Art and Christianity
Substance of an address given in the Cathedral on 15th March 1950 by the Reverend Hugh Ross-Williamson. Featured in The Friends of Rochester Cathedral Annual Report for 1950.
Hugh Ross Williamson was a popular historian and dramatist. Starting from a career in the literary world, and having a Nonconformist background, he became an Anglican priest in 1943.
National Portrait Gallery
A photograph of Ross-Williamson is in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery.
The artist is the seer, the man who sees further into the meaning of reality than the rest of us and who is able to communicate to us something of his vision. He enlarges, by his art, the boundaries of our world. The builders of our great cathedrals, for instance, have taught us something about a forest, something about the properties of inert stone; have related them to each other and both to the ultimate mystery of God. To take another example from a different art and a different period, Van Gogh made us see the sunshine in a new way and the tortured struggle which underlies the most peaceful of landscapes. And Shakespeare gave us a mimic world which we can use as a magnifying glass to see better the strange, intricate world of personal relationships in which we live and move.
Art and religion, both illuminating Reality for us, have their roots intertwined. They take their rise in the nature of the universe we know--the eternal rhythm of birth, growth, death and rebirth. This is the pattern which underlies everything. It is the story of each day from sunrise to sunset; of each year, from spring to winter; of each human life. All history is comprehended in it--the story of the rise and fall of empires, ideas, men. It is the key to all the great tragedies as well as all the fairy tales.
This common basis of art and religion--and indeed of "civilization" itself--will not, I think, be ques tioned. But "religion" is not the same as "Christianity", though the identity is too often assumed in conversa-tion. Anthropologists, pantheists and artists can all agree on the one and can speak a common language; but the Christian stands a little apart from them, making a specific and arrogant claim. He insists that the meaning of the pattern is illuminated by a particu-lat instance and that only through admitting this "scandal of particularity", as it has been called, can the ultimate Truth which all are seeking be known. Birth, growth, death and rebirth are summed up and explained in the Incarnation, Life, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter who was born, lived, died and rose again in a verifiable and particular place and time, yet who was God.
To this fine point the pattern comes. With this fact all "religion" has to make terms. The sufferings and sacrifices of the gods of Osiris, or Dionysus, or Baldur-give place to the Passion and Redemptive Sacrifice of God Incarnate. And art, too, must come to Calvary, if it is to live.
Of the tremendous implications of this there is obviously no time to speak even in outline. To explore it would need a library. What I am concerned with is to point out one or two of the practical consequences. In the ages of Faith, art and Christianity were, in a great measure, reconciled. If a painter wished to depict his vision of the meaning of motherhood, he could express it in terms of the Madonna and the Holy Child. No intensity of suffering could be imagined which lay outside the Via Dolorosa, the Crucifixion, the Entombment; no vision of hope, conceived and executed by the greatest of geniuses, could be adequate to the Resurrection. And the whole range of ordinary human life, in its simplicities and gratitudes and joys and fears, could be- and was--told within the framework of the Ministry of Jesus and the parables he told.
And, in literary art, standards of judgment--the mere matters of right and wrong which were accepted alike by the artist and the audience--were rooted in the 'Teaching of Christ; teaching, indeed, not all new but with the old natural law authenticated as true because it was now taught by God Incarnate. It might be possible to disagree with Dante as to which of his contemporaries should be seen in the Inferno; but not to disagree that certain actions were, quite simply, wrong and thus deserved punishment.
Now all that is changed. Gradually but inexorably since the Renaissance, Man has tried to put himself in the place of God. What is called and, indeed, in certain respects was- a movement of liberation of the human spirit has led to the rationalism, scepticism, pride, anarchic individualism which has led us to. where we are: "Glory to Man in the Highest, for Man is the master of things." Instead of the liberation of the individual we are faced with the disintegration of the human person, his declension into a unit of materialist enslavement. And in this chaos of fear and frustration art has got lost too. For to-day the artist has no "terms of reference" by which he can communicate with his fellows. He cannot even use Christian symbols with the certainty that what they mean for him they will also mean of his audience. When, for example, a play of Mauriac's was recently performed in London, even quite intelligent critics could not understand it. It presupposed Christian ethics--that adultery and suicide were sins. The audience, assuming that the first was of no consequence and the second an act of bravery, naturally found the play impossible to understand. Even if a great painter gives us a "Crucifixion" he cannot be sure that those who look at it regard it as, at the best, an unfortunate martyrdom, or, at the worst, an historical event of doubtful authenticity.
Examples could be multiplied, but they are hardly necessary. The "dilemma of the arts" is too obvious and accepted for me to need to elaborate it. Nor could 1, even if I wished, give the solution, except in general terms. If our Christian truth is true, if our "particu-larity" is the only key to reality, then everything depends on it and, especially, that other approach to Reality, that authentic vision, which is Art. Art must come back to Calvary.
Reverend Hugh Ross-Williamson
Address given in the Cathedral on 15th March 1950
The Friends of Rochester Cathedral were founded to help finance the maintenance of the fabric and grounds. The Friends’ annual reports have become a trove of articles on the fabric and history of the cathedral.
Canons, colleagues, volunteers and staff have shared their memories and reflections in many forms over the years.