November at Hampstead Parish Church sees a curious combination of events and themes. We start with the celebration of the Saints and the commemoration of the faithful departed and all those who have died fighting for this country. Artistically we celebrate drama in our production of a play by Somerset Maugham, poetry in readings about birth death and rebirth, and music in the special celebration of the patron saint of music, St Cecilia. We end the month with the beginning of Advent and the confirmation of the faith of a group of young people and adults. And in the middle of it all we will have anticipated Christmas with the Christmas Market, as Hampstead will also have done with the turning on of the Christmas lights on the 22nd.
In some ways this combination represents to me a question which has been on my mind for some time in connection with next year’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival which will take as its theme, Music and Dance, focusing on the fact that two great Russian dancers, Karsavina and Pavlova, lived in Hampstead and were part of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes whose early seasons are being celebrated this year and next. But what one might ask does a highly secular and morally often rather outré business like the Russian Ballet have to do with Christianity? There are very few ballets on Biblical themes (Joseph and Job are the only two I can think of). A similar problem often arises when selecting plays for performance in Church – what we do in drama here is supposed to contribute to the mission of the church and to involve religious and moral themes, but sometimes perhaps we find ourselves interpreting these objectives with great flexibility! And music can have the same difficulties, especially in times of financial hardship! What do the arts really have to do with faith and the mission of the church? In the past drama, dance, music and even the visual arts have been severely frowned upon by parts of the church, usually because they seemed to infringe a commandment or lead to inattention and immorality. At a deeper level it seems that drama, dance, art and music have been felt to appeal to dangerous instincts and emotions, expressing aspects of human nature which need discipline or correction. As R.S. Thomas once at his fiercest put it:
Protestantism – the adroit castrator
Of art; the bitter negation
Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy –
You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s
Terrible impotence in a warm world.
And yet in different ways all of the arts have also been used to serve the gospel in some way, both in liturgy and church building and decoration and in the enacting of stories from Scripture and the lives of the saints. They inspired the soul’s potency in a warm world.
So what is to be said theologically about the arts especially those which do not obviously connect with God in the way ‘religious’ art is supposed to?
Going back to the themes of this month it could be said that all the arts at their best celebrate, confirm, remind and prepare the way for the gospel in its incarnation in the deep reality of human life. What artists seem pre-eminently to do is to look at, to listen, to watch and attend to what is there below the surface of nature and human life. Sitting alone in the face of nature that can only inadequately be described as beautiful, one can feel increasingly alone and purposeless, unnecessary to the ‘sweet especial scene’; or one can discover that we are part of that scene and our role is truly to see it and praise it. As Rilke puts it:
And these things,
that live only in passing, understand that you praise them;
fugitive they look to us, the most fugitive, for rescue.
They want us entirely to transform them in our invisible hearts
into – oh, infinitely – into us! Whoever we finally are.
Whether in poetry or prose, in paint or stone, in music or dance, we look to the artist in his or her secondary creation to help us see, hear and begin to understand what God has created in and for us. We may independently have begun to do this and the more our tentative insights and imaginings are confirmed by the artist, the deeper we go. Sitting before the view we may find that our depressive mood is interrupted by a sudden memory of what we may poetically have seen or read or heard elsewhere which now transforms our mood and provides a way forward. Music or the movements of the body or an image in word or paint suddenly connects itself with something else we have seen or heard and understanding grows.
Thomas Aquinas described beauty in terms of wholeness or integrity, right proportion or harmony, and radiance. Perhaps that is a condition to which all the arts in one way or another aspire and we are moved by them because in showing us something of beauty they prepare the way for us to begin to understand the glory of God and also the extent to which we fall short of that glory and need saving from all that is ugly, cruel and untruthful.
This is not of course to encourage a religion of art. As Paul Tillich once wrote, ‘In and after the First World war, the belief in the arts as a substitute for religion broke down. Art was not able to open up the source of power to meet the catastrophes of the twentieth century.’ The contemporary search for spirituality in art may be in danger of forgetting that insight. As well as in some of their manifestations enabling us to see the beauty of creation, artists in their commitment to truthfulness and the search for meaning do in a way prepare us for the gospel. The musician and the dramatist have often enabled us to see the tragedy of things in all its harrowing painfulness and yet in the truthfulness of that articulation finding a way forward into deeper understanding. Henry Moore maintained that an artist could not work without believing that life has some significance and meaning and it is through the artists’ search that we might begin to find some important partners in conversation that the church must seek out in order to serve its mission.
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker