The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do, Part 21

We return here to our examination of the meaning of the Bible’s form and its implications for Christian artists.  Over the last two weeks, we discovered that God has constructed Reality in such a way that symbols (whether verbal, visual, tactile, etc.) must be used for communication.  We also saw that everything that exists in Creation is a symbol of God (Gen 1; Ps 19; Rom 1; etc.).  We found also that every symbol communicates knowledge or content, since it represents (re-presents) the thing it stands for, and that knowledge communicated symbolically addresses the intuitive aspect of the mind primarily, and thus transcends Aristotelian logic, though it does not contradict logic.

We saw, as well, that symbols communicate multiple levels (or layers) of meaning or content simultaneously (e.g., it represents more than one thing at the same time).

This biblical doctrine (that everything in Creation is a symbol that communicates more than one level of meaning all at the same time) is the basic building block of all Art, in whatever form it takes.

To illustrate this, let us first contrast symbolic and artistic endeavor with one of the more deliberately artistically limited forms of communication we have: didactic speaking and writing, such as is employed for the purpose of teaching or transferring information with no deliberate attempt to ornament either the mode of expression or the content to be communicated at all (e.g., “Thou shalt do no murder” or “obey those in authority,” etc.).

Now, as we saw several weeks ago, because language utilizes symbols such as written or verbal words, letters, and thought-constructs (such as figures of speech or colloquialisms), even didactic (or “teaching”) communication inevitably and inescapably utilizes artistry (in fact, didactic communication that emphasized the artistry inherent in the form is usually thought to be better and more memorable, hence more effective, than didactic expression which does not do so).  However, the primary concern of didactic expression is to communicate information in such a way that the meaning of the content to be taught is reduced to its essential essence (e.g., its “bottom line” or primary meaning within the context in which it is being taught).

This is not a bad thing.  In fact, a goodly portion of the Bible (the Epistles, case law, etc.) are didactic communication.  It is good to know the bottom line, to clearly be taught what to prioritize in ethics and belief, and so forth.  In this sense, then, didactic communication seeks to limit the layers of meaning to one within the context of what is being taught overall.

The problem is this: we moderns in the West tend to value this mode of expression above the plethora of more determinedly artistic modes of expression (in Scripture and elsewhere), because we have been captured by an Enlightenment mindset that values utility (or usefulness) and rationalism (a belief that holds that only that which may be comprehended by the mind in an Aristotelian logical matrix is worthwhile) above all else.  The bottom line, in such thought, is all that matters.This Enlightenment mindset (named after the historical period in which it arose in Western Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) has today largely captured our society to the point that even the Church (especially the evangelical wing of the Church) is influenced by it.  This is why churches today focus almost exclusively on the didactic portions of Scripture, largely ignoring biblical books such as the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, which abound so richly in poetic and artistic imagery (or, on the few occasions when they are taught, they are largely denuded of as much of the multilayered imagery as can be, to get to the “meat,” e.g., the “real” “bottom-line” meaning of them).

The Church’s fixation on didacticism has led to a devaluation of not only the less didactic parts of Scripture, but also of symbolic parts of our expression of the Faith.  Amongst Evangelicals generally, the Sacrament (instituted by Christ and a central part of the Church’s worship for centuries) is as rarely observed as possible.  We Evangelicals also have some of the ugliest and plainest church buildings imaginable.  All of that is in line with “bottom line,” utilitarian, rationalistic thinking.

This worldview also, of course, inevitably affects the Arts.  It causes us to only think of art as a means of getting to the bottom line.  Our songs, paintings, fiction, dances, architecture, etc., are reduced to propagandistic one-liners, with no rich complexity or multi-layered levels of meaning which give depth and resonance with the way God has constructed Reality, and thus cause even our one-liner Truth to seem false and unrealistic (pagans, after all, are just pagans; they’re not stupid).

Art, like Reality, is intended to be multilayered.  God constructed Creation to be so, carrying content on many levels simultaneously.  The “bottom line,” you see, is best understood in the nexus of all the corresponding meanings as they cohere; as they come together to the center of that which is symbolized.

Art does the opposite of utilitarian rationalism: it multiplies, it revels in, it presents multiple levels of meaning, rather than one only.  It speaks not just to the mind, or to Aristotelian logic, but to the whole person, to body, emotions, intuitions, etc., as well as to the mind.  To deny this to ourselves, the Church, and the world, is to cut ourselves off from the possibility of knowing God in the multiplicity of ways He has revealed Himself in the symbolic and multifaceted Creation and in the artistic and many-layered Scriptures.  It also is destructive of the Church’s art and witness.

Lord willing, we will take up the ways Art is affected through the symbolic in the next post.

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