Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (21 page)

The range of possible perspectives in any scene – and the range, therefore, of responses available to the viewer – reveals the responsibilities which fall to the makers of images: to direct us to those who deserve but often do not win our sympathy, to stand as witnesses to all that it would be easier for us to turn away from. The gravity of the task explains the privileged place accorded in the Christian tradition to
St Luke, the patron saint of artists, who, legend tells us, was the first to depict the Crucifixion, and who is frequently represented in Christian art with brushes and paints in hand, taking in what the Roman soldiers pretended not to see.

7.
While bitter debate must always surround the larger question of what makes a good artist, in the context of religion the criteria are narrower and more straightforward: a good artist by Christian standards is one who successfully animates the important moral and psychological truths which are in danger of losing their hold on us amid the distracted conditions of daily existence. Christian artists know that their technical talents – their command of light, composition and colour, their mastery of their materials and media – find their ultimate purpose in calling forth appropriate ethical responses from us, so that our eyes can train our hearts.

Militating against this mission are all manner of visual clichés. The real difficulty with the ideas which underlie compassion is not that they seem surprising or peculiar, but rather that they seem far too obvious: their very reasonableness and ubiquity strip them of their power. To cite a verbal parallel, we have heard a thousand times that we should love our neighbour, but the prescription loses any of its meaning when it is merely repeated by rote.

So too with art: the most dramatic scenes, painted without talent or imagination, generate only indifference and boredom. The task for artists is therefore to find new ways of prising open our eyes to tiresomely familiar yet critical ideas. The history of Christian art comprises waves of assaults on the great old truths by geniuses who tried to ensure that viewers would be astonished anew and provoked to inner amendment by the humility of the Virgin, the fidelity of Joseph, the courage of Jesus or the sadism of the Jewish authorities.

All such efforts ultimately have a twofold purpose, in accordance with the basic precepts of Christianity: to encourage a revulsion towards evil and to excite a love of goodness. In both cases, inferior art is problematic, not for strictly aesthetic reasons, but because it fails to promote appropriate emotion and action. It is no easy thing to keep making hell vivid: the attempt can easily yield just another vat of burning flesh, one more in a redundant series which, in its formulaic horror, ends up touching no one. It takes more than bloodthirstiness to revive our disgust at cruelty. We can grow bored of seeing yet another painting of the seventh circle of hell or another photograph of the killing fields of Gaza – until a skilful artist stops us in our tracks with an image that finally brings home to us what is truly at stake.

Just as evil must continually be made new to help us sense its power, so too must goodness. Accordingly, Christian artists have tirelessly striven to render virtue vivid, to pierce through our cynicism and world-weariness and to lay before us depictions of individuals whom we should all wish to be a little bit more like.

8.
Naturally, Christian art does not treat all of the themes that we should bear in mind for the health of our souls. There is no shortage of topics it ignores: the role of self-discipline, the need for playfulness, the importance of honouring the fragility of the natural world … But completeness isn't the point. For our purposes, Christianity is more interested in defining an overarching mission for art: to depict virtues and vices and remind us of what is important though prone to be forgotten.

Intriguingly, Christianity never expected its artists to decide what their works would be about; it was left to theologians and doctors of divinity to formulate the important themes, which were only then passed on to painters and sculptors and turned into convincing aesthetic phenomena. The Church implicitly wondered why a mastery of the technical aspects of art – a talent for making a dab of paint look like an elbow, or a patch of stone like hair – should be thought to be compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. The religion did not, on top of everything else, expect that Titian could be a gifted philosopher. It may be that we are asking too much of our own secular artists, requiring them not only to impress our senses but also to be the originators of profound psychological and moral insights. Our artistic scene might benefit from greater collaborations between thinkers and makers of images, a marriage of the best ideas with their highest expressions.

Christianity was also wise in not insisting that the concepts behind works of art should change all the time. There have been few more harmful doctrines for art than the Romantic belief that greatness must involve constant originality at a thematic level. Christian artists were able amply to express their unique skills, but had to stick to a set roster of topics, from the Annunciation to the Deposition. Their individual inclinations were subsumed within an overarching brief which spared them the relentless Romantic pressure to be original.

To specify that images must focus on the same ideas is not to demand that they should all look identical. Just as
Titian's and Fragonard's versions of the holy family's Flight into Egypt look entirely different, so too a putative ‘Sorrows of Infidelity' depicted by a contemporary photographer like
Jeff Wall would not need to look anything like the same theme as handled by his colleagues
Philip-Lorca diCorcia or
Alec Soth.

9.
Although we have up to this point considered modern secular art only incidentally, and through the prism of photography, the model wherein art serves as a mechanism for reminding us of important ideas extends comfortably beyond the representational realm to include abstract works.

Though it can sometimes be hard to say quite what abstract pieces are
about
, we can sense their broad themes well enough and, when it is a question of great works, we welcome them into our lives for the same reasons as figurative images: because they put us back in touch with themes we need to keep close to us but are in danger of losing sight of. We sense virtues like courage and strength emanating from the stern steel slabs of
Richard Serra. There are ever-necessary evocations of calm in the formal geometries of paintings by
Agnes Martin, while poems on the role of tension in a good life lurk within the wood and string sculptures of Barbara Hepworth.

Buddhism has been provocative in suggesting that our response to abstract creations could be enhanced if we were given specific suggestions as to what we should be thinking about while we contemplate them. When faced with the complex patterns of mandalas, for instance, we are encouraged to narrow down their range of possible meanings and focus on them as sensuous representations of the harmony of the cosmos described in Buddhist theology. The religion additionally gives us mantras to repeat as we look, most often ‘Om mani padme hum' (translated from the Sanskrit as ‘Generosity-ethics-patience-diligence-renunciation-wisdom'), which sets up a virtuous cycle whereby our eyes enrich our ideas while our ideas guide our vision.