Culture Review

There has been much released recently that should be of interest to any exploring or living out their faith. New work I have noted recently includes:

 
The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse – the beginning of a septet, this darkly ecstatic Norwegian story of art and God is relentlessly consuming.

'It is late autumn, close to Advent. Two older men, painters, live near each other on the south-west coast of Norway, one in the city of Bjørgvin (a thinly disguised Bergen), the other in remote Dylgja overlooking the sea. Both men are called Asle ...

The version of Asle who has found God (which he gently insists is “knowledge” not “belief”) provides some of the book’s most ecstatic, probing scenes. In one passage Christ’s nativity is alluded to almost in passing; a well-worn story, yet one which Fosse somehow makes refreshingly original. Similarly, his descriptions of young Asle’s growing awareness of colour and its endless variations prefigure Asle the mature artist. The overall theme of a “shining darkness”, referring to Asle’s painting, his losses and his faith, is used to illuminate the fugue state of being.'

'Karen Solie’s TS Eliot prize-shortlisted The Caiplie Caves is one of the more unusual poetry collections of recent years. It is many things at once: a vision of insular Celtic Christianity in its early medieval heyday; a juxtaposition of this with a more elliptic modern narrative; and a meditation on literary form, and how the modernist long poem might look through a contemporary lens ...

Another writer with a keen insight into insular Celtic Christianity is Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. In The Mother House, Ní Chuilleanáin’s established preoccupations – allegorical journeys, the ghosts of the past, religious life – are copiously on show, but with a newly sharpened elegiac edge.'

'Mutual Admiration Society is a group biography of a circle of ... women who became pals at Oxford, including [Dorothy L.] Sayers; the cheekily named society of the title was a real club, whose members composed poetry and prose for each other’s delight.'

What faith Celia Paul has herself, she expresses on canvas:'“From the earliest memory every day started with prayer and ended with prayer,” she says. “And it is still in my bloodstream, even though I am not conventionally religious. I am not good at belonging to groups. But doesn’t everyone think about God?”

That tendency, her memoir [Self Portrait] suggests, was one reason Lucian Freud was drawn to her, and one of her own means of keeping herself apart.'

The Observer’s comic-strip artist Simone Lia on her new children’s book, her obsession with invertebrates, and how a prayer for a superior hotel room transformed her life: 'I am so diverted by her, I forget to ask where God fits in nowadays and pursue the subject by email. She replies in full. She explains she needs to “come out” as a Catholic because “our culture is not set up for a relationship that takes place in silence and solitude”. '

'“We believe because she believes,” says [Cynthia] Erivo. The actor describes herself as a person of faith. She prayed before going on to set every day – for guidance, to lose her own vanity, for energy on days she was tired and “to make the space safe and open for her because I feel as if Harriet [Tubman] is complicit in this storytelling [Harriet]. I feel that she’s around. It’s comforting to be able to reach into your faith to tell the story of somebody who has faith.”'

'Everyday Life is wildly uneven, held together only by its thematic obsession with religion: disc one (Sunrise) literally ends with a hymn, disc two (Sunset) with Chris Martin singing “Alleluia, alleluia”. You lose count of the references to God, church and prayer in between. What this signifies remains a mystery: has Chris Martin, a lapsed Christian, rediscovered his faith? Is it intended more in the vein of Nick Cave’s recent line about how “it doesn’t matter whether God exists or not – we must reach as if he does”? The answer remains elusive.'

'Ghosteen drips melody like the permanent rain. It oozes emotion from a heavy heart. It embraces the frailty of the human soul. It’s full of poetry and images that switch sometimes from the time honoured embrace of Elvis and Jesus and the icons and articles of faith whether they are god or rock n roll to a yearning deeply soulful of a very personal heartbreak with a powerful honesty and lyrical nakedness reflecting a genuine darkness and intimate honesty that is a step deeper into the personal and the intimate that is compelling and hypnotic and with an almost ambient atmospheric music to match.'

Thanks for the Dance 'Opener Happens to the Heart reflects on [Leonard Cohen's] career with trademark humility: “I was always working steady, I never called it art. I got my shit together, meeting Christ and reading Marx” ... Like those of Marvin Gaye and Prince, Cohen’s oeuvre sought to reconcile the spiritual and the sensual, which both feature heavily again ... As the pace slows to a transcendent crawl and backing vocals form a heavenly choir, The Hills mocks his ageing body (“The system is shot / I’m living on pills”) and the stunning The Goal finds him “almost alive” and “settling accounts of the soul”. The last poem he recorded, Listen to the Hummingbird, implores us to find beauty in God and butterflies: “Don’t listen to me.” And, finally, there is a vast, empty silence, and he is gone.'

'Kiwanuka is a contemplative song cycle intended to be listened to in one extended sitting ... At the core is Kiwanuka’s inner battle between anxiety, self-doubt, spirituality and wisdom, which is then set against racism and rueful glances at the state of the world ... for all its melancholy, Kiwanuka is never downbeat. There are moments – such as the “Time is the healer” gospel choir in I’ve Been Dazed, or hopeful closer Light – when positivity bursts through with such dazzling effect you want to cheer. Kiwanuka is a bold, expansive, heartfelt, sublime album. He’s snuck in at the final whistle, but surely this is among the decade’s best.'

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Coldplay - Everyday Life.

Start:Stop - Every person is a special kind of artist

Bible reading

Then Moses said to the Israelites: See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; he has filled him with divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. And he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do every kind of work done by an artisan or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of artisan or skilled designer. (Exodus 35. 30 – 35)

Meditation

The first person in the Bible to be described as having been filled by the Holy Spirit was an artist - Bezalel, who worked on the Tabernacle. As the first Spirit-filled person mentioned in the Bible, Bezalel, was chosen by God to be skilled, knowledgeable and able to teach in all kinds of craftsmanship. So, to be biblically inspired is to make or create.

Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God. Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative. We are all creations of the Creator, created in His image, to be creative!

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms." As J. John has said, 'Creativity has been built into every one of us: it is part of our design. Each of us lives less of the life God intended for us when we choose not to live out the creative gifts God gave us.'

It is easy to think that this only applies to certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity – to think that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc - but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, says that this does not mean that we should all strive to be 'artists':

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich other people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

God’s image in us means that all people are creative in some way. A creator God has created creative people! Therefore, whether we’re writing, cooking, painting, composing, acting or taking photographs we can all use our creativity to learn from God and express our worship to him. As the saying goes, ‘The artist is not a special kind of person, every person is a special kind of artist.’

Intercessions

Creator God, we remember and give thanks for those who pour their souls into music loud and soft, those who put pigment to surface, carve wood and stone and marble, who work base metals into beauty, those building upwards from the earth toward heaven, those who put thought to paper by computer and by pen; the poets who delve, the playwrights who analyze and proclaim, the dreamers-up of narrative, all those who work with the light and shadows of film, actors moved by Spirit and dancers moving through space. Lord, remember your artists. Have mercy upon them and remember with compassion all those that reflect the good, the ill, the strengths and the weaknesses of the human spirit.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

Teach us, Lord, to use wisely the time which You have given us and to work well without wasting a second. Teach us to profit from our past mistakes without falling into a gnawing doubt. Teach us to anticipate our projects without worry and to imagine the work without despair if it should turn out differently. Teach us to unite haste and slowness, serenity and ardour, zeal and peace. Help us at the beginning of the work when we are weakest. Help us in the middle of the work when our attention must be sustained. In all the work of our hands, bestow Your Grace so that it can speak to others and our mistakes can speak to us alone. Keep us in the hope of perfection, without which we would lose heart, yet keep us from achieving perfection, for surely we would be lost in arrogance. Let me never forget that all knowledge is in vain unless there is work. And all work is empty unless there is love. And all love is hollow unless it binds us both to others and to You.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

God, we are truly bearers of the light from above, within and around us. Help us to be bearers of that light to others who seek a vision of the goodness and beauty of Your Creation. We ask that you help us and our creative work to be witnesses to your love, your kindness, and your care for us. Continue to inspire us with the gift of your imagination.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

The Blessing

Bless all who create in your image, O God of creation. Pour your Spirit upon them that their hearts may sing and their works be fulfilling, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Arcade Fire - Ready To Start.

Discover & explore: Imagination

A.N. Wilson has written that, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were artistic giants in the Anglican Church. He was thinking people such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Sayers, best known for her fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, was also, like C.S. Lewis, a popular Christian apologist. Her most interesting apologetic work is perhaps The Mind of the Maker (1941) where she explores the creative act itself in the Trinitarian terms of Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit):

“For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] 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 [or Activity] 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.”

If the relationships within the Trinity provide the model for our creativity as human beings, this suggests that our creativity itself comes from God. Sayers remarks in the book that the one thing we know for sure about God at the point that he makes humanity in his own image is that he is creative: “The characteristic common to God and man, is … the desire and ability to make things.”

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing. Sayers quotes Nikolai Berdyaev approvingly when he says, "God created the world by imagination" and we get an insight into God’s imaginative work of creation through the passage from Job (38. 4 - 21). As those made in the image of God, we are sub-creators, able to, as Sayers puts it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms."

These ideas, which see human creativity and the creative act itself as being formed and framed by God, lead us to view art and the imagination as a gift from God. Max Lieberman & Michael McFadden note that the:

“idea of the artist as instrument of the divine, or acting with divine inspiration, has been an archetypal theme espoused by great artists attempting to express the processes of their work. Kahlil Gibran, the great 20th century mystic poet and artist touched on two of the metaphors of antiquity, to describe the process of an artist's creation in writing, "Am I a harp that the hand of the almighty may touch me or a flute that this breath may pass through me?" Gibran perhaps unconsciously, refers to the Ancient Greek metaphor of the Aeolian Harp and the Hindu myth of Lord Krishna's flute … The Aeolian Harp represents the artist, whose finely tuned and sensitive soul responds to the divine breeze of the Holy Spirit as it blows through the strings, turning what is invisible and intangible to most, into beautiful enchanting music to move the minds and hearts of those who might be otherwise insensitive to the movement of this divine force … The artist is similarly conceived as a musical instrument in an Ancient Hindu myth … The great artist is conceived as the hollowed-out instrument of God, emptied of egoism and selfish desire, and thus able to transmit the experience of their union with the divine through the enchanting "music" of their artwork.

Some years ago I encountered the same idea in a book called Written In My Soul, a series of interviews with some of the most well-known singer-songwriters from the 1950s onward, where I was struck by the extent to which these great artists – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison and others – felt that their songs were given to them in moments of revelation, that their songs were already written and ‘came through them as though radio receivers – without much conscious effort or direction.’ More recently, the singer-songwriter Bill Fay has released a track called ‘Who is the Sender?’ in which he asserts that his songs are delivered to him by the unknown sender. Songs aren't written, but found. "Music gives," he says, and he is a grateful receiver.

MIA, the artist who work we were exhibiting at St Stephen Walbrook at the beginning of this service series, has identified similar words of Paul Klee as describing her own creative process: “Everything around me dissolves and interesting works emerge as if of their own accord. My hand is entirely the instrument of a distant sphere. It isnʼt my head that is working, but something else, something higher, something somewhere more remote. I must have great friends out there – obscure, but also brilliant - and theyʼre all very good to me.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in a similar moment of inspiration while writing Kubla Khan. He wrote: “In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimes:' 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'

The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter.”

The gift of imagination is one given in moments of inspiration which cannot be repeated. Such experiences can be described as experiences of the Holy Spirit inspiring or coming on the artist. Certainly that has been my experience both in creating and preaching. I will often reflect or meditate on an experience, a song, an image, a Bible passage, by putting it in my mind, carrying it around in my mind over several days or weeks, reminding myself of it from time to time and just generally living with it for a period of time and when I do that then I find that, at some unexpected moment, a new thought or idea or image will come to me that makes sense or takes forward the experience or song or image or passage on which I had been reflecting. To my mind that is the Spirit coming and making connections, bringing clarity, making sense.

That was also Coleridge’s understanding of imagination. He was part of the Victorian Romantic movement, which features in the Guildhall Art Gallery’s collection, where visualising the distant past and opening up worlds of imaginative possibility offered “much needed escapism from the harsh realities of everyday life.” For Coleridge, though, imagination is the intuitive, unitive faculty in us that sees the whole behind the parts; the one and the many. Where reason analyses and reduces into parts, imagination puts the parts together into a whole and takes us to the hidden metaphysical unity behind multiplicity. For Coleridge, as for Sayers, this is not simply “much needed escapism from the harsh realities of everyday life” but instead “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”

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John Rutter - Look At The World.

T.S. Eliot: Christianity, fragmentation and reconciliation

Robert Crawford, writing in The Guardian, explains how T.S. Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think:

'Fifty years ago this month (after being nursed through bouts of ill health by his shrewd second wife, Valerie, who had been his secretary and who lived until 2012), TS Eliot died in London. He was by then no longer a young bullshitter but the incarnation of his art form. He was not just the most famous poet alive, but regarded (as many still regard him) as the finest poet of the 20th century. Internationally lauded, he had been awarded the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit. Adults knew him as the poet not just of “Prufrock”, but also of The Waste Land and Four Quartets; theatre audiences had flocked to his plays such as Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival, in London and on Broadway; at home and at school, children relished “Macavity”, one of the poems from his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, just as eagerly as later audiences have delighted in Cats, the musical based on those poems. On 4 February 1965 Eliot’s memorial service filled Westminster Abbey.'

Crawford writes that 'Eliot remains one of the greatest religious poets in the language, and that, too, has added to his global reach as well as enriching his adopted and adapted European sensibility.'

Barbara Reynolds has described the way in which Eliot, in his essay ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’, visualised “the setting up of a Community of Christians, of clergy and laity, who shall speak with authority contesting heretical opinion and immoral legislation, individually and collectively setting themselves to form the conscience of the nation”. She has also described how Dorothy L. Sayers seized on this idea and used it as the basis of her book, Begin Here. The idea is not just representative of Sayers’ activity though, but also of Eric Gill, C.S. Lewis and Eliot himself in the books, broadcasts and lectures that they produced throughout the war years.

Eliot was linked with other writers inspired by Christianity including Christopher Fry, David Jones, Sayers and Charles Williams: Eliot published and wrote introductions to the work of Jones and Williams; Eliot, Sayers and Williams shared a common love of, and wrote on, the work of Dante; Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams all wrote drama for the Canterbury Festival, which was initiated by George Bell; Bell also held several conferences on art and the church and again Eliot, Sayers and Williams were involved; Eliot, Fry and Williams were part of the Verse Drama movement; while, Jones and Williams shared a love of the Arthurian legends – Jones critiquing Williams’ work in The Arthurian Torso.

Crawford comments that 'Poetry in a complex era had to reflect, or at least refract, a sense of complexity.' The complexity found in Eliot refers both to his understanding of his complex era and also to his sense of the place of tradition in the present. Eliot uses fragments of literature drawn from across tradition to map out the place of "stony rubbish" and of:

"A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water"

which is the waste land.

The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to "shore up" fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the 'Golden Bough', Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.

The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: "as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth."

Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and 'Aphrodite in Aulis'. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as “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”.

'Aphrodite in Aulis' is full of Jones’ preoccupations: “the Grail, the Lamb, the soldiers (Greek and Roman, Tommy and Jerry), Doric, Ionic and Corinthian architecture, the moon, the stars and the dove.” These disparate ideas and images are held together firstly by Jones’ composition with the whole painting revolving around the central figure of Aphrodite and secondly by his line which meanders over the whole composition literally linking every image. By holding these images and what they signify together in this way, Jones is able to create an image that both laments the way in which love is sacrificed by the violence and aggression of macho civilisations and also, through his crucifixion imagery, to hold out the hope that love may overcome that same violence and aggression.

Writers like Eliot and Jones 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.

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Victoria Williams - Polish Those Shoes.

Faith and imagination resources

I was recently asked to recommend some resources on the interface between faith and imagination. Those I commended were: 

Art and Christianity Enquiry are the main organisation in the UK exploring links between faith and the visual arts. There are a small number of articles on the page about their journal. 'Art, Modernity & Faith' by George Pattison, 'God in the Gallery' by Daniel A. Siedell and 'The Art of the Sacred' by Graham Howes are all well worth reading. Daniel Siedell had a blog for a while on the themes of 'God in the Gallery' which has some interesting debate on it. Colin Harbison is also worth reading online.

'Contemporary Fiction and Christianity' by Andrew Tate is a good review of theological themes in literature as is 'The Poet as Mirror: Human Nature, God and Jesus in twentieth-century literature' by Karl-Josef Kuschel. George Steiner's 'Real Presences' is a classic text when it comes to literature arguing that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art. Malcolm Guite makes a similar argument for poetry in 'Faith, Hope and Poetry'. In 'Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love' Rowan Williams sketches out a new understanding of how human beings open themselves to transcendence.

Steve Scott's 'Crying For A Vision' is worth a read and spans music, literature and visual art. My own co-authored book on faith and music (taking in aspects of literature and the visual arts too) is 'The Secret Chord'.

