Art and Spirituality
Pippin Michelli, Ph.D.
The Church has always used art to promote spiritual awareness, but it may never have been harder to identify the right kind and quality of art for that purpose. As part of the structure and governance of society, the Church could once command much and ignore its congregation's needs. But in a society that insists on individuals' rights to establish the nature and details of their spirituality, it must invite and convince at the individual level.
Typically, today, individuals conceive their spirituality in terms of private emotion and intuition, rather than intellectual orthodoxy. Thus it is more than ever vital to create environments that promote apparently spontaneous emotional states that people equate with spiritual awareness. Traditionally, this was achieved through beauty of form, materials and craftsmanship. The cultural consensus on the nature and appearance of beauty made this possible. But there is no such consensus today. We cannot agree what beauty looks like, or even that it is spiritually valuable.
These problems are the legacy of our changing social structures and are now part of our identity. As a result, liturgical art is often reduced to the palest ghost of what it once could be or proscribed altogether. Yet the situation has evolved surprisingly logically, and an understanding of that process can help us generate a positive and relevant way forward for religious art.
To show how much this process affects contemporary thought, I want to take the observations of two previous conversators as complementary starting points. I'll begin with Professor Dixon's comments on beauty in relation to church architecture, and then address Reverend Brewster's identification of spirituality in visual art.
Dixon's temperate comments represent a typical modern take on beauty. While discussing English Baroque churches, he made two significant suggestions. Firstly, he remarked that it was hard to know if Wren and Hawksmoor were consciously thinking about beauty when they designed their churches. But he argued that the churches were indeed beautiful and thus implicitly claimed that the architects achieved beauty as a by-product of intuition or inexplicable native genius, rather than by following rules. His second comment was that beauty can be a distraction. Many would support these views, but few would notice the culturally-formed assumptions underlying them. Yet they need to be understood if we are to move forward.
The twin beliefs that beauty is an intuitive phenomenon, and that rational attempts to create it are fundamentally misguided, go back to Kant. Kant's characterization of unsystematic beauty was a direct attack on the previously dominant Classical concept of beauty. But that Classical concept defined architectural design as practiced by Wren and Hawksmoor, and had done so without interruption since the legalization of Christianity. A full century before Kant attacked the core of their ideas, Wren and Hawksmoor would have been thinking about beauty as a routine design issue. Let's see why.
