Miscellaneous

The Historic Greatness of Christian Art

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: RR318A1

Location/Venue:

Year:

[John Saunders] Good afternoon everybody, I’m John Saunders. Welcome to the Western Conference on the Media and the Arts. Things are a little crazy right now, we had a few more people than we expected, and if we had any mix ups or anything like that, well kind of bear with us. I wanted to welcome you all to the conference, this is our first, and we think the first of its kind; and already I should tell you that there have been some ripples across the country, and an awful lot of publications, not only in the Christian community but the non-Christian community have taken an inordinate interest in what we are doing here, I hope they don’t consider us a threat yet; give us some time to get our act together before they start attacking us!

But we are very pleased that a very special gentleman could join us for the conference, he along with Dr. Rushdoony in my opinion is probably one of the most important thinkers in a century if not in American history, and I am referring of course to Dr. Cornelius Van Til. Dr. Van Til, would you stand up please and let everybody say hello to you? (applause)

Thank you very much, I- in a very real sense for me, the Western Conference on the Media and the Arts is my attempt- and I suppose before I tell you that, I should tell you that when I first took this idea to Rush, why he stood there and he stroked his beard and he listened to it for a few minutes, and he said: “That’s fine John. Go ahead, do that.” And he turned around and walked away. And I stood there and I said: “Wait a minute Rush, you don’t understand!” and he says: “Go ahead and do that, it’s fine.” and I said: “Well, maybe next time I’ll keep my mouth shut or consider…”

But we are very, very gratified with the turn out and the ripples that we are already beginning to hear from the conference, and as I started to say this is my attempt, a little self indulgence perhaps on my part, but it is my attempt to say thank you to my two spiritual fathers, Dr. Cornelius Van Til and Dr. R.J. Rushdoony.

I am an artist who for many, many years has been- I would say incensed, is probably the kindest word I can use- over the state of the media and the arts. But with all that anger and that concern at the direction in which the art is going, I had no way out of it other than to just dig a hole and bury myself, because there were no solutions being offered, until I met with Dr. Van Til’s works and Dr. Rushdoony’s works. And now I see that at the Chalcedon Foundation and with Dr. Rushdoony and Dr. Van Til that for some reason we seem to have become the cutting edge of Reconstruction in many, many areas of life. And our first speaker today is considered by most people who have taken the time to investigate it and who have tried to oppose him, as the foremost (?) witness in the world, the first amendment, particularly with respect to the relationship between church and state. He has written more than 30 volumes, done thousands of tapes, probably that many essays as well, the Chalcedon Report and the Journal of Christian Reconstruction, now is reprinted all over the world in many, many areas, even turning up behind the Iron Curtain; and Newsweek Magazine called Chalcedon Foundation the most influential think tank of its kind in America- and then of course they promptly proceeded to ignore everything that we had to say, and I thought that was probably an even greater complement than the first statement. But Dr. Rushdoony is currently today the leading historian of ideas I think in America, and I think it is only fitting and proper that the man who rides the cutting edge of that sort of Reconstruction be the man who begins the Western Conference on Media and the Arts. Dr. Rushdoony? (applause)

Thank you John; or should I say son? John has been calling me father for so long that I feel a little ancient to have a son that big and that bald. (laughter) I feel a little older today too, because yesterday I had a letter from a university asking me if I would leave my papers to them when I died. Well, I hadn’t planned on dying, so that was a little disturbing; apparently they figure I’ve outlived my day. Well, I trust I have not.

Our subject in this conference is the Arts and the Media. The two subjects are very closely connected, as I shall attempt before I finish this session to point out. This past summer, a major American seminary issued a bulletin on the arts; it was entitled: Christianity and the Arts. It was concerned, it said, with meaning in the arts, and it began by declaring and I quote: “In the perceptive moment, the selfhood of the beholder is reconstituted by the work of art. The artistic whole is a symbol which integrates the self as the perceiver surrenders to it. A part of Michael Polanyi’s contribution to aesthetics is his engaging discussion of the components of this dynamic.”

