This Weekend Ecstatic features Isaiah Morris Today’s essay was featured live at our London Inkwell Evening
I HAVE A CONFESSION: I’m tired of all this talk about “Christian creativity.” I’ve seen innumerable conferences, conversations, allowances of mediocrity, and seeming platitudes. Too often, despite all the examination of the place of our craft within the heart of the lover who captivated my God’s eyes, there’s little to actually show for it—crystallizing into what feels like mere superficialities.
In my repeated conversations with friends, and in reading op-ed after op-ed, it’s as though we oscillate between naive optimism and cynical despair. We declare that everyone is creative but that contemporary art needs to be “redeemed for Christ.” You’re either a recent “convert” and feel as though only crucifixes are worthy of being painted or an exvangelical who says anything but crucifixes should be mentioned. This is a story many have told and not one I will reshare. But I think there’s an underlying issue.
Saint Jerome by Jan Olis
Iris Murdoch, in The Bell, articulates the problem through the Abbess of a lay-Anglican nunnery, Imber Abbey:
Work, as it now is… can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative. A few professions, such as teaching or nursing, remain such that they can readily be invested with a spiritual significance. But although it is possible, and indeed demanded of us, that all and any occupation be given a sacramental meaning, this is now for the majority of people almost intolerably difficult.
The disgruntled interactions many artists experience may have more to do with the inadequacy of our language to give our professions spiritual credibility. So, we simply wax our words with vaguely religious meanings, hoping that will kindle the flame. We know that these things matter to God, but the pastorally authorized lexicons don’t feel up-to-scratch. However, what if it's not a pastoral stamp of approval that we need but instead a deeply felt and known metaphysic?
I want to argue that we need a more substantive bedrock for the practice of art—one that takes seriously the potent depths of wonder: a wonder that is linguistically robust and not just surface-level; that seeks to cultivate a yearning for otherness, for that genuine desire to enter into dialogue with that which is not me. In laying this foundation, we might just find language that permits us to love more deeply even in the midst of our artistic becoming.
I REMEMBER IT like it was yesterday, walking into my seminary’s library and seeing Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord on the shelf. At the time, I was a second-year theology student reconciling his love-hate relationship with Australian Pentecostalism and the confusion of my creative career which was thriving in the context of blaring music and strobe-lit dancefloors most weekends. Surprisingly, Balthasar speaks on none of that. Instead, he offers a broaching, dense framework for wonder (along with the rebellious feeling of telling my pastors, “I’m now reading Roman Catholic theology”).
It was Balthasar’s theological vision that had me consider monastic life for a few years. I would incessantly think about and visit Tarrawarra Abbey until, finally, gaining the courage to tell my professor, “I’m not sure if the Lord is calling me, a Pentecostal, to the Religious Life. Could we discuss this?” He, an Anglican-turned-Pentecostal, smiled. Dr. B took my quest for spiritual rigor seriously.
Yet, it was in having read Iris Murdoch’s words via the Abbess only a few months ago that I now realize what I was seeking all this time was the “intolerably difficult” sacramental significance in my vocation as an artist.
IN THE GLORY OF THE LORD, Balthasar tells a story where, up until their scientification, aesthetics and Beauty were a disposition of openness toward the world as imbued by God’s Glory. He goes on to consider Heidegger’s question: why is there something rather than nothing?
Essentially, Beauty reveals the wonder that there really is something rather than nothing. Balthasar proceeds to bring this idea to a crescendo, which I paraphrase: the particulars of creation participate in Being itself as the eternal victory over Nothingness. Creation’s victory is that it is not nothing. Sustaining this victory is the God who is beyond Being. Creation celebrates this win by radiating God’s Glory as Beauty, endlessly expressing itself in Freedom, as pure Gift, and as Love.
Therefore, Beauty opens us up to wonder and awakens us to others. Balthasar illustrates this illumination through a glance, saying:
“[In the mother’s smile, the child] awakens at the love of the Thou, as it has always slept in the womb and on the bosom of the Thou… Therefore it is right that the child should glimpse… ‘God’, first in … its parents, and that only [later]… does it have to learn to distinguish the love of God from the love which it has experienced in this way.”
NOW, BALTHASAR’S CONSTRUAL helps to set the scene for the arts, as we return to Murdoch’s wise Abbess: how might we attempt to suffuse twenty-first-century artistic practice with spiritual meaning?
Art’s primordial gift is akin to the parent's glance, evoking a positive distance between the self and someone or something other. This actual “gap” between the image and me is itself the possibility of Love’s eruption. Art asserts that materiality is the site for the event of Love, enacting that “glance”, that “wink”, that “gesture” toward us to participate in it. Or, following Murdoch, art invites us to become a ‘half-contemplative’, to behold and consider there being something ‘other’.
Art’s horizon and groan is for Love’s theophany. The creative act, therefore, testifies the belief that this world is worthy of being adorned, even amidst profound suffering and grief. Good art cultivates this potential toward communal actuality; while bad art abuses it for self-indulgent ends lost in a solitary ‘I’’. As Murdoch says in her essay, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” (1966):
It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.
