Wycliffe hall The Evangelical College in the Heart of Oxford A Permanent Private Hall of the University of Oxford Michael Lloyd discusses how Art sits alongside an unseen God The Creation of Adam, The Sistine Chapel 1508-12 Michelangelo
1 by Michael Lloyd The Revd Dr Michael Lloyd is Principal of Wycliffe Hall God in Art, was given as a talk by Michael Lloyd on April 11th 2014, as part of the Passion for Life Mission in the Cotswolds, UK. One of my longest-standing friends was, in his youth, on the dinner party circuit in London. One such dinner party, Jeremy spent the first half of the meal talking to the lady on his right. Half way through, he turned to the lady on his left, as you should, but unfortunately found her to be a rather minimal conversationalist. What do you do? was his rather conventional opening gambit. I m a student, was her somewhat uninformative reply. Oh, what do you study? he asked. Art, she said. Now, Jeremy knows nothing about art, so he said, Oh, I adore art. Do you? she asked, which didn t give Michael Lloyd by Abigail Lloyd him much to go on. Jeremy had majored in history at University, so he rummaged around in his memory, and the word, Renaissance popped into his mind, so he said, Yes, he said, the Renaissance is my favourite period, desperately hoping that it had something to do with art. Is it? was her monosyllabic response. Yes, he said,
2 And at that point, his memory came to his help, and he remembered that some friends had told him that they had just been to Italy and seen Michelangelo s David. So he risked saying, Yes, and of all his works, his David is for me the finest. Uh huh, she said, encouragingly. Yes, he said. It s the colouring. It s that delicate brushwork. That magnificent frame. When I saw it hanging there, I said to myself, sheer perfection. Did you? she loquated. Two weeks later, his friends who d been to Italy invited him round to see their holiday photos. And this, they said, is of course Michelangelo s David. It isn t, he said. It is, they said. It can t be, he said. David (sculpture!) 1501-4 by Michelangelo And a year later, he was at another dinner party where the conversation turned to great gaffes people had made, and one man said, Do you know, my sister once went to a dinner party where some idiot spent the whole evening talking about Michelangelo s David as though it were a painting. And Jeremy says he is still ashamed of this, but he heard himself saying, Surely nobody could be that stupid! Well, I may know more about art than Jeremy does, but I m not an expert. I ve been asked to give a theological perspective on art, and I just want to comment on three things that are very odd, when you come to think about them. The Oddness of Art itself It is easy to see how art and language and music got going evolutionarily. It is useful to be able to communicate with other members of the family, to pool knowledge, to tell other members of the tribe where they can hunt bison, to alert them to the presence of predators, to share information that will help them to find food and avoid danger. But art has evolved beyond usefulness. Art has evolved to the point where it is done for its own sake, and not for any survival value. Art has evolved to the point where it can be positively disadvantageous from a survival point of view. Take, for example, the Sarajevo cellist.
