art

The Artist-in-Residence in the Local Congregation

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One creative approach in integrating the visual arts into the life of the local congregation involves employing an artist-in-residence. In return for studio space and appropriate monetary remuneration, the artist-in-residence is available to create visual arts for worship, to instruct worshipers about the nature of the visual arts in worship, and to involve members of the congregation in the design and fabrication of the arts in worship.

Art and theology are both about the discipline of the imagination. Thus, they have a natural affinity, one with the other, making an advocacy role by the church for artistic expression in process and product a wise investment. In fact, the local parish provides an optimal setting for a resident artist and gives the congregation and artist alike the mutual benefit of each other’s imaginings.

The sense of awe and wonder triggered by watching a resident artist work kindles the religious imagination. The reality of radical faith is brought to light when watching an artist trust a creative process to reveal resolution. The presence of grace is experienced when watching an artist transform material and transcend the medium by creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The intermingling of creative processes with religious ideas is productive for the church and empowering for the artist. This mutually beneficial arrangement lifts up the notion that applied creativity is an essential resource for building our world, while the faith of the church lifts up the notion that the capacity to create is a reflection of our being in the divine image. By building on the intrinsic relationship between the artistic and spiritual dimensions of human existence, an artist-in-residence program promotes the idea that the artistic vision and the vision of faith see possibility in all things.

Although the following discussion sets forth parameters for a visual artist’s residency, its concepts are adaptable to residencies of artists working in nonvisual mediums (dance, music, drama, or other arts). Furthermore, the issues and suggestions outlined in this discussion are pertinent to churches of contrasting membership sizes. Only slight modifications are required in establishing an artist-in-residence in a small church of approximately 200 members as opposed to a corporate-sized church of 2,000 members. (See Arlen Rauthge’s Sizing Up Your Church for a definition and discussion of categories of congregational size.)

In a large church, it is politically astute to align the arts committee with another (worship, liturgy, education, or music) for support or status. As a catalyst for arts activity, the arts committee negotiates between professional staff and members of the congregation, recommending to both on behalf of the other.

Since the arts committee functions to enhance the life of the congregation through art, and since art is easily dismissed or misunderstood, this committee must supplement all of its programmings with a persistent educational agenda. First, however, the committee must educate itself. An organized study of several books that bridge art and theology will enable the members to field such questions as: “What is religious art?”, “What is Christian art?”, “What is sacred art?”, “What is liturgical art?” Members will be prepared to point out invalid distinctions as well as amplify meaningful ones. If asked, “Is the best church art the best secular art, or what purpose in Christianity should art serve, or can a non-Christian artist produce a work of art for liturgy?” committee members will answer by asking more questions. Compelled to such discourse with the congregation, committee members animate interest and understanding of the arts and lay the groundwork for the appointment and arrival of an artist-in-residence.

It is wise to select an artist who not only is professionally competent but also is articulate and engaging. Give the artist ample room. Convert a Sunday school classroom to a studio. Such a room often exists in a heated building otherwise empty during the week. Forty hours per month of working time on behalf of the church is an equitable exchange for a modest salary and in-kind contribution of space and utilities. Give the artist a key and expect him or her to come and go at will, creating in the studio a place where the creative process is given high visibility for the church. The congregation and the artist need at least a year together to realize the benefit of each other. A renewal contract or a contract with another artist is a viable option at the end of the first year.

Traditionalism versus innovation is the critical issue the church faces in committing to an artist-in-residence, and the arts committee helps the congregation understand this issue. The artist works at the boundary between tradition and innovation. A work of art by nature has the capacity to take a person to a new place of being because the newness of the experience excites, distresses, delights, disturbs, challenges. The role of the artist, like that of the priest, is a prophetic one.

The arts committee helps to integrate the artist with the professional staff and advocates for his/her presence in planning sessions. Inclusion achieves two major things: first, the artist has time to incubate, a critical step in the creative process when the artist wrestles with ideas and searches for solutions; second, the artist is not ghettoized, thereby enabling his/her works to be understood as essential to the life of the church rather than “extra,” like frosting on a cake or stripes on a pair of stockings. If the artist is well integrated into the staff and understood and accepted as one of them, his or her visual proclamations will be taken in stride much the same way the pastor’s work is.

When West Coast artist Nancy Chinn was artist-in-residence with a congregation in San Francisco, she appointed two committees to work with her—one, a Dream Committee, and the other, a Recruitment Committee.

The Dream Committee, comprised of approximately half a dozen members from the congregation, interacted with Nancy regarding the use of sanctuary space around themes of worship. Referring to the appointed Scripture for that week or season, Nancy would ask, “What does this Scripture mean to you? What are the feelings this Scripture evokes from you? What is the mood we are trying to get across with this theme?” These questions provoked a “feeling” response, enabling Nancy to incubate ideas and visualize creations.

The Recruitment Committee, also comprised of members of the congregation, helped paint, fabricate, cut, install, and otherwise construct the work designed by the resident artist. Thus the work in the sanctuary became the work of the people. This work, inspired by Scripture, might accompany the procession, amplify the reading of the lessons, embellish a prayer, accompany the bringing of the gifts, elaborate upon the sermon, or surface during dismissal. With the help of this committee, the artist designed the work (a painted paper carpet down the center aisle with images of Holy Week on which congregants walk); organized the project; worked out mechanics of installation (e.g., a concealed drop-line system supportive of an evocative swoop of red, orange, and yellow ribbons during Pentecost, or 1,400 cut and folded paper dove images during Epiphany); and instructed people how to work with the chosen artistic medium.

The artist embodies and enfleshes the Word with the aid of the community in other ways. He/she might offer intergenerational “how-to” workshops during off-school times that thrive on the spontaneity of children and adults of all ages. Retreats which lift up the creative process as a meditative process, sessions with Sunday School teachers helping them incorporate the artist’s expertise in their teaching situations, an artist’s chat on Sunday morning about work in the church studio, or a dialogue sermon about applied creativity as rootedness in the divine image, all represent possibilities for engagement.

It is empowering to the artist to interact with a nurturing community. Furthermore, artists need space and the church needs the fresh insights of its artists. Why not risk such a relationship? Without risk, art and theology will not take us to an enlarged vision of reality where the religious imagination can take flight.

Symbols as the Language of Art and Liturgy

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Symbols are a primary means by which the truth of the gospel is communicated. They communicate to us through all our senses and on many levels, to our thinking and our feeling, our memory, and our imagination. Further, symbolic language serves to unite Christians, giving them a common reference point and experience that transcends divisions within the Christian community.

Artists Are Primary Communicators

We can’t do anything right in the work of reform and renewal of the church if we do not first realize its importance. We are not decorators to a reality that is essentially abstract and cerebral. We are, in fact, primary communicators, ministers, and evangelists, since our work is in and with and for the Sunday assembly where the faith community celebrates its identity as church and shares its nourishment—where humans are formed, not merely brains informed. We are communicating the gospel at a level that precedes, and is fundamental to, all theologizing and all administration.

What is the symbol language of our “primary and indispensable source,” the liturgy, and how are the environment and arts part of it? By the terms symbol and symbol-language I mean primarily the stories of the Bible proclaimed in the Sunday assembly and the actions we call sacraments done by the Sunday assembly. The environment is the skin, the space, the enabling scene of that assembly, that proclamation, that action. Its arts are the skills of music, rhetoric, movement and gesture, design and craft in the making and using of all things necessary for sacramental worship (from architecture and images to vessels, vesture, utensils, and books, and so on).

Communication among human beings, including what Jews and Christians believe is God’s revelation, puts the environment (its shapes, colors, textures, smells, flavors, tones) and all the imagining and skills we call the arts right at the center of the enterprise. So when poor, deluded creatures dismiss environment and art considerations in any of the ways with which we are so depressingly familiar, what they are really doing is dismissing the way God touches us, loves us, the way God reveals the divine design and will, the way in which we are invited to share the vision of God’s reign, justice, and peace for all, liberation and reconciliation for all, and therefore the way we are to know ourselves as a church and our mission in the world. There is nothing luxurious or precious about these concerns.

Symbol-Language Appeals to All Our Human Levels and Faculties

Unlike our prose discourse and our verbal formulas, so terribly limited by their vocabulary as well as by the time and place in which they are conceived, the symbol-language of liturgy is comprehensive, classic, and seminal.

Since we believe the biblical covenant and the paschal mystery are God’s invitation to a new way of life, a new orientation of our lives, and not merely to an oath of allegiance or a set of ideas or a party line, symbol language is its favorite as well as its most adequate communication. Symbol-language appeals comprehensively to all of our human levels and faculties and to the whole species in all of its variety. Its types are deeply embedded in our common human roots, escaping the Babel of our different languages, customs, ways. It engages not merely the listening and idea mechanism but the entire person, through song and speech and silence, through gestures and other forms of movement, through touch and taste and smell and sight and hearing, through its evoking of memory, recollection, fantasy, imagination—acting out in liturgy (rather, enabling the Sunday assembly to act out) the liberating and reconciling deeds of God in living rite, as the commitment of the baptized.

From the liberating bath of immersion into baptism’s newness to the reconciling meal, where we share equally one holy bread, drinking from one holy cup, in the Eucharist’s solidarity—in every rite of public worship, this multidimensional symbol-language admits the inadequacy of our feeble words, respects the terrible mystery of God, excludes no means that might, however obliquely, penetrate our defenses with vision and with hope.

But this can’t be unless we take it seriously unless we play hard at it unless we give our ears and our hearts to those biblical stories, our minds and our bodies and our imaginations to those sacramental actions and gestures. When the liturgy thus becomes ours, our very own, we can begin to catch the vision of God’s reign, of what we and our world must become—liberation and reconciliation.

And the stories and the actions and the gestures will not grab us in this way until we learn to absorb them fully, with no abbreviations and no shortcuts: space—not constructed on the model of the auditorium but made for liturgical action; the baptismal bath—immersion, done to the full; the Lord’s Supper—bready bread, broken, shared; real wine—poured out and drunk from common cups. Significado causant. The sacraments have their effects through what they signify—our experience of them. We have been positively ingenious in depriving and robbing the sacraments of their signification: by our “practicality”; by our desire for convenience; by our aversion to work. Our liturgical world has been verbal—anything else is incidental. Opening up the nonverbal to signification and experience is a revolution that has hardly begun.

Symbol-Language Unifies Us on a Biblical and Sacramental Level

Symbol-language is catholic, universal, not only in its comprehensiveness but also in its classic character. It is a great gift to have covenant sources that reveal God’s design and make us partners in its realization—and do it in a classic way, a way that applies to all times and all places. No blueprints. No party line. No concrete instructions for exactly what must be done right now in our lives, in our political and economic organization, in our other cultural and social affairs. Those things God trusts us to work out with the talents we have been given and in concert with the rest of the human family. Only the direction, the orientation, the goal is clear in the Word of God who is liberator and reconciler—justice and peace. Everything is to be measured in that direction. And it is that direction in our sources, as well as their ambiguity about our concrete steps today, that invites a multitude of different insights and interpretations … and with all of these joined in the church, we make a bit of progress toward consensus. That’s why at our best (and we are rarely at our best) we are so loath to stifle controversy. Because we are all so limited individually (none of us being the whole Christ), it is through our sharing of different interpretations about what to do that we may eventually arrive at some common interpretations as the body of Christ.

That classic, catholic character makes a lot of people nervous. What it wants to do is challenge us to respect each other and be open to learning from each other, recognizing our need for each other, to be, as church, the body of Christ. If we have a deep unity on this symbolic biblical and sacramental level, then we can trust each other to grow up and bring our own consciences and human gifts to a common solution of problems. But if we have lost that deep and classic oneness, then there is nothing left but a sect, a party line, forced and literal conformity on a relatively superficial level.

