From early childhood I have always had a strong emotional reaction to beautiful things. Some of these are natural and some man-made. Beauty is revealed in many places, from the cry of a newborn child and the glories of a sunset to the intricacies of a mediaeval illustrated manuscript. This existence of beauty in the world has imprinted in me, from early years, two important theological ideas. One is that beauty is a manifestation of truth every bit as precious and lasting as the truth contained in a list of propositions or statements. If something were to say that God is beauty and that beauty, in whatever form it manifests itself, partakes of God, I would have no problem with such an insight. A second way that the identification of God with beauty is helpful, is that, just as God exists beyond time and outside space, so the same thing can be said of beauty. Beauty, in the way I understand it, will always be something transcendent, outside time and space.
At school, the study of classics brought me into me touch with Plato’s notion of ideas. This is the theory that everything in the world was related to an ‘idea’ or ‘form’ of itself in another dimension. The extent to which anything approached its ideal, was the extent to which it was most truly real. A horse approaches the ideal of horsiness as it resembles this ‘form’ of a perfect transcendent horse. Plato’s abstract ideas may make no sense from a western trained thinker’s point of view but they form an important background for the understanding of parts of the New Testament and the theology of the early Church. Whether you find Plato’s thinking and speculations helpful or not, this idea of a real world transcending and giving reality to our present one, has been a powerful, even captivating idea over the centuries of western thought.
Platonic ideas, particularly as they were absorbed and reconstructed by the Greek fathers, formed part of my theological formation. Culturally they are at odds with the precise world of the 18th century enlightenment model as understood by the Western traditions. This personal appropriation of Platonism saved me from two theological perspectives which are, I believe, unhelpful to many people. The first is the idea that only words can contain and define the divine reality in what is known as propositional thinking. Such thinking is found among the Reformers and their successors. It is also believed that nothing can be said about God unless it is rooted in the words of Scripture. Patristic insights that God is unknowable or beyond the capacity of human thought find little place in reformed theology. A second application of enlightenment thinking is associated with liberal Protestantism. This also, in a different way, tries to present Christianity as far as possible within the framework of modern scientific and philosophical thought. Stories of miracles have a habit of being explained away rather than pointing to the limitations of human language and experience. This appeal to rationality as defined by 18th century philosophers like Locke and Hume is a strong influence in much of modern liberal theological discourse.
When I say I prefer Plato to the Enlightenment, I am not suggesting that one is right and the other wrong. I see no binary tension here. I want to affirm Plato and his followers alongside enlightenment rationality. Both have their place. Plato provides us with a way of approaching the mystery of God which has proved very popular over the centuries. From his speculations we acquire a language with which to speak about what is perhaps unspeakable and beyond reason. Western logic finds this hard to do. The word ‘mystery’ itself introduces us to this distinct way of reasoning. The word is formed from a Greek word muo which means to be silent. Mystery is thus a reality which drives one to a place which has no words. The ancient world was familiar with mystery religions of all kinds. I doubt that our modern culture would find them easy to understand or reinterpret, however hard we try to be ‘ecumenical’. Various salvific myths were staged for the initiates in the mysteries. making effective use of light and darkness. These dramas were designed to create a sense of religious crisis in the postulant. The dramatic light shows put on by NOS in Sheffield, Hillsong and similar megachurches are, paradoxically, the closest that our culture goes in reproducing something of the religious impact of the ancient mystery religions. As the Old Testament reading from Isaiah this morning (Sunday) puts it: ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ This is the God beyond words, beyond concepts. To speak at all about him we need the metaphors and images of the mystics and spiritual explorers from ancient times till today.
Returning to our title, the Greek thinkers, both pagan and Christian, had a strong attachment to beauty. The idea or ‘form’ of beauty was something very close to their idea of God. It was a young Greek theologian, Christos Jannaras, who, in the 60s, wrote a book in which he expressed the idea that the understanding of beauty was something that Orthodox theological tradition did well and that it was something they had to offer to the worldwide church. This notion has followed me through the fifty+ years since I first heard it. I have, as a consequence, been keen to explore the links that seem to exist between the notion of God and beauty in whatever manifestation it appears. There are still places in the Christian west where beauty remains a key component of worship and is understood to help bring people to God. There are artists, poets and musicians in our culture who still help to make this vital connection between the human spirit and the God who reveals himself as beauty to so many. Of course, only a very few artists and merchants of beauty confess a Christian faith, but each of them, in different ways, are teaching us to use our God given sensitivity and awareness of beauty. This frequently points us to God. I am grateful to all of them.
