Aesthesis and Ascesis:
11/04/14 
James McCullough
A Review Essay and Reflection on How the Arts can Facilitate Spiritual Formation
Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? (Mark 8:17-18)
God in Jesus Christ calls and enables His people to live lives of participation in His redemptive purposes for the world. Rabbis speak of the divine tikkun ha'olam, the repair of the world, and God's people enjoy the opportunity to take part in this drama of cosmic rehabilitation.
Doing so means experiencing a process of repair in our own lives, however, and this personal rehabilitation involves what Jesus called discipleship. Discipleship in turn involves what can be called spiritual formation. By spiritual formation, I mean the assimilation of qualities and capacities necessary for participation in a life with God and in God's purposes for the world. Paul summarizes these qualities as faith, hope and love. Peter speaks of supplementing saving faith with sanctifying character qualities (II Peter 1). Later Christian reflection will elaborate on the theme of virtue, habits of the heart as it were, that enable God's people to capacitate all the good God wills for them and for their lives in the world.
In His work with His disciples, Jesus highlights a theme found way back in Isaiah and as far into the future as Revelation. That theme is of eyes that see and ears that hear. Jesus issues this challenge several times and is in several Gospel passages. Its repetition signals its significance. The capacity for awareness, discernment, and attentiveness seems to reflect and determine the condition of the heart, which in Scripture stands for the vital center of a person's motivations and affections.
I've come to believe that at the center of spiritual formation is growth in the capacity to see and hear with depth and discernment. It also involves knowledge, and a widened scope of awareness and concern. And finally imagination, the capacity to empathize and enter into another experience in which we identify with others and perhaps vicariously learn from their experiences and perspective on things. But what are the means of grace by which such spiritual shaping comes about? Classic examples would include Scripture, of course, as well as the practices of prayer, worship, fellowship, and the reception of the sacraments.
Over the past few decades, however, a host of Christians of lively faith and orthodox doctrine have begun to highlight the relationship, as I put it, between aesthesis (sense perception) and ascesis (discipline, as in this case related to the spiritual life), and of the role the arts and creativity have in this process. Let me share with you some of the names and perspectives among some representative writers, and conclude with reflections of my own.
Among the leaders of the evangelical awakening to the role of art and artistry in relation to Christian theology is Jeremy Begbie. His 1991 book Voicing Creation's Praise serves as a compelling theological consideration of the arts. The arts, for Begbie, help facilitate our priestly vocation to reflect back God's glory in creation, and do so by illuminating the texture of created reality, human experience, and the divine Being itself. Such a vocation requires an awareness of God's glory in creation, and in this human artistry can help. As a musician, Begbie frequently turns to music to exemplify how the arts function as metaphors, like Jesus parables, that reveal the hidden depths of things or the overlooked aspects of God's grace. In its capacity for simultaneously diverse unity (i.e. multiple part harmony and counterpoint), music for Begbie provides a wonderful analogy to God's Trinitarian Being.
One of the most compelling and accessible accounts of the relationship between art and theology is by the Anglican bishop Richard Harries. In his 1993 Art and the Beauty of God, Harries argues passionately for a re-embrace, particularly among contemporary Protestants, of beauty as a central theological category and as a central dimension of human existence. We know that God is holy, and loving, and righteous and just and so forth. But is He beautiful? What would highlighting this attribute of God do to our perception of God and of His ways with us? What does it even mean that God is beautiful? And what if beauty were God's desire for us? Beauty in what sense? How would we recognize it if we saw it? And what of disguised beauty, the beauty, for example, of a graphic depiction of the Cross, or of John Merrick, the central character in the 1980 film The Elephant Man? Do we have eyes that see?
