Jacek Salij - If God is an Artist...

Never again will men listen there to the music of harp and of minstrel, of flute-player and trumpeter; never again will the craftsmen of all those crafts be found in thee (Apocalyptic 18:22)

I have the nagging feeling that this threat is coming true before our very eyes. For can the painting of a picture, or the expressing of a poem, only to proclaim nothingness and despair, to browbeat people into believing that everything in the last resort amounts to chaos and absurdity - can this still be called art? Is the artists' task to suggest to us that we may also despair in a way that is interesting, exciting and flashy, or even merry? Is that the way art is to fulfil its vocation, trying so profoundly to "humanise" the despondency it is preaching, that it decks the despair out in the robes of heroism?

Or is it normal for the average educated person to feel so terrorised by some anonymous authority that, when he looks at some contemporary works of art, he not only doesn't dare to express his own feelings, but sometimes he even denies himself the right to such feelings? There must by an evil spirit of the times that is not allowing him to be a free person, that has cajoled him into accepting that it is his bounden duty to conform, to fall into line with what?ever it is "the done thing" to think or feel about a given artist or work, or about contempo?rary art at all. One of the reasons for the prevalent tendency nowadays to isolate oneself off from what is going on in art, I believe, is the healthy reaction of holding on to the last ves?tiges of one's personal freedom: at least in this field many of us do not want to be a magnet?ic tape pretending to be someone we aren't.

Having said the above, at least I don't have to explain why I felt piqued by the slogan, "Art as the place for Self-Rediscovery". Let art try to rediscover itself first! After all, it's been art that, for the past few generations, has made a massive contribution to all of us getting so lost!

I beg the artists whom I have the honour to be an acquaintance of, or even a friend of, and in general people who respect restraint, to be kind enough to take into consideration that the Philippic - for that is the genre of literature I am now turning to - is by its very nature one-sided. I am only concerned here with showing that art is co-responsible for there being so much ugliness in the modern world, so much despair and straying. Too often have the artists been involved in the debunking of ugliness, sin and absurdity, while hardly anyone at all has been debunking the debunking - for acquiescing to many things that we should never have acquiesced to, and even for glorifying them. Ugliness should not be disclosed in ways that only enhance it. Just as dirt should not be removed by cleaning agents which are more dangerous pollutants of the environment than the dirt they remove. All those who want an art that will become a place for self-discovery must become fully aware of how pro?foundly art has contributed to the poisoning of our spiritual environment. Any country curate can tell us that a religious conversion is a sham if it is not accompanied by an acknowl?edgement of one's sins and their repudiation.

I am a theologian and I am going to try, from the perspective of my discipline, to give an answer to the question whether art may become for us a place for self-discovery. Holy Scripture calls God an Artifex (Vulgate), which is the Latin for the New Testament Greek T~~y~p~. Sometimes these keywords have lost some of their original content in modern lan?guage translations, understandably enough (eg. Polish tworca, "creator")

.In fact the Ronald Knox - Douai translation has "Artificer" (Wis. 13:1), and the Authorised Version/RSV describes God as the "builder and maker" (Heb.l 1:10). For God is the Artifex, not in the nineteenth-century sense, of course, but in the meaning of the One who adapts the world He has created Himself for our abode, so that we may feel at home in it: "the Lord who made the heavens, and the whole frame and fashion of earth, moulded to His will. He did not create it to lie idle, He shaped it to be man's home." (Is. 45:18). In their hexaamera, explanatory works on the history of the creation of the world and of man, the Fathers of the Church were wont to distinguish between the act of creation itself and the subsequent six days of "beautifying" the Earth, turning it into a fit habitation for man.

The creation of man itself is presented in the Bible as the Artificer's work. Later the Sages referred back to this point to criticise idolatry: instead of worshipping his own Maker, man was bowing down to worship the idols he himself had fashioned!

But it is most important that we look at the Sculptor known as Jesus Christ. It is a well?-known fact that the Christology of the New Testament makes abundant use of the ideas elaborated in the latter, reflective books of the Old Testament treating of Divine Wisdom, which is called "the designer of (all things)" (Wis. 7:21), This is the way in which the Holy Spirit was leading up to the revelation at the beginning of St. John's Gospel.

