For Christian virtue to rise above its pale and monotonous image, it must, like art, become a bridge between the visible and the invisible.
In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus looked up into the face of a priest and was struck by its gray, mirthless, sunken appearance. Dedalus had considered taking holy orders, but now a future confined to the holy life seemed “grave and ordered and passionless.” The prospect of pursuing an artificial perfection seemed unbearable.
Stephen Dedalus came close to living out his life as a committed Christian. He cherished the state of grace after his conversion and responded to the call to be holy, but he felt a cleavage between human wholeness and the religious goodness that he saw. And so he turned to something else that moved him to the depths: the passionate pursuit of beauty as an artist. In our own time, Dedalus’s road away from religion has become a congested freeway.
Making Truths Tangible
When aroused to confront the challenges of a secular age, believers usually focus on the difficulty of believing. Our contemporaries seem to have a hard time grasping tales of angels and demons, the Virgin Birth and the Second Coming. We struggle to make these truths tangible in a world whose inhabitants do not regularly bump into miracles.
Much effort has gone into creating an intellectually credible apologetic, but Christianity faces another problem, one that involves deeper instincts: the problem of who has got the good life. If religious truth does not grab us by the lapels, religious goodness is still less compelling. Experience speaks louder than doctrine, and thus, for the great majority, goodness is what first attracts their attention. Very few turning points are based on abstractions. Not many of us (unfortunately) go around seeking truth, but all of us are after the good life, the meaningful life, the life that does not merely entertain but satisfies.
Stephen Dedalus wanted to believe. The mysteries of the faith attracted him precisely because they were glorious mysteries. But something tripped him up: the “pale service of the altar,” the failure of religious goodness to compel.
Conservative Christian goodness has acquired an insipid image. Too often it simply whines from the corner of the sanctuary, mumbles excuses at parties, and shuffles along out of step and slightly behind the times. Religious goodness is regarded by our secular contemporaries as a trivial pursuit. Compared to efforts to achieve world peace and end world hunger, preoccupations with jewelry, foul language, and whether women should preach do not seem earthshaking.
Conventional religious goodness is seen primarily as something that avoids evil. Because it is perceived as the absence of something, goodness is unable to inspire. Religious goodness confronts a world full of threats—anarchic rock lyrics blaring on every frequency, suggestive TV shows on every station, riotous parties in every neighborhood, decadent materialism all over the mall—and has to turn away. To the conventionally good, the world is morally toxic: like a continuous stream of tobacco smoke blown in one’s face. The easiest sermon to preach is on why the world is going to hell.
When avoidance is at the center of morality, when virtue is a matter of continually whittling life down to size, then it will appear pale and stifling. If a people’s primary focus is on remaining unspotted by the world, they will invariably become petty in order to preserve their peculiar patch of religious turf undefiled.
Tragically, conventional religious goodness manages to be both intimidating and unchallenging at the same time. On the one hand, the prospect of spending one’s life always vigilant against the evils of the world fills people with dismay; it is just too hard not to fall. On the other hand, though vigilance is difficult, the challenge does not seem to be all-important; it somehow does not seem worthy of our best energies.
Reimaging Virtue
If we are to find a cure for Dedalus’s Complaint, we must radically alter the way we think about being good. It will not do just to buckle down and try harder, to push our pettiness to the limit. We have to reimagine virtue and rediscover its original passion.
The New Testament call to holiness is something very different from the pale, chill order of conventional goodness. There is an intense vision in the Epistles that is remarkably close to the passionate ambition of an artist. We see Paul, an up-and-coming member of the Pharisee party, throw away social approval in order to press toward the high calling that has laid hold of him. Paul is compelled. He urges us to make righteousness a consuming pursuit and proclaims that conventions like circumcision mean nothing—the only thing that counts is new creation.
I suggest we can best reimagine virtue through the paradigm of creating art. We must rescue goodness from the petty and pedantic, and restore it to what God intended it to be: an art form, a high calling, something with eternal resonance.
To Make The Law Musical
Great works of art and spiritual accomplishments have much in common. The connection is embedded in the fundamental biblical principle of the dynamic relationship of law and spirit.
Scripture does not present God’s law as an arbitrary code plopped down on the world, but as something inevitable, ingrained in the universe. This moral law, defined as good, spiritual, and holy echoes the “good” description of God’s creation repeated almost as a litany in Genesis 1. Harmony and color, emotion and rhythm are good; the fabric of creation is good. Artists who master those principles move and enlighten us. God’s moral law is every bit as inherent in creation.
In Psalm 119, the poet rhapsodizes on the priceless heritage of God’s precepts. He makes the law musical. He longs to meditate on those statutes; he treasures every word in his heart. One is reminded of someone poring over the score of a masterful symphony.
It is hard for us to relate to that psalmist. The law, for us, is an impersonal entity imposed on us by impersonal institutions; our encounters with it generally involve traffic cops, clogged courts, convoluted tax codes, zoning ordinances, or a maze of unintelligible propositions on a ballot. But for the psalmist, the law revealed God; it was personal.
The precepts and statutes that inspired him were not isolated entries in a thick code book, but a series of notes in the great score that expressed God’s character.
Many artists echo the psalmist in their appreciation of essential truth, of the world’s fundamental forms. Even a romantic painter like Delacroix, reacting against a rigid classical style, valued “the hidden symmetry … the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc.” Almost all artists would confess a longing to uncover eternal laws in the world they reflect.
The law is an essential prerequisite to the expansive, creative virtue we might call artful goodness. But law is not enough. The law can point us toward imitation, but not art. It continually runs into the barrier of our carnal nature, our tragic twist away from expansive goodness toward petty selfishness. Sinfulness includes a bent toward the pedantic. We don’t naturally ascend: we guard turf, take offense, strike back, put down, complain—all without effort. But we grasp spiritual values only by taking pains.
