Did you not hear My Lady
Go down the garden singing
Blackbird and thrush were silent
To hear the alleys ringing...

Oh saw you not My Lady
Out in the garden there
Shaming the rose and lily
For she is twice as fair.

Though I am nothing to her
Though she must rarely look at me
And though I could never woo her
I love her till I die.

Surely you heard My Lady
Go down the garden singing
Silencing all the songbirds
And setting the alleys ringing...

But surely you see My Lady
Out in the garden there
Rivaling the glittering sunshine
With a glory of golden hair.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

St. John presumably would include beauty as one of those made things. The alternatives to the Christian view are disturbing.

It's possible that we ourselves made beauty. This would perhaps be the view of the naked pastor, Thomas Kinkade, Steve Pettit and Mark Scandrette. Or perhaps there is no such thing as beauty at all; what attracts us may all be personal preference and culturally determined prejudice.

But to discuss beauty would require that we familiarize ourselves with the explanations offered by those who actually made beautiful things. And if we did this, we would be doing aesthetics.

A Remonstrans reader sent me this atrocity. I don't know exactly what is wrong with this unsupervised simpleton and his fellowship of bouncing cretins, but I hope they were quickly cornered and tranquilized without incident. I encourage you to watch this, and take the trouble to read the sorts of critical judgments offered in the comment column. Many, many people found this offensive.

But why did they find it offensive? To me this is more frightening than the show.

If it is at all possible, I suggest you do this before going to bed. Brood far into the morning hours: what does this portend?

"...there is a right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action."

Can we reasonably assume that God is interested only in our actions? Is he indifferent to the matter of right feelings, right experiences and right enjoyments? And is this a conclusion justifiably drawn from a reading the Psalms?

I think it is not.

Most of our contemporaries believe that whatever limitations are imposed on us by a decadent ambient culture will somehow be adequate to the task of right living. Most assume that reform can be measured in millimeters when in fact it will be measured in metric tons, by which I mean to say that we are not only wrong in thinking that our change can be incremental, we have not yet grasped the proper unit of measure.

I thought about this again yesterday as our choir led us in a rather silly contemplation of the Promised Land. If the realities of the Christian life cannot be conceived in a culture of misguided activities and misapprehended artifacts, there will be no way to correct the sensibilities of all those kids who heard our choir sing. We will not fix in a classroom what we broke in our public worship.

If Scruton is correct in seeing culture as a way of conveying right feelings, and if Eliot is properly concerned that the loss of faith is preceded by a distortion of sensibility, then these are issues of ultimate significance.

Sentimental forms are not adequate to express a very, very unsentimental faith.

For those of you who are (or will be) reading Scruton, pay special attention to what he has to say about judging art.

These things are interesting for their own sakes. But they also confer other benefits. They create a frame of reference which permits us to communicate our states of mind. They offer consolation, amusement, enjoyment, and emotional stimulation in a thousand ways. But we do not judge them by measuring those good effects. On the contrary, we judge them on their intrinsic merits. The question before the critic is not: "does this have good or bad effects?" but "is this a proper subject of interest?"

He then discusses the defects in art that is obscene and art that is sentimental.

It is possible that the commercialization of the human heart by the modern media is responsible for the hysteria with which modern traumas are greeted. But it is not such bad effects to which a critic refers, in criticizing a sentimental work of art. Sentimentality is there on the page, on the canvas, or in the notes: it is an intrinsic property of the work itself. The task of the critic is to reveal it for what it is, and to show also that a work with this defect does not justify the attention for which it clamors.

I suggest you do two things. First, give some thought to how your liturgy addresses "proper subjects of interest". What is being clamored for?

Second, compare this type of criticism with the sort you find here. Note the points of contradiction. If the church is going to dither over bringing art into the church, you'd best prepare yourself for the sort of "art" some people have in mind. Mark's views are as intellectually stimulating as a sideline interview with an NFL player.

It is easier to spot the discrepancies between what the church has done historically and Scandrette's apery, but then make the same comparison of the work of, say, Faber, Milton, Newton and Watts with today's fundagelical kitsch.

What, exactly, has been aped, and why?

Elsewhere Roger Scruton describes the sphere of culture. For those who want to pursue the matter, I think Culture Counts is also not a bad place to start.

What should we include in the category of culture? The answer is suggested by my argument, which has pointed to a certain kind of judgment as central to the phenomenon. A culture consists of all those activities and artifacts which are organized by the "common pursuit of true judgment," as T. S. Eliot once put it. And true judgment involves the search for meaning through the reflective encounter with things made, composed, and written, with such an end in view.

It is hard to conceive of the activities and artifacts of contemporary Christianity ever rewarding a search for meaning. The activities and artifacts of contemporary Christianity certainly are not organized with such a pursuit in mind.

And it is no easier to come up with a persuasive argument that Christians should be averse to looking. But I can promise you won't find many fellow-pilgrims; I think you will find religious people fond of kitsch the way a pig is fond of muck.

They will also be suspicious of any loathsome second books you bring to the discussion. I'm suggesting you may have to think this through by yourself. You might meet with interested people in a local broom closet.

But I think it is worth it.

We spoke some time ago about the place of criticism in culture. Criticism is essential to the true judgment Eliot and Scruton talk about. What we often see today is the sort of reform that fixates on revamping hymnals or writing newer hymns or marketing slightly less dated nonsense by "people you can trust". By criticism we don't mean personal opinions about the proper proportions of melody to rhythm, and we're certainly not talking about abandoning aesthetics.

It doesn't matter if we come up with 500 new hymns by Friday if they are all bad hymns. If they merely preserve the emotional attachments of yesteryear, we will not be better off.  And if they just update religious meaninglessness, how will we have benefitted?

Scruton will help you understand the relationship between knowledge and feeling, the uses of criticism, and how one teaches culture.

It's worth your time.

_____________________
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged
Roger Scruton
Encounter Books
ISBN: 978-1-59403-194-6

 

Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is a right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.

 

There was, and still is, the philistine who wants to introduce for public amusement some meaningless innovation which he says he "can relate to"; something in a fresh "style". He should have been told in crisp and unsubtle words, "This is not a style, and for the sake of your reputation you'd be wise to keep to yourself the fact that you can ‘relate' to it."

That didn't happen.

To some small degree we've sensed that we made a mistake, but we're not crystal clear about what the mistake was. We decided to saddle all the horses we could find across the prairie and ride off at a dead run in whatever direction the horse thought was promising.

So the horses are lathered and thirsty and we now have two problems: we have the meaningless innovations and we also have the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations. I'm thinking here of that chart I showed you from someone who worked it out that rhythm related to the body and melody related to the spirit, therefore Spiritual Man would listen to music that was predominantly melodic and he would reject music that was conspicuously rhythmic. I think also of the observation that aesthetics has made our worship loud and skillful (and Catholic) when it should be soft and unskillful.

And now that I say we have two problems, I realize that I've miscounted; we actually have three problems. We have the meaningless innovations, we have the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations, and we have the excitable zealots who incited the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations.

A coma would be refreshing right about now.

Or, if a restorative coma isn't covered by your health plan, you could read Scruton on beauty. What I quoted above will be much more meaningful to you after you read the book, but even still, it wouldn't hurt for you to think through this: "The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires...".

Beauty doesn't do this; the judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires. Think about that. A philistine could get lost in a museum and still stagger out onto the street with disordered emotions and desires. Keep this in mind as you read the book.

I'm not asking anyone to accept it; I'm sure many (almost certainly all the fundagelicals) won't. I'm saying that if Scruton is right—and you're free to dismiss his conclusion only after you've read the book—then this piffle about subjective preferences and culturally determined perceptions is profoundly harmful. You are oblivious to how reason and value penetrate your life.

What we do, or fail to do, in the presence of beauty must be ominous for one who claims to honor God and enjoy his creation.