On imagination specifically, Walter Brueggemann's 'The Prophetic Imagination' is another classic text. 'Image' Journal sees itself as bridging faith and imagination. In Walking On Water, Madeleine L'Engle argues that the prime task of the artist is to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation. In The Mind of the Maker Dorothy L. Sayers explores understandings of the Trinity through the medium of human creativity. Finally, in The Book of God Gabriel Josipovici applies literary criticism to the texts of the Bible. 

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Bruce Cockburn - Creation Dream.

Speech to launch commission4mission in South London

I spoke tonight at a well attended Private View for commission4mission's Christmas exhibition entitled 'Incarnation'. 

The exhibition can be seen at Wimbledon Library Gallery (1st floor, Wimbledon Library, Wimbledon Hill Road, London SW19 7NB) and includes the work of 16 artists in media including ceramics, fused glass, paintings and photography. It continues until Saturday 8th December, 9.30am - 7.00pm (2.00pm on Saturday) with access through the Library. A second Private View will be held tomorrow from 6.30 - 9.30pm. 

In launching commission4mission in South London, I said the following:

commission4mission was launched in March 2009 by our Patron, the Bishop of Barking, to encourage the commissioning and placing of contemporary Christian Art in churches, as a means of fundraising for charities and as a mission opportunity for churches.

We aim to:

·                    provide opportunities for churches to obtain and commission contemporary Christian Art for church buildings;

·                    provide information, ideas and examples of contemporary Christian Art and its use/display within church settings; and

·                    raise funds for charities through commissions and sales of contemporary Christian Art. 

In the short time that commission4mission has been in existence we have:

·                    built up a pool of over 30 artists available for Church commissions;

·                    developed a blog profiling our artists and giving up-to-date news of our activities;

·                    completed of 10 commissions;

·                    organised 13 exhibitions, two Study Days, three art workshops, several performance and networking events for members;

·                    created an Art Trail for the Barking Episcopal Area;

·                    worked in partnership with two other arts organisations (Christian Artist’s Networking Association & Veritasse) to create an Olympic-themed art project – Run With The Fire; and

·                    published several sets of images and meditations primarily with a Lenten or Passiontide focus.

We seek to be a proactive organisation for both the artists and the churches with which we work. For our artists we regularly provide information updates and networking opportunities as well as actively promoting their work through our blog, events and exhibitions. This ensures that they feel connected to one another and the wider faith and arts scene as well as benefiting from the support and ideas of fellow members. For churches, we actively provide opportunities to think about the possibility of commissioning contemporary art by seeing and considering the work of our artists and by suggesting ways to overcome some of the barriers which sometimes seem to stand in the way of new commissions such as finances and the differing tastes of church members. 

Why do we do what we do? Fundamentally, I would want to say that there is a Trinitarian underpinning to what we do. Firstly, that we are creative because we are made in the image of our Creator. That, as Dorothy L. Sayers reminded us in her book The Mind of the Maker, to be made in the image of God means that we are most like God when we are being creative. Secondly, that it is the Holy Spirit who gives skill to craftspeople and artists. The first Spirit-filled man in the Bible, Bezalel, was chosen by God to be skilled, knowledgeable and able to teach in all kinds of craftsmanship. So, to be biblically inspired is to make. Thirdly, that because God became truly human in Jesus we can represent his human nature as with any other member of the human race. So that, if we paint a picture of Jesus, we’re not trying to show a humanity apart from divine life but a humanity soaked through with divine life.

Next, I would want to say that the Arts are in many ways foundational to all that occurs in Church. Very briefly, we can say that:

•         the Architecture of our churches provides a designed context and stage for the worship that occurs within them;

•         we re-enact Biblical narratives through the poetry of the liturgy;

•         music in church provides composed expressions of emotions and stories in and through song; and

•         images in churches re-tell Biblical narratives and open windows into the divine.

Finally, we would also say that the Arts contribute to the mission of the Church by:

•         speaking eloquently of the faith;

•         providing a reason to visit a church – something we have tapped with our Art Trail for the Barking Episcopal Area;

•         making links between churches and local arts organisations/ initiatives; and

•         providing a focus for people to come together for a shared activity.

These then are key reasons why, in commission4mission, we seek to encourage the commissioning and placing of contemporary Christian Art in churches.

I would like to end with a poem by the German kinetic sculptor Heinz Mack who has had much experience of trying to work in and with Catholic chapels in Germany:

“Church art is not always art.

Art that happens to be placed in church, is art in the church,

But not Church art.

Church art that is shown in museums, remains church art in museums.

Art for the Church is not always regarded as art by the Church.

The Church does not always want art.

Art is art without the Church.

Great Church art is art in the church and for the church.”

In seeking to encourage the commissioning and placing of contemporary Christian Art in churches, commission4mission is aiming to be about “art in the church and for the church.”

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Switchfoot - New Way To Be Human.

What is the purpose of creativity and imagination?

Dorothy L. Sayers remarked on the fact that the one thing we know for sure about God at the point that he makes humanity in his own image is that he is creative:

“[H]ad the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man, is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things”. (The Mind of the Maker)

She argues that it is therefore logical to suppose that creativity is a significant aspect of humanity’s being made in the image of God. Similarly:

“In his essay “The Image of God and the Epic of Man,” [Paul] Ricoeur suggests that humans are in the image of God because they too enjoy the power of creativity. Thus the image of God, creativity, gives rise to the images of man, in the sense of the images that man makes. These images constitute “the sum total of the ways in which man projects his vision on things.”” (K. J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology)

Within the Biblical Creation stories human creativity is seen in: God’s blessing of humanity which included the tasks of increasing in number, filling and subduing the earth and, ruling over living creatures (Genesis 1: 28); Adam’s working and taking care of the garden (Genesis 2: 15); and, Adam’s naming of the living creatures (Genesis 2: 20). Albert Wolters brings both sociality and creativity together when he comments that:

“Adam and Eve, as the first married couple, represent the beginnings of societal life; their task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life." (Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview)        

These two also sit together because of the development that runs through the stories. Wolters describes this in speaking of Genesis 1:

“There is a process of development and evolution as the earthly realm assumes, step by step, the contours of the variegated world of our experience. On the sixth day this process is completed with the creation of man, and on the seventh day God rests from his labors. This is not the end of the development of creation, however. Although God has withdrawn from the work of creation, he has put an image of himself on the earth with a mandate to continue. The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it – but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they must fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more. Mankind, as God’s representatives on earth, carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth … From now on the development of the created earth will be societal and cultural in nature.” 

