A New Feature on the Arts: 'The Refiner's Fire'

In today’s culture, formal philosophy is infrequently taught and less often understood. Values for living are often put forward and discussed not so much in academic treatises as in the creative arts, including drama, music, literature, and the visual arts, all of which have been dealing in religious dimensions more overtly of late. Failure to recognize the “messages” in such cultural expressions does not mean that one is immune to their influence.

Evangelicals are showing an increasingly lively interest in the arts, and a more critical eye and ear. We welcome this, and respond with a new feature, “The Refiner’s Fire,” under the direction of Editorial Associate Cheryl Forbes. For its premiere we offer two items. First, an engaging introductory article on critical discernment by Bonnie M. Greene, who teaches English at Bellevue Christian High School in Bellevue, Washington, is a free-lance writer, and has B.A. degrees from Seattle Pacific College and the University of Washington. Next comes a sprightly review of the film “Time to Run” by Miss Forbes, graduate of and graduate student in English literature at the University of Maryland, a member of our editorial staff for two years, a singer and music lover, and the only person we know who reads Milton for pleasure. “The Refiner’s Fire” will appear every other issue. Perhaps it will be the area of the magazine that calls forth the most reader dissent, for criticism is always a subjective realm.

Discerning Artistic Spirits

Of all the paintings and prints in my living room, only one is by an artist whose name brings instant recognition. And it is that print which often prompts a guest to ask if I am an amateur artist. I explain that it is a print and attempt to change the subject, for I know he’ll blush and laugh nervously when he hears that the painting reproduced is by Van Gogh. In his embarrassment, he’ll probably mutter something about how long it has been since he took art appreciation in junior high. His discomfiture is too great to allow the kind of chuckle the situation deserves, nor do I really feel free to drive out the old myth about the “world of art”—an exotic place that we may all visit on our vacations, but that is open during the off-season only to the rich and to the artists themselves.

Whether they know it or not, even people who claim to prefer the “objective verities” of the sciences participate in the world of art every day. For art is a means of stylizing a basic heart commitment, whether it comes from the brush of an artist who makes his living by giving shape on canvas to his understanding of life, or whether it is reflected in the hard-cash purchase of a seascape to fill the blank space over the fireplace. A person who visits an art gallery only when he’s on a tour to Paris or Rome is nonetheless likely to decorate his home with prints of the safe masterpieces, or perhaps with the large garish scenes found in the drugstore. He pays taxes to support art collections in municipal museums, to fill libraries with fiction, poetry, and drama, and to staff state schools that train many of the nation’s future artists. If he watches the nightly news on TV, he glimpses glittering events at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he may bristle when a presidential council suggests federal funding for the arts. He watches movie adaptations of Hardy and Conrad novels to relax before going to sleep, and he may even go to a play or two—Fiddler on the Roof, if not The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. And so the average person does participate in the aesthetic life of his community, as an involuntary patron if not an actual consumer.

The major art movements can affect a person more subtly than he could imagine. One of the best examples of art’s broad influence is in the use of asymmetrical magazine layouts, which were introduced in Vogue back in 1920 by an art director who loved the work of Pieter Mondriaan. Within thirty years Mondriaan’s ideas about art had changed the face of nearly all the better-known magazines in the country. The average person read the magazines without knowing that serious art was pushing its way into his life.

If art didn’t have much influence on the rest of life, it might be all right for a Christian to choose to ignore art except when it intruded into his life unavoidably. But art is powerful, and it is persuasive. Furthermore, art is important because it forms a part of the way we put our lives together. In the paintings, the dances, the sculptures, and the music with which we surround ourselves are found the spirits—whether of apostasy or of faithfulness—that shape our heart’s understanding of life.

“Highbrow” art aside (ordinarily a fruitless distinction for the Christian), the spirits of the age shout loudly from the art produced for mass consumption. For instance, one branch of American mass art is a sort of dehumanized paean to technology. The furniture is made of cold chrome and vinyl, and the vibrant, geometric shapes of the paintings and sculptures reflect the power and might of the machine. And the women’s magazines translate the methods of modern technology into simple terms so that a reader can create decorative art from tin cans and doweling while the children are at school.

Another branch of mass art rejects the power of technology in a back-to-nature stylization of the old romantic concern for individual freedom. The hand-crafted look turns up in ethnic art, in macramé wall-hangings, in découpage on dressers, in batik screens, in jasmine-scented sand candles, and in many other forms. It makes little difference how odd the piece is, as long as it obviously was made by hand rather than by machine.

Art for the mass market also breathes the romantic spirit in the escapist pieces that fill department stores, Bible bookstores, and discount houses all across the country: seascapes that never saw an oil slick or a dead gull, pictures of children with over-sized eyes, portraits of families who never heard an angry word or the whining of a tired child, and ceramic moldings of panthers, peacocks, and every conceivable kind of exotic plant. This never-never-land kind of art fits perfectly into the plushly romantic decor of many American homes. Even the “highbrow” art that reaches the masses of people comes in condensed versions of the classics and in such television romances as Jane Eyre, which stripped the novel’s heroine of her classic feminist trappings, substituting a beautiful actress for the thin and ugly Jane.

Whether one chooses to decorate his surroundings with reproductions from the supermarket or original prints from the Museum of Modern Art, the art he chooses grows out of a perception of life that is rarely articulated and that might dismay him if it were.

Art is powerful and persuasive not only because it is a part of a person’s life style but also because many artists have something important to say about their heart’s perception of life. An artist’s perception of the meaning of life engages the whole man—the senses, the emotions, the intellect—and calls for a commitment of some sort from his audience, whether a minimal response of sympathy for a character or a major response of devotion to an ideal. For instance, Shakespeare’s dramatizations of events taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles gave uneducated Elizabethans an afternoon of entertainment and beauty and also, without straying into propaganda or didacticism, aroused their sensibilities to basic human issues: questions of morality, justice, the source of government’s authority, the limitations of power. The same questions were implicit in the histories of Holinshed, but Shakespeare’s dramatic art, which was not essentially intellectual, drew a fuller response from the viewer than did the historian’s prose. Even art that is only mediocre as art can prompt a reaction to important issues. The reader of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man chokes with anger and frustration at the injustice and exploitation the hero encountered as a child and in college. Although he probably does not close the book with an articulated plan for combating injustice and racism, he knows he can never again gaze indifferently at racist institutions and customs.

Because art is powerful, because it is important, and because it is unavoidable, the Christian should learn to discern the spirits that move it. Part of his personal commitment to Jesus Christ is a responsibility to grow in his understanding of how Christ’s redemption claims his entire life, even his participation in the arts. The Christian who does not test the spirits of the art he encounters makes himself vulnerable to subtle influences he might heartily disapprove were he aware of them. Furthermore, the Christian is called to speak the prophetic Word of the Lord for aesthetic life to those around him, whether they be his own children or skilled playwrights, painters, poets, and musicians.

Admittedly, discerning the spirit of an art work is no easy task. The critical tools taught in high school and college develop skilled readers, but only the eye of faith can see beyond the intricacies of the technical performance to perceive the artistic response to the Law-Word of God. What the artist sees and puts down in words, colors, or sounds grows directly out of his heart’s perception of life. If he sees the healing redemption of Christ coming to men in need of real salvation from real sin and guilt, his basic outlook (though not necessarily his style or his subject matter) will be totally different from that of the person who thinks of the world as an intriguing, if perverse, place to be manipulated and developed for man’s pleasure. There are as many different attitudes toward the world and man’s place in it as there are artists, of course, but only the eye of faith will recognize the apostasy or the faithfulness that motivates the artist’s heart direction. For instance, Picasso’s broken figures and distorted human faces suggest an irreparable brokenness of life, but Janice Russell, a Christian painter from Chicago, gives her people a look of serenity in the midst of the brokenness. Russell shows Picasso’s influence in her style, but her own vision of healing transforms that style to reflect the Truth.

Exercising the eye of faith takes considerable practice. Courses in art criticism seldom speed up the process, for the job is much more than a critical exercise. The Christian faces a battle of spirits involving the whole person. To enable him to get to the heart of a work without being sidetracked by less important considerations, Calvin Seerveld, in A Christian Critique of Art and Literature, offers three questions that lead to a basic understanding of the artist’s heart attitude toward Jesus Christ. He asks himself: (1) What does the work say about man? (2) What does it say about the universe? and (3) What does it say about sin?

