Whether a Christian enjoys high church, low church, or something in between, aesthetics in the Church are not about any one individual person and their particular tastes. Aesthetics are, fundamentally, not a matter of legalism, but of edification—that the Gospel of Christ might be preached and taught to all peoples, unhindered by its medium.
It is easy to say that aesthetics, especially regarding Christian worship and practice, are simply a matter of personal taste, and that everyone can have their own uniquely beautiful way of doing things. But such a position is untenable. It is clear – self-evident, perhaps – that some things are more beautiful than other things. And beauty has an important catechetical and evangelical role in the life of the church.
Objective claims can be made about that which is beautiful and delightful precisely because our God is objectively beautiful and delightful, whether someone knows it or not. As the source and standard that governs all questions of aesthetic judgment, God invites man to explore and delight in His created world and man’s capacity to create within it. This exploration should not be a reason for fear and trembling or the fracturing of doctrinal fellowship. Conversely, aesthetics should not be disregarded as unimportant or divisive. The visual and auditory world, the things we give our attention to, ineluctably shape us, and the way they are presented matters.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman recognized that the medium of communication necessarily impacts the message. A medium of communication, Postman writes, “sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth.”1 Postman rightly understood that just as a text message is very different from a handwritten letter, so too in the Church, the medium by which the Gospel is communicated affects the message.
Historically, liturgies have served as the glue holding a church’s doctrinal imagination together in unity. When Luther struck out to reform the worship practices of Rome, he paid scrupulous attention to the ideas being communicated by the words and music, as he understood just how profoundly this high art of the Church would shape the affections and imaginations of its participants. Indeed, Luther was hesitant to even translate the Mass from Latin into German, as he knew the music would no longer fit the words. As Robin Leaver writes, “For Luther, the heart of the Gospel is at the heart of every question of theology and every practical concern… Luther’s starting point for liturgical reform was the doctrine of justification.”2 Luther rightly recognized that the liturgy was not just an aesthetic or theological matter but a practical one.
Some media of communication will be more or less effective depending upon their context. For instance, if a Christian desired to share the Gospel with another individual, it would probably be unwise to sing the liturgy to them; a conversation and a monologue would be better suited to the task. Yet if the Body of Christ is joined together in worship, the liturgy becomes a profound way of communicating the faith to the congregation, and lodging the words deeply within one’s mind and imagination.
In The Father of Lights, Junius Johnson has described this experience of the beautiful as “a moment in which we are reminded of God.” In this sense, beauty has a missiological aspect. Good aesthetics serve as an excellent vehicle for sharing the Gospel. Like William Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey,” beauty offers the experiencer “a sense sublime / of something far more deeply interfused.” For a 21st-century rationalistic and materialistic society, offering non-believers a window into God’s glory through beauty has perhaps never been more crucial. As concerns the body of Christ, the movement away from beautiful churches, liturgies, hymns, paintings, sculpture, and the like strips the Christian of the opportunity to peer behind the veil and to remember God viscerally.It is common to think of objectivity and subjectivity as mutually exclusive, as though where one exists, the other cannot. Aesthetic objectivists will argue that beauty is something which must be sussed out through creative toil and labor; it is not at all dependent (they would say) upon the “eye of the beholder.” Aesthetic subjectivists would claim that their position is only a matter of opinion, anyway, and that human perception and taste are fundamental to the experience of beauty. Yet there is far more common ground between the objective and subjective aestheticians than they realize. In a sense, both positions have valid claims.
Johnson argues that “the subjective element in the experience of beauty is irreducible.” Superficially speaking, the point seems obvious–we cannot experience art through anything but a subjective experience. My eyes, ears, touch, and all my senses will never be objective by virtue of their connection to my individual soul/consciousness. This fact appears to be undeniable. Yet even still, God himself is surely objective — the good and true and beautiful which we strive to understand and join in eternal communion. This, of course, we must hold as true, while understanding that our experience of God’s objective nature is necessarily mediated by our subjective perspectives. For Johnson, the dynamic naturally results in a vast and lasting conversation, to which “we all contribute by virtue of being created as this particular image of God.”3
The importance of engaging with aesthetic considerations lies in the fact that the subjective views of God, which He has given to each individual human being, have been and can be expressed in many and various forms, in order that the world and the Church may come to a fuller understanding and experience of their Creator here on Earth. This does not mean that the Church should strive to be as diverse in its artistic style and as subjective as possible, but that, when trying to express the whole majesty of God in artistic form, there will be natural variation in which aspects are highlighted.
But it is still a great and often (naively) prideful error for the Christian to believe, without any examination, that his aesthetic tastes are the primary guideposts by which art should be adopted for the sanctuary and the liturgy. This phenomenon can occur at the level of the individual, select group, or whole congregation. At any level, it is an abuse of Christian freedom to consider one’s own particular desires supreme to those of the Body of Christ, especially considering the doctrine of the Fall and the bondage of the human will/desires to sin.
The idea that man does not naturally tend toward beauty is the same subject which C.S Lewis takes up in his tract on education, The Abolition of Man. Lewis recognized that tradition passes down from age to age important insights about the nature of reality — insights robust and varied enough that any one man would be unlikely to come across them all on his own. Without the guiding hand of the past, aesthetic intuitions are wont to lose their way. By consulting those who have come before the modern world and have sought the truth tirelessly, the Church finds a long aesthetic tradition to enjoy and steer the Body of Christ toward beauty by its example.
It is the Church’s responsibility to view art not through the lens of individual tastes, but through the lens of the edification of the Body of Christ. This, as T.S. Eliot has pointed out, can best be accomplished through a deep engagement with the tradition of great, particularly Christian, aesthetics. Trying to do otherwise, to completely avoid or reject the tradition in favor of one’s own interests was, in Eliot’s mind, not only not possible, but also immensely foolish, and full of its own risks. As Eliot notes with regard to poetry:
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.4
Eliot’s warning is timely for the modern Church; trying to divorce oneself from the ecclesiastical tradition of visual art, architecture, and poetry (especially as manifest in the liturgy and architecture of the church) runs the risk not only of creating an unsightly environment of worship, but even of inadvertently propping up the perverse.
Whether a Christian enjoys high church, low church, or something in between, aesthetics in the Church are not about any one individual person and their particular tastes. Aesthetics are, fundamentally, not a matter of legalism, but of edification—that the Gospel of Christ might be preached and taught to all peoples, unhindered by its medium. To work toward practical answers, the Scriptures and the tradition are available to those who would search them so as to help avoid what Luther bemoaned: “For everyone is constructing his own [mass]: some with good intentions, others again with presumption, in order that they may shine as also having produced something new to prove that they are not ordinary leaders. Such is the fate of Christian freedom. Few use it save for their own pleasure or advantage, not for the honor of God and the welfare of the neighbor.”5
Notes
1 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20.
2 Leaver, Luther's Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications, 174-175. Emphasis mine.
3 Johnson, The Father of Lights, 21, 31.
4 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 946.
5 LW 53:19.
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