To which she goes on to say:
The great artist sees [their] objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is… away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.
Before discussions and conferences on how beauty can save the world, we first need to declare the reality that Creation is the site for epiphany—encountered through a bodily grammar, as God chose to manifest himself in the Incarnation. Whether consciously or not, artists are trying to provide a sense of epiphany to the contexts of their time. This can be done well when the work of art created is the glance it is meant to be.
This may be why so much contemporary Christian art is unpalatable, merely kitsch, or struggles for spiritual significance; it only attempts to appease. It makes no attempt to really listen to the song of reality as it actually is. The image is constricted to something it was simply not meant to be.
In The Bell we are left with a contradiction. The underlying plot of the novel is that this particular Abbey commissioned a modern church bell to replace the lost and ancient one. Meanwhile, two characters discover the ancient bell in a lake, and decide to secretly swap them before the big reveal. However, failing to replace it, the modern bell is, in a very Anglo-Catholic manner, processed up a hill. As it begins to ring loudly, the bell’s wooden frame collapses.
Somewhat comically and somewhat mysteriously, the bell disappears into the lake. For one nun, the response is to jump in the water like a madwoman. For the press, it makes for a great front-page headline. But, at no point does the event allow for apathy. While it is precisely this heightening of the mundane that Murdoch is offering, she simultaneously prescribes the bell with a seemingly mystical quality. This image of a bell, quite literally, escapes their grasp—some will chase after it, while others will use it to tell more stories. But what the bell’s gift will not invite is a return to the so-called ordinary.
IT WAS MURDOCH’S monastic fiction that glanced at me. I had confused the desire to justify my artistic vocation with an attempt to embrace the spiritual rigor of monastic life. Through The Bell, that space between what I could have been (a monk) and what I am (an artist) was filled with the in-breaking understanding of love. Love as a gift to the real world through ruthlessly orienting my life to what I’m supposed to be.
Through art’s symbols, metaphors, and images our imaginations are sparked toward a confrontation with the world as it actually is: a gift of God’s Love. The arts continually offer new metaphysical moments of wonder at the some-thingness of creation, inviting us to participate more thoroughly in reality. Murdoch helped me to see that I do not need to retreat from the world in prayer to gift it with my love, and neither should “Christian creativity.”
To faithfully participate in this world is to discover that church bells are sounding everywhere—yet, sometimes, we may first need the ones we think should ring to come crashing down. So, ring me Your Beauty God, and not my idolatry.
Isaiah Morris Writer & Artist
Isaiah Morris is a London-based, Melbourne-born multimedia artist, curator, and writer. He holds a Master’s in Christianity and the Arts from King’s College, London. Isaiah has shown projection and light-based art across Australia, Japan, Korea, and the UK in galleries, shopping malls, music festivals, and churches.
What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
We help build thriving, faithful creative networks around a poetic core. Join us at our upcoming Inkwell Evening in Charlotte, North Carolina on February 22. Let’s gather for an evening of art, storytelling & friendship.
I really enjoyed reading this -- the journey with Von Balthasar and Murdoch and the current conversation in "Faith & Art" circles was interesting, and I took notes (not something I often do for a Substack essay!). So thank you. I heard the emphasis on the Incarnation, which of course, we know about because of the witness of the Scriptures, but I was also looking for the Scriptures as a whole to be offered as at least an informer in shaping this "more substantive bedrock for the practice of art." I get that the Scriptures can be used and abused to discourage artists, to silence creative work, and as a blunter of every sharp edge. That's not what I'm after --rather, I'm coming to see the whole Biblical narrative as a revelation of "the world as it actually is: a gift of God's Love." It felt like that was missing from this essay. I'm a writer so I know that you can't say everything in any given piece, but if he's after a "new metaphysic" -- yes and amen to the centrality of the Incarnation of the Word, but what a glorious gift we've been given in all of the Old and New Testaments. I'm becoming passionately convinced that artists who are Christians would do well to spend more time there.
Isaiah threaded this needle masterfully.
I really enjoyed reading this -- the journey with Von Balthasar and Murdoch and the current conversation in "Faith & Art" circles was interesting, and I took notes (not something I often do for a Substack essay!). So thank you. I heard the emphasis on the Incarnation, which of course, we know about because of the witness of the Scriptures, but I was also looking for the Scriptures as a whole to be offered as at least an informer in shaping this "more substantive bedrock for the practice of art." I get that the Scriptures can be used and abused to discourage artists, to silence creative work, and as a blunter of every sharp edge. That's not what I'm after --rather, I'm coming to see the whole Biblical narrative as a revelation of "the world as it actually is: a gift of God's Love." It felt like that was missing from this essay. I'm a writer so I know that you can't say everything in any given piece, but if he's after a "new metaphysic" -- yes and amen to the centrality of the Incarnation of the Word, but what a glorious gift we've been given in all of the Old and New Testaments. I'm becoming passionately convinced that artists who are Christians would do well to spend more time there.