Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty

2. This Book Is Not about Art

11 2 This Book Is Not about Art To say this book is not about art is to imply that it is about something else, and one way to begin exploring this something else is to examine first the work of art. By this, clearly, I do not mean an artwork, but rather the work—the “tasks”—that art accomplishes. In an analogy of a bridge, an initial task might be articulated as the work of making possible the crossing of vast expanses. The question then turns on what to cross and the means to cross it. Almost at the end of the second millennium of Christianity, theologian Avery Dulles noted a worrisome problem: the Christian church was caught in a circularity that threatened the dynamism of theological thought and the relevance of Christian practice. Dulles warned that the church had been lulled into taking for granted “the existence and content of revelation” and assuming that the job of “convincing the unconvinced” was simply and essentially to affirm official Church teaching.1 Despite the repeated earthquakes caused by reformers, both Protestant and Catholic, the very foundation of the edifice of the Christian church—that God reveals God’s self to humanity—remained largely unexamined.2 “How does the Church itself find out what revelation is?” asked Dulles pointedly.3 His questions, although articulated as a problem of method, reveal his concern that apologetic and dogmatic approaches had sidestepped the question of the existence of revelation 12 Bridge to Wonder itself, since “theological method generally presupposes a doctrine of revelation and uses revelation as a norm.”4 In other words, how could theologians speak of what was understood to be revealed without first attempting to show that it had been revealed? Can we tell others about what we have heard, if they do not know anything about the experience of hearing? From a lesser theologian the question might have appeared impertinent or even schismatic, but from the future Cardinal Dulles it was prescient and important.5 To answer his question, Dulles looked carefully at symptoms of the age’s malaise, which had been compounded by the church’s failure to deal openly and creatively with the problems posed by the idea of revelation. Philosophical agnosticism, he noted, reduced what the church called revelation to an insubstantial mix of myth and metaphor developed by human persons to speak of a God that could not be known.6 Linguistic analysis also had great difficulty assigning authoritative weight to language about God, due to the discipline’s methodological inability to grapple with paradox and symbol.7 Theories of knowing that grew out of modernity—which stressed the limits of human knowledge and understandably questioned ideas of revelation when it was expressed as a “transfusion from the divine mind”— needed to be addressed, not ignored.8 Dulles also took seriously the difficulties arising out of empirical psychology while pointing out the reductionism of the most extreme positions that assigned psychiatric explanations to all revelatory experiences recounted by mystics both ancient and modern.9 Additionally, he noted that even biblical criticism and doctrinal pronouncements (coming as they often did from opposite poles of the theological spectrum), by focusing on the lack of historical reliability of biblical texts, reduced their reception as revelation to a choice between a critical dismissal on the one hand, and an uncritical and naive piety on the other.10 Venturing even further, Dulles found that well-meaning attempts at the work of comparative religion were routinely unable to deal with the apparent plurality of revelation and thus unwittingly reduced all talk of divine revelation to “human attempts to probe the depths of truth and goodness.”11 If the parameters were such that they could recognize no possibility of diversity in divine revelation, then all revelation was dismissed. Finally, as Dulles saw it, the growing influence of the social sciences stressed the well-founded suspicion that, often, “appeal[s] to divine authority can be a hidden way of obtaining This Book Is Not about Art 13 conformity and of suppressing doubt and dissent.”12 The result was that the existence of something that could be called divine revelation was anything but a foregone conclusion. Without revelation, theology would have nothing to speak about, since one way to describe theology’s task is precisely as that of pondering critically humanity’s reception of and response to...