Many modern writers portray man as a helpless victim or an aimless wanderer for whom satisfying life is impossible. Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown relates the downfall of a mime who begins to disintegrate when his common-law wife leaves him because friends convince her that the church must sanction her marriage. The novel’s final scene pictures a dissipated mime playing the part of a jongleur on the steps of a Bonn railway station among people who remain nameless and indifferent to his anguish. With similar hopelessness, Robinson Jeffers’s poem “To the Stone-Cutters” expresses what many serious writers feel:

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated

Challengers of oblivion

Eat cynical earnings.…

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun

Die blind and blacken to the heart

The hopelessness depicted in many European plays and films like La Dolce Vita suggests that while man’s life is terrifyingly empty, he is incapable of salvation because he doesn’t have the ears to hear, and the prophet is dumb as well.

Other writers do not express despair as much as they picture men who are sickly parodies of the whole, healthy men intended to reflect God’s image. John Updike’s couples are inclined to little more than illicit sexual relations. B. F. Skinner’s scientists in Walden Two are so scientifically programmed that they hardly seem to breathe. In the film The Twenty-fifth Hour Roumanian peasants are reduced to cringing shells of human beings by their political conquerors, who are themselves reduced to unfeeling beasts. Sartre’s prisoners in No Exit testify that human beings are fiendish hypocrites, driven by total selfishness.

At the other extreme are the optimists who paint a hyper-rosy world. Although the happily-ever-after novels and the cheerful movies enjoy wide audiences, they seldom reach the plain of serious art and therefore do little to counter the black resignation of much of the modern art world.

But what about artists who say something positive and true about man? Although incisive revelations of the human heart occur quite frequently in serious art, few artists elicit a biblical response from the viewer. One who does is Georges Rouault. One of the most moving paintings in modern art is his portrait of two sagging prostitutes, which with grey-blue hues suggests that the artist sees sin and what it does to human beings, but also knows that above all they are human beings and need compassion. Flannery O’Connor continually asserts that the cripples, the fat, and the ugly are human beings who must be treated as such, and not as cases for developing social responsibility, or experiments in applied psychology, or just plain trash. F. J. Powers’s short stories portray priests in the pettiness of daily life, but they are men who live in true faithfulness to God because they are whole men, not waxen figurines who whisper ineffectual prayers to occupy their time.

The characters in a book are usually clearly drawn, but the author’s understanding of the kind of world they live in may be only suggested by such elements as the role of “fate,” the successfulness of the hero’s struggle, and the kind of salvation deemed possible. For instance, Hemingway leaves Frederick Henry without a country, without Catherine, and without hope; as A Farewell to Arms closes, he is at the end of a road in a closed world where men suffer under cosmic frustration. In Waiting for Godot Lucky and Pozzo wait interminably and pointlessly in a wasteland world in which salvation is continually promised but never realized. Camus’s narrator in The Fall describes an inferno-like world of growing evil in which the judge/penitent confesses his way into a superior position and thence into the spot vacated by the God of his ancestors. Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage plods along in a world to which she knows salvation will never come; her only response is to keep plodding and to continually whittle human needs down to the sliver that men can expect to fulfill. And in The Great Gatsby the only supernatural force is the feeble remnant found in the celebrated eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, which stare across an ash heap at the tragedies of human life.

Among more popular artists the most common views of the world are probably epitomized by two films of the sixties, The Graduate and Easy Rider. In the first view, the “good guy/little guy” breaks through the evils of the system and creates a new world for himself through courage, luck, reason, or whatever happens to fit the artist’s tastes. Works of this sort might include Jane Eyre, Zadig, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Seize the Day. On the other hand, Easy Rider is an example of the kind of work in which the “good guy/little guy” takes the brunt of the senseless outbursts of an implacable system. Other works like it might include The Stranger, All My Sons, and The Pawnbroker, works in which the protagonists struggle but find the obstacles too great for them to overcome.

