Abstract
During my final year as a doctoral student at Baylor University, I had the opportunity to audit David Lyle Jeffrey’s “Philosophy of Art” course. Like this book, the class was at once rigorously intellectual and deeply worshipful. Jeffrey has been teaching such a course for 20 years, and he’s been publishing on theology and the visual arts for more than 45 years, so even though his formal training is in literary scholarship, this book has been percolating in his thoughts and affections for decades. And it stands as a remarkable witness to the way that scholarship can be a form of worship. If Jeffrey shows that beauty and holiness have historically had an uneasy relationship, and yet that beauty can indeed serve holiness, his work here also demonstrates that for all the ways modern scholarship can be at odds with piety, it too can serve holiness. Christian readers will find their minds enlightened and their hearts enkindled with love for the God whose holiness is beautiful beyond all human seeing.
In the Beauty of Holiness is, as its title implies, an extended meditation on how the Christian artistic tradition has imagined the proper relationship between beauty and holiness. In so doing, it offers literary scholars the opportunity to put discussions of literary aesthetics in a broader cultural and theological context. Over the course of the book, Jeffrey stages conversations between many writers—including Dante, Herbert, Wordsworth, the Rossetti siblings, Hopkins, and Potok—and their artistic contemporaries. The range of voices that Jeffrey weaves together is truly breathtaking. His discussions move seamlessly between philosophy and history, biblical exegesis and careful interpretations of particular paintings, theology and music. All of this is contained in a beautifully made book: the glossy, eight-by-ten-inch pages have wide margins and include 146 high-quality color reproductions. Eerdmans did an excellent job with this volume, and it is a rich gift to scholars and teachers.
Jeffrey begins with a reading of Hopkins’s poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” that focuses on our human tendency to make beauty a replacement for God rather than an act of grateful worship. Our contemporary culture often makes the aesthetic an ultimate good and worships poetry, music, painting, and high culture. Professors of literature, because we feel the power of beauty, are particularly prone to this species of idolatry. Yet this is a danger because beauty is intrinsically linked to the holy presence of God. Art can lead us to God, yet it’s always an instrumental good. In advancing this argument, Jeffrey provides not so much a history of Christian art as a more focused narrative about the relationship between beauty and holiness in the Christian tradition: how they were brought together in the early church and medieval period, separated during the Renaissance, and now, by some artists, are again being brought together.
Jeffrey’s first chapter surveys biblical descriptions of beauty, arguing that “there seems to be no fully accurate access to what the Scriptures mean by beauty except through appreciation of the holy” (20). We see this connection in the instructions God gave Moses for the tabernacle and the particular vocation given to Bezalel and his assistants whom God names as having “wise-heartedness,” a term that connotes “artistic creativity” and is later applied to Solomon, the builder of the temple (20–21). The tabernacle and the temple are set apart, made holy, by their remarkable beauty. Yet beauty can also be corrupted to lesser ends and so serve idolatry. Jeffrey identifies 14 Hebrew words used to express different kinds of beauty, and traces their nuanced uses. Jeffrey hypothesizes that the New Testament’s comparative inattention to beauty may be influenced by the Septuagint, which muted the Hebrew range of terms, but the larger cause is that “the primary Classical Greek word for beauty, kalos,” is used in the New Testament “almost exclusively to signify ‘good’ in its ethical register rather than ‘beautiful’” (33). For the Christian, the ultimate form of beauty is a good life. Jeffrey points to the woman who anoints Jesus’ head with perfume as an example of how this goodness exceeds merely utilitarian notions of good works (Mat. 26:10). The ESV, according to Jeffrey, is right to translate Jesus’ defense of her: “she has done a beautiful thing to me.” Jesus here unites ethics and aesthetics in a way that is deeply Hebraic. Beauty leads us to the one who is good. The beautiful temple will be destroyed, but believers themselves become temples inhabited by the Holy Spirit, and “the deeds of a consecrated life” embody the profound beauty of this holy inhabitant (35). This Christian affirmation that the highest form of beauty is a righteous life led Augustine to see the cross of Christ as the supreme form of beauty. While Augustine destroyed his early book on beauty, Jeffrey argues he remained convinced that earthly beauty, when ordered to God, served holiness. Augustine thus reunites beauty as moral good with artistic or creational beauty: the cross is beautiful because it reminds us of the act of supreme love.
This theological aesthetic shaped the development of church architecture. Central to these designs up through the late Middle Ages was a belief in an ordered, proportioned cosmos to which individual human worship should be tuned: “To construe the cosmos in this universally intelligible way is to see everything in it as an articulate expression of ultimate, transcendent Truth, a language of God waiting to be learned” (65). These proportions, derived from the description of the Temple in Exodus, Ezekiel, and John’s Apocalypse, as well as accounts from pilgrims to Jerusalem, influenced both the construction of churches and the design of poems like those by the Pearl poet and Dante. The medievals also developed a robust aesthetic of light that was rooted in John’s articulation of Jesus as the light of the world, the one who creates light and is himself light. The soaring stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals stand as the highest witness to this belief.