3 This is what matters - beauty, harmony, humanity. Not hatred, destruction, conflict and cruelty.
4 Vedran Smailović was a cellist in the Sarajevo Opera and the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra. During the siege of Sarajevo, he regularly took his cello and played it in the bombed-out buildings of his city, with snipers bullets criss-crossing around him. It seems to have been his way of defying the violence, of not letting it pass unprotested against, of not letting it pass for normal. It seems to have been his way of saying, This is what matters - beauty, harmony, humanity. Not hatred, destruction, conflict and cruelty. The Oddness of Christian Art Given the second Commandment - You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth - it is very odd that there is any such a thing as Christian Art. Judaism and Islam have largely taken the Second Commandment It was brave and impressive and moving. It was not calculated to help his chances of survival. Art has evolved to the point where it is no longer about survival. It is done now for its own sake. It is just part of who we are, and part of the point of living. And because God is the Creator, we are creative. In fact, I believe that art is a bit of a clue as to what human beings are, a bit of a pointer as to our purpose and raison d être. We are bits of replicating DNA, but we are more than that. We are animals but we are more than that. We do communicate in order to survive, but more is going on than that. In Jewish and Christian understanding, human beings are made in the image of God. And because God is the Creator, we are creative. That s just part of who we are, part of what we are for, part of our purpose, part of the point. So the fact that we have evolved beyond what is evolutionarily useful to be essentially creative is not surprising. It s what you d expect if we are indeed made in the image of a Creator God. to rule out any representational art, and have gone instead for geometrical designs. There was a big debate about it in eighth century (called the Iconoclasm Controversy) and the Church decided that representational art was to be allowed, and, indeed, celebrated. Why? Primarily because of the Incarnation. Because they believed that God had become human, and lived a human life and died a human death. Therefore, they believed, we are not left just to guess about who God is. We have some handle now on what God is like, His character and His characteristic ways of working. A young girl was drawing, and her mother asked her what it was a picture of. God, she replied. But no one knows what God looks like, replied her mother. They will
5 when I ve finished, replied the girl. Obviously, we still have no idea what God looks like in fact, to ask what the invisible God looks like is a meaningless question. But we do now know something of what His character is like. We do now know a little of how He reacted in different situations. We do now know how He responded to people s questions and needs and hurts and failings. We do now know more about His compassion and love, His hatred of hypocrisy and hardness. Which gives artists something to work on. The Oddness of Crucifixions But crucifixions became the most common form of Christian art because the Crucifixion caused a revolution in our conception of God. We naturally worship that which is successful, that which is unlimited by failure or untouched by suffering. Idols tend to be the projection of our own hopes and longings, which are for freedom from want or pain. The Greek and Roman gods would never have dreamed of suffering with us or for us. There is a scene in Euripides play, Hippolytus, where the goddess Artemis leaves the dying Hippolytus, saying: I may not look upon the dead, nor stain my sight with the anguish of departing breath. What a contrast with Jesus: not only did He stain Himself by touching the ritually impure and the dead, but He knew in His own lungs the anguish of departing breath. It would be very odd if most of the official portraits of JF Kennedy were of the cavalcade in Dallas. So why are so many portraits of Jesus portrayals of His Crucifixion? The Roman world certainly thought the idea of a crucified deity very odd. There is a piece of Roman graffiti near the Palatine Hill, dating probably from the early third century. In it, a man is kneeling to a figure on a cross, which has the head of a donkey. The inscription reads, Anaxamenos worships his god. To some third-century Roman, the idea of worshipping a crucified man clearly seemed odd to the point of being ridiculous and risible.
6 Isenheim Altarpiece 1512-16 Matthias Grünewald
7 The Crucifixion gives us a very different sort of God. It gives us a God who is not an inflictor of suffering, but a fellow-sufferer. It gives us a God who is, literally, compassionate - unlike Artemis, who, when asked by Hippolytus, Do you see my miserable state? replies, I see it; but my eyes are forbidden to shed tears. I suggest that the only God who is adequate is one who exposes Himself to all that we go through, who does not keep Himself remote and safe and immune, but who comes to where we are, suffers what we suffer, goes through what we go through. That seems to have been the view of Matthias Grünewald, who painted his famous crucifixion for the Monastery of St Anthony in Isenheim. a God who entered into their condition, who shared their suffering, went through what they went through, bore their pain The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak. They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne. But to our wounds, only God s wounds can speak, and not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. Jesus of the Scars The monastery ran a hospital, specialising in the care of those suffering from skin diseases and the plague. The terribly scourged skin of Christ presented the patients with a God who entered into their condition, who shared their suffering, went through what they went through, bore their pain - skin for skin. That is the revolutionary view of God that the Cross established, which crucifixions proclaim, and which Holy Week celebrates. Edward Shillito expressed the same insight in poetry. After the First World War, with its intense experience of suffering, he gave voice to the view that a detached God, immune from the sufferings of His creatures, was no longer tenable or worshipable: