Abstract
These essays, expertly edited and introduced, with full and relevant footnotes, are to be doubly welcomed: firstly as an extended postscript to Brown’s remarkable sequence of five monographs, begun in 2004, that are concerned primarily with religious experience as mediated through culture and the arts, and where, as he puts it here, ‘God might be speaking to us not only through the Bible and Church but also in the wider imaginative world where God continues to be at work, even if seldom adequately acknowledged’ (p. 4). Secondly, the 13 essays here, if rarely de novo, and drawn primarily from specialist periodicals and conference papers, will surely constitute, especially for newcomers to Brown, a succinct yet accessible account of his more extended exploitations at the always complex interface between theology and culture.
The opening section, called ‘Foundations’, is essentially a triptych of introductory essays that, drawing on very disparate sources – predictably Ruskin and Austin Farrer, but also John Coltrane, Francis Bacon and the contemporary Australian poet Les Murray – try to steer us beyond facile presumptions about divine inspiration, and more towards recognizing ‘the capacity, however this originates, of certain words or non-verbal forms to speak to us, and thus lead us into new ways of understanding our tradition as we attempt to absorb these new triggers to thought’ (p. 39). This leads on, unsurprisingly, to a related, and very penetrating, discussion of ‘The power of symbolism’. Here, Brown offers a challenging (but anthropologically grounded) contention that ‘what gives symbols their power is their multivalency’, and that ‘it is precisely because they open the viewer or reader to a plurality of possibilities that helps to explain their irreducibility’ (p. 52). He then fruitfully applies this insight to both baptism and water, not only in early Christianity but also in contemporary visual culture – for example, Antony Gormley’s sculpture in Winchester Cathedral’s crypt, Bill Viola’s video installation The Messenger at Durham, and even Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life. The sheer range and relevance of Brown’s examples are as impressive here as in his penultimate section, on ‘Artists as theologians’, which, if anything, is even more combative in tone and content. Underpinning an already very suggestive discussion about the potential contribution of artists across the centuries to three specific areas of Christian doctrine – the annunciation, the ascension and the Trinity – is a very telling critique of much ‘traditional’ theological and art-historical method, whereby: a simple translation exercise is … embarked upon, with what is allegedly ‘said’ by the paintings or sculpture judged in precisely the same ways as what is said more directly through words elsewhere. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that this is entirely the wrong approach. Painting, like music, needs first to be evaluated in its own right. (p. 102)
In sum, this remains a powerful, very readable, and at times quietly subversive exercise in theological aesthetics. Nonetheless, some might still want to argue that in an ostensibly ‘post-modern’ Western culture, where normative constructs as such, and the lingua franca of both religion and art in particular, are now so fractured and fluid, it is often difficult to envisage, as David Brown has long done, any or all of these as wholly effective and omnipresent vehicles of divine disclosure.