In addition to the six day development of creation, development is also seen in: God’s blessing of humanity in Genesis 1: 28; Adam’s working and taking care of the garden (Genesis 2: 15); and the two trees that held the potential for god-likeness (Genesis 2: 9, 16 & 17, 3: 22). Wolters says of the world that “[c]reation is not something that, once made, remains a static quality. There is, as it were, a growing up (though not in a biological sense), an unfolding of creation.”

The latter point is worth expanding further. One tree held out the potential for becoming like God in having the knowledge of good and evil, the other in living forever. The former tree was banned for Adam and Eve while the latter is not. One reading of this story is that God intended Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Life and become like him in having eternal life. If so, this is another example of development. 

For the stories to have this development dynamic suggests creation is both actuality and possibility and that humanity has the responsibility of actualising the possible. If so, possibilities are, as Ricoeur argues, real, although unactualised. Ricoeur suggests that imagination leads to actualisation and that both are a means of self-understanding for humanity:

“Ricoeur is unwilling to dismiss human projects as unreal just because they have not yet been realized or because their conditions do not yet obtain: “It is by virtue of an unjustifiable reduction that we decide to equate ‘world’ with the whole of observable facts; I inhabit a world in which there is something ‘to be done by me’; the ‘to be done by me’ belongs to the structure which is the ‘world’.” In the case of human willing, the possible precedes the actual, for the forming of a project precedes its realization: “The presence of man in the world means that the possible precedes the actual and clears the way for it; a part of the actual is a voluntary realisation of possibilities anticipated by a project.” Moreover, in determining to do something, I likewise determine myself: “In the same way that a project opens up possibilities in the world, it opens up new possibilities in myself and reveals me to myself as a possibility of acting. My power-to-be manifests itself in my power-to-do …” The “possible” is therefore an essential component in self-understanding. I achieve self-understanding when I grasp what possibilities are open to me." (Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur)

This can be seen in the Creation stories when God asked Adam to name the living creatures. Names in ancient culture are descriptive of the essence or meaning of objects or people. Therefore, here God was asking Adam to be creative both in imagining the possibilities for each creature and in the forming of a name to reflect those possibilities. However, God was also asking Adam to develop self-understanding because the naming of the living creatures is set in the context of finding a helper for Adam. As Adam imagined possibilities for each creature he was also coming to an understanding of his needs as a human being and rejecting each creature in turn as a suitable helper for him. Therefore, when God creates Eve, Adam had the necessary self-understanding to recognise Eve immediately as the helper for which he had been seeking (2: 23 & 24).     

I am suggesting therefore that the creation stories depict a relational God creating a relational world with which he interacts. Within this he created humanity in his relational image to develop the relational possibilities inherent within creation; these being, as Colin Gunton suggests in The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, to develop the practical implications of relationality, perichoresis and substantiality through sociality and creativity.

God’s intention was that this task would be undertaken by human beings in relationship with him and with the rest of creation. Not only was humanity created in his image but humanity’s task was to be undertaken in his image, as though he himself were undertaking it. It is this that helps us to understand the meaning of the ban on Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

God, as the source of all things, contains both actuality and possibility. In creation he actualised good, and evil remained only an unactualised possibility. Nevertheless it is real (though unactualised) and can be imagined (either through imagining the opposite of the actual or difference in the actual) and thereby actualised.

God’s intention was then to train humanity for our task of developing creation by assisting us to imagine possibilities as a means to self-understanding. This is what I noted in the story of Adam naming the living creatures. In this way God was acting like a parent telling her child not to put his hand into a fire. The child imagines the pain of being on fire and learns the lesson. God in the creation stories wished to do the same. He wished to introduce human beings to the knowledge of good and evil by imagining, under his guidance, the possibility of evil, as a means of learning the dangers inherent in actualising evil. In this way human beings could have developed into divinity by gradually developing the knowledge of good and evil and then by eating the fruit from the Tree of Life and living forever.

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Van Morrison - Rave On John Donne / Did You Get Healed?

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (2)

Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that:
"[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."
Chesterton provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out. It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the influence of Chesterton and Belloc came primarily through their non-fiction - "especially their vigorous defense of Catholicism" - but that they did write some fiction which had bearing on the development of the English Catholic novel:

"Chesterton used allegory and fantasy to express religious themes, a technique that would be utilized by later novelists. Although weak in terms of character development, his novels like Napoleon of Nottinghill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) effectively convey Chesterton's sense of Christianity as a robust, life-affirming religion, and a vision of humanity as flawed and unable to improve without supernatural help ...

There is a possibility that Belloc, who spent a good part of his youth in France (his father was French), may have read Huysmans and some of the other French novelists, for in his novel Emmanuel Burden (1904), a satire on the moral debasement of a mercantile English family, he writes with the kind of interiority and emphasis on the salvation of one's soul typical of the French Catholic writers."