Reform and Renewal Are the Very Nature of the Church’s Existence

Another characteristic of the symbol-language I am discussing is its seminal, unfinished, evolving, developing nature. God’s revelation itself is progressive, as the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity prove, and indicates a living tradition, a continuous creative process, by which God draws human history inch by inch toward a fuller realization of the freedom and oneness God has already given us in faith. That is why reform and renewal are the very nature of the church’s existence and not merely an era or a diversion in its story.

What a relief! Who could abide the church if we thought it was a finished, completed, perfected reality? Any more than we could abide ourselves as individuals, if we thought we had no possibilities of change, of growth, of development! Our understanding and living of the Good News is always in process, conditioned by our time, our place, our culture. All that is in God is dynamic, moving (not standing still and not retreating) toward God’s reign of justice and peace. We imagine and experience in rite and bring to our work and world possibilities of greater justice, firmer peace, more freedom from oppressors or addictions, more oneness in diversity for all God’s children.

Art always sees nature, the world, and humanity not as inert, static, fully developed accomplishments of the past, but as en route, on a journey, full of promise and of as yet unrealized possibilities. True art will have nothing to do with a static, rear-guard, the-old-times-were-the-good-times conception of life or of the church. In art, we bring our human intent, our express desire, our will, and our commitment to a work of creation. Not resting in what has been but increasing the good, the true, and the beautiful, drawing what is to be out of what is with our imaginations and our work.

In this seminal character, this openness to growth and development, the arts are like the gospel itself. No wonder they are so bound up with its symbol-language and that their ministry is so indispensable to its proclamation and celebration.

How Do We Go about Our Project?

Now to a few remarks about the means we use for our project. How do we prepare an environment that enables and enlists the arts that serve this critical symbol-language of our rites? Power corrupts, as we all know. To approach our function in these matters without reflection on that fact of human experience would be foolish indeed. Clericalism and what was for a time considered clerical power are fading—not rapidly enough, but fading nonetheless.

One of the great gifts of the reform efforts thus far since the Second Vatican Council has been stemming of our perennial drift toward idolatry, a purification of our notion of God, the holy otherness of God, that has, as its complement, the rediscovery that we are all creatures, no matter what hats we wear or what offices we occupy. All of us are gifted in different ways, yet all of us are limited. Relating again the clergy and any other specialized ministries to their basis in the common ministry of the community of the baptized has shattered the long-tolerated illusions about exclusive clerical connections with the divine. Slowly we regain a healthy notion of church, including recognition of our need for specialized ministries—a need that does not require pretension.

We must not be apologetic about this development, as if this health were somehow a weakening of ministry or offices of leadership. It is their strength, and this conciliar era is a gift of God. This moment of reaction is merely another instance of our well-proven resistance to repentance.

Now that we are beginning to move from what had become autocratic to a more communitarian and consensual sort of decision making, we have to remember that the new committee, although it is more representative of the community than the old autocrat, is no more than the autocrat a source or guarantee of competence. The committee has to do the same searching for artists, architects, designers, craftspeople as the autocrat had to do. When the autocrat did not do this searching and finding and freeing of appropriately competent artists, and instead assumed that because he had the job he had the gifts, we witnessed the environmental and artistic mess of our recent past. If the new committee is going to act in the same way, the results will be just as disastrous.

Committees and collegial structures of all sorts are necessary and important developments in the church. But we must not confuse their function with any of the particular competencies that environment and art require. A liturgy committee, for example, should have a basic understanding of the faith community and of the full, conscious, active participation of all its members required by its liturgy and of what the rites require in terms of personnel and equipment. But when it comes to the ministry of reader, the committee has to search for that particular trained talent of public proclamation. The old autocrat who understood human limits (many did not) searched out, employed, and paid individuals with appropriate training and talent for the job to be done. The new committee must do the same and should be able to do it more effectively, given its representative character and its presumed knowledge of the community and its resources. It is a tragedy when the new committee simply inherits the old autocrat’s power, without any feeling of responsibility for seeking and hiring those highly individual and particular competencies and charisms. One of the marks of the church, as a community whose common ministry is liberation and reconciliation, should be a deep respect and reverence and gratitude for the gifts of others and a feeling of need for them. We recognize this when we are dealing with tasks of plumbing or bricklaying. We tend to forget it when we are dealing with building or renovation, with design and the arts in worship.

