Prolegomena: Three

This is the third part of my introductory discourse to this site. Please read parts one and two before this.

First of all, I think that Protestant art must necessarily involve some degree of naturalism. By this, I do not mean that more imaginative or fantastical subjects or settings are not allowable—they most certainly are—but that an effort should be made to link even very alien concepts to the reality we perceive in the world around us. Protestant doctrine has a quite populist feel in contrast with the Roman (no sacramental division between laity and clerisy, generally a less authoritative central governing body, etcetera), and Roman Catholic art has generally been made for the church itself, and thus has in mind the distinction between “religious” and “secular” life, a line which, in Catholicism, is hard and definite. (Lutheranism retains something of this distinction, and its art overall represents more of an adaptation of Roman material than a break with it—hence, I will from here on out assume a Reformed perspective and use the terms “Reformed” and “Protestant” interchangeably.) By contrast, Reformed art should ideally not be esoteric or fanciful in its coloration—regardless of who its characters are, they should behave as real human beings do. It should not convey a sense of an idealized upper realm, as Catholic art frequently does (Dante, for instance, comes readily to mind).

Secondly, Protestant art ought to be characterized by a very real moral sense. Beauty for the sake of beauty is a thoroughly ambivalent concept. In one sense, it is valuable: what is beautiful is good in itself. It needs not be covered over with a fabulous (in the sense of “told about in fables”) lesson. In another sense, however, it is obviously wrong: a Reformed standpoint cannot call anything autonomous other than God. With this in mind, it must be always “beauty for the sake of God.” Beauty is then created with the intent of being offered to God as a fruit of labor. But we are called to work also for the building up of the church, and it is in this sense that the beautiful ought also to be useful. Beauty ought to draw us to goodness.
Note well that I do not intend, here, to conjure images of cautionary tales and bedtime stories, in which the virtuous hero always triumphs and according to which the chief of virtues is always (saccharine) niceness. What I have in mind here is rather something much like the work of Dostoevsky, that most Calvinistic of the Orthodox. What I have in mind is the cry of the nameless narrator of Notes From Underground, “They won’t let me… I can’t… be good!” or the steadfast hope of Dmitri Karamazov that he will sing a hymn to God from beneath the earth. What I mean by “moral sense” is the bone-deep conviction that there is good and that there is evil in this world, and that we ought to be on the side of the good.

It will not, perhaps, be surprising if I suggest that this moral vision is mostly to be found in the tragic mode. Hamlet’s self-assessment, “I myself am indifferent honest,” is a declaration of mediocrity, but, poised between his knowledge of his uncle’s sheer wickedness and his own clear and religious conscience, it takes on new meaning. Between the great possibilities of evil and righteousness, we can attain a new level of understanding and insight. The prototype of this is, of course, the beautiful and profound Book of Job. Job finds himself unable to account for evil, both in the sense of what we might call “natural” or “circumstantial evil” and outright moral evil. He knows there is both good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness, and he cries out to God—now in reverence, now in frustration—to reveal and unmask them. It is the very type of the believing but fallen man.

Third and finally, Protestant art must have a pregnant sense of redemption. This does not need to be immediate, personal, and realized (what I will call “salvific” redemption), it can also be expectant, hoped-for, prophetic. It can be eschatological, the sense and trust that redemption is intended and will come—the “desire of the everlasting hills.” It can be the enacted redemption of Sydney Carton—“It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”—or the prophesied redemption of Hieronymus in Thomas Mann’s underappreciated story, “Gladius Dei”:
And there, against a yellow wall of cloud that had drifted from across the Theatinerstrasse with a soft roll of thunder, he saw the broad blade of a fiery sword, outstretched in the sulfurous sky above this lighthearted city... 'Gladius Dei super terram,' his thick lips whispered; and drawing himself to his full height in his hooded cloak, he shook his hanging, hidden fist convulsively and added in a quivering undertone: 'cito et velociter!'
This is a theme made available to the Reformed artist by a monergistic understanding of salvation. Because all things are in God’s hands, and His alone, redemption is never impossible. It merely waits upon the good pleasure of the Lord.

This may do as a final summation of Protestant art: all things are open to it. It has the right to treat the king and the criminal alike, as fallen men before the great Judge. It has its doctrine of total depravity and the helplessness of man to open up the great, wide vistas of tragedy. It has its belief in the utter and unlimited redemptive powers of God to open up truly comic and even, one might almost dare say, humanistic avenues of flourishing and rightness, a picture of the shalom of God and a far-off vision of the New Jerusalem. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof,” the Psalms say, and this is the heart of the Protestant ethic of art.