The carnal nature is reductionist, recognizing only the most obvious pleasures and quickest rewards—or punishments. Listening to an enthusiastic testimony about someone’s “new life in Christ,” it hears only that he doesn’t drink or dance anymore. The part about a “personal relationship with Christ,” floats through the mind untouched.
Externals can be efficiently passed from generation to generation. A liturgical form is repeated faithfully through the decades. Wearing veils, not painting fingernails—these things snap right into a subculture. People without a shred of interest in spirituality zealously preserve these “standards” through centuries. But when it comes to passing on patience or peace—that effort falls apart within a few years.
In trying to raise us above the pedantic, God had to deal with the problem of our sinful nature. On a legal level, he absorbed its worst consequences by sacrificing his Son as our substitute. On an experiential level, God unleashed his Spirit to transform those who accept his sacrifice. He attacked the hopeless dullness of the carnal nature by pouring his own creative energy into us. This is the missing element. For artful goodness to occur, law must be animated by God’s Spirit.
The Spirit within us is presented as a potent brew: We were “all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13). To the Ephesians, Paul presents being filled with the Spirit as an alternative to drunkenness (5:18). That strong spirit produces expression: Believers speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (5:19). Conversation is lifted up so that chit-chat turns to art. The spirit-filled believers make melody with their hearts to the Lord, getting beyond the dull chant of the wage laborer. Having the spirit means that God himself is at work in us. Ancient poets were so taken with their inspirations, so driven to expression, they described the creative process in the language of possession. The Spirit-filled are God-possessed and must express him.
Artful Goodness
The artist, especially the painter, develops a disciplined way of looking at nature, or the world. He looks carefully; he finds new ways of seeing the ordinary; he puts things together or tears them apart. The artist looks with intensity, involving his intellect and emotions. Then, when insight develops, he gives it expression in paint or poetic cadence.
Morally speaking, the Word of God is our world, the source of our art. We need to look at it with the same intense involvement that the painter looks at life. We must find new ways of seeing the familiar, involve our intellect and emotions, and then, when insights develop, give them expression.
The Spirit turns law into artful goodness, creative expression. The law becomes light (Ps. 119:105–06), not a dense code book, and we can paint with light. The Spirit fleshes out the black-and-white character sketch of the law into full-color expression. Goodness grows to be more than just putting round pegs in round holes and square pegs in square holes; it is offering up sacrifices of praise to God, creative works that rise like incense above the mundane to echo God’s qualities. In Christian history there has almost always been pressure to confine goodness to one style. At one time, extemporaneous prayer in public worship was scandalous; you had to go by the book. The saints used to believe that singing anything except psalms and scriptural canticles in church was an insult to God.
How much better it is to reveal the richness of the Word to the world! Our challenge is to see deeply the original source of inspiration, nature-the-Word, and then to express it in new ways. That is how we progress. Instead of patching the wineskins, we must make new wine.
Beyond Avoidance
Jesus specialized in enlarging the Law. He urged his contemporaries to move beyond their confining traditions and inspired new ways of expressing old truths. There is a great gap between conventional religious goodness and the teaching of this artful Master.
When socializing, conventional goodness refrains from throwing wild parties, avoids drinking or carousing; and issues no invitations to the impure. Jesus suggests something different: “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed …” (Luke 14:13–14).
Conventional goodness submits to indignities without retaliation. Jesus wants something more. He wants us to be disarmingly—stunningly—good. Why not dumbfound the oppressive Roman soldier who forces you to carry his burden one mile by carrying it two?
Conventional goodness fasts and prays and puts on a somber “spiritual” face. Jesus tells us to fast and pray and put on a red dress.
The New Testament is always pushing us beyond imitative good deeds to artful goodness. And some have caught the spirit and responded. Throughout history, men and women have gone beyond conventional religious goodness and demonstrated a robust virtue that compelled their contemporaries.
When confronted by a growing crime rate, conventional goodness locks the doors, bars the windows, and votes for mandatory sentencing. Artful goodness checks out the streets—like Father Mario Borrelli of Naples, who disguised himself as a “scugnizzi” gang member, panhandled on the streets, slept on basement gratings, ate scraps of food out of old tin cans, and, after winning the trust of street kids, founded the House of the Urchin to give them a home.
When unjustly accused, conventional goodness is filled with righteous indignation. Artful goodness expresses something more enlightening—like Pastor Harold Welkin, who answered a parishioner’s venomous letter filled with outrageously false attacks by writing four simple syllables: “Please pray for me.” Welkin won the man’s devoted friendship.
Conventional goodness avoids questionable amusements. Artful goodness tries to turn them upside down—like Doctor of Theology Ignatius of Loyola, who agreed to play billiards with a fellow professor on condition there was a stake in the game. Ignatius won and laid down his terms: the man must read the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius’s devotional guide, and practice them for one month. As a result, there was a marked change in the life of an irreligious professor.
Artful goodness means going beyond our chronic defensive fight against evil. In our conventional efforts to be good, sin usually dictates the rules and the battleground. Sin becomes the focus of attention: we constantly define it, react to it, avoid it, overcome it, careen around it.
It is time goodness took center stage. In our lives, we can express qualities luminous enough to be called art. The driving force of the good life, the best life, is positive expression, not defensive reaction.
Vincent Van Gogh carried on his fierce struggle against madness because he had something to express: “In a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize.” The artistic drive compels people to put up with all kinds of hardship in order to capture something eternal, something that matters. If Christian virtue is ever to rise above that pale, monotonous service at the altar in the greatly shrunken world of religion, it must capture this same drive to express, to become a bridge between the visible and the invisible.