For some, natural beauty and works of art actually, in some way, mediate God's intentions and presence in the world. For David Brown, such aspects of human experience have a sacramental quality and function. In his 2004 God and the Enchantment of Place, Brown elaborates this thesis in a very wide-ranging consideration of landscapes, landscape painting, and church architecture. Brown's theological agenda and pastoral passion is for the legitimizing of the whole range of human experience as a theological concern and the re-enchantment of human in an openness toward God. Brown writes:
Sport, drama, humour, dance, architecture, place and home, the natural world are all part of a long list of activities and forms of experience that have been regulated to the periphery of religious reflection, but which once made invaluable contributions to a human perception that this world is where God can be encountered and encountered often. [9]
This year alone (2011) has seen the publication of at least five volumes that advance this conversation about theology, spirituality and the arts. In Contemplative Vision: A Guide to Christian Art and Prayer, Juliet Benner conducts readers through a tour of familiar and unfamiliar paintings from Western and Eastern sources which not merely illustrate Biblical scenes but in effect exegete them in illuminating and powerful ways. Benner's gentle and accessible text facilitates the reader's encounter with the paintings provided in the book. Her text is a meditation on seeing, because 'how we see determines what we see, and what we see shapes the soul' [12].
In Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life, William Dyrness discuss the "aesthetic and affective turn" in Western culture, but rather than being threatened by it sees it as an opportunity for evangelicals to re-embrace on old and venerable practice of theologia poetica, or poetic theology, by which Dyrness means theological engagement with all forms of poesis, that is human "making." The natural desire for beauty and for aesthetic satisfaction points towards, rather than negates, a desire ultimately for God, according to Dryness, and as such should be encouraged and promoted within the church.
In Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human, Steven Guthrie, a protege of Begbie, explores human creativity in the context of the doctrine of sanctification and eschatology. In the chapter entitled, "Seeing the Spirit in All Things, Seeing All things in the Spirit: Discernment and the Restoration of Vocation," Guthrie returns to one of Begbie's themes, that of our priestly calling to mediate God's intention for the world and the worlds existence before God. Doing so requires the capacity to see and perceive the interpenetration of both of these realities. The arts help us do so by honing capacities for discernment:
The artist doesn't simply vent raw emotion but deals in the stuff of the external world - color, sound, event, movement. Neither, on the other hand, does the artist simply offer copies of reality, but rather, he commends a particular way of seeing, hearing, and experiencing the world. Consider this color when placed next to that; observe this scene from this vantage point; listen to these sounds in this sequence and arrangement; consider these events with the framework of this story. In each instance, the artist says not simply "see this color," but "look and see if you can see this color as'" 169
For Gregory Wolfe, the need of the moment for Christian and all people of goodwill to unlearn the pragmatic and utilitarian habits of contemporary life and learn again the intrinsic values of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. In Beauty Will Save the World, Wolfe commends the arts as providing "the necessary contemplative space that pulls us back from the realm of action in order to send us back wiser and more fully human" [22]. For Wolfe, human culture represents a common grace that is under threat from battles between shrill religious communities and the secular orthodoxies entrenched in academia and media. Politics then panders to these two camps. Wisdom is the need of the moment, and the arts provide a real and necessary access to it.
Finally and most recently, Timothy Gorringe in Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art, commends the arts to Christians as forms of "secular parables." Like Jesus' parables, themselves a form of art, great art for Gorringe challenge us to "think about God's reality in the midst of ordinary things" [14]. I might add the extraordinary as well. If Gorringe overemphasizes the cognitive dimension of the arts, it is nonetheless a needed counterbalance to a prejudice that relegates the arts to the merely decorative or entertaining. Artists think with their hands and through their craft, but it is a mode of reasoning, and as such provides viewers and listeners with a widened scope of thought and reflection.
These books expertly explore the relationship between the arts and theology, experience and spiritual practice. In my own work I seek to extend the conversation with the inclusion of these elements to the question of spiritual formation. I want to understand how the arts can interact with a relationship with God in a cumulative dynamic of change and transformation.
What, then, is the relationship between aesthesis, that is, sense perception especially pertaining to art, and ascesis, discipline applied to spirituality? How can the arts facilitate spiritual formation? I might outline a response in the following manner.
First, the arts engender attentiveness. This is an insight given particular articulation by the twentieth century Christian thinker Simone Weil. In her account, attention is analogous to prayer, which itself presupposes faith and love. Our capacity for attentiveness is our capacity to remain still in God's presence. In order to really encounter art we must pay attention to it, to slow down, to look and listen. For many of us, this will require discipline. We are active people who live in a culture that sees busyness as a status symbol. Great art slows us down. It takes time to indwell a novel, to look at a painting, to listen to a symphony. Begbie writes that the arts are "ineluctably acts of communication" [220]. We hope to be attentive to people (are we?). Likewise, we must be attentive to the arts, to learn the unique languages by which the arts speak to us (visual languages, sonic languages, gestural languages, etc). We must assume as posture of open encounter with an Other.
Secondly, the arts widen the sphere of our awareness. "Do you see this woman?" Jesus asks the Pharisees (Luke 7). Do we? Do we see women as real objects of God's grace, activity, attention? Certain minorities groups? Children? The handicapped? Jesus' artistry in the Parable of the Good Samaritan bequeathed a whole new language of human relations. The arts continue in this vein by way of subject matter, perhaps the most significant decision an artist in any genre makes. For many whites, for example, films featuring Sidney Poitier were the first time they ever really saw a black man. Worldly wit and scandal that he was, Oscar Wilde had it right when he wrote:
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.
It is important to note, however, that one's exposure to the arts not be limited to the conventionally beautiful, easy, or accessible or to expressions of creativity that only confirm what we already know about and believe. We need to be open to works that challenge or even disturb us. Many Christians are familiar with a love the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, and there is much to commend about his work. They form a kind of "natural theology" of God's presence in creation. But his paintings tend to emphasize an idealized vision of life. Absent are difficulties. The lights are always on. A diet of Kinkade would leave us with little insight into how God is present, or if God is present, in the midst of the ugly and problematic.
In light of this we can begin to see how the arts, thirdly, facilitate an appropriation of new truths. For me, the basic thing that all art communicates is story, the story the work expresses or the story the work participates in, what some refer to as a "worldview". Art communicates some sense of what life is about and insinuates the implicit truth-claim of its story to us. We therefore have to practice a critical openness towards the arts, but in doing so we open ourselves to things that God is up to, even in "non-Christian" ways. To read the Japanese poet Basho's haiku is to see the details of things with a Zen eye. We don't have to become Zen Buddhists ourselves to read his poetry, but we have to allow ourselves to be lead by him as he hears the frog jumping in the pond. His Zen doctrine led him to seek a sense of timelessness. Our Christian doctrine leads us to see God's working with a sense of timefulness. But we can benefit from Basho's capacity to value the seemingly insignificant and the virtue of being able to capture it with such a light touch.
So engagement with the arts is risky. But avoidance of them is enervating. The Bible itself, made up of stories, songs, puns and parables ? some not particularly "pretty" - is itself a risky work of art. Some two-thirds of the Old Testament alone is in poetic form. This should signal to us the kind of communicator God Himself is. The Bible is not a book of propositions. It is a book of narratives and images, from which propositions can be drawn, but the better we attend to the Bible's own language the closer to its Spirit we'll be. Engagement with the arts, therefore, enables us to engage with Scripture in deeper and more effective manner.
The ascesis of aesthesis, the discipline of attending thoughtfully to the aesthetic dimensions of life, cumulatively and over time shapes us into people with greater capacities to see, listen, and act accordingly. The sphere of our concerns is widened, and ability and even willingness to participate in God's concerns are developed.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Begbie, Jeremy S., Voicing Creation's Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts, London: T & T Clark, 1991. This was Begbie's doctoral dissertation, and in it he examines and critiques Paul Tillich and the Dutch Neo-Reformed theologies of creativity. The last third is his own working out of a Christ-centered account of God's creative and redemptive purposes and how the arts can illuminate these realities.
Benner, Juliet, Contemplative Vision: A Guide to Christian Art and Prayer, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011. A book for beginners, with beautiful colored plates of the paintings she considers. Meant for devotional reading, but will serve as a fine introduction to visual art.
Brown, David, God and the Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. A more sophisticated text, but a masterful review of the meaning of sacrament and how this might apply to the aesthetic dimension of human existence. The reader receives an education in landscape, landscape painting, and church architecture with a driving question in mind: How is God's presence implicated in all of this?
James McCullough is a PhD candidate in Theology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research is being done under the auspices of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, and is focused on the relationship between the arts and spiritual formation. Jim is a MDiv graudate of the Princeton Theological Seminary. Jim is married to Jill and they have four children.