Conclusion

We pray and think and talk about how our faith communities and local churches can create environments and solicit arts that will not only embody but also encourage and enable the kind of human experience through symbolic communication we call liturgy. We are given the thankless task of being goads, prodders, gadflies, stingers of consciences (including our own). We get tired. We’d like to have somebody pat us on the head and say “Thanks … thanks!” But if we are serious about where we are or are coming from, our job is to struggle against human nature’s preference for the misery it knows, its fear of the new and different. But when the job is done and space begins to form the faith community that worships in it and with it, encouraging and enabling with its awe-inspiring beauty and its warm human scale and hospitality, the full, conscious, active participation of the entire Sunday assembly—then, if we are still alive, we can bask in the glory. For now, however, it is all uphill.

Liturgical Aesthetics

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The aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship encompass not only written liturgies and rubrics but also the ways in which the liturgy is brought to life. This article addresses the rich and varied ways that these aesthetic dimensions are realized, including the liturgical expressions of time and space, the visual and the aural, the cognitive and emotional, the eternal and the culture-bound.

The term aesthetics derives from a Greek root meaning “of or pertaining to things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial)” (O.E.D.). Since the 18th century, the term has come to designate the theory and interpretation of the beautiful in art and in nature. Liturgical aesthetics comprehends both the modern and classical meanings of the term. Thus the scope of this article includes the concept of beauty in relation to prayer and ritual as well as reflection on the sensible signs and various “languages” of worship such as time, space, sound and silence, movement and gesture, sacramental sign-acts, and the artistic environment.

Relations between beauty, the human senses, and the worship of God is both obvious and difficult to trace in their complexity. Liturgical worship requires corporately shared forms into which a community of faith enters to give expression to adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and petition. Because liturgy is more than texts and rubrics governing the correct performance of ritual acts, the “poetics of liturgical celebration” is of primary importance. The study of literary qualities of texts is only one strand in such a poetics. Since the mystery of God’s self-communication in Word and sacrament is always in and through specific forms, the poetics of liturgical celebration constitute a simultaneously theological and anthropological inquiry. Poetics as the study of how living discourse utilizes the powers of language is here applied to the broad range of liturgical utterance and to the arts of ritual enactment.

Liturgy possesses great formative and expressive power over human imagination, thought, emotion and will. Speaking theologically, we may say that, over time, Christian liturgy forms persons in the paschal mystery that it signifies and at the same time brings to communal expression the lived experience of the gospel. From a phenomenological or anthropological point of view, liturgy may be said to form human persons (and communities) in specific symbol systems and fundamental ways of being in the world. At the same time, liturgical rites become the means of expressing primary identity and passional self-understanding. Both the formative and expressive dimensions of liturgy require structure and particular elements—words, actions, symbols, music, and related art forms. But what gives such elements and the structure of the rites life is style—a particular way of celebrating the rites. As Aidan Kavanagh has observed, “ … the artful symbolism which is the liturgy is never secured in the abstract or in the general. It is accomplished in specific acts done by people in certain places at given times” (“The Politics of Symbol and Art in Liturgical Expression,” in Symbol and Art in Worship [Concilium: Religion in the Eighties, no. 132], Luis Maldonado and David Power, eds. [New York: Seabury Press, 1980], 39). Liturgical aesthetics investigates what is signified and experienced and how it is so signified and experienced in actual worshiping assemblies.

