Art and the Beauty of God’s Creation
Martin Oliver quizzes Bishop Richard Harries of Oxford, who presented last year’s Heslington Lecture on Art and Christianity
Christis: What was it that first drew you to link art and religion?
RH: Well, I’ve always been interested in the arts myself. I’ve always read a lot, liked poetry, loved theatre and the visual arts — they’ve always been very important to me. But I think that the arts play a key role in so many people’s lives today. Just take the example of music. Never in the history of the world has so much classical music been listened to. There’s Classic FM, which exists as a commercial station; and when you think of the amount of records, CD’s, that are sold… So, it’s a very important part of people’s lives, and I believe that it plays a kind of spiritual role — it offers people the inspiration and solace. Perhaps people who during the nineteenth century would have been regular church members and who are not now are at least receiving some kind of spiritual nourishment through the arts.
Christis: So, do you see art as an end in itself, or as a means of communicating spirituality?
RH: I think it’s important to treat the arts as important in their own right: they cannot just be used as propaganda, and I think that — whatever the subject matter, even if it is very secular — the genuine works of art do have a spiritual dimension. And I think one’s understanding of this needs recognising and accounting for in some way. How do you account for the powerful impact of the arts in so many people’s lives? There is a place for Christian art, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. No art is value-free, or moral-free. Every work of art expresses a particular perspective on life, a particular feel for life. Therefore there’s absolutely no reason why there shouldn’t be a Christian art. But I would want to distinguish Christian art from Christian propaganda. Now I think there is a place for what I call Christian propaganda — that’s using some of the media, whether it’s music or drama, to communicate a Christian message. I think that’s legitimate, providing you know what you’re doing, and it can be fun — but you shouldn’t automatically think you’re going to produce a work of art by doing that.
Christis: There are some groups, for example the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who think that art can obscure the message behind it. It’s the idea that the symbol can become more important than what it symbolises, and it seems very close to the ideas about idolatry.
RH: I think there has always been a struggle and a tension within Christianity. Christianity stands first with Judaism, and later Islam, in saying that God is ultimately beyond anything that we can represent or think about; God is utterly transcendent. The command about making idols needs to be taken seriously. But what distinguishes Christianity both from Islam and Judaism, of course, is that we believe that God revealed himself in human form. In the seventh to the ninth centuries, the church was convulsed in debate over whether there should be a Christian art. Eventually, the seventh council of Nicea in 787 affirmed not only that there can be a Christian art but that there should be Christian art because, as they argued, the invisible has been made visible, and therefore it’s important to have representations of the incarnate God in Jesus because this is a witness to the incarnation. But there has always been a tension. In that period of the Iconoclastic controversy, many people felt that Christian art had gone too far towards superstition and idolatry, and therefore for one hundred and fifty years all Christian icons were smashed. This iconoclastic trend re-asserted itself during the reformation and in this country again in the seventeenth century in the civil war with Cromwell. We still see some of the results of that in our churches — smashed statues, and so on. Personally, I think it’s quite legitimate to have Christian symbols and Christian images, provided we know that these are only images, that they point beyond themselves to a God who is ultimately beyond anything that we can say or understand.
Christis: Returning to the idea of communication, in the history of the church, religious art has been important in communicating ideas, especially with medieval illiteracy — for example, with the mystery plays. How do you see the arts today fitting in with these traditions?
RH: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. Christian art has been used for much of Christian history, especially in western Christianity, as what you might call visual aids. This is particularly true of the wall paintings in medieval churches which you can still see quite a lot of, and of course in stained glass windows. Even when people were illiterate they could see the Christian story in the stained glass and on the walls. And as you rightly say, the mystery plays are a very good example of the Christian message being brought to people through drama. I think this is all to the good, and interestingly enough, at the counter-reformation when the Roman Catholic Church was very worried about the success of the Protestant reformation and wanted to reform itself in their own way, one of the means they used was drama. Therefore the modern emphasis in some Christian circles on the use of drama to communicate Christian faith stands in a long, good tradition.
Christis: It’s said that Christian art was used to adapt Pagan symbolism and bring Pagans into the faith, but there’s some debate as to whether Pagan symbols also adapted the Christian faith. Was it a two-way process?