 

It is not only in the world of art that we observe the steady advance of kitsch. Far more important, given the influence on the popular psyche, has been the kitschification of religion. Images are of enormous importance in religion, helping us to understand the Creator through idealized visions of his world: concrete images of transcendental truths. In the blue robe of a Bellini virgin we encounter the ideal of motherhood, as an enfolding purity and a promise of peace. This is not kitsch but the deepest spiritual truth, and one that we are helped to understand through the power and eloquence of the image. However, as the puritans have always reminded us, such an image stands on the verge of idolatry, and with the slightest push can fall from its spiritual eminence into the sentimental abyss.

--- Roger Scruton
The Flight from Beauty

We pointed recently to some examples of well-intentioned blunders. I will repeat for those who may have misunderstood: I agree with Piper's prejudice against drama in the church. When most people think of me they think of someone who condemns drama everywhere: I object to drama in the Globe Theatre—that goes to show how monomaniacal I am about it. I stand with the Puritans and against fundamentalists, that separatist-when-it-suits-them bunch. I can't imagine Piper ever saying anything against drama that I could not agree with. What I take exception to is his observation that this desire for drama in the church can be both "a token of unbelief in the power in preaching" and also fall in the category of liberty in Christ.

This makes no sense at all. I think we all know that Piper is a better theologian than that, and I think most of us suspect he is just trying to answer a question in as politically unobjectionable a way as he can. The unthinking mob is not going to reconsider its indulgences on the strength of that characterization.

Peter Masters said many good things. I agree with his correction of Frame: I think it is idiotic to be delighted by simple, repetitive songs because there are very few thoughts in them. When someone prefers banal choruses to the Psalms we begin to wonder if this preference for "few thoughts" isn't especially suited to John Frame's own mind. Anyone who thinks Wesley and Watts are too sophisticated needs to get a library card on the very first occasion that presents itself.

"Sophisticated"?!

So I am on the same side of the barricades as Piper and Masters. On the general questions we are hunkered down in the same trenches.

What provokes my dismay is the solution.  If drama-as-liturgy stands or falls on the influence of John Piper, we are in a very bad way. If music cannot be used to express worship, we are reading different Bibles.

I've suggested in the past that we are beyond a human solution. Culture is not a hat we can throw away because next season the style will have changed anyway. It is more like a birthright: you get to discard it only once.

We now live in the Wild West, and we ain't seen no law in these here parts for neerly a hunnert-n-fiffy years, you young whippersnapper!

It's not just the rustlers and the train robbers who do what is right in their own eyes. We've enjoyed decades of this sort of vigilante worship and tribal piety.

Imagine telling Pascal that drama in church is a matter of Christian liberty. Conjure the image of J. S. Bach flying into a rage on hearing that he cannot use music to express worship. We are not only at the mercy of the bandits here, we are at the mercy of the lawmen. We're being offered these draconian remedies, ad hoc fixes and punitive solutions which will ensure that we never get it right.

This would be an ideal time to come to our senses. There is a Law. There has always been a Law. There is a law about what is good, there is a law about what is true and there is a law about what is beautiful, believe it or not. And since most people do not, you ought to become conversant with it.

Here is a place to start. I hesitate to mention it because we live among yahoos who, on the strength of reading one short book, are more likely than not to go out and shoot up the neighborhood again and confiscate everyone's pennywhistle. But if you want to be rational about it, you should read something about beauty.

Here are 197 pages about

• Judging Beauty
• Human Beauty
• Natural Beauty
• Everyday Beauty
• Artistic Beauty
• Taste and Order
• Art and Er­os
• The Flight from Beauty
• Concluding Thoughts

Please; read something thoughtful.

Please.

____________________
Beauty
Roger Scruton
Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-955952-7

I honestly think I never read such undiluted nonsense as when I read religious folk who, having embraced those bits of pop culture they liked and thought would be evangelistically productive, proceed to condemn those bits of pop culture they dislike. It's as though they just don't care about being taken seriously.

We would naturally suppose that upon seeing the error of their ways, they would stop, retrace their steps, and try to determine where they left the path. What we have in fact is a bunch of severely disoriented people certain they know the way out, and they are all shouting through the woods to one another.

I read recently that "special music" is to blame for our distraction from worship.

According to one inflatable spokesman, the first problem with our worship is that it has become aesthetic.

Surely not!

Yes, and "aesthetic" is a bad thing:

Contemporary worship, however, is fully aesthetic in purpose and practice. God is the audience and the worshippers are performers. Skilful instrumentalism is part of the offering of worship. We repeat, that many evangelical churches have, in this way, gone back to Rome, but they have actually surpassed Rome both in intricacy and decibel count. At the dawn of world history Abel's offering was accepted by the Lord because it was the very act God had commanded - a humble offering representing the need for atonement. Cain's offering, however, was rejected, because it presented his own skill, labour and artistry. It was a ‘works' offering. To parade before God our skills as an act of worship is surely nearer to the offering of Cain than that of Abel.

Back to Rome?

It sounds like Dr. Dan Sweatt has taken up the study of the fine arts.

As fun as it is to bash the Roman Catholics, the use of aesthetics in worship is not fairly attributed to Rome. Talk to the nice Orthodox people. Or the Coptic church. Or...

In fact, I'm willing to bet that the writer of Psalm 33 was not a Roman Catholic, and he spoke quite pointedly about playing instruments both loudly and skillfully.

"Music may only assist at a practical level; it cannot be used to express worship."

People, we are getting more desperate, more frantic, more audacious, and more tyrannical.

But we are not getting out of the woods.

Cigarettes will not give you cancer in the short run.

John Piper began his answer with a platitude about "the freedom that we have in Christ". He ends by saying, "Nobody's going to go to Hell because of this...in the short run."

He opines that Scripture is not explicit on forbidding "using a screen to put the lyrics up or to put the scene of a waterfall behind it or to make the waterfall actually move behind it...". He claims to be—and I believe he is—persuaded of the power and validity of preaching, and he thinks the use of video and drama largely is a token of unbelief in the power of preaching. It is hard to draw a crisp line from this "freedom in Christ" to an accommodation of tokens of unbelief.

As I said Friday, this is a perfect picture of our time: a threadbare phrase to mollify the crowd followed by a passionate assertion about the primacy of expositional preaching.

Couple this with the predictable incompetence of Evangelicals when it comes to "the arts in the church". Anyone who requires pictures of your fishing trip in order to understand the metaphor of fishing for men does not need art, he needs a caring nursery worker with a diaper bag. And recall the excitement of the philistines over on Gundersen Drive when they discover a "story of redemption" embedded in an R-rated trivialization of the human condition.

If you want to experience an imaginative and beautiful articulation of the Christian faith, I will tell you what you should do. First, stay away from churches. You're not likely to stumble across very many hymns of the church there; instead you'll get some sappy, effeminate doggerel superimposed on a film about a waterfall.

Second, go to the library and read what Christians have written.

Third, go to the concert hall and listen to the art of Bach, Mendelssohn, Cucu, Rachmaninoff, Balakirev, Pärt.... You will get to hear some pretty persuasive stuff partly because music directors who are serious about culture won't indulge your appetite for garbage with some piffle about your freedom in Christ.

It's true that Scripture does not explicitly name moving pictures as something to be condemned; nor does it say anything explicit about passing out methamphetamines in the Primary Sunday School class. Strangely, though, Scripture is pretty unambiguous about any attempt to trivialize God, his word, or our faith. It doesn't take a Walter Pater to work out that this might well include the inept mimicry of adolescents with film cameras.

Whoever thought that using dramatic entertainments would "backfire" and work against the preaching of the cross? Who could ever have anticipated that long-term harm might occur if we confused preaching with theatrical amusements?

Who beside the Church, I mean?