What is the Task of Today's Christian Artist?
Rebuilding the bohemian neighborhood of the City of God
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Katy Carl
The first thing I did after my honeymoon was buy a desk. It was a monster, a huge oak rolltop that cost sixty-five dollars—not then an insignificant line item in our budget—at the midtown St. Vincent de Paul. In the thick, ferocious July heat of St. Louis, struggling upstairs because our building had no elevator, my new husband and I team-lifted the desk. It barely fit through the door of our tiny apartment.
We dusted its resident spider colony out with Swiffers and paper towels. Scarred from use, but clean and strong, this elegant furnishing dwarfed our more temporary stuff. Particle-board futon and wire shelves hunched shyly away from their grandiose new neighbor, not quite sure how to behave in its presence.
No more was I. This was a serious writer’s desk. Was I a serious writer? I couldn’t quite make up my mind to own my ambitions. The desk embodied an attempt to speak them into being, to create an environment where they could thrive. Still, in certain moods, it seemed more a hollow gesture, a pretentious pose, than a living word.
Didn’t serious writers cut ties and move to big cities to network—or out to the middle of nowhere, the better to concentrate? Didn’t they need prestigious grants—or trust funds? Seated at the rolltop, I didn’t fit the profile that lived in my own head. I was neither an overnight sensation nor a prolific prodigy. I was a jobless, broke, married, Midwest-dwelling, twenty-two-year-old woman with a BA in English, and—good Lord—we were Catholic. I knew what that meant, or seemed to: Eventually we’d end up in some little cul-de-sac, all the housework on my shoulders, and that would put an end to fiction writing. I’d seen all the sitcoms. I’d read my John Cheever. Didn’t suburbs kill art by their nature?
Looking back, it’s not hard to see how badly I had my categories confused, how desperately I clung to a flawed idea of my vocation. It was no call of mine, though I feared it must be, to make a life that looked like art. Instead, I needed to make art that looked like life.
Yet if it is—as I believe and as poet Dana Gioia exhorts—the task of today’s Christian artists to “rebuild the bohemian neighborhood of the City of God,” we will have to understand both art and life better. We cannot keep mixing up the externals, the piece of performance art that is a career, with the sustained, focused, determined practice of a craft. We can, and will have to, rebuild bohemia in suburbia. We can seize the structured lines of the purely practical and insist on limning them with beauty. We can embrace the quirky and the unworldly while also cultivating the steady predictability that helps our lives bear fruit. We can accept, at the same time, both order and surprise. In these ways, we can and should reconcile these supposed antagonists. Along the way, we may need to let go of some unnecessary things.
The myth of the art monster is first on my list of cargo to jettison. This myth arises, in part, from distorted readings of the artist’s prophetic identity in the Western tradition. We encounter the idea of the artist as rhapsode in Plato’s Ion and Symposium dialogues, and there is more than a grain of truth to their image of the artist as a conduit for transcendent value. Yet cultural distortion can hamper our ability to process this image, to understand what it means for us, and to hold it in balance with other thoughts about how to live a flourishing human life.
The experience of the Scriptural prophets, in both the Old and New Testament, resonates with the rhapsode’s role. The Lord gives dictation and expects the writer to take it—with accuracy: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets” (Habbakuk 2:2, ESV-CE). The Lord also drives the prophet to symbolic action, which places him on the margins, or beyond the pale, of social acceptability—think of Ezekiel cooking his bread over dung fires, or lying catatonic on his side for more than a year. (The local Homeowner’s Association would not approve. Fortunately, the HOA is nobody’s spiritual director.)
In the original contexts of creative prophecy and prophetic creativity—both biblical and classical—rhapsodic conduits were guided and guarded by spiritual forces greater than the individual self, to prevent misuse of their gifts. Elizabeth Gilbert acknowledges an aspect of this in her TED talk on “genius,” but if we go back to Plato’s Phaedrus (or to Mary’s Magnificat), we see it even more clearly. The spirit driving the creative act lived independently of the rhapsode. It wished to communicate only truth and wisdom, and it would not steer its spokesperson wrong. “Divine madness” might cost the poet—or prophet—his identity, but it would leave him with his integrity.
By contrast, the medieval artists and architects who built the cathedrals saw themselves not as prophets but as craftsmen. In slow, steady fashion, they practiced, refined, and handed down the traditions of technique they had received. Yet no less did they express the truth of God as the Holy Spirit then communicated it to them. Architect and artist Antoni Gaudí recapitulated their ethos in the twentieth century: blending technique and natural observation with innovation, showing that tradition need not be a thing of the past but could be living and effective.
Distortion, though, had entered the picture with the Romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They revived the old idea of “divine madness” but stripped it of its religious content—and so also of its safeguards. Creative contribution was no longer seen to arise from divine or spiritual origins, but instead from the all-important, supposedly independent inner life of the artist: self-anointed, self-appointed, and self-inventing.
So the myth of the art monster was born, and with it the unmooring of aesthetics from morals. This new paradigm all too often became an occasion for bad-faith excuse-making in the name of “experience” that fed “inspiration.” Byronic license lent itself to Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century development, which Gioia traces, of the poète maudite—in literal translation, the “damned poet,” or in common parlance the “tortured artist.”
