There were giants in those days (4)

Finally, their emphasis on relationality. They chose to explore aspects of coinherence and relationality at a time when progress was achieved through specialisation and when World Wars were undermining belief in human brotherhood. Relationality, however, was fundamental to their vision enabling them to explore the links between past, present and future within works that aimed at being holistic and reconciliatory.

Eliot’s Four Quartets ends with our arrival at the place of our beginning but, for the first time, with knowledge of the place itself. This knowledge is of unity:

“A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

This knowledge is also that of the eldila in Lewis’ Perelandra:

“In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!”

In this aspect of their thought, these artists were ahead of their time. Now, with the growth of the global village, globalisation, the international community and the world-wide web, inter-connectivity is a ‘live’ issue. Moynagh describes globalisation as involving “the interlocking of nations so that they begin to form a single unit” and argues that as “[p]eople across the globe are becoming connected in new ways … this will transform our lives … [providing] fresh opportunities to be in touch with others”. “New networks will give rise to a new society”. This optimism is echoed by Susan Greenfield. She predicts that as we communicate and learn through new technologies, “we won’t see ourselves as individuals any more”. Instead, “[w]e will be a living web”, “more networked and connected, less separate”. This change will come because “when people learn predominantly in visual form from screens, they won’t think in linear ways, but in “hypertext”, free-associating between ideas in the same way information is accessed on the web".

Jones provides a theological underpinning for a ‘hypertext’ approach to knowledge. Jones believes that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. This is the idea of the signifier and the signified that is found in semiotics. All things, therefore, including human beings and other living creatures are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present this multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Maritain suggests that it is multiple signification that creates joy or delight in a work of art:

“the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

For Jones such signification is the essence of a Christianity, which has, at its heart, the re-presenting of Christ under the form of bread and wine. When the sign is the thing signified what you have is incarnation, the union of the natural and the supernatural.

This same correspondence is also found in the work of Williams. He argues that the supernatural and, ultimately, God himself, is known “through images within the natural”. At its best this is the Beatrician moment, when “one can know himself to be … in Love; one can have a sense of living within the beloved”, of imaging and participating in the “supernatural fact of coinherence”. “All things,” Williams suggests, “are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It’s our business – especially yours and mine – to take up the power of relation”.

Once we have seen that we live from others, then Williams suggests that we are able to live for others through mutuality, reciprocity and exchange. “At the root of the physical nature of man,” he wrote, “lie exchange of liking, substitution, inherence. The nature of man which is so expressed in the physical world is expressed after the same manner, only more fully, in the mental and spiritual”.

Again, the Incarnation is key. Williams says that Jesus, “preferred to shape himself within the womb, to become hereditary, to owe to humanity the flesh he divinitized by the same principle – ‘not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ By an act of substitution he reconciled the natural world with the world of the kingdom of heaven, sensuality with substance. He restored substitution and co- inherence everywhere; up and down the ladder of that great substitution all our lesser substitutions run; within that sublime co-inherence all our lesser co-inherences inhere”.

For Williams, exchange has economic and political implications as well as ecclesiastical and personal. Similarly, Sayers argues that “… the Church, as a Christian society, is concerned … to sanctify humanity … the whole of humanity”. “She must,” Sayers argues, “include within her sacraments all arts, all letters, all labour and all learning … she stands committed to the assertion that all human activity, whether of spirit, mind or body, is potentially good – not negatively, by repression, but positively, and as an act of worship. Further, she must include a proper reverence for the earth and for all material things; because these also are the body of the living God”.

This is so Sayers believes because “the Trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, with the nature of God, in Whom all that is exists”. Therefore, all human making follows this Trinitarian, coinherent, inter-connected pattern:

“First: there is the Creative Idea; passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning; and this is the image of the Father.

Second: there is the Creative Energy, begotten of that Idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter; and this is the image of the Word.

Third: there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul; and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other; and this is the image of the Trinity.”

Through recessive signification, the Way of Affirmation, the Beatrician moment and the Trinitarian patterning of making, a theological basis for inter-connextivity and the networked society can be formed which holds the potential for the Church to “join up the fragments of society” in the way that Sayers and these other artists envisaged.

In our day, people like Moynagh through The Tomorrow Project, Michael Schluter of The Relationships Foundation, and Christian Schumacher of Work Structuring Ltd. are developing policy and practice on the basis of these ideas while the likes of Walter Brueggemann and Mark Oakley in speaking respectively of funding the counter-imagination and the collage of God are taking our theological understanding of relationality further. While seeking to understand and build on the work of such thinkers and practitioners we should not neglect or under-estimate the extent to which the artists considered in this series can fund the counter-imagination of the Church as it builds a collage of God for the 21st century.

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Robert Randolph & The Family Band- Deliver Me.