in her life's work. It's a distinction that has bedeviled Christians from the start. It still does. As Maritain puts it:

"Do not separate your art from your faith. But leave distinct what is distinct. Do not try to blend by force what life unites so well. If you were to make of your aesthetic an article of faith, you would spoil your faith. If you were to make of your devotion a rule of artistic activity ... you would spoil your art. The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach it and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here.... Christian work would have the artist, as artist, free."

If we return to our earliest history, we find a general agreement revolving around a Hellenistic idea of the artist's calling. Working up against the backdrop of art as "imitation," Gregory of Nyssa gives voice to the patristic mind when he writes:

"Therefore, just as when we are learning the art of painting, the teacher puts before us on a panel a beautifully executed model, and it is necessary for each student to imitate in every way the beauty of that model on his own panel, so that the panels of all will be adorned in accordance with the example of the beauty set before them; in the same way, since every person is the painter of his own life, and choice is the craftsman of the work, and the virtues are the paints for executing the image, there is no small danger that the imitation may change the Prototype into a hateful and ugly person instead of reproducing the master form if we sketch in the character of evil with muddy colors."

Imitation here is not to be thought as slavish mimicry but rather a faithful re-presentation of the earthly domain or of God's domain, of reality or of Reality.

Finally, you hang around the church long enough and you'll no doubt hear this plaintive cry:

“All I want is for my art to give glory to God.”

This, to my mind, is the worse kind of statement. Not only does it present itself as self-evident, when it is anything but that, it also results in making the nearby listener feel all the worse because he should know what that means and he dare not disagree for fear of being seen as the heathenish brother. Who doesn't want their work to glorify God?

The problem with this last statement is that it fails to state anything distinctive about the vocation of an artist. In attempting to say everything that matters, it unfortunately says nothing at all, nothing that discloses concrete understanding about an artist's calling. In point of fact, one might press the same question to all the above statements: In what way exactly is any of it unique to an artist?

How are educators not also co-creators? How are politicians and engineers not also called to be responsible gardeners of the world? Are not businesswomen also co-cultivators? Is not the work of a pastor also, in some measure, that of a priest of creation? Do designers of highway billboards render accessible the invisible and ineffable or is this the exclusive prerogative of singer-songwriters and authors of literary fiction?

And isn't your mother also prophetic? At least maybe in hindsight? I think so, and it is the difference between a biblical prophet, an artist as prophet and your mother as prophet that I hope to explore in the next entry.