If Christian liturgy is understood as a complex of communal sign-actions and texts brought together in symbolic patterns about the Scriptures, the font, and the Table, then liturgical aesthetics studies the perceptual elements and the art of ritual enactment which render these human activities alive with significant form. If Christian liturgy is understood as an epiphany of the mystery of the divine self-communication, then liturgical aesthetics must address the question of how the style of celebration opens access to understanding and participation in that which theology cannot explain but can only comprehend in wonder and adoration. Both conceptions of liturgy and both methodologies are necessary.

Liturgy and Aesthetics: Historical Ambiguities

The matrix of artistic creativity for pre-Reformation cultural life in the West was the Christian liturgy. Liturgical art was, to a great extent, the fountainhead of popular art, and the cultural imagination was permeated with biblical stories and liturgical images. Such a historical period furnishes ample evidence of the power of liturgy to shape and receive cultural modes of perception. By contrast, the prophetic side of Christianity has from the beginning been suspicious of human imagination, voicing objection to the dissociation of the aesthetic from the ethical or the holy. The words of Amos echo in other historical periods: “Take away from me the noise of your song; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” (Amos 5:23–24). Furthermore, the iconoclastic impulse to resist the uses of art emerges in the name of holiness to guard against idolatrous confusion of images with the divine reality they are to represent or express.

At the outset, Christianity had considerable reservations about the arts and a relatively unadorned liturgy. The immoralities of songs in the context of pagan rites provided good reason for such suspicion. The pattern of life that was associated with music and the other arts of the theater was cause of great concern to the church. There was an asceticism in the earliest monastic movements that regarded the ease and even the sensuality of the post-persecution church as apostate. While the prophetic biblical traditions feared idolatry, the use of music, for example, seemed at home in the chanting of psalms. But the traditions springing from the philosophy of Plato also influenced the early church. Aware of the enormous emotional power of music, poetry, and dance upon the human psyche, such traditions regarded artistic endeavors as traffic with the ambiguities of sensuality. The strictures against flute-playing in Plato’s Republic emerged in the Christian assembly’s initial resistance to the use of instruments in worship. The mistrust of matter and images itself led to a chaste role of iconography in the early buildings. Gradually, especially in the East, the idea of the icon as an image that mediates but does not contain the sacred, emerged.

The theological and philosophical suspicions of art and of the aesthetic power of liturgy surfaced virulently again with some of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. The systematic destruction of images and religious art in places such as Zurich in 1524 at the hands of the Zwinglian town council testify to the fear of external rites, material form, and visible symbols. The suppression of all music in the liturgy seems even more extreme, especially at the hands of such an accomplished musician as Ulrich Zwingli. Yet such a reduction of the aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship among the Reformers resulted from an enormous drive to purify and to spiritualize worship forms in a period when the aesthetic and symbolic profusion of the Roman rites seemingly overwhelmed the central mystery of God’s gracious acts and the primary symbols of faith. The sixteenth-century simplifications were partly a result of a new stress on Scripture as a primary source for liturgical norms arising in that period; but they also depended upon an opposition between reason and emotion, alongside a dualism of spirit and the physically sensate. Luther was not such a liturgical purist. In fact, as the liturgical iconoclasm of the Reformation grew more extreme, he spoke, even while defending simplification of the rites, of his eagerness to “see all the arts, especially music, in the service of him who gave and created them.” The liturgical aesthetics of the three magisterial Reformers—Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli—show a remarkable range of differences among themselves respecting the material forms that worship employs. None of them refers substantially to the earlier traditions which struggled with these same tensions, namely those of the early patristic figures, most especially St. Augustine.

It was St. Augustine who asserted that, despite human sin and limitation, divine providence could yet work through the human experience of beautiful things to illuminate the ground of all human perception and understanding in God. For Augustine, the recognition of truth and beauty in and through the created order (the physical and the sensual) revealed a divine lure turning human beings away from desires linked with sensuality and mortality to the love of God. Before him, Basil, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, had argued that honor given an image would move on to its origination in God. In contrast to the early theological suspicion of the arts and to the more extreme views of the Reformation, there has been an alternative tradition from Augustine to Aquinas, rediscovered in later historical and cultural periods—as with the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement and neo-Thomist revivals associated with Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson —which regarded aesthetic activity and its liturgical bearing as defined in light of the relation of God to all human perception and to the goodness of the created order itself.