Crowe continues that "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both of whom started publishing fiction in the late 1920s, were the most important English Catholic novelists of what is referred to as the golden age of the Catholic novel":

"Perhaps because of his robust enthusiasm for his new faith and his pugnacious disposition, Waugh made no apology for the less salient aspects of Catholicism ... By making that choice, Waugh produced novels that arouse repugnance in secular readers (as well as in some Catholics), but also provide for many Catholic readers a fiction that explores with great depth and subtlety the religious world in which they live. Although Waugh's approach alienates some, it is possible that his boldness in unabashedly insisting on Catholicism as a supernatural entity gives his fiction a depth and intensity that resonates with many readers, even many secular ones ...

Whereas Waugh looked to the Church as a principle of order in the chaotic decadence of modern life, Greene was more focused on the personal drama of good and evil, sin and grace. Also, although Greene had no illusions about the depravity to be found in the secular world and depicted it in stark detail, he was also attentive to a critique of the Catholic community. Perhaps for this reason, he did not arouse as much ire among critics as did Waugh. Like Mauriac, whom he very much admired, Greene is particularly hard on self-righteously pious Catholics who keep the letter of the law but have little charity."

Joseph Pearce writes on CatholicAuthors.com that:

"Graham Greene is perhaps the most perplexing of all the literary converts whose works animated the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. His visions of angst and guilt, informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility, make his novels, and the characters that adorn them, both fascinating and unforgettable.

His fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created."

Crowe writes that:

"Muriel Spark ... is one of the most important English Catholic novelists after Waugh and Greene ... Spark believed that her conversion enabled her to write: "Nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn't do it because I was never sure what I was. ... I didn't get my style until I became a Catholic because you just haven't got to care, and you need security for that." One critic refers to Spark's Catholicism as her "rock," a position from which the believer can survey the human condition. She herself said that Catholicism helped her become a satirist. "The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart. It's not a fluctuating thing." Spark's narrative voice is sure and confident, able to survey the foolishness in a fallen world without ever quite falling into cynicism. The irony, though sharp, is open to the possibility that God may bring good out of sin and evil."

Crowe wrote in 2007 that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon":

"... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism. Yet ... they have produced highly accomplished fiction in which religious meaning emerges from and is inextricably entwined with human experience. Some of their novels make extensive use of explicitly Catholic material. Others are deeply informed by a Catholic vision without much use of explicitly Catholic material ... Clearly they have not been doing the same kinds of things that Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, and Greene did, yet their fiction exemplifies exciting possibilities for the Catholic novel ... they have more than most contemporary English novelists, allowed their faith to inform their writing and have exemplified very different and interesting ways of integrating Catholicism into their work in ways that are substantial, imaginative, and serious."

Crowe concludes regarding Ellis, Lodge, Maitland and Read:

"These novelists do not hesitate to delineate with trenchant irony, biting satire, or simply devastatingly realistic description the ways in which the Church fails. Their angles of vision diverge and their critiques are distinctly different, focused on sexual teachings (Lodge), patriarchy (Maitland), or post-Vatican II developments (Read and Ellis). Yet they still see their world through the categories, the symbols, the stories, and the rituals of Catholicism - not just because they are literarily useful, but also because they undergird the story with a meaning that transcends the secular."

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James Macmillan - On Love.

Christ-like gentle insistence

Michael Hampel makes interesting use of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Mind of the Maker in his profile of Paul Mealor in today's Guardian:

"Theologians have chewed over the question about what it means to be made in the image of God for some 3,000 years, and it took a writer – a detective novelist indeed – to come up with the most useful answer. Dorothy L Sayers, never shy of cutting through the brambles of theology to talk realistically about God, took a close look at the verse in the Book of Genesis that claims God created humankind in his image (Genesis 1: 27). She spotted that all we know of God up to that point in the Bible is that he was somehow responsible for creation, and so she concluded that to be made in the image of God means that we are most like God when we are being creative. She set about working out how to apply this theory to the creative impulse in her most significant piece of popular theology The Mind of the Maker (1941), a book that still today has a lot to say to us about how we resist the culture of instant gratification that has been more destructive of humankind and its environment than any world war.

The encampment outside St Paul's Cathedral has held a mirror up to society – and the church, too – but its mirror is part of a culture of blame designed to make people look ugly. It's asking questions that mustn't be shirked, but it was gentle insistence that was the hallmark of Jesus's ministry, and his persuasive personality was the thing that gave him the authority that made people wonder at him. Art has a role to play in challenge, but it's the gently persuasive kind that stands the test of time and works its way into the soul, winning hearts and minds for something better than the status quo.
For people of faith, that something better is God. Dorothy L Sayers insisted that the work of the human maker had to be worthy of its role to reflect – however dimly – the work of the divine maker: "No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand who made heaven and earth."

There's a challenge to the destructive culture of instant gratification if ever there was one. It takes me back to my school motto: Age quod agis ("Whatever you do, do it well.") Paul Mealor has heard that challenge, but his music makes a challenge of its own to the church: that gentle insistence and calm persuasion are more Christ-like than the arguments of synods."

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Paul Mealor: Stabat Mater.

The Selfless Gene

I've just read Charles Foster's book The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin in which Foster argues that it "is simply not possible to demonstrate either that natural selection has in fact produced everything that we see in the natural world, or that it could have done." Instead there is "plenty of room for other complexity generators" with Foster arguing that one of these has been "the force of community, of altruism, of selflessness" which has consistently "been at work moulding the shape of the biological world." How, he asks, could "selfish natural selection have allowed even apparent altruism to start in the first place"? Perhaps, he suggests, "there was a good force seeding it and inhibiting the usually unswerving efficiency of the selfish stamper."

Alongside his examination of evolution Foster also interprets the Genesis creation stories. His conclusion here is that, if we want to look for an historical Adam and Eve, we look among the "anatomically modern but behaviourally naive Homo sapiens" of Africa and the Levant who existed alongside the Neanderthals:

"Just like the biblical Adam and Eve, they had an abrupt change. Something non-anatomical but profound happened to them which transmuted dramatically the whole way that they looked at themselves, at one another and at the world; which gave them self-consciousness, a fear of death and a taste for bangles; which catapulted their society and the world ito a catastrophic sophistication."

