Art and Music E-Book

Paul Munson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 155

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

God made us to enjoy beauty wherever we find it, whether it's music or the visual arts.  But sin finds ways to obscure what is right in front of our eyes and ears. Drawing on years of teaching experience, two professors offer tips for understanding, evaluating, and appreciating art in all its forms while highlighting the important ways in which art and music reflect the glory of God. This book will help you better understand and appreciate humanity's pursuit and imitation of beauty through artistic expression—a vital means by which we bear witness to the beauty of our Creator.

Leseprobe

ART AND MUSIC

A STUDENT’S GUIDE

Paul Munson and Joshua Farris Drake

Art and Music: A Student’s Guide

Copyright © 2014 by Paul Munson and Joshua Farris Drake

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jon McGrath, Simplicated Studio

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3896-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3899-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3897-1 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3898-8

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP       24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

15  14  13  12  11  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To Elizabeth Bedsole Joseph Blass Ronald Boud David Dennis Dianne Gatwood Kenneth Hartley (in memoriam) James Richard Joiner Don W. Martin C. David McClune Terry McRoberts Michael K. Penny Andy Roby Georgia Wellborn

with whom we shared those lovely thingswe’re told to think about—the sounds with which creation rings—our friends who find them out.

CONTENTS

Series Preface1   What Do We Mean by the Word Beauty?2   Why Should We Enjoy Art and Music?3   How Do We Judge Art and Music?4   Looking at Art5   Listening to MusicTimelineQuestions for ReflectionGlossaryResources for Further StudyGeneral IndexScripture Index

SERIES PREFACE

RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

The Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series is designed to provide an overview of the distinctive way the church has read the Bible, formulated doctrine, provided education, and engaged the culture. The contributors to this series all agree that personal faith and genuine Christian piety are essential for the life of Christ followers and for the church. These contributors also believe that helping others recognize the importance of serious thinking about God, Scripture, and the world needs a renewed emphasis at this time in order that the truth claims of the Christian faith can be passed along from one generation to the next. The study guides in this series will enable us to see afresh how the Christian faith shapes how we live, how we think, how we write books, how we govern society, and how we relate to one another in our churches and social structures. The richness of the Christian intellectual tradition provides guidance for the complex challenges that believers face in this world.

This series is particularly designed for Christian students and others associated with college and university campuses, including faculty, staff, trustees, and other various constituents. The contributors to the series will explore how the Bible has been interpreted in the history of the church, as well as how theology has been formulated. They will ask: How does the Christian faith influence our understanding of culture, literature, philosophy, government, beauty, art, or work? How does the Christian intellectual tradition help us understand truth? How does the Christian intellectual tradition shape our approach to education? We believe that this series is not only timely but that it meets an important need, because the secular culture in which we now find ourselves is, at best, indifferent to the Christian faith, and the Christian world—at least in its more popular forms—tends to be confused about the beliefs, heritage, and tradition associated with the Christian faith.

At the heart of this work is the challenge to prepare a generation of Christians to think Christianly, to engage the academy and the culture, and to serve church and society. We believe that both the breadth and the depth of the Christian intellectual tradition need to be reclaimed, revitalized, renewed, and revived for us to carry forward this work. These study guides will seek to provide a framework to help introduce students to the great tradition of Christian thinking, seeking to highlight its importance for understanding the world, its significance for serving both church and society, and its application for Christian thinking and learning. The series is a starting point for exploring important ideas and issues such as truth, meaning, beauty, and justice.

We trust that the series will help introduce readers to the apostles, church fathers, Reformers, philosophers, theologians, historians, and a wide variety of other significant thinkers. In addition to well-known leaders such as Clement, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, readers will be pointed to William Wilberforce, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, George Washington Carver, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Michael Polanyi, Henry Luke Orombi, and many others. In doing so, we hope to introduce those who throughout history have demonstrated that it is indeed possible to be serious about the life of the mind while simultaneously being deeply committed Christians. These efforts to strengthen serious Christian thinking and scholarship will not be limited to the study of theology, scriptural interpretation, or philosophy, even though these areas provide the framework for understanding the Christian faith for all other areas of exploration. In order for us to reclaim and advance the Christian intellectual tradition, we must have some understanding of the tradition itself. The volumes in this series will seek to explore this tradition and its application for our twenty-first-century world. Each volume contains a glossary, study questions, and a list of resources for further study, which we trust will provide helpful guidance for our readers.

I am deeply grateful to the series editorial committee: Timothy George, John Woodbridge, Michael Wilkins, Niel Nielson, Philip Ryken, and Hunter Baker. Each of these colleagues joins me in thanking our various contributors for their fine work. We all express our appreciation to Justin Taylor, Jill Carter, Allan Fisher, Lane Dennis, and the Crossway team for their enthusiastic support for the project. We offer the project with the hope that students will be helped, faculty and Christian leaders will be encouraged, institutions will be strengthened, churches will be built up, and, ultimately, that God will be glorified.

