Wrestling With Angels

One of the greatest challenges for today’s Christian artist is the Christian audience. Two things the average Christian looks for in art, no mater what the medium: religious content that makes him feel better about himself and the world in which he lives, and any immorality about which he can complain. To exacerbate matters, the artist must also contend with a market place that demands mindless art: an art that requires no thought and no mature sensibilities to admire or enjoy.

In making a distinction between admiring and enjoying a work of art, I have already presented a problem. For many, what is enjoyed is obviously “admirable” or we wouldn’t enjoy it! What is not enjoyed is just as clearly not admirable. This sentimental approach to art can also be seen in the pews where people evaluate the minister’s sermon, not by its theological accuracy, but solely by how it made them feel.

When evaluating anything crafted by a human being, one of our primary questions is about whether or not it is well made. And to answer this question, we must know what it means to be “well made” in regard to the object being evaluated. For example, what properties or attributes must a painting or novel possess for us to say this is beautiful or admirable?

Albert Magnus thought that beauty is the “splendor of form shining on the proportioned parts of matter.” Aquinas wrote that “the beautiful” object is one that has integrity, proportion and clarity. Of course, as Jacques Maritain and J.F. Scanlan note in Art and Scholasticism With Other Essays, “Integrity and proportion have no absolute significance and must be understood solely in relation to the end of the work, which is to make a form shine on the matter.”

Our enjoyment of a work of art has no primary place in our evaluations. I know what makes an opera admirable, but I do not enjoy opera. I admire certain paintings of Picasso, but I do not enjoy Picasso. Conversely, I thoroughly enjoy the drawings of my grandchildren, but I would not classify these drawings as being “admirable.”

(For a thorough treatment of enjoyable beauty and admiral beauty, I recommend reading two chapters in Mortimer J. Adler’s, Six Great Ideas: Chapter 15 deals with Enjoyable Beauty; chapter 16 with Admirable Beauty.)

Four Standards of Judgment
In Francis Schaeffer’s little book, Art & the Bible, he suggests that there are four standards in judging art: 1) technical excellence; 2) validity; 3) intellectual content, the world view which comes through; and 4) the integration of content and vehicle. While I do not always agree with how Schaeffer applies these standards, I do think this is an excellent place to start.

Technical excellence. It is not fair for us to condemn a work of art merely because we do not like the artist, the subject matter or the worldview that comes through. “If the artist’s technical level is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view.”

Validity. When an artist is motivated by the desire for fame or fortune, or when he or she aims solely to please the audience, the work done lacks validity.

In Letters of Flannery O’Conner: The Habit of Being, O’Conner (a Christian) speaks to this point as she evaluates a book that a friend sent to her. “[Her book] is just propaganda and its being propaganda for the side of angels only makes it worse. The novel is an art from and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it. I didn’t make this up. I got it from St. Thomas (via Maritain) who allows that art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end. If you do manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first…”

Content. Here, for the Christian, is where we evaluate the worldview of the artist by the standards of a biblical worldview. Can an unbeliever produce a work of art that exhibits a Christian worldview? Certainly.

Again, from O’Conner’s Letters, “In the gospels it was the devils who first recognized Christ and the evangelists didn’t censor this information. They apparently thought it was a pretty good witness. It scandalizes us when we see the same thing in modern dress only because we have this defensive attitude toward the faith.”

Integration. In any great work of art there is a “correlation between the style and the content.” One of the illustrations Schaeffer gives here is T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland,” where the poetry fit “the nature of world as he saw it, namely, broken, unrelated, ruptured.” If you have read this poem, you will remember that Eliot used “fragments of language and images and allusions drawn haphazardly from all manner of literature, philosophy and religious writings from the ancients to the present.” The style of the poem, its form, fit the artist’s content.

As you can see, evaluating a work of art is primarily an intellectual exercise, not an emotional one. Sadly, however, much of the criticism we hear and read from Christians tells us little more than the fact that they didn’t enjoy the artwork. There is little if any criteria for the judgments made: merely a visceral reaction.

All this being said, I don’t go to museums, read books or listen to music so as to evaluate the art. I do so because I simply want to enjoy the art. After all, art is not an abstraction; it is an experience. After the enjoyment, I begin asking myself why. If I didn’t enjoy it, I also ask myself why. And with great art, the meaning continues to expand, long after your first encounter.

Wrestling With an Angel
Serious artists seek to express or portray reality as they have experienced it with what talent they have been given. They are only limited by the depth and breadth of their experience. Accordingly, I want to vicariously “experience” something of what the artist is sharing with me; which, of course, requires that I get inside the head and heart of the artist, asking myself what it is he or she is seeking to “say.”

Initially, we should not approach art with a critical mind but with an aesthetic attitude: one that seeks to experience the work of art on its own terms. For as soon as we begin critiquing the art, we are no longer experiencing it. And if we cut short our experience, how do we know exactly what it is we are criticizing?

How can we evaluate a particular work of art if we do not know what the artist is seeking to share with us? Admittedly, this is sometimes difficult, but this should make us even more cautious in our assertions. Can I condemn an artist for not expressing something he or she has no intention of expressing? Can I fairly ridicule a novelist because I would have told the story differently? And if what the artist wanted to do was raise questions, can I justly complain that they didn’t give any answers?

As a writer, I sometimes have people tell me that I should have added other points to my essays. The challenge many of these people fail to appreciate is that one only has so many words allotted to him in an article. Artists have limitations regarding the dimensions of the canvas, the size of the stage, or the length of the symphony. And if any of these productions have been commissioned, they only have so much time before the work must be ready for showing.

No artist says everything he or she wants to say in a single work. Why would they want to? It would be like a minister seeking to tell us everything he believes in a single sermon. This is why we should be very careful about pronouncing “final judgments” on an artist because of a single work. As Schaeffer pointed out, it is the body of their work that will tell us about the true skill and worldview of an artist.

Given these limitations within which an artist must work, I believe we should add a degree of respectful empathy to any judgments we make about his art. Producing art is often painful. It is like Jacob wrestling with the angel. “I won’t let go—no matter how painful the process—until I produce what I see, what I hear, what I feel.” The process can be maddening and it often leaves artists with a “limp” in their personalities! Do you always say with perfect clarity what you intended to say? Have you ever walked away from a conversation and then later think to yourself, “O, I should have said this or not said that”? Artists do this with most every work they have ever created.

For most serious artists, producing a work of art is like delivering a baby. How would you feel if someone looked at your child and said, “Ugh, how ugly”? Even if the baby does have two heads and scales all over its body, have a little heart! (I stole this illustration from someone else but do not remember from whom!)

Few people take the time to educate themselves as to the nature and principles of various art forms. (Sadly, this doesn’t stop them from critiquing the art or the artist.) The attitude seems to be, “Either you have a taste for that sort of thing or not.” But if beauty and truth come from God, are we wise to approach the subject in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion? If the Master Artist has gifted people with the vision and skill to reflect something of Him and of His world, shouldn’t we learn to understandingly admire these creations?

For the artist, producing the work of art took hundreds or even thousands of hours of “wrestling with an angel.” We should at least take more than a few minutes of time wrestling to understand what he has produced, before pronouncing the angel with whom he wrestled was Lucifer.

Copyright 2005, Monte E Wilson