The history of styles of celebration and the “ceremonial” employed in liturgical rites have shown wide extremes in the history of the church, especially in the West. This fact shows that the aesthetic dimensions of Christian worship are an ingredient in any change, whether of complex elaboration over time or of dramatic reform and simplification. The last third of the twentieth century is witnessing one of the most extraordinarily complex periods of reform and renewal in the history of the Western churches. The emergence of liturgical aesthetics as a discipline is partly a necessary outcome of these developments.

Liturgy as Art: Symbolic Form and Mystery

Any consideration of liturgical aesthetics must begin with the acknowledgment of this ambiguity in the long history of Christian faith and artistic expression. Still there remains the fact that liturgy itself employs cultural forms in imaginatively powerful ways. Liturgical action does not simply use art, it is art—dialogue with God in symbolic form. To speak of liturgical aesthetics, then, is to refer to that which is an ingredient in the enactment of the rites, both sacramental and nonsacramental. There is an intrinsically aesthetic character to all liturgical celebrations and environments. This fact is at the heart of what liturgy is, according to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council. The liturgical assembly is the articulation and expression of the saving mystery of God in Christ, and of the nature of the church. The symbolic action of the liturgy is also an experience and manifestation of the church and participation in the mystery of the triune life of God which animates the world. Such manifestation and participation are always in and through specific cultural forms: language, symbol, ritual sign-acts, music, gesture, visual and tactile environments.

Explorations in the domain of liturgical aesthetics, therefore, seek to interpret and understand the various relations between beauty and holiness in particular liturgical contents. Bearing in mind the ambiguities of the human imagination per se and the possibilities of mistaking the symbol for the reality symbolized, liturgical aesthetics proceeds on the assumption that there is an ultimate connection between beauty and the reality of God. Liturgical aesthetics is based on the fact that liturgy is a complex art form and that right praise and thanksgiving to God require the engagement of the full range of human emotion, intellect, and will. Liturgical worship employs corporate shared forms that invite and engender fully human participation, neither exclusively cognitive (mental) nor exclusively emotive or volitional.

The symbolic value and the beauty of the various elements of the liturgy derive from the material and form of each, while the sacredness or holiness derives from the mystery of the events celebrated “in, with, and through” Jesus Christ. These principles are based on the claim that God has created all things and called them good and has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, gathering a historical human community—always culturally embedded and embodied—for worship and service in the world. Liturgical aesthetics is thus rooted and grounded in the doctrines of creation and incarnation. All things are rendered holy by virtue of creation and the redemptive action of God and are to be so regarded and brought to expression in communal worship of God. Liturgical worship respects the difference between creature and Creator, employing the things of earth to signify the glory and mercy and justice of God. This calls for a fundamental religious sensibility oriented to splendor and to appropriate sobriety and awe in the use of language, symbol, gesture, and the various languages of the rites.

Yet there is also a permanent tension involved in the use of material objects, the domain of the senses, and the imaginative powers of human art. This is because human beings are not in full harmony with the created order, nor is any human community or culture congruent with a fully transformed world. Our liturgies remain “east of Eden” and captive to the limits of human cultural perception as well. In short, Christian communities remain sinful and culturally bound. This means that whatever significant form is realized in liturgical celebration conveying the self-giving of God, we still “see through a glass darkly.” Hence liturgical aesthetics must always point to an eschatological self-critique of the use of forms. This permanent tension in liturgy as art is but a reflection of the situation of faith—we live in a good but fallen creation, between the initiation of redemptive history and its consummation. Any given liturgical aesthetic belonging to a particular time and culture requires a counterpoint in a religious sensibility oriented to that which transcended culture, that “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard,” