The DNA of the western imagination

Daniel A. Siedell's latest post gives clues as to some of the directions Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and I are planning to go in with the Living the Story course we are currently planning. Siedell's post is based on a biblical reading of the work of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya:

"First, it argues that the Bible's influence does not have to be embodied in a self-conscious way, as a form of meditation or reflection on particular biblical themes. If the Bible is the DNA of the western imagination, as such critics as George Steiner, Northrop Frye, and Andrew Delbanco suggest,then it should be present in some way in the work of an artist such Martínez Celaya, who is deeply formed by the western literary tradition, not only as a reader but as a writer of poetry and prose ... Second, the exhibition argues that the Bible can function as a provocative and enriching critical tool, which can expand rather than limit the experience of art ...

The Bible is a rich resource for critical practice. But for use in this context, it needs to be liberated from the believers, who fear that its authority or infallability as God's word is undermined if it approached as literature. For them, art, literature, music, film, and theatre should function as Bible studies and devotional exercise in paint, sound, word, and image. Far from protecting it, this literalistic approach to "Biblical art" weakens its power, restricting its use to quoting chapter and verse in support of dogma and theology. This makes the Bible boring and obscures the fact that it is a dynamic and powerful cultural artifact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...

to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the  creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Recent books by scholars Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity) and Bruce Hoslinger (The Premodern Condition) have revealed this more clearly. The paucity and shallowness of contemporary art criticism, which oscillates between journalism, marketing, and obscure pseudo-theory, might be ameliorated through a rediscovery of the literary treasures of the Bible, treasures that have seduced the greatest minds and artists throughout modernity (and postmodernity)."

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Willard Grant Conspiracy - Fare Thee Well.

There were giants in those days (3)

Given the significance of these artists and the support they received from the churches, why this implication of failure? Why was their impact not greater? There are, of course, many cultural, organisational and sociological factors that would need to be part of a comprehensive answer to those questions. Many of which are broader and more significant that the artists under discussion here, but in the remainder of this series of blogs I wish to explore three factors that are closely connected with these artists in particular.

First, the looseness of their groupings. The Anglican and Roman Catholic groupings essentially progressed down different tracks. The Roman Catholic grouping, for example, forming out of the Arts and Crafts movement, holding more left-wing political views and being underpinned by art theories and theologies from France, particularly those of Maurice Denis, Jacques Maritain and Maurice de la Taille. Within the Anglican groupings, Lewis and Eliot were poles apart in terms of their literary criticism and approaches while within the Roman Catholic grouping the common splits endemic to communities ensued, leading to Gill’s departure for Wales. As a result, these giants never achieved the level of group cohesion envisioned by Eliot in ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’.

Second, the extent to which they opposed the zeitgeist. Although, radicals for their time in the forms of their art they were nevertheless traditionalists in terms of content. Norbert Frye’s summary of Eliot’s social criticism is applicable to most, if not all, of the artists we are considering here and brings out the extent to which they were opposed to the most significant developments of their age. Frye says of Eliot that:

“He is uniformly opposed to theories of progress that invoke the authority of evolution, and contemptuous of writers who attempt to popularise a progressive view, like H. G. Wells. The “disintegration” of Europe began soon after Dante’s time; a “diminution” of all aspects of culture has afflicted Europe since Queen Anne; the nineteenth century was an age of progressive “degradation”; in the last fifty years [of Eliot’s life] evidence of “decline” are visible in every department of human activity”.

This decline includes the development of nation states and religious sects, the specialisation of knowledge and the mechanisation of work. It can be summed up as “the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and a common culture”. The impact of these artists, however cohesive they could have been as a group, was always likely to be limited if their opposition to the zeitgeist was so fundamental and their positions ones that could easily be dismissed by their opponents as ‘conservative’, ‘traditional’ or ‘backward-looking’.

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Olivier Messaien - Louange a l'eternite de Jesus.