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Jim's PERSPECTIVEFebruary 8, 2016O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Psalm 96:9 One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord. 27:4 And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. Psalm 90:17 “Worship” and “Beauty” are two subjects that are of crucial importance to me. To get at worship I think that I must begin with beauty. Many of us have read or quoted the above scriptures that speak of the beauty of the Lord. Some writers have tried to articulate what the “beauty of the Lord” is, but none have caught my attention as much as Jacques Maritain, who is someone I’ll bet the vast majority of us know nothing about. That’s a shame because he has so much to say about the nature of existence and of the Kingdom of God. I myself have discovered this great French Roman Catholic philosopher relatively recently, having seen his name in print in a theology textbook when I was at Duke Divinity School thirty years ago. That “Inner Voice” redflagged his name in me, but I didn’t follow up on him until the past couple of years. I have since become a devotee of this guy (who died in 1973), and he is as important to me as C.S. Lewis or any other living or deceased thinker. In 2014 I had been reading the letters of Flannery O’Connor, and she wrote to a friend at the time that she was reading Maritain’s then just-published (1953) Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. When I saw that, the “Inner Voice” said, “You have to get that book now.” And so I ordered not only that one, but a re-print edition of a philosophy textbook that he wrote in 1930, and, as it turns out, his An Introduction to Philosophy is the best book I have ever read on the subject. Twice, in fact, and I am going to read it again. He believed, as did Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (in whose steps Maritain is following), that philosophy must begin with metaphysics, that is, one must start with questions related to the nature of being, essence, and existence. He pointed out in that book that objective, rational, logical, and discursive approaches to knowledge, scientific and otherwise, fall short of the mark. He is not the only one who ever said that science will tell us what something is, or how it works or acts, but science does not deal with questions about the “whys” things are. They simply uncover (“dis”cover) things that were already there. They don’t deal with how or why they got there in the first place, or what they are in their essences. I have digressed a little, but I felt that I needed to establish a background for the discussion on Beauty. In Maritain’s book, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, he wants to know the nature of the creative act, particularly the creation of art. Along the way he also tried to get at the meaning of inspiration, and how something comes from nothing. “Ex nihilo” is how the early theologians expressed it. Many of us know the scripture from Romans 4:17 that God “calls things that are not as though they were.” That’s essentially what artists do. Maritain mentions in the beginning of the book that music is perhaps the best way to express what he’s suggesting, but that the inclusion of music in the discussion of art is too broad for the scope of his task. And yet he uses many musical examples, and he quotes musicians themselves—as he does artists/painters—who wrote about the processes of how they do what they do. I’m still moving toward beauty, but to do that, let me first try and put into words how Maritain defines art. He says, more-or-less, that art is the engendering of, and the participation in, beauty by discovering the rules of making, supplied by the intellect through the means of emotion by way of the senses. I realize that this a mouthful, so to speak, but this what I have been able to put together in my own mind concerning what Maritain wants to say in terms of how he perceives the very nature of art. “The engendering of, and participation in, beauty” are his words. But what is Beauty? We all assume that we know when something is “beautiful,” be it a sunset or a baby or a woman or a well-built piece of furniture. But trying to define it is somewhat more difficult. To do so, Maritain draws on three concepts from Thomas Aquinas’s discussion on the Trinity in his seminal work, Summa Theologica. Aquinas and Maritain say that there are three components of Beauty. Beauty has 1) Integrity or authenticity, which has to do with the fullness of being; 2) Consonance or proportion, which has to do with unity and order; and 3) Radiance or clarity, which has to do with the light that emanates from things and illuminates the intellect (p.161). Readers’ eyeballs must be popping out of their heads about now, if you’ve even bothered getting this far, but I must say that understanding this stuff is really important to me. God creates and, in spite of sounding redundant and ridiculous here, creates creators. God, the creator, wants us to create as well. We discover something in ourselves that I believe that God has put there in order for us to know a little something of how he himself operates. Aquinas believed that “the existence of all things derives from divine beauty.” So do I. For me, worship and beauty go together, and I refer to the above verse that we are