One of the great things about living in the Warsaw/Winona Lake area is experiencing the benefits of having a world-class music ministry, Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh’s Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship and its MasterWorks Festival, located here. (This is especially great for me since Dr. Kavanaugh is also the music minister of the church which I serve as pastor.) Tonight, it was the Second Sunday series, which opened with Barbara Kavanaugh on cello playing a Bartok suite of Romanian folk dances and closed with Gert Kumi on violin playing a suite of Albanian dances by a 20th-century composer I’d never heard of before—both wonderful pieces beautifully played—as the bookends to a thoroughly enjoyable peformance. We are blessed.As I was sitting there in the dark of Rodeheaver Auditorium, the thought occurred to me: can we perhaps define art as those things which will endure, not only in this creation but in the new creation? There are various definitions and philosophies of art out there, with most of which I disagree at least in part, and I don’t have any well-developed and firmly-fixed ones of my own; that’s something I’ve been working on for a while now. I even wondered this past spring if art is even a small enough thing to define at all; I’m by no means sure it is. Even if it’s too big to define in its essence, it might yet be possible to define it operationally; hence my thought of this evening.On the one hand, I’ve believed for a while that what makes true art is partly about quality (for lack of a better word) and partly about truth; Ragnar Tørnquist wrote one of his key characters in The Longest Journey an excellent disquisition on the latter point, which I’ll post on at such time as I can ever get the game running on any of the computers that are currently consenting to function in this house. To say that those things which are both great enough and true enough to be preserved by God in the new heavens and the new earth qualify as art has a certain appeal to it. On the other hand, it does seem to me to be too restrictive. To take an extreme example, it seems safe to say that we won’t be reading Flaubert as we walk the streets of the new Jerusalem—but does that mean that Madame Bovary isn’t art? The conclusion seems to me self-evidently absurd. The worldview of the book is, I think, brutal hogwash; but Flaubert expresses it brilliantly and powerfully, and at an extremely high level of technical accomplishment. Can that not be art? I don’t really think so. Which means that my thought must be, at best, an incomplete definition: a category of art, but not the whole.Update: a conversation with my wife (who hated Madame Bovary) suggested an aspect I hadn’t considered: whatever the falsity of his philosophy and conclusions, Flaubert unquestionably captured the truth of the human condition under sin with great vividness; if one doesn’t believe (as I don’t) that human history and the reality of this world’s brokenness will be simply erased and forgotten in the new creation, then it makes sense to think that his artistic achievement might indeed endure for that reason. Maybe, then, the problem isn’t with my definition, but with my application of it.
(You can absolutely tell that I’m on call tonight)
It seems like you’re talking about redemption. Art is redemptive? Art reflects redemption? Art gives substance to hope? Or perhaps – redemption is beauty? Beauty is redemptive? Or truth?
In the New, is all made art? Or returned to its original truth/beauty, which we merely glimpse in art? Will we see the beauty and truth of our previous sufferings and ignorance and fallen-ness? Will we see more clearly that we were fallen yet already redeemed?
Yeah, I remember those nights. I wasn’t so much talking about redemption as about that which is redeemed, or redeemable; but I think you have some great questions/ideas there. My initial reaction would be to say “all of the above”; though that leaves a lot of the thinking yet to be done.