The association between God and beauty has had some practical consequences for the way I practise the Christian faith. There will some who will not approve when I say that I have been protected from versions of Christianity that put a great deal of emphasis on the notion that to utter the correct formula of belief is somehow to ensure salvation. I feel also that I have been preserved from another exclusivist notion that there is but a single version of truth. To belong to the spiritual world known to the mystics and represented by the word mystery, is to realise that every version of truth is one that tries to approach or come close to truth rather than to own it. To say that to know Christ is to know God does not give us the right to exclude others who use language and ideas in completely different ways. The language of mystery is above all a language that insists on humility in the face of ultimately unknowable truth. From my perspective, any exclusivism in theology is divisive and the cause of endless pain and distracting struggles for the Church. Anglicanism in its classical form has always insisted on one special claim of inclusivism which allows me to feel at home. It declares itself, not to be the Church but to be part of something bigger and wider – the Catholic church. In other words, it looks beyond itself, to the Orthodox and the Catholics for its self-definition. It enjoys, even celebrates, this self-understanding of fuzzy boundaries. There are, of course, boundaries of what is or is not acceptable in Christian teaching but probably not in the places that many people want to put them. Many older Anglicans regret an apparent shift in direction, away from this inclusive feel over its boundaries to a position of strict doctrinal correctness. The more the Church tries to tighten the edges of its structure against others, the more it ceases to be a place of welcome.
The examples of beauty in our world are endless. Not everyone will be sensitised to more than a few of these manifestations but everyone can be taught the way that the language of beauty is a path to spiritual awareness. Clearly in our utilitarian world, few people speak the language of beauty well. Those who speak it at all, are, I believe, not far from God. They may not yet speak the conventional language of Christianity but, with help from people who already have made that connection, they may be able themselves to cross over to a position of faith. The words of the hymn will come alive for them: O worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.
It may be argued that one of the reasons why Christianity seems unhelpful to so many today is that there is such severe dissonance within scripture: between the exclusivist OT and the more expansive NT. Indeed, the faith is a decidedly uneasy marriage of Hebraism and Hellenism: a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, philosophically speaking.
There was a third strand to the two that you have identified, and which was especially strong in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, in an echo of the late seventeenth century ‘Cambridge Platonism’ of Cudworth, More, Norris, Smith, Whichcote, etc. This strand was ‘idealism’, which was Hegelian (and therefore, to some extent, Platonic) in inspiration. It was especially strong in Germany (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, etc.), and also in the UK, and this is the best recent account of the British variant: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/british-idealism-9780199559299?cc=gb&lang=en. The neoplatonic element was emphasised by W. R. Inge.
However, idealism and its Platonic underpinnings came under great attack in the 1940s, notably from Karl Popper, and have never really recovered. This might explain, at least in part, why the Christian philosophical tradition in the UK has scarcely recovered, and that (absent the likes of Austin Farrer, Basil Mitchell or Richard Swinburne) there have been no heirs to the ‘idealism’ promoted F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet or J. M. E. McTaggart (who were in sympathy with elements of Christianity, though McTaggart was a churchgoing atheist). Insofar as idealism retained any purchase after the last war, it was perhaps through Willard Quine’s notion of systematicity (which David Armstrong ran with), but this was something which was of negligible theological utility.
It was beauty that hooked me: beauty of sound, sight, smell, ideas, action, character. Nothing to do with elitism but rather the beauty of which we are all capable and that in some way we all display. Church as patron of the arts, of beauty in all its forms. This has largely vanished as the money has vanished. We are left with a quasi-mechanistic organization – do X and the result will be Y – in which results disappoint because algorithms are simplistic, beauty is banned in the new puritanism, and I am repelled.
If you are lucky enough to have a good choir, it helps. I find the beauty of music really a religious experience. Somewhat spoiled by those who don’t want women and girls in the choir.
I don’t think there are very many all-male choirs left. Most (all?) cathedrals have a girls’s choir, and there are now some with adult women singing alto with the men – three or four that I know of. Most college choirs are mixed, and only this week St. John’s College, Cambridge has announced that girls and women are to be admitted to their famous choir.
