Prolegomena: Two

This is the second part of my introductory discourse on this site. Please read the first part before this.


What I have called “Protestant art” has a much smaller corpus than the Roman Catholic, and my opinions on its shortcomings are both suspect (as I am a Protestant myself) and underdeveloped (as I think I would need more time to consider it in its full breadth, and as it is much less frequently held up to the public eye). However, I think I can identify the characteristic Protestant fault: it is, plainly, ugliness. Bad Catholic art is lascivious and florid; bad Protestant art is correspondingly moralistic and totally lacking in beauty. Perhaps I ought to say instead that Catholic art is ugly with the ugliness of the fop, Protestant art with the ugliness of the miser. Roman art of low quality swallows up the figure in finery; poor Reformed art smears the figure with mud.

But I am not here to criticize Protestant artistry, I am here to defend it (I come not to bury, but to praise). This is my chief aim. To begin with, then, I must answer the questions, Where is Protestant art to be found? It is somewhat different in character from Catholic art—it is less visual and more literary, though it does have its notable painters—so what are its chief characteristics? What are its inner qualities, what makes it worthy of notice? These are hard questions, but they must be answered—and I will do so to the best of my capabilities.

Protestant art has roots in the time before the Reformation. The Franco-Flemish painters and their conventions would be the guiding light for subsequent Protestant forays into the plastic arts. A school of realistic art with an emphasis on the life of the ordinary citizen grew up in the Low Countries prior to the sixteenth century—this is the aesthetic that would guide the great figures of the Dutch Golden Age of visual arts. A concern for the common (as well as a certain penchant for stark and wintry scenes) plays a part in the Protestant artistic ethos. But the best embodiment of the Protestant visual style is, undoubtedly, Rembrandt. His biblical pieces are more human and restrained than the corresponding works of the Roman tradition, his portraiture is realistic but sympathetic and simultaneously conveys an affirmation of life and a moral sense. His “Return of The Prodigal Son” is arresting, a scene of intense but human momentousness appearing out of the starkness of the black canvas. His “Raising of the Cross” is the strongest argument I have found against my own iconoclastic position: an eloquent depiction of religious truth (it is Rembrandt who crucifies the Christ in the piece, just as it is all of us in fact). His work is the positive pole of Calvinism which is almost never seen or noticed—the world seems only ever to find the negation in the Reformed position, not its affirmation.

But, as I mentioned, the characteristic art of the Protestant world has been literature more than painting (sculpture has remained largely a Catholic domain, perhaps due to the influence of iconoclasm), and it is here that I feel most inclined and most able to speak. I wish very much that I had the talent for visual art—it is expressive, concise, and eloquent in a way that no other art can be—but I do not, and my critical eye for it remains, at best, that of a slightly educated amateur. But if I have any art in me at all, it is literary, and if I have any critical faculty at all, it is for literature.

I said before that Dante is one of the world’s treasures in the field—well! let that stand, it is so—but I will take John Donne over a hundred Dantes. The characteristic Protestant form is not the epic—Milton is, to my mind, an aberration and atypical, as is Spenser—but the lyric (not, however, that there are not good Catholic lyrical poets), and Donne is a master of the style. Donne’s specific theological commitments are somewhat less than clear, though I am inclined to think of him in a Reformed context (whether he is a predestinarian or not), and he certainly represents, to me, a kind of archetypal Calvinist artist. He raises hard questions, his words are sharp-edged and bold—he even dabbles in some risqué material (in a way that I cannot really imagine a good Anabaptist or Methodist doing). His work has dark tones, but its structures are breathtakingly gorgeous. And, vitally, his work (especially the later work) is characterized by a kind of moral incisiveness that is indispensible for the kind of Protestant milieu I have in mind.

The same holds true, as I see it, for the more serious works of Shakespeare. I am well aware that the actual ecclesial allegiance of the playwright is questionable (though I personally find it hard to believe that he is anything but a member of the Church of England), but his work occurs in the post-Reformation period of England, at a time when Reformed influence was high (though, it is true, there was much influential Catholicism as well). And I cannot think of anything else to call Hamlet and Macbeth than meditations on the depravity of man, in a very Protestant (and perhaps even Calvinistic) mode. Hamlet and Horatio are, after all, young students from Wittenberg (Luther’s school), well aware of the wickedness of men—“this quintessence of dust”—and Macbeth’s headlong charge into what he knows full well is evil bears the marks of Luther’s rejection of the Aristotelian notion that all men seek the good.

But what I have said to this point is really only circling the issue—as I said, I believe that the artistic potentialities of Protestantism are largely untapped: Scotland and the Netherlands never produced a truly great composer (and England’s best, Handel, was really a German), the overzealous segments of the Reformed movement were actively anti-artistic, America had little time to create prior to the onset of modernism as a philosophy and form, and so forth. What I mean when I say “Protestant art” is still largely an ideal, not an actuality. We see glimpses of it in various artists, but it rarely if ever truly expresses itself fully. I suppose, then, that I should lay it out plainly and simply.