Few modern artists have a biblical sense of the world and man’s place as the crown of the creation, yet subject to the law of God. One who does is Jerry Koukal, a Seattle artist, who frequently expresses the idea that some things endure in this life despite the chaotic changes most people encounter from one year to the next. His style is almost anachronistically representational, with old but working pumps, weatherbeaten barns and rural houses, and beached dinghies filling his landscapes. Flannery O’Connor’s gothic tales express the horrible violence that breaks forth when the spirits of good and evil clash in a world suffering under the weight of spiritual battles. In one of her best-known stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a foolish old woman is murdered when she presses her feeble faith on a convict who holds her at gunpoint. The woman’s death is horrible and shocking, but O’Connor recognizes that the world marred by sin is not a place where good always prevails and evil men fall before the tin swords of the puniest Christians.

When the Christian confronts the portrayal of sin and evil in art, he has to keep his wits about him, for many authors use very complex narrative devices that disguise their personal attitudes. For instance, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Defoe’s Moll Flanders tell their own stories, but they are not to be trusted implicitly because at times they may be ignorant, naïve, overly emotional, or simply deceived. In a similar manner, Antonioni used the out-of-focus shot in The Red Desert to suggest the viewpoint of a woman who didn’t understand everything she saw.

Many artists are more straightforward in their narrative technique, and therefore their attitudes toward the sin they depict are more easily discerned. In The Morning Watch James Agee describes a churlish teen-ager who blasphemes while he genuflects at a pre-dawn Lenten watch; Agee’s sympathies are so clearly with his sensitive companion who struggles to worship sincerely that there is no doubt what the author thinks of the young hypocrite.

Sometimes the Christian faces the problem of determining what the artist considers to be sin. Some look on evil as a result of poor conditioning, while others see it as simply an asocial phenomenon. Probably the most widespread attitude toward sin is the reduction of real sin and genuine guilt to transgressions of society’s rules and mere guilt feelings. The pattern begins in children’s books (which seldom pretend to be art, of course): no one plays with the neighborhood bully until he stops picking on the little children on the block. In books for adults, a democratic consensus on what is sinful is so widespread a standard that it often goes undetected until a particular evil is traced back through several generations of writers. For instance, though abortion has always been a popular form of birth control throughout much of the world, few serious authors treated it sympathetically until quite recently. John Barth’s The End of the Road has a modern stamp because he creates sympathy for the lovers who are forced into incredible trickery to find an abortionist because the mores of their small-college town are so “old-fashioned.” Clearly, enough people now approve of abortion to allow Barth such an open attack on the anti-abortion faction.

It is extremely important that the Christian apply a biblical standard for judging sin, rather than one that sees sexual sins as the only ones worth worrying about. For instance, Robinson Crusoe and Horatio Alger are guilty of greed and exploitation, which are just as immoral as Tom Jones’s sexual problems. The Christian’s task in such a case is to be careful that he is not subtly induced to join the author in approving evil that many would not call evil because they live by the wrong spirit.

In an age that prides itself on its honesty and frankness, it’s not surprising that many serious writers recognize what sin does to man. Even apart from social-protest literature, the broken relics of sinful living fill the pages of many modern novels. Shirley Jackson’s parable “The Lottery” describes the terrible selfishness that results from clinging religiously to irrational tradition. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams clearly pictures the paralysis and slow death that a sick mother inflicts on her children. Some of the best-known paintings of the century express the tragedy of sin’s effects on human life: Chirico’s “The Anguish of Departure,” Picasso’s “Guernica,” Shahn’s “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Nevertheless, the artist who perceives the horrors of sin seldom offers more than sympathy or an appeal to the nation’s social conscience. Few artists know the hope of true healing through Christ’s redemption, and those who do run the danger of turning their aesthetic efforts into polemic, dogma, or theology. There are some, however, who reveal a rare Christian understanding that sin reaches deep and complicates life so much that simple solutions and perfectly happy endings are not possible.

The Christian’s analysis of art will be an arduous and lonely task, for there are few teachers to encourage and even fewer critics to guide. If grappling with the spirits of aesthetic life leaves us tired and discouraged because the armies of the Lord are so few in number, we need not worry; fatigue is not deadly. The real cause for alarm will come if we allow ourselves to shrink from this gargantuan task because our faith is too small, too simplistic, to meet the despair and perplexity expressed in the works of the artists among us.

BONNIE M. GREENE

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