To Suffer the Beautiful
Part Four: Recovering the Imago Dei within Artistic Sacrifice
In the first three parts of this To Suffer the Beautiful series, I’ve outlined three corners of the picture I’d like to frame. In the first part, I carved out the notion of Artistic Suffering within the realm of art and beauty; in the second part, I distinguished Artistic Suffering from general suffering and aimed to show the former’s redemptive and remedial nature; and in the third part, I outlined the additional notion of Artistic Sacrifice within the sphere of Artistic Suffering, and I emphasized how the former notion has disintegrated within the modern art movement as it bleeds into our day. In this fourth and final part, I will seek to dive deeper into Artistic Suffering and to offer a solution to its disintegration.
Peter, Matthew, and John’s latest essays—which I highly recommend you read if you haven’t already—come at an opportune time, since all three explore concepts within art that are essential to my solution, especially the element of transcendence. While Peter explored the notion of transcendence within the modern artist’s creative act, Matt supplemented Peter’s work by flushing out what exactly the aim of artistic transcendence is:
“The proper and de facto object of true art is the virtual contemplation of the human soul… The divine, of course, cannot be excluded from this picture, since…the divine is the origin of the artistic spark. Yet, art nevertheless remains a properly human endeavor.”
Neither angel nor beast strives to encapsulate beauty through art, yet man does. Art is a properly human endeavor. Yet neither is it the case that man must necessarily seek to encapsulate God directly whenever he creates art; he instead seeks to represent something of the human condition through “the virtual contemplation of the human soul.” In a sense, then, each artwork is a story of souls, including the artist’s own soul.
However, as John writes in his latest article, the imago Dei (“the image of God”) is inherent in the very personhood of man, so while we might not create art with God as the direct subject, his inherent image within creation and the human soul—the proper object of art—is pervasive. The forms and content of our work reflect the structures of God’s creative DNA whether we want them to or not. We recognize something in art because it is a patterned re-presentation of creation (perhaps this is what makes art a truly proper form of recreation, that is, re-creation or sub-creation). By creation, I do not simply mean material things, but the created order in a comprehensive manner, which is inclusive of both physical and metaphysical realities—earth, heaven, principalities, souls, etc. Art in many ways does not present something new but something recognizable and formative.
Again, art is not divorced from a divine source even if its proper object is the virtual contemplation of the human soul. The issue I raised in part three of this series, however, is that the understanding of this divine source is false within the modern (and post-modern) art movement generally. Peter addressed this incisively in his last piece as well when he wrote that in the wake of a western society which had grown exceedingly progressive in the twentieth century, “the common man’s experience of any transcendent reality disappeared, and the artists’ creativity became the last connection of man with anything beyond or above his daily mundane experience.” In other words, a secular culture, while divorced from God in a real sense, is still drawn to divinity and it finds this divinity in art itself, although in a grossly misconstrued way, which is exactly the issue.
A major part of this misconstrued notion of art arises because of a misconstrued notion of the human condition and the human soul in which suffering has lost any sort of value within human living. As such, the proper roles of Artistic Suffering and Artistic Sacrifice have also devolved and been subtly disordered towards improper ends (in the case of Peter’s article, ends which are not really an end, but a sort of downward spiraling game of artistic charades). The issue will only be remedied, then, when artists recover a sense of Artistic Sacrifice in which their own egos and artistic solipsism are burned at the pyre in their effort to create something truly new—new because it has been born from the heart of the old.
A certain distinction to be made here, of course, is not that we need more artists creating Christian art—although there’s certainly no harm in creating more works like Michelangelo’s Pieta—but that we need more Christian artists creating art. We need artists who, while committed to incarnating beauty in a fallen world and while respecting the mysterious nature of beauty, are also committed to the truth and not just their own vague, esoteric versions of it. It’s one thing to have an artistic insight into the human condition, it’s another to be able to communicate it through art.
Furthermore, if man cannot rediscover the imago Dei within him, then he is likely not to find anything redemptive or healing about his own suffering or the suffering of others. If a man fails to cultivate the divine life within him, it will be because he has rejected the furrowing plow of suffering and the seeds of sacrifice sowed in his lifetime. There is no greater manifestation of this intersection between the imago Dei, suffering, and sacrifice than Christ’s passion, and, as such, it is the Crucifixion that stands in a special way as the divine source and summit of Artistic Sacrifice. This manifestation lives on through those artists that embrace it as the perpetual standard against the transient fashions of every age.