Soli Deo GloriaDavid S. DockerySeries Editor

1

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY THE WORD BEAUTY?

It isn’t the likeliest place to find art. The new ballpark is hemmed in on three sides by traffic and on the fourth by a garbage incinerator. The smells of these peripherals are driven out, it’s true, by those of flat beer and roller-warmed hot dogs, but this can hardly be said to draw the art-appreciation buffs, who, we’re told, prefer wine and cheese. And yet it is there that park designers put a statue of a beloved home-run hitter. No doubt he was amused. The ordinary fellow from an ordinary place, who spoke plainly and lived his life without pretention, now stands 7.5 feet tall in 750 pounds of bronze. A pigeon, unconvinced by the likeness of a batter’s high-velocity swing, balances quietly on the cap, leaving an untidy mess. And the boy and his grandfather who stand there on game day know that the statue is beautiful—from the pivot of the ankle to the visionary, skyward glance over Sixth Street.

We begin with beauty because it is what makes art, art. When people call something “art,” they’re saying two things, really: first, that somebody made it (for we don’t call accidents “art”), and, second, that its appearance has the potential to reward those who pay attention to it. That is, it can be appreciated for its beauty. If we put a tribal ceremonial mask or a Louis XVI secretary desk in an art museum—indeed, if we use the word art to describe a matching outfit and shoes or the perfect baseball swing—it’s because we believe that in addition to whatever other functions these things have, they are also beautiful. They provide aesthetic delight. When the main purpose of a made object is to reward aesthetic contemplation, we call it “high art” or “fine art.” We begin with beauty, therefore, because nothing—neither art nor an approach to art—can be evaluated without a sense of what it is for. Although certain philosophers quibble over identifying beauty as the purpose of art, this is only because they fear some people’s usage of the word beauty may be too constrictive. But ordinary people have always known that the reason we draw and sing is to please viewers with beautiful drawings and hearers with beautiful songs.

Such consensus, however, does not make the idea easy. Beauty has been a central problem in Western thought since the days of Plato and a problem that non-Christians, especially, have difficulty solving. Darwinian materialists may be satisfied that they have found a plausible explanation for the peacock’s iridescent plumage. They find it somewhat harder to explain quite why the peahen finds iridescence especially sexy. And if her tastes pose some problems, ours pose even more. The materialist cannot explain why a human soul responds as it does to the night sky or to the sound of the sea—or, for that matter, to Rembrandt’s Denial of Peter in the Rijksmuseum or to Bach’s “Gratias agimus tibi” in the Mass in B Minor.

When the artist Makoto Fujimura began studying traditional Japanese nihonga painting as a graduate student in Tokyo during the late 1980s, he was not yet a Christian. One day an assistant professor came into his studio unannounced, looked at the painting Fujimura was working on, said its surface was so beautiful that it was almost terrifying, and walked out. Recalling the incident decades later, Fujimura asks, “Do you know what my response was? I immediately washed the painting down. I couldn’t take that. I just didn’t have a place for that comment, because, being honest with myself, I felt, if that’s true, then I don’t have a place in my own heart for beauty that’s almost terrifying.”1

We begin with beauty, frankly, because it drives us to consider the Christian intellectual tradition, which alone gives real answers to the question of how beauty—the source of pleasure—can also terrify. After briefly considering the classical and postmodern views of beauty that dominate our culture, this first chapter will argue that Christian doctrine alone provides a satisfactory explanation of beauty and, thus, a satisfactory explanation of art.

A DESCRIPTIVE DEFINITION

Dictionaries provide descriptive, not prescriptive, definitions. We may or may not like such definitions. We may want to tweak them to conform to what we believe words ought to mean. But there’s no doubt that the editors at Merriam-Webster describe rightly when they say that by beauty, we mean “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”2 This may or may not tell us what beauty is, but it certainly tells us what people mean by the term. Whenever anyone speaks of “beauty,” at the very least he is referring to the capacity of an object to please those who apprehend it.

THE CLASSICAL VIEW OF BEAUTY

In ancient times the equivalent Greek word, kalos, worked the same way.3 Since beauty is considered to be in the thing perceived, the classical view concludes that beauty is objective. It is an attribute of the object. Therefore it must be something that can be empirically studied and even measured, as leading Greek thinkers tried to do. The outstanding fifth-century BC sculptor Polycleitos wrote a famous book, now lost, called the Kanon, in which he published the numbers of perfect beauty. They were all simple ratios. The analogy to music excited the Pythagoreans, who inferred great significance from the fact that vibrating strings produce harmonious sounds when their lengths are measured in simple proportions. Classical architects planned buildings not with blueprints or elevation drawings but with numerical formulas. All this assumed that beauty is uniform, that all beautiful things are beautiful in the same way. Aristotle taught that “the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.”4 Plato taught not only the uniformity of beauty but also its absolute nature: implicit in the Republic and Phaedrus and explicit in the Symposium is a conflation of the good and the beautiful. The beautiful is the good. In such a worldview beauty becomes the very purpose of life, and aesthetics provides the basis for ethics.

This has been the most influential aesthetic position in Western history. Whatever we may think of it, everyone can at least agree that many beautiful things do fit Aristotle’s analysis: the symmetries of the human face, for example. Moreover, one can only be thankful for the countless beauties that classicists have dreamed up over the centuries, from the formal clarity of a Botticelli mural to that of Jefferson’s Monticello. If we divorce the Parthenon in Athens from its original function to house the goddess, we can treat it as an unparalleled architectural achievement, which in its own way reveals the glory of man’s Creator. But make no mistake: not only were the masterpieces of classical antiquity made in the service of idols but also the classical vision itself, at its purest, is an idol. When form is made absolute, when—like the media-bewitched teen starving herself before the mirror—we devote our lives to the pursuit of some created formal standard, the result is not beautiful at all, but wicked and ugly. Hear C. S. Lewis’s warning against aestheticism: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”5

But this is not the only critique of classicism. The classical view of beauty may be dominant in the Western tradition, with neoclassical movements peculiar to every era, but every era also produced its own alternative to the classical vision. And it’s easy to see why. Every reader, surely, can think of things he knows to be beautiful, even though they are not ordered or not symmetrical or not definite: a thunderstorm, say, or a clear, blue sky. How are we to explain the beauty of these? Nineteenth-century romantics, to cite just one alternative, saw the sublime—that which fills us with awe—as a higher aesthetic category than those of classicism. They preferred the Swiss Alps to English formal gardens. Yet neither romanticism nor any other reaction against classicism has provided a viable explanation for all human experiences of beauty. Can a scheme that accounts for our reaction to Victoria Falls and the Pleiades also account for the aesthetic value of something as comfortable and domestic as a lullaby or a quilt?

THE POSTMODERN VIEW OF BEAUTY

Who, then, can tell what beauty is? We’ve only mentioned the classical position and, in passing, the romantic critique of it, but of course every culture and every worldview has its own aesthetic values. How could any one explanation account for all instances of beauty? In the pluralistic 1980s and 90s the problems of beauty came to seem insurmountable. Indeed, the descriptive definition seems to contradict itself. Read it again. Beauty is “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.” The first half locates beauty in the thing perceived, whereas the second half links it to pleasure—which is something that takes place inside the perceiver, not in the thing perceived. So which is it? Is beauty a quality of the perceived object or a quality of the perceiving subject? It can’t be both. Something cannot be both objective and subjective, except perhaps in Hinduism. Since what pleases me may not be what pleases you, postmoderns have roundly rejected the opening phrase of the definition. To the postmodern, beauty is in fact a quality of the subject—a quality of the one looking, not of the thing being seen. It’s the sensation I have whenever I perceive something I like.6 It is just a matter of taste, which cannot be accounted for, except by sociologists who study how we are culturally conditioned to consider some things beautiful and not other things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Let’s think about that adage for a minute. It’s of fairly recent origin (late nineteenth century). But we have so imbibed postmodern relativism that most people think of this adage not as a matter of worldview but as a truism. The best way to learn its meaning is to consider when we say it: invariably in the midst of a dispute over the aesthetic worth of something, and it has the effect of ending the dispute. For if beauty exists in the beholder—in you and me, and not in the thing under dispute—then why are we disputing? Nobody argues about subjective phenomena. We don’t argue about whether you are hungry or whether I’m afraid.

The adage performs a metaphysical sleight of hand. Throughout human history cultures have felt the need for some category corresponding to this English word beauty. It provides the basis for all critical thinking about form and preference. How do we know that some preferences are better than others? Well, we assess the beauty of the thing preferred. Drug addicts prefer intoxication. Intoxication is manifestly not beautiful. Therefore we know something is wrong with their preference. Without a concept of beauty, we could still call any action motivated by their preference immoral (provided we still have a concept of the good), but we couldn’t criticize the preference itself. In short, the idea of beauty is what allows us to call an appetite for bad things wrongheaded. But the adage (which almost everybody assumes to be true) would remind us that beauty and preference are the same thing. When we act as if beauty were an objective standard by which we can judge preferences, we are—it seems—just playing a mental game that arbitrarily privileges our preferences over other people’s preferences, for any argument about the healthiness of certain preferences is circular. End of discussion. Now we can all get along.