In other words, every viewing of a work of art is to be a humanistic, born again experience. We surrender our selfhood to the artist’s work to be reconstituted or re-made by it. How much is involved in this surrender they then go on to describe, and remember, this comes from the experts in the arts in a major American Seminary. I quote: “At a recent exhibition of Perception of the Spirit in Twentieth Century American Art we aided many people to become newly informed by the art works. First, each viewer is asked to set aside his or her name, and to take for a name of the colors, black or white, in the drawings. One may become a thin white line, or a bulging black shape, or a broken thin black line, or a black line that is distinct at the top and fades towards the bottom. Each person is then asked to make the sound that expresses the color in that shape. With the painting as the score, the viewer’s warm up as an orchestra, each person making a variety of sounds that may express his or her color in the one shape each has selected until each person hits the sound that best expresses that color and that shape. Then the conductor of the tour becomes the conductor of the orchestra and walks in front of the painting and points to the different sections of the painting as the cue for those who have selected shapes in those sections, to make their sounds. The painting will sound differently depending on whether it is played from top to bottom, or left to right, or diagonally, or spiraling. Then each person is asked to develop a physical movement to express the sound and shape and color he or she has become. After playing the painting again with each person making his or her movement with the sound, there is a time of sharing for each person to point out the shape or the color he or she has become, and to lead all in making the sound and movement it makes. This is a most informative period, for others may become aware of many shapes in the painting for the first time. Finally, each person may resume making the sound and movement of the shape originally selected, and interact with others who are doing their different sounds and movements to discover patterns of interrelationship.”

This method, we are told, alters and I quote: “The tacit dimension of the viewer, in order to realize explicit new integrations with more comprehensive entities.” Well, this is very pretentious language, but the gist of it is that we must submit totally and uncritically to humanistic works of art. We must integrate ourselves into the world of the artist, a religious surrender of the self is called for.

In fact, we are told that in this surrender we are ‘reborn’. This tells us something about the function of modern art; art in the modern mood, humanistic art, seeks to play a prophetic role in our culture. It seeks to enable us to be born again into a humanistic mold, in fact we are told, and let me quote one more time: “In the perceptive moment, the selfhood of the beholder is reconstituted by the work of art.”

The artist as prophet and messiah seeks to remake us. This is the thesis of humanistic art.

Thus we must say of all such art that it is first of all art by an artist who sees himself as a religious prophet. We must therefore approach him uncritically, we must surrender our judgement, we must abandon all relics of the Christian world and life view, and enter into the art in order to be reborn.

Of course this represents a departure from the older perspective, which viewed the artist as an artisan; someone who was a working member of society, a builder thereof. In the history of artists as artisans there are many ups and downs, but one essential fact must be remembered: the artist was a working builder in society. He exercised a Christian function whereby he worked to the glory of God and to the development of man in terms of God’s purposes. As such, he was a working member of society. He saw himself as a business man of another variety. For example, Peter Paul Rubens was not only a capable businessman, but also a diplomat; he was a highly moral man, and international figure, he had an assembly line in his studio for painting, and turned out 1,200 oils in his lifetime, all of high caliber. He did it because he saw his work as an artisan.

However, today we have a totally different perspective. As a result, it means second, that the meaning of art is reduced to the purely subjective. The men in the American Seminary whom I quoted, Adams and Mullen, in asking viewers to imagine themselves as colors and shapes and sounds in a painting asked for a ‘do it yourself’ meaning. Their basic premise is that the world is a world of brute factuality, and meaning can only exist if we ourselves create it, and the artist helps us to break down all our relics of a Christian world and life view, and by submitting to him uncritically we are born again into the world of brute factuality.

The world of brute factuality of course makes possible only subjective meaning. Art then ceases to be communication, and becomes subjective expression. This is why modern art has departed from the media, whereas historically it was a central aspect of the media. It does no longer communicate.

As a result, the world of purpose is rejected and art has become in the humanistic tradition occult and esoteric. As against the discipline of reality, art rejects discipline, and we have the drift of the artist away from the real world and away from the working world.

Medieval art was practical, and it was Christian as was Reformation Art. The artist then was working to further the glory of God. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” And art was a part of that purpose.

The artist as the avant garde of society is a product of a divided and a humanistic culture. The artist is going off in a different direction from the rest of society, from Christian society. The gap is there because the humanistic elite are moving away as rapidly as possible from a Christian world and life view. Having nothing to communicate, they communicate nothing.

The great artist representing this in the modern era was Marcel Duchamp. We shall return to him a little later. Marcel Duchamp whose Nude Descending a Staircase created a sensation in its day, later abandoned all formal attempts to paint. Instead he went to the dump heap, selected various broken and discarded items, including in one famous episode a broken urinal, to display at the museum as his most recent artwork. But finally, he abandoned even that, because he felt it represented too much purpose, and he abandoned art to withdraw from the world for the rest of his life.

