Allusive and Elusive

At the ACE Conference I had the opportunity to present a paper of my own entitled Allusive and elusive: Speaking significance, meaning and connections in art and religion. I used as my starting point for this paper the novelist Nicholas Mosley's recently re-issued lay essay in theology, Experience and Religion.

In his essay Mosley argues that modern works of art commonly reflect both the chaos of our world and our sense of helplessness about this chaos. The problem, he suggests, is our lack of a language in which to express our common experience of life. “This common experience,” he suggests, “is partly simply that there is an enormous amount of joy, energy, order, significance in the world that does not get expressed by artists and thinkers of any subtlety now, and which gets hopelessly vulgarised by those with none.”

“What is required," he thinks, "is a way of thinking which will take account of both the hope and hopelessness, responsibility and helplessness, the good not in spite of but together with the evil.”: “Because of its very complexity it will not be something argued, reasoned in a straight line as it were; but something of attempts, flashes, allusions – a to-and-fro between a person and whatever he has to do and to discover. What it will be saying will not be part of a comprehensive system but things-on-their-own, parables, paradoxes; the connections between which will have to be held and understood with difficulty, not justified.”

Mosley notes that both art and religion were once to do with such significance, meaning and connections and that lively religious languages have in fact been artistic languages; with religion being written in poems, parables and stories. He calls for a revival of religious and artistic languages that are “elusive, allusive; not didactic,” dealing with the patterns, connections, that facts and units of data, together with the minds that observe them, make. By this, he thinks, seeming opposites might be held from a higher point of view and “errors accepted as the purveyors of learning rather than traps.”

In the paper I tried to explore the way in which the form and content of the Bible and in the religious art of Marc Chagall, T.S. Eliot, and David Jones could form the basis for a revival of religious and artistic languages of the type for which Mosley has called. I suggested that the form of the Bible can be understood as mirroring that of a collage or patchwork quilt, as fragments of very different writings are stitched together, not in a linear, logical argument but by the use of a common narrative thread. The result being a paradoxical internal web of connections between writings combined with a forward narrative thrust. The paintings of Marc Chagall and David Jones together with the poetry of Jones and T.S. Eliot are created in a similar style to that of the Bible revealing a similar web of connections combined with a narrative dynamic.