All this has considerable synergy with an argument which I put forward in relation to one of the essays at NTMTC. There I argued that the Biblical creation stories are myth in terms of their literary genre but functioned as history for the Hebrew peoples using them following their first tellings. Their historical usage and roots cannot, therefore, be overlooked in our understanding and use of them. Ernest Lucas, for example, notes in Wonders of Creation that:

“The story of the Garden of Eden certainly has its roots in history. It is not just an imaginative fairy tale. Genesis 4 tells of a descendent of Adam called Tubal-Cain, who was the first person to use metal to make things. This means that Adam must have used only stone implements. Genesis 2 tells us that Adam was a gardener and that he tamed animals. All this adds up to a picture of Adam as what we would call a ‘New Stone Age man’.

Now, as far as Europe and the Near East is concerned, the New Stone Age began around 8,000 BC in the upland plateaux of Turkey, and then spread into Mesopotamia, Palestine and Europe. What is interesting is that the Bible places the Garden of Eden in the area where the New Stone Age culture first arose. From the second chapter of Genesis it seems that Eden was at the place where the Tigris and Euphrates rise – which is in the upland plateaux of Turkey. In addition the word ‘Eden’ may come from a Babylonian word meaning ‘plateaux’.”

The key word in Lucas’ analysis of the historical basis for the Genesis stories is probably ‘culture’. If Lucas is right in locating stories of Eden in the New Stone Age then what he is doing is locating them at the launch point for cultural evolution. This is the point in history when human beings begin, by a combination of social organisation (sociality) and individual creativity (development), to extract ourselves from dominance by the processes of biological evolution and to impose our culture onto nature itself (the domination of which Genesis 1 speaks).

The creation stories, history and science could all agree that this is the first point in history at which human beings essentially could have a choice about how we behaved ethically. Prior to this point human beings had been hunters, migrants dependent on the movements of their prey and participants in the natural ‘kill or be killed’ processes of a nature that is “red in tooth and claw”. However, as human beings developed agriculturally and socially, the killing of animals and other human beings was no longer essential. In fact, the logic of human culture is towards co-operation not opposition. Gerd Theissen has argued that:

“… cultural evolution replaces 1. chance mutations and recombinations through innovations, which are a priori aimed at the solution of certain problems, but which in a wider context still occur ‘blindly’. It replaces 2. selection through ‘reinforcement’, which is recalled, perceived and anticipated – i.e. through a ‘selection’ in human imagination which anticipates the external pressure of selection and makes it less harsh. It replaces 3. genetic transmission with tradition, which draws on individual experience and therefore can be modified by it – and which nevertheless often takes place mechanically as ‘inheritance’.”

Theissen’s thesis in Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach is that cultural evolution transcends biological evolution as a result of the intervention of human consciousness which gives direction to the process. If this is so, then “cultural evolution represents a reduction of selection – i.e. an evolution of principles of evolution – protest against the harshness of the pressure of selection through the deliberate action and thought of human beings can be recognized as an obligation which is ‘pre-programmed’ into the structure of reality and which no one can escape who wants to accord with ultimate reality” .

The biblical creation stories locate the imago dei in the ability of human beings to be both consciously and directedly social and creative. The result is that human culture is seen as the means by which the universe is developed and perfected. To do this, human beings need to work against what the story calls the effects of the Fall i.e. biological evolution. From the New Stone Age onwards it was possible for humans to do so. As we can see from examining human sociality and creativity, this is not what human beings have chosen to do.

Looking first at sociality, three levels of relationality have been noted by Daniel Hardy, in his essay ‘Creation and Eschatology’ in The Doctrine of Creation, with the third being a definition of sociality:

• identity through dissociation: “varied spacio-temporalities of existent beings assign them varying stability and direction, and this constitutes their identities as different from each other, which their mobility and energy varyingly allow them to move freely as dissociated from others: they are themselves (identity) through dissociation (difference)”;

• coexistence: “the same features of [existent beings] may … lead them to acknowledge comparable features in others, and make suitable allowance for them. In such cases, there is co-ordinate spatio-temporality, the basis of coexistence”;

• directed choice of others: “identity (stability and direction combined with mobility and energy) arises through the conferral of recognition and scope for positive freedom upon others as others. In such situations, the ultimate form is dedicated spacio-temporality, where identity is a consistent, directed choice of others and a movement toward them through which they are identified as themselves and honoured as such – to which they respond in trust … [t]he theological term for such a dedicated spatio-temporality … is election, and the result covenant”.

The logic of cultural evolution and the biblical creation stories is that human beings should operate at level three. However, biological evolution and most human behaviour remains stuck in a combination of levels one and two. Chris Mitchell explains, in ‘Homo Ethicus?’, an article in Third Way, that biologists “recognise three different types of altruism: ‘reciprocal altruism’ (as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma ), ‘kin selection’ (which gives help to individuals who are genetically related), and ‘signalling’, which is the apparently selfless behaviour of unrelated individuals to indicate their status to future mates” . Mitchell comments that the “biological imperative is “Save yourself!””

Looking next at creativity, Brian Horne has argued (drawing on the work of Arthur Koestler and Martin Buber), in his The Doctrine of Creation essay ‘Divine and human creativity’, that “the act of [human] creation is a ‘relational event which takes place between two entities that have gone apart from one another’” . Koestler uses the word ‘biosociative’ to describe the connection of “previously unconnected matrices of experience” . For these three, this “capacity to make something new, to bring about objects and situations that were ‘not there’ previously, by an act, at once intuitive and intellectual, of discovering the possibility of connecting hitherto disparate matrices of experience, is both distinctively and intrinsically human” .