The logical end of Duchamp’s position was suicide, although he did not take it. The modern artist, instead of being as logical as Duchamp, seeks constantly for a new way of saying nothing. Art is inescapably a religious activity; man in all his activities manifests his faith. Henry Van Til declared that culture is “Religion externalized.” Man expresses his faith in his daily life, in his art, his music, his work, and his play. And as Dr. Cornelius Van Til has said: “There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy.” And increasingly, our culture is pushing everyone to a choice between the two: theonomy, the rule of God and His law, of His word; autonomy, self rule, the epitome of humanism.

Each vocation in our day likes to see itself as an exception from the moral and the normal rules of society; as having special privileges. This is an aspect of humanism. The clergy, civil authorities, judges, doctors, lawyers, all see themselves as somehow exempt from the disciplines of reality, of morality, and of the every-day world. Talent, in fact, is seen by many as a principal of exemption, and the more talented and intelligent you are, the more, supposedly, you are exempt from the moral and normal rules of society.

The Biblical doctrine however is the greater the responsibility, the greater the accountability. As our Lord declares: “For unto whom much is given, of him shall be much required. And to whom men have committed much of him they will ask the more.” The responsibility in the field of the arts therefore is very, very great; it is a theological responsibility.

Dr. Cornelius Van Til has set forth tellingly in his discussion of man’s Summum Bonum, mans highest good, what the implications of the Biblical position are, and I quote: “the ethical ideal that man as originally created naturally had to set for himself was the ideal that God wanted him to set for himself. This was involved in the fact that man is a creature of God. God Himself is naturally the end of all man’s activity. Man’s whole personality was to be a manifestation and revelation on a finite scale of the personality of God. When we use the common expression that the world and man especially was created to glorify God, it is necessary to make a distinction between the religious and the ethical meaning of those words. In a most general way we may say that God is man’s summum bonum. Man must seek God’s glory in every act that he does. Man’s ethics is not only founded on a religious basis, but it itself is religious.”

The implications of this are far-reaching. Man’s highest good is not to be sought apart from God, nor in a flight from this world. Neo Platonism professed to be very religious. Neo Platonic thinkers within the circle of Christendom often saw holiness as a separation from matter to mind, instead of a separation from sin. But Paul tells us: “Whether therefore ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” Every realm of human activity therefore must be to the glory of God. Neo Platonic art is very much with us in some circles; it can only be religious with a cross in the picture or a religious scene. Instead of faith governing the total perspective of the artist, it is ascribed instead only to certain subjects. In terms of this neo platonic view the holy family is a religious subject, but contemporary families cannot be, unless a Bible or a cross is somehow included.

In other words, neo Platonism sees Christianity as having a limited sphere of life, what I have called ‘box theology’ governs them. Whereas in terms of scripture our faith must be the total condition and framework of all things, all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. There can therefore be no meaning apart from God, and therefore whether it be in our work or in the arts or in the media, meaning is inescapably God centered.

As Dr. Van Til has said and I quote: “Man’s whole personality was to be a manifestation and revelation on a finite scale of the personality of God.” As man grows in grace, and as he develops his talents in his particular calling, to that degree he will manifest God’s nature and power.

Dr. Van Til has said further and I quote: “Both ethics and religion deal with historical man kind as genuinely revelatory of God, and as genuinely significant for the development of God’s purpose with the universe. We seek God in everything, if we look at the matter from the most ultimate point of view.”

All things were made by God, and hence are revelational of Him. Hence we see the frustration of logical humanistic art. Camus as a logical existentialist, a consistent humanist, declared emphatically that it was necessary to choose evil, because God is good. That it was necessary to affirm no meaning, because if meaning were affirmed for the smallest atom in creation, it would open the door wide to the God of scripture.

Hence, art is either Christian or anti Christian. It cannot be neutral. There are no alternatives; because it lives in God’s universe and works with God’s materials, it must either affirm Him or wage war, very futilely, against Him.

As Dr. Van Til has said further and I quote: “The most important aspect of this program for man is surely that man should realize himself as God’s vicegerent in history. Man was created God’s vicegerent, and he must realize himself as God’s vicegerent. There is no contradiction between these two statements; man was created a character, and yet he had to make himself ever more of a character. And so we may say that man was created a king in order to become more of a king than he was. For the individual man the ethical ideal is that of self-realization, that the ethical ideal for man should be self realization follows from the central place given him in this universe. God made all things in this universe for himself, that is, for his own glory; but not all things can reflect His glory self consciously. Yet it is self conscious glorification that is the highest kind of glorification. Accordingly, God put all things in this universe into covenant relationship with one another; He made man the head of creation. Accordingly the flowers of the field glorified God directly and unconsciously, but also indirectly and consciously through man. Man was to gather up into the prism of his self conscious activity all the manifold manifestations of the glory of God; in order to make one central, self conscious sacrifice of it all to God.

Now if man was to perform this, his God given task, he must himself be a fit instrument for this work. He was made a fit instrument for this work, but he must also make himself an ever better instrument for this work; he must will to develop his intellect in order to grasp more comprehensively the wealth of the manifestation of the glory of God in this world. He must will to be an ever-better prophet than he already is. He must will to develop his aesthetic capacity, that is his capacity of appreciation. He must will to be ever a better priest than he already is. Finally he must will to will the will of God for the whole world. He must become an ever better king than he already is. For this reason then the primary ethical duty for man is self realization. Through self realization man makes himself the king of the earth, and if he is truly the king of the earth, then God is truly king of the universe, since it is as God’s creatures, as God’s vicegerent that man must seek to develop himself as king.

When man becomes truly the king of the universe, the kingdom of God is realized; and when the kingdom of God is realized, then God is glorified.”

Let us note that there is a difference between self realization in terms of what God made us to be, priests, prophets and kings in Him; and self expression in terms of the humanistic ideal, self expression in terms of a world of brute factuality, in which the only meaning is derived from the arbitrary will of the individual. The more a man grows in this Christian self realization, the more both spontaneity and necessity operate in his life. This fact makes understandable (San Songs?) well known remark, one of the most beautiful ever uttered by a musician, when he said that he composed music the way a pear tree bears pears.

Johann Sebastian Bach was another such man. The extent of his composition is so great that given the laborious hand inscribed methods he used, it is amazing that a man could compose as much and so marvelously in a lifetime. (Girlet?) has written of Bach, and I quote: “We ought to note carefully that Bach’s sense of pride in being a musician from a musical family stemmed from the feeling of having received a noble calling and a solemn obligation. Moreover, that his pride was utterly removed from the individualist, egotistical, vain gloriousness found in many artists. Bach viewed his own life as a repetition of the existence and work of his ancestors. For that reason, master in his art appeared to him not so much as a gift, but as an assignment and a demand; he felt that he was confronted by something in which he was to achieve proficiency, to acquire expertness, and which he was to put into action. Occasionally he was asked what measures he had undertaken to reach so high a degree of skill in his art; he usually replied: “I have had to be diligent. If anyone will be equally diligent he will be able to accomplish just as much.” He did not make much of, even as he did not depend on, his superior native endowments.”

Art is most certainly a form of communication, a media, and that is why the media and the arts belong together. I asked my wife Dorothy, who is for me the best of authorities, to define art; and she did so in nine simple words. She said: “Art is the right way to do a thing.” No definition of course is more than an indication of the meaning of a thing, but with this disclaimer, let us examine Dorothy’s statement. I can, at a piano or organ pick our notes, sometimes even put together a crude tune. I can with a pencil draw a far cruder echo of a picture. Neither effort is even remotely art, because I lack the technical skill and the thing to communicate; in both music and drawing I have nothing to say. On top of that, I do not know how to say it. As a result, art is the right way to do a thing.

For modern artists, because art is humanistic self revelation, there is no communication. Most such artists are boring people, to know them better is no advantage, it is a liability; it is not surprising that humanistic art has lost its hold on the masses. It is the esoteric cult of a self elected humanistic elite, and manner has replaced content. It has become fadistic mannerisms.

However, as we examine a Christian view of art, we find that Coomaraswamy declared in his Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art and I quote, that our art once, and I quote: “Affirms that art is the making well or properly arranging of anything whatever that needs to be made or arranged, whether a statuette, automobile, or a garden. In the western world this is specifically the catholic doctrine of art, from which doctrine the natural conclusion follows in the words of Saint Thomas: “That there can be no good use without art.” It is rather obvious that if things required for use, whether an intellectual or a physical use are under normal conditions both not properly made, they cannot be enjoyed, meaning by enjoyed something more than merely liked. Badly prepared food for example will disagree with us, and in the same way autobiographical or other sentimental exhibits necessarily weaken the morale of those who feed upon them. The healthy patron is nor more interested in the artists personality than he is in his tailors private life. All that he needs of either is that they be in possession of their art.”

Christian art stresses an objective frame of reference, communication, the use, and the ablest possible expression. Modern art stresses self expression. Van Til has said that man’s highest good is self realization in terms of what he is under God, and the choice before us is autonomy versus theonomy, and steadily we are begin pushed to a decision on that issue. Geoffrey Scott in his Architecture of Humanism has called attention to the fact that humanism worships power; as a matter of fact, one of the world’s contemporary political leaders said a few years ago: “The goal of political power is the control of human beings.”

