Multi-layered meaning

At the launch of the Art Trail for the Barking Episcopal Area last Thursday, Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, described and reflected on a painting by Stanley Spencer, from his Christ in the Wilderness series, entitled The Scorpion. He concluded:

“I do not know what other art form could convey and hold the possibility of converging in so many layers. Not just do the visual arts comment on biblical narrative, but they illuminate it in a way that written or spoken forms cannot, being linear forms. Art opens windows on a set of concepts and ideas and brings them together. These windows offer a fresh perspective onto the faith we share, that other forms simply cannot.”

Multi-layered meaning also features in The Writing on the Wall where Maggi Dawn demonstrates the way in which our culture is built stories or ideas which come from the Bible. One example she uses is that of the series of stories within a story found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the result being "a complex mix of stories that reveal human nature, often with a high element of comedy, but also projecting a strong moral theme." For example, Dawn notes that there are three levels to the 'Cook's Tale':

"In the background is the fall of Adam and Eve, who defied God, ate forbidden fruit and were expelled from the garden. The 'Cook's Tale' gives us Perkyn Revelour, who disrespects his master but is ultimately undone by gluttony - surrounded by a shop full of good food, and with every need catered for, he still wants what is not his, and ends up living in poverty with a 'fallen' woman. And the Cook himself begins by challenging Harry Bailly's authority, and ends by having a fall of his own because he too is a glutton and a drunkard."

Modernist Art, Gabriel Josipovici argues in Whatever Happened to Modernism, is art which is aware of such complexities in order to consciously utilise these to explore both the layers and limits of meaning; art which arrives "at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities." Josipovici cites Wittgenstein, in one example from the many he uses, "struggling, in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, with the conundrum of whether he has written the series of fragments which follow because he is, whether through weakness or because of the temper of the times, not up to writing the kind of large, coherent argument which came naturally to Locke or Kant, or whether he wrote it as a series of fragments because that is precisely what the argument he was trying to put forward demanded."

Stories or art which possess such levels of meaning, consciousness or complexity are, Josipovici argues, sites of contestation. Just as in the series of stories within a story which form the Canterbury Tales and enable comment and debate within and without the story on the character's attempts at entertainment and moralisation, so Josipovici argues, "each artist, each work even, must be judged seperately and in its own terms, within the larger story of which each is a part." He concludes that this means "that argument and disagreement will never end, which is as it should be." "A tradition," he writes, "is a living thing, and each major artist ... leads to its reconfiguration, however minutely."

All of which can lead us back to the Bible which, as Maggi Dawn notes, tells its stories by moving backwards and forwards between different modes of expression. The form of the Bible is then one of conversation or contestation in the way that is similar to what we have seen of Josipovici's argument. Similarly, Daniel W. Hardy in Wording A Radiance has suggested that the process which generated the scriptures was that of Jesus walking and encountering people. His encounters led to question and answer, conversation and interrogation, where there was no predicting where the conversation would end up.

We are healed, Hardy suggests, as we are "drawn into a process of re-generation that imitates the very process that generates the scriptures." This means being drawn into "an ongoing, open drama of the everyday, in which our contribution to the dialogue and action are shaping the plot." This idea is similar to Josipovici's thought that each major artist leads to the reconfiguration of a living tradition and also to the idea of Tom Wright (see Living the Story) that we live in the Biblical story by improvising our part on the basis of what we know of the story so far and the hints we have of how it will end. Hardy, concludes that we are to be "like Jesus in conversation rather than saying: sign up to my faith statement."

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