Now, no conflict need really exist between a creative life and an ethical one. The two are, as Étienne Gilson observes, intertwined and inextricable. Yet poètes maudites painted art and uprightness as diametric opposites. This opposition is an illusion, but it can be a powerful one, and artists play into it whenever they embrace violation, fragmentation, and destruction as positive values rather than as toxins that can sicken or kill the life inherent in integration, generation, and creation.
To resist this false opposition, to envision new forms of everyday artistic solidarity, and to reimagine possibilities for creative life embedded in vibrant community contexts, Makoto Fujimura’s idea of the “cultural estuary,” found in his book Culture Care, will be one of our strongest resources.
A cultural estuary, as Fujimura describes it, is a protected yet not sequestered environment. Because it contains an abundance of natural resources and supports complex interrelationships, it affords diverse species the conditions for flourishing simultaneously. Here, artists—like the rare wild species to whom Fujimura’s image compares us—can grow and thrive in preparation for an engagement with the wider culture.
Fujimura’s metaphor is drawn from natural spaces that exist near the meeting of rivers with oceans. In literal estuaries, pollution from larger bodies of water is filtered out. Sensitive creatures take refuge in clean space, yet also enjoy free movement between the river and the open ocean. Some species remain in place to act as filters; for example, oysters remove toxins from the environment and, in Fujimura’s delicious phrasing, “turn irritants into iridescence.” Other species, like salmon, are born and nurtured in an estuary only to leave it permanently upon reaching maturity.
Yes, such metaphorical ecosystems—like their literal counterparts—are endangered in many places. Yet they still exist, and we can still protect them. Building bohemia inside suburbia could transform both for the better. It could offer inner freedom to artists, families, and communities, restoring a clearer sense of purpose by encouraging forms of productive leisure activity that are not ephemeral—ordered toward consumption, doomed to impermanence—but instead built to last.
To move in this direction, though, we need freedom from more than the myth of the art monster. We need freedom from pride, anger, anxiety, status-seeking, and fashionable ressentiment, as well as from any identity lies that stand in the way of our openness to creating what we are called to make. We need, too, freedom from materialist perfectionism, from lust for control, and above all from the groundless fears that needlessly limit so many lives today.
These freedoms are already being established, and the work of the cultural estuary is already being done, whenever we strengthen authentic one-on-one relationships—with immediate and extended family, with friends and acquaintances, with the wider community. It is already being done whenever we seek to build peace instead of escalating conflict. It is already being done whenever we read about, listen to, and view the arts with care, following the scriptural injunction to “test everything; retain what is good” (1 Thess 5:21).
A cultural estuary for working artists cannot be composed exclusively of working artists. Healthy communities work toward mutual comprehension and goodwill among artists and audiences, students, and all those in the community who are necessarily committed to other goals. Art is an act of service to the common good; art sustains and nourishes the community that in turn supports the artist.
To support this mutual uplifting, where the practices of art and the common life are integrated rather than fragmented, what else will we have to let go? The images of filtering and of freedom already suggest a willingness to do without luxuries, a clarity as to what is truly necessary. For the artist, art is a true necessity, never a superfluity. Caryll Houselander speaks of this necessity in her book The Passion of the Infant Christ. She observes that, like children, artists would far rather live in simplicity with love and the liberty to make things to their own taste than with the kind of wealth that, past the point of essential stability, becomes nothing but a burden.
My hope is that, in life and in art, Christian artists—and their communities—would begin to fulfill Houselander’s desideratum that we would pursue, not status or recognition, but “the things that satisfy our deeper instincts; to be at home, to make things with our hands, to have time to see and wonder at the beauty of the earth, to love and to be loved.”
Notice how Houselander envisions acts of making, living simply, serving each other, and sharing love not as opposed or in tension, but as confluent. In her memoir of blending creative work and family life, One Beautiful Dream, comic and writer Jen Fulwiler says:
“There is a tendency with anyone who loves any kind of work to fantasize that if you just had endless time for it, you’d be able to achieve perfection… When you put love first, not only does your life improve, but your work improves.”
In this spirit, a coda: I finally finished my first novel not at the old oak rolltop, long left behind in a cross-country move, but between a family-heirloom dining table in my own home and a perfectly comfortable bar counter in an Airbnb whose desk had turned out to be too small to use. I read and marked digital proofs sitting on our house’s blue hand-me-down couch, with my fourth child, then two years old, curled up by my side.
What had held me back before was always the myth of the art monster. The rolltop desk had been that myth’s physical representation in my life, a Dickensianly blatant symbol. I had thought it was my oak of justice, the glorious tree at the heart of my garden. It turned out to have been the poison ivy. My problem was not art itself, but my misconception of how its practice had to look to others so as to be considered valid. Only once myth turned to mist did I get over myself and learn to show up, instead, for the real work that needed to be done.
Katy Carl
Writer & Editor
Katy is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of As Earth Without Water, a novel, Fragile Objects, short stories, and Praying the Great O Antiphons, meditations. Thoughts on this essay? Leave a like and share in the comments!
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Missional Labs pitch day in central London on Nov. 15. Their pitch events gather church, ministry, and marketplace leaders to highlight the ventures in their accelerator program.
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The paintings of Jonathan Todryk.
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Very much edified by this read. I write my best poetry on the notes app on my phone when I am supposed to be paying worshipful attention in Church.
This is beautiful. Thank you. I draft poems in Google docs while waiting for school pick up or before cooking dinner and it is the most productive I have been. Love the encouragement to love and participate in the world and the words will be better for it 👏👏