Sermon: What is art?

Preacher:

Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Date:

Sunday 10th March 2013

Service:

Eucharist

Guildford International Music Festival 2013

 

The artisan encourages the goldsmith,

and the one who smooths with the hammer

encourages the one who strikes the anvil,

saying of the soldering, ‘It is good’;

and they fasten it with nails so that it cannot be moved.  (Isaiah 41:7)

I want this evening in the context of this service which is part of the Guildford International Music Festival to spend a few minutes thinking about two questions: what is art, and what is art for?

Gerald Finzi (whose anthem we heard a few minutes ago) was one of the most discriminating of English composers in his choice of texts.  He and his wife Joy lived in an old farm-house outside Newbury where Gerald tended his collection of rare apple trees and assembled a library of around 4000 volumes of poetry and literary criticism.  The books are now in Reading University Library.  He also collected eighteenth-century musical scores, and that outstanding collection is now in St Andrews University Library.  Unlike Elgar, for example, who felt under an obligation to use his wife’s often winsome and sentimental poetry, Finzi was able to delve through his library and choose texts of the highest quality to set to music.

           ‘Lo, the full, final, Sacrifice’ is a good example.  The words are drawn from Richard Crashaw’s version of two Latin hymns by St Thomas Aquinas.  Crashaw was a High Churchman and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge in the years before the Civil War.  He was also a metaphysical poet.  Expelled by the Parliamentarians from his Fellowship, he became a Roman Catholic, and his ‘Hymn of St Thomas in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament’ expresses an uninhibited celebration of his new faith.

           The central theme is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and its connection to the doctrine of the eucharist.  As set by Finzi, the opening section references the foreshadowing in the Old Testament of the eucharistic sacrifice: Isaac, the son given over to be sacrificed; the ram that becomes a substitute when Isaac is reprieved; manna, foreshadowing Jesus, the bread of heaven; the Paschal Lamb, slaughtered, as will be the Son of God, to save God’s people.  In these ways, with a few deft allusions that men and women of his day would have understood instantly, Crashaw introduces his theme.

           He goes on to reflect further on Christ’s sacrifice.  It was out of love, he says, that the Son of God sacrificed his royal status, and embraced human flesh, to ‘mix with our low Mortality’, in Crashaw’s phrase.  By means of his sacrifice, Christ offers his blood, in the eucharist, to all his children:

                                            … That so all may

           Drink the same wine; and the same Way.

Christ’s undiscriminating generosity is revealed through the sacrifice of the cross, and we can lay hold on its spiritual benefits through participation in the eucharist.

           Principal among those benefits is the gift of sharing in Christ’s resurrection.  In Crashaw’s ecstatic words:

O dear Memorial of that Death

Which lives still, and allows us breath!

Rich, Royal food!  Bountiful Bread!

Whose use denies us to the dead!

To share in the bread and wine of the eucharist (the body and blood of Christ) is an anticipation of the resurrection life.

           There is, of course, much more.  Take it away and use it for personal reflection.  But before we move on, let me say something very briefly about the most striking phrase of all, Crashaw’s

… soft self-wounding Pelican!

Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man.

Aquinas and Crashaw are alluding here to the Christian use of the pelican as an emblem of Christ the Redeemer.  Pelicans have at the tips of their beaks a crimson spot, and this gave rise to the mistaken belief in the ancient world that a pelican, while really preening its breast feathers, was feeding its young with its own blood.  As a result, the pelican was extensively adopted as a symbol of loving sacrifice.  It is easy to see how the Church took this up and applied it to Christ, who not only was sacrificed for others on the cross, but (it was believed) nourished the faithful with his own blood through the eucharist.

           But let us return to the questions with which we began: what is art, and what is art for?  I want to suggest that the idea of ‘sacrifice’ can help us to an answer, and also that it provides a touchstone – an authenticity test – for religious art in particular.