Horne suggests that biosociative acts are:

“acts which release us from the kind of determinism which is characteristic of the natural order, that is, of purely animal existence. To put a theological gloss on this we might say that in the non-human world (the natural order) creatures are simply what their appearance shows them as being: they are determined, without choice; they glorify God by being only themselves in their instinctive behaviour. In the human world it is different: there is freedom to choose, to act in certain ways which are willed and which may result in a creativity that will glorify God.”

Horne cites both:

• the Eastern Orthodox tradition - “Man has been called a demi-urge, not only to contemplate the beauty of the world, but also to express it” ; and
• the Western Liberal tradition - “Art does three things: it expresses, it transforms, it anticipates. It expresses man’s fear of the reality he discovers. It transforms ordinary reality in order to give the power of expressing something which is not itself. It anticipates possibilities of being which transcend the given possibilities”

to argue that human creativity involves the development of possibilities inherent within the creation. Here Horne quotes Paul Tillich - “Man stands between the finite he is and the infinite to which he belongs and from which he is excluded. So he creates symbols of his infinity.” – to argue that what “is created is not being itself, but symbols of being, or rather signs of new creative activity (not only in the fine arts) as a power ‘to carry on the creation of the world and anticipate its transfiguration’”.

The universe as we know it is basically deterministic – it develops naturally according to a network of inter-related elements and processes by which successful characteristics are generationally and genetically selected and replicated. Although deterministic, it is not simplistic - “there is neither order which is not to a degree chaotic, nor chaos that is not to a degree orderly” . Human beings are a part of these determined but complex processes but can also exercise a degree of freedom from them, through sociality and creativity, within the constraints of finitude. In exercising this degree of freedom we seem to be faced with two possibilities:

a) we can use this freedom in the way suggested by biological evolution i.e. we can use it selfishly utilising it to maximise the possibilities for human survival. This can involve both exploitation of and/or co-operation with ‘others’ (whether human or non-human) but always on the basis of the best outcome for ourselves. To do so, is to operate at levels one and two in Hardy’s three levels of relationality; or
b) we can use this freedom to identify the essential nature of all that is ‘other’ (both human and non-human) than us and develop the possibilities of those ‘others’ in line with their essential nature. To do so, is to: act within the image of God; operate at level three in Hardy’s three levels of relationality; fulfil the logic of cultural evolution; and create an act of worship, as God is praised in and by the perfecting of his creation.

Finally, living in the way outlined at b) is a form of evolution that does not have to involve death. This is a point noted by both Dorothy L. Sayers and Theissen. Sayers states that:

“The components of the material world are fixed; those in the world of the imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction … of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to ‘creation out of nothing’ and we conceive the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist.”

While Theissen says that one of the new things in cultural evolution is “that patterns of behaviour can be given up or changed without the death or extinction of those involved in them. Human beings can change their mind. They can be ‘converted’ to the better when they see that the way in which they are behaving will lead to disaster”

John Barton, in People of the Book?, provides an excellent summary of Theissen's Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach. Barton says that Theissen "believes fully in random selection. But he argues that from time to time the human race shows itself capable of what he calls 'evolution against evolution'. At such moments the inherent selfishness of genetic and biological development (as described, for instance, by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene) goes mysteriously into reverse, and altruism arises. Altruism is a move against selection and towards the protection, instead of the destruction and elimination, of the weak ... Theissen maintains that we can see this happening in two highly distinctive phases of human religious history:
in the increasingly monotheistic faith of ancient Israel, and in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In an evolutionary perspective religion has often been simply one of the social mechanisms by which control, and hence the continued survival of the strong, is established; but in these two cases religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the down-trodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutilation that spell death for the weak and powerless ... "In the midst of history a possible 'goal' of evolution is revealed: complete adaptation to the reality of God"."    

I think that Theissen's thesis also has synergies with the ideas of René Girard who begins his explanation of the dynamic of scapegoating by postulating the ‘mimetic of desire’, which is basically a kind of jealousy, but with a twist: we learn what is desirable by observing what others find desirable. Having ‘caught’ our desires from others, in a context of scarcity, everyone wants what only some can have (i.e. survival of the fittest). This results in a struggle to obtain what we want - which in turn produces a generalised antagonism towards the individual or group that seems to be responsible for this disappointment.

The vicious riddance of the victim has the potential to reduce the eagerness for violence, and if not, then the assumption is that more scapegoats need to be sacrificed in order to achieve a sense of appeasement and restoration of the status quo. The removal of the victim or victims – the lambs to the slaughter, gives a temporary re-assurance of the crisis disappearing, and the sensation of renewed possibility. This is a description of cheap solidarity and cheap hope.

Girard concludes his anthropological and literary analysis of scapegoating by examining Judeo-Christian texts, and traces the movement away from the dynamic of scapegoating through the Old into the New Testaments. It was this experience that contributed to Girard’s conversion to the Christian faith. His analysis of the Bible ‘as literature’ led him to conclude:

• that Jesus is the final scapegoat (i.e. in Theissen's terms the evolution against evolution or in Foster's selflessness against selfishess);
• the New Testament is ‘on the side of’ Jesus, the scapegoat. The Gospels are unusual because here is literature that encourages people to see the world through the eyes of the scapegoat;
• the scapegoat in the Gospels refuses to let death be the final word and he rises again triumphant; and
• the followers of the scapegoat enact the seizing of the scapegoat, and the scapegoat’s triumph over death, in Eucharistic celebration.

All this is by way of suggesting that Foster's thesis finds support elsewhere which both strengthens and broadens the argument. Foster, I think, sees selflessness as a force alongside selfishness within evolution rather than the evolution against evolution for which Theissen argues.

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Rickie Lee Jones - Falling Up.