When power is worshipped as humanism does, this leads to the imposing, to the monumental style in architecture, in music, in painting, and in literature. It is art that self-consciously claims greatness.

With romanticism, art became sensitivity to things remote and different, to things new and strange. We still see this in the quest of professional tourists, who are always seeking as the only desirable place to travel to, a place that is untouched, where nobody else has been, no matter how primitive the accommodations or how plentiful the fleas. Such a place is desirable, and they pride themselves on having been there. Because in the romantic quest beauty finally gives way to strangeness, and strangeness becomes mere innovation, and innovation becomes progressively more and more perverse. The logical consequence of the emphasis of humanism is that the universe and man are in effect remade by each new school of art in their own image. Each private experience is imperialistically presented. Communication is denied in favor of expression.

The great humanist manifesto of course was Genesis 3:5 ‘Ye shall be as God, every man his own God, knowing, that is determining for yourself, what is good and evil, right and wrong, what is law, what is beauty; determining all things.’ When art becomes consistent with the principal of the fall, Genesis 3:5, it forsakes communication. Each man becomes his own world of meaning and his own law, his own universe.

Now the words communication and communion go back to the same root. Without communion there can be no communication, and humanism has a communications problem, a media gap. Its logical end is not Pentecost, but Babel.

Again the word ‘common’ is related to communion and communication. Humanism destroys anything in common between man and man, and as a result it is the art of anarchy. The Biblical doctrine of communication rests on what Dr. Van Til points out and I quote: “The image of God in man consists of actual knowledge content. Man does not start on the course of history merely with a capacity for knowing God; on the contrary he begins his course with actual knowledge of God. Morever, he cannot even eradicate this knowledge of God, it is this fact that makes sin to be sin against better knowledge.”

This means that all humanistic attempts are waging war against man. Every humanistic artist is denying his own being which was created in the image of God, is suppressing the knowledge that he has in favor of no knowledge. Man’s activities are never performed in a vacuum. Every act of man, however fallen he may be, is still the act of a creature made in the image of God, and to deny that fact is suicide for man.

In Van Til’s words again: “Either presuppose God and live, or presuppose yourself as ultimate and die. That is the alternative with which the Christian must challenge his fellow men. Taken properly the idea of common grace presupposes as it expresses, the universal presence of the revelation of God.”

Every atom of being, every fiber of man’s nature, is revelational of God. Borrowed art works on borrowed premises. Duchamp, whom I mentioned earlier, realized this; and he said that he found it “intolerable,” (and that was the word he used) “to put up with a world established once and for all.” Those are his very words. According to him, even gravity was a coincidence, and he objected to any belief in gravity. His basic premise was that the goal of man intellectually should be to lose the possibility of recognizing or identifying two similar things, to find anything in common between two items in the universe, because he recognized that a common element presupposes a given order, and points ultimately to God.

According to Robert Label, and I quote: “In his statement that right and left are obtained by letting drag behind you a tinge of resistance in a situation, he advances still further toward deliberate disorder and disorientation.”

Duchamp as a consistent humanist went so far that he sought to create a new language and a new alphabet, and in that new language there was to be no framework of meaning. Because he recognized that even in words there are propositional truths, and like some of our contemporary theologians if we can call them that, he was at war with propositional truth because it led to God. And so he wanted a language that would have no meaning. He finally gave up the quest because he found it was impossible. And so he withdrew into silence.

Duchamp also had declared that his purpose was to ‘de-sacrilize’ art, by robbing all artistic activity of meaning. And because he was a logical man he finally abandoned art. He saw all art, even to bringing in things from the trash heap to exhibit, as representing still some kind of design, some kind of purposive activity, and therefore a witness to God. He denied that there could be anything common between two atoms in creation. He denied the possibility of communication, because he lived a life without communion.

No other civilization than in the Christian has art gained a higher status and function. It has gained this because the artist is a member of a communion when he is a Christian. He has something in common with all men under God, and he lives and works in that recognition. He makes a good use of things, he communicates. Instead of being the lone outsider as the humanistic artist tries to be, he is then the concert violinist in a great concerto, because he is the highest realization of a common life and experience. This is the greatest aspect of Christian art, communication in terms of communion.

Art is a media of communication and communion, and also of an enhanced common life. Art belongs with media, and the media and the arts both need to return to a Christian world and life view, or they will destroy the very purpose of their being. Thank you. (applause)