           The text from Isaiah describes a group of craftsmen making an idol.  There’s a goldsmith and a blacksmith; we might speculate that there would also have been a carpenter and perhaps a carver or sculptor.  Whether the object they made was beautiful to look at or technically accomplished we don’t know; it must have been valuable if a goldsmith was involved.  So somebody had made a sacrifice in order to commission and pay for it.  But (as Isaiah was quick to point out) the thing was a sham.  How could a god be made by human hands from human materials?  To worship such a thing was a nonsense.  Art, therefore, was conniving at a lie: the essential link between art and truth was not being honoured.  The sacrifice was worthless.

           In trying to distinguish good art from bad art one of the tests we need to apply is truthfulness.  Does this painting, this sculpture, this musical composition and its text, tell a story that is true, or is it superficial, self-serving and false?  Does it tell us about more than itself, or (as with the manufactured idol) does the story end there?

           Modern art has its equivalents to that ancient cultic object: artists whose work is solely about themselves, their preoccupations, their successes and their failures.  It is essentially egotistical.  Of course, all art is self-referential.  Bach, expressing his profound Christian faith in music; Rembrandt, revealing a compassionate humanity in his portraits; Henry Moore, capturing the nobility of the human form in stone: the artists expose themselves to our scrutiny through their art.  But good art goes beyond that.  It is transformative.  It takes us beyond the notes, the painted image, the stone, into another world.  It informs and transforms our perceptions.  Like the pelican, supposedly piercing its breast to feed its young, the artist sacrifices his or her control over the music, the painting, the sculpture in order to give nourishment (spiritual and aesthetic) to others.  Truly great works of art go out into the world to become part of our common heritage and transform our understanding of the obligations, possibilities and challenges of being human.

           It is here that art and religion meet.  Both endeavour to express and explore something that is ultimately beyond our comprehension.  However, both can provide some of those ‘hints and guesses’ to which T.S. Eliot refers: pointers to partial understanding; moments when the veil is briefly drawn back.

           That was appreciated by the man who commissioned Gerald Finzi to compose ‘Lo, the full, final, Sacrifice’.  Walter Hussey was an Anglican priest who, between 1937, when he became Vicar of St Matthew’s, Northampton, and 1978, when he retired as Dean of Chichester, did more than anyone else in this country to reinvigorate the tradition of the Church as patron of the arts.  But this was not art for art’s sake.  It was art for the sake of the Christian Faith; art as a way of approaching faith and celebrating it.  Finzi’s anthem was one of Hussey’s earliest commissions; it was composed for the patronal festival at St Matthew’s in 1946.  Hussey went on to commission a string of distinguished composers: Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett and Lennox Berkeley at Northampton; Herbert Howells, William Walton and Leonard Bernstein among many others at Chichester.  In both places, he also commissioned major pieces from artists who included Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, John Piper and Marc Chagall.  Chagall’s joyous evocation in stained-glass of Psalm 150, and Sutherland’s deeply moving encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (both at Chichester) demonstrate how art can deepen and enrich faith.

           For the artist, it is like a sacrifice.  He or she selects their materials, uses gifts of mind and hand to fashion them into a work of art, but then has to let go of the precious object, giving it to a world which will make of it what it will, trusting that its message won’t be lost, that someone will understand, perhaps even see or hear more than the artist.

           It might be termed incarnational.  God the Creator expresses his being and his nature in and through the material order, and most momentously in taking human flesh and being born as man in Jesus the Christ.  Creation and incarnation are aspects of the art of God.  A world and a particular human life are fashioned by God who then ‘lets go’, allowing his creation, his Son, their freedom.  It is a sacrifice familiar to any artist, any parent.  The paradox is that in this act of release God himself becomes the eternal giver: he is the sacrifice.  Having released the created order to go its own way, he shares eternally in its experience of suffering through the cross.  Having there surrendered his life he generously gives it again through bread and wine.

           In Crashaw’s words:

The living and life-giving bread,

To the great twelve distributed

When Life, himself, at point to die

Of love, was his own Legacy.