to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Every time I read that I am reminded of something that I heard my deceased friend and evangelist father-in-law, Earl Tyson, say repeatedly when quoting that passage from Psalm 96. He contended that many have reversed the order of the verse to read, “Worship the Lord in the holiness of beauty.” Earl was suggesting that some worshipers are more caught up in the form they use to worship in order to participate in it. For them, worship must be “beautiful.” High-Church—or high-brow—people are what he had in mind. And incidentally Earl was one of the few ministers that I knew who was equally comfortable with High Church folk as he was with so-called Low Church. He had the ability to relate to, and be received by, farmers in Seven Springs, NC who sat around a pot-bellied stove eating sardines out a can. He loved them and being with them, and they loved him back. Earl also could don the robe and stole and officiate alongside a Roman Catholic Cardinal (which he actually did) in a High Church wedding held in a castle in Spain. He was also admired by the well-to-do. But Earl’s comment, “’Some think that to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ actually means, ‘worship the Lord in the holiness of beauty,’” was about the tendency of more than a few High Church worshipers to look with disfavor on a worship experience that is not based on ritual, order, procession, ceremony, pageantry, and “appropriate” music as the means for allowing such worship. They would consider emotion-driven, impromptu, informal and casual worship settings as gauche and vulgar. I have known many such worshipers. In fact, in the past I myself have been called “vulgar” by some of my own parishioners essentially because of music that I love and play, and which, by the way, I believe to be no less “appropriate” and “authentic” for worship. However, I will also say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with ritual, procession, ceremony, or pageantry, and, in reality, there are many aspects of High Church worship that are extremely appealing to me. There is nothing like a processional to a Bach chorale. But looking down one’s nose at other worshipers cuts the other way as well: I have also known Low Church parishioners who made fun of the more formal elements of High Church worship, especially its music. I have said many times that I happen to love the music of the black church. And I love the forms and styles of music, many of which originated in the black church, which led to blues and jazz. I believe that there is freedom, freshness, and joy found in a so-called emotion-driven and spontaneous worship experience that is often lacking in the more formal settings. “Emotion” and “experience” are key ingredients in any worship context. Worship (and its music)—High or Low—that fails to impact one emotionally does not do its job. I quoted Maritain earlier as having defined art as “the engendering and participation in beauty.” I am tempted to borrow and re-apply his definition to worship as the engendering and participation in HOLINESS. To their credit, those who consciously and intentionally seek an emotion-driven worship experience realize, if only instinctively, that emotion is the proper vehicle for reaching people and ushering them into the Presence of God. However, I believe that they often mistake what’s actually happening, or is supposed to happen, in such an experience. Some feel that one must “by-pass the intellect” (but keep in mind that a few others go the exact opposite way--trying to by-pass the emotion in worship) by constructing forms and structures that allow emotion to accomplish its end. The goal for them is to get people to respond, not intellectually, but emotionally. For them, an emotional experience becomes the end-all of worship. On the other hand, I’m not sure if those who self-consciously seek an emotional experience realize that the goal in worship is not an emotion at all, and that emotion is not the epitome of experience. Emotion, as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Maritain believe, is the actual means to one’s intellect. This quote, found on page 96 of Maritain’s book (Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry), stuck out in my mind: “…according to (Aristotle), nothing is to be found in the intellect which does not come from the senses.” I think that this could be re-stated as “the way to the head is through the heart.” The implication of all this is that emotion is merely a vehicle to get us to an even higher goal. It strikes me that both High Church and Low Church often mistake this higher goal, which, in my mind, is the true goal, and this has to do with the components of Beauty/integrity (authencity), Consonance/proportion (order), and particularly Radiance/clarity (illumination). Radiance, again, according to Aquinas is the “light...that illuminates the intellect.” The larger goal in Integrity, Unity, and Clarity, is not beauty, for beauty’s sake, and is not emotion, for emotion’s sake. Anything that is done authentically will get us to Integrity, Unity and Clarity, and anything that will get us to Integrity, Unity, and Clarity is acceptable worship.
- Jim Radford |
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©2013 Jim Radford. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
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