RH: It is certainly true that in some countries, Christian faith took over pagan images, but I think in many cases this was entirely legitimate. One example, for me, is in Egypt of the Pharaohs. They had a sign which they call the Ankh, which means life, and it appeared in nearly all their representations of the Pharaohs. Now when the Christians first came to Egypt, they were immediately struck by the resemblance between the Ankh and a cross, and of course, if it meant life it was very natural for Egyptian Christians to adopt it. In fact on one of my cloaks and mitres I actually have an ankh, and I like the thought that this is a continuity that goes right back to the Pharaohs’ Egypt, and perhaps 4,000 BC. Another example, seen in the Mediterranean world, is perhaps more controversial. The old sites to the female goddesses were eventually taken over by Christians, who built churches there instead of temples. It is perhaps no accident that eventually the virgin Mary came to mean a lot to people in those countries, which seems to indicate a very deep-seated desire or need within the human psyche to have some sort of female image of the divine. I know we’re on difficult, controversial ground here and I think this is an unresolved debate. But I think that it’s certainly true as a general principle that the Christian church in the ancient world did want to build on continuities with the past and not just destroy them, though in the first centuries of the Christian church it did want to distance itself from all forms of Paganism. I mean, the early church, although it went for Icons and paintings, was very reluctant to allow statues because these were associated with Paganism. You won’t find any early Christian statues. So there was both a break and a continuity.
Christis: As if they took time to establish their own basis, and then grew by incorporating other artistic traditions
RH: Mmm… Yes, that’s right.
Christis: One very visible symbol of Christianity is architecture. What do you think about modern Christian churches?
RH: A lot of the churches that went up in the nineteen sixties were disasters, quite honestly, not only from an aesthetic point of view but also from a design point. I mean, from the word go their roofs leaked and they had to have thousands of pounds spent on them. One 1960’s church in our diocese we had to demolish altogether and build a new church. It was a very bad period for religious architecture, I think, but the recent churches I have consecrated seem to be of a very different order altogether. They’re not grandiose — they are much smaller, more modest buildings, but they are attractive, and they seem to me the kind of buildings that will last. They are appropriate for our time. So I would argue that there’s a much better standard of church building now than there was twenty or thirty years ago.
Christis: The tradition of specifically Christian art seems to have ebbed in the last 50–100 years. Do you think that art is less important now in terms of the Christian faith?
RH: I think we need to be a little sceptical about the idea that there is no Christian art in the 20th century. It varies a lot from one art form to the other, but for instance this century, an extraordinarily high percentage of the great composers have had a religious faith, or more specifically the Christian faith, as an inspiration. Like Messein who died last year, whose faith was absolutely central — but he’s only one of a whole number of people. Even those people who are not paid-up Christians still find Christian themes very fruitful for their work. Someone like Benjamin Britten, who probably was not a believer, nevertheless found Christian themes pretty fundamental to his whole understanding of life. The theatre producer Jonathon Miller, although he regards himself as an atheist from a Jewish background, has actually stated that couldn’t do his work without the great Christian themes of redemption and atonement because they are so central to his own life. The Christian faith is still very much a fructifying force in the arts. When you look at poetry of course, some of the great poets of the twentieth century have been avowed Christian believers: TS Elliot and WH Auden to name but two. There’s a great role of honour. Even in painting, there’s far more painters than you might think specifically painting on Christian themes. Not perhaps particularly well known at the moment, but they might very well be soon.
Christis: Would you like to name some?
RH: There’s Cecil Collins who painted rather strange pictures but from an avowedly spiritual point of view, or Alan Herbert who paints what look like primitive paintings, but are in fact rather sophisticated — again from a Christian point of view. In my book, I’ve published a picture of a Crucifixion by a man called Rykert; a very arresting, startling, representation. You could take better known ones like John Piper, for example, who did a great deal of religious art, Graham Simon, and, er, names just suddenly slip from me at the moment, but anyway, there are a lot of others.
Christis: Would you tell us a bit about your book, because most of our readers won’t have seen it.
RH: Well, there’s no reason why they should have! But anyway, it’s called “Art and the Beauty of God’s Creation”, and was published by Mowbury’s just before last Christmas. I was very lucky that Anthony Burgess of the Observer voted it one of his three books of the year, and the Observer gave it a whole page of book review, it was the last review he did before he died. I like to think that it helped him on his way into the next world… But it talks about how we account for the importance of the arts, the importance of Christianity having a place in the arts, how you account for the spiritual dimension in the arts in theological terms, and what the relationship is between Christian and more general art; those are some of the themes.
Christis: There is one last traditional Christis question which we’ll have to ask you, which is, what is your favourite kind of fish?
RH: Well, that’s an interesting question… err… well, I think it would be fresh mackerel. But it would have to be fresh.