I shall never forget the shock I experienced when for the first time in my life I came across an early Christian explanation why man's Creator himself and the Supreme Artist had become a man. It would never have occurred to me that this might be the meaning of Christ's gesture of the laying on of clay on the blind man's eyes. It might be worth mention?ing that the text I am going to quote was written in an environment which could still remem?ber the Apostle John, whose gospel notes this incident (Jn.9: 1-7). St. Irenaeus, author of the passage, has left a moving testimony of how he always has a mental picture before him of his master, the Venerable Policarp, Bishop of Smyrna, telling him about his direct contact with the Apostle John!

This is how, just a little after the times when the Gospels were written, St. Irenaeus explained the gesture of the anointing of the blind man's eyes with clay:

Referring to the first creation of man, the Lord shows all who can understand him that Hand of God who fashioned man out of clay. That same Artist who allows the foetus to develop in his mother's womb accomplishes His work before the eyes of all, so that the works of God may be revealed. That same Divine hand that fashioned us in the beginning and that fashions man in his mother's womb, in these latter days is searching for us the lost ones, finds his lost sheep, takes it up on his shoulders and to the delight of his companions brings it back to the communion, where He reigns for ever and ever. (Adversus Haereses, 5, 15, 2)

.It is enough to take just a glance at these three remarks on God's "artistic" activity to observe that in all three dimensions it is activity on behalf of man's dignity and liberty. First of all, the Divine Artist does not want man, made in His own image and likeness, to feel lost and homeless; He wants the Earth to be a real home for man, in other words a place where man can feel at home.

Individualism has destroyed the ancient intuition in us that the real dimension of freedom is the possession of a house of one's own, the faculty of really "making oneself at home". For the ancient Greeks, for instance, "a free woman" was a married woman, one that has a home of her own, and is the mistress in it, a housewife. In Latin, moreover, there is a striking similarity between liberty, "children", and libertas, "freedom": the Romans simply knew that their children felt at home, which could not be said for their slaves. Let us recall how often our own forefathers in Poland, under the Partitions, used to say that essence of a nation's servitude was not feeling at home, not being master in one's own country.

One might risk stating two theses: Every organisation of man's space such that the peo?ple dwelling therein feel at home is a participation in the work of the Divine Artist. Conversely, any action that fills up man's space with ugliness and false beauty, despair or the obfuscation (rather than removal) of these things, is a form of contestation of the Divine Artist, an attempt to build a human world in defiance of God.

If the above theses are true, then art is not, and cannot be, a place for self-discovery; however its significance in the shaping of the numerous spaces in which people rediscover or lose themselves is so important that it cannot be overestimated.

The second dimension for the "artistic" activity of God is not merely human space, but simply man himself. The Divine Sculptor wishes to mould me and each one of us in His own image and likeness. This dimension, too, is connected with our calling to freedom. For our likeness to God consists, among other things, also in the fact that we may be our own mas?ters and do not have to suffer the bondage either of our anxieties and passions, or of diverse anonymous authorities or hidden manipulators. In this dimension, too, works of art may help us on the road to freedom, but they may, on the other hand, intoxicate us with visions of a counterfeit freedom; they may strengthen in us the joy of life and mutual intimacy, but they may also deepen and aggravate our loneliness and hasten our decline towards death.

Naturally, art's double-edged potential also affects our part in the third dimension of God's "artistic" activity, the dimension in which man has become the subject of the redemptive concern of Jesus Christ. Works of art, not only the religious ones, may provide us with consolation on our road to salvation, towards our deeper and deeper self-comprehen?sion; but they may also lock us up in a morbid self-satisfaction or in despair, in other words, in the narrow tram-lines of the temporal.

But is such art that is not a co-operator in the Divine Work but its destroyer still a work of art? There might be some well-founded doubts as to this. Perhaps it might be worth while recalling again the Apocalyptic curse against Babylon: "Never again will the craftsmen of all those crafts be found in thee.

Scriptural quotations in English from the Ronald Knox - Douai translation of the Vulgate, unless identified as the Authorised or Revised Standard Version.