In the late thirteenth century, Franciscan spirituality sought to reconnect the holy with the human, and in so doing, it revitalized lay Christianity and profoundly influenced artists like Giotto: “What the alfresco painting of Giotto did accomplish above all is to make the events of the Gospel and the lives of holy saints both credible and beautiful to ordinary eyes, and not simply beautiful as art objects” (121). The effects of this Franciscan mode of emotional engagement with biblical stories can be seen both in Dante’s figural poetics and in Grüenwald’s famous altarpiece depicting the grotesquely suffering Christ. This is, as Jeffrey recognizes, a “terrible but holy beauty” (133). Typically, the annunciation scene accompanies such altarpieces because Mary, whose outer beauty manifests the inner beauty of her holy life, exemplifies the proper response to God’s address, and we who gaze on her are invited to participate in her assent to God’s will. Mary is a student of the Word, and her agency in responding to the angel’s proposal mirrors—in a redemptive reversal—Eve’s choice to take the fruit offered by the serpent. As Jeffrey concludes in describing the Ghent altarpiece, “This is beautiful art about beautiful deeds; its purpose is to invite participation in these deeds” (143).
The story grows more complicated on the eve of the Reformation. On the one hand, the Catholic Church, particularly in Rome, had become enamored with wealth and power such that much of the art it sponsored was intended to convey the church’s status more than God’s holiness. Other Vatican art, like Raphael’s paintings in the Stanza della Segnatura, conveys rich doctrinal and philosophical insight, but this art does not induce worship so much as theological reflection. To demonstrate the way that Counter-Reformation art suffered from this division between superficial, erotic beauty and holy doctrine, Jeffrey compares various portrayals of David and Bathsheba. To many of these painters, David’s sin was more interesting than his repentance, and their art accordingly evokes lustful voyeurism. Rubens’s portrayal of Bathsheba frankly eroticizes her, and Jeffrey notes that Rubens’s “popularity with wealthy patrons—including ecclesiasts—was because of just such voluptuous depictions” (211). In general, Protestants responded by either rejecting art as decadent and distracting or by crafting their own programmatic images, but Jeffrey praises Rembrandt’s rendition of Bathsheba for evading this false dichotomy. Rembrandt focuses on Bathsheba’s human suffering, trapped by a king who views her merely as an appetitive object (212). As Jeffrey concludes, “beauty here is a victim of vulgar appetite,” and Rembrandt’s painting serves as a warning to those who would corrupt holy beauty for “voyeuristic self-indulgence” (216).
While religious poets and musicians continued to thrive in Protestant Europe and England, the Protestant emphasis on the aural—faith comes by hearing—caused many painters to turn toward the natural world for suitable subjects. Casper David Fredrich is Jeffrey’s chief exemplar, and Jeffrey argues that the natural sublime enabled artists to produce an aesthetic sensation that acts as a kind of replacement for the more traditional beauty of holiness; the Romantic sublime promised a doctrine-free reproduction of “the awe once associated with religious experience” (244). In response, some artists—like those in the German Nazarenes or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—turned back to earlier forms of religious expression. Yet while religious tropes recur in nineteenth-century art, they are often shorn of any transcendent meaning. This tendency takes a more extreme turn in the paintings of twentieth-century surrealists who depict religious symbols almost exclusively to attack them. As Jeffrey argues, “Artists after the Enlightenment who try to advocate for art as a religion substitute often have recourse to traditional religious symbols and ideas, if only to subvert them” (291). Jeffrey concludes his narrative with three artists—Rouault, Chagall, and Arcabas—who genuinely seek to root their art in the transcendental reality of truth, goodness, and beauty. Fittingly, the last paintings Jeffrey examines are from Arcabas’s Emmaus cycle, which Jeffrey describes as “ineluctably evok[ing] a desire to reenter the presence” of the recognized yet departed Christ (359). God may be absent from the frame of much contemporary art, but some painters faithfully and imaginatively continue to point the way to his holy presence.
By the end of this book, Jeffrey has indeed demonstrated that “the abiding legacy of Christian art … bears ongoing witness to the love of God for the world, both in its creation and in the re-creation made possible by his advent” (365). It would be parsimonious to quibble about artists who were excluded or given short shrift in a survey as extensive as this one is. But if readers understand the artists that Jeffrey includes as representatives, they can extend the framework he provides to consider how other artists fit into this narrative. Further, Jeffrey’s many references to authors suggest how the literary tradition engages the artistic conversation that is his main subject. Hence this book provides a rich foundation for scholars interested in the long-running, interdisciplinary dialogue about how art can help us obey the psalmist’s injunction to “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.”