Not all Cathedrals, no!
I believe you, but I’m still right to say ‘most’ cathedrals!
I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised to learn that The Times reported in December 2019 that there were then 739 girl choristers in English cathedrals, outnumbering the 737 boys. Of course those numbers may be different now, but they do show greater parity.
Incidentally this year is the 30th anniversary of the pioneer founding of the first cathedral girls’ choir by Richard Seal at Salisbury in 1991.
Sometimes what they want is to have the choice (like: all girls, or all boys, or mixed). Oxford colleges had a choice of all 3, but now there is a ‘choice’ of 1 which is obviously not just less choice but no choice at all.
Sorry, I’m afraid I must be missing your point, but the Queen’s College, Keble and Merton, to name just three, have mixed choirs and there are others. What is the ‘choice of one’?
A hearty Amen to this blog, Stephen!
However, my understanding of the term ‘catholic’ is that it means ‘universal’, rather than Roman Catholic or Orthodox. Our links to the Methodist Church are stronger than those to either Roman Catholics or Orthodox churches. The Puritans, too, are a part of our heritage.
I see all Christians and all Christian denominations as part of the catholic church in that sense, and I think you would probably agree.
In my three decades of ministry in chaplaincies and parishes, I came to realise (slowly, I’m afraid) that there are many people who have a sense of God and of reaching out to that God, but have no words to express this. It’s a big mistake to dismiss these people as being not Christian, or as having no faith.
Yes. Those things like wayside shrines where someone has died.
Beauty drew me further in to church mainly through its music. My first love at 17 was JS Bach, perhaps a little precociously, but the depth, the profound sounds touched me deeply even before the accompanying words, often in German or Latin. Moreover I found his organ works captivating and they were lyric-free.
But worship is communal, and in leading music it becomes obvious that people must be able to engage or you’ll be singing alone. Compromise is needed and songs written more recently than 150 years may have to be considered. Of course Bach’s cantatas were probably considered gauche by some in his time.
A good many recent worship songs ticked the beauty box for me, and many old hymns rarely sung.
I struggled for authenticity in worship, for substance over form. Trendy or not there were moments of profound spiritual encounter, or so it seemed. Easily killed by crass replacements or lazy repetition, the moments were chimeric and never recurred. I came to the conclusion the Holy Spirit could never be distilled into a bottle and poured out by us as we chose. God remains a mystery, and necessarily so.
Yes. I found rehearsals could be more moving than performance.
I don’t want to be too academic about this, but many of Bach’s organ works are based on Lutheran chorales and, in that sense, do have a ‘lyrics’ basis. I was drawn initially to Bach’s great pot-boiler the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (it’s now claimed by some that he did not compose it!) but back in the 1950s there were Sunday morning BBC radio organ recitals which introduced me to the chorale preludes and, later, the chorale fantasias (for those unfamiliar with the terms, they are for solo organ). For many UK people the tunes are unknown, except for a few of them which have been adopted as hymn tunes here, and so their significance not recognised. These are profoundly religious works, and when their associated words are understood, an added spiritual dimension is added.
Can we get back to the original discussion? It is fundamentally about theology and some of the contributions about the make-up of choirs and music seem to be extremely marginal to the topic.
… in which case Ratzinger and von Balthasar have much to say, as do the Russians. To my mind the theology of beauty is linked to that of desire and delight, woefully lacking in the western church. Lust, eroticism, greed for beauty, porneia. It’s human.
I was brought up to believe that art in church was wrong because it made people worship it and not Jesus (though an exception was made for badly-done homemade worship banners) and in my youth I believed that churches should be stripped of everything, that the puritans had the right approach and anything that attracted attention was idolatrous.
In the intervening 20 years that’s weakened, though I’m saddened that my faith has also weakened with it. I discovered how art and music could provide food for the soul and experiences of God which I never got from plain churches and long sermons (but for some congregants the sermons did what music did for me).
And yet… sung worship with a duff organist or out of tune choir kills the sense of the presence of God like nothing else. That makes me uncomfortable and question whether it’s really God I’m there worshipping or it’s the music. Maybe removing music from church so we can’t be distracted from God is the right answer after all…
I’m an old puritan myself! But the 92 year-old very deaf former organist who stepped in on an emergency basis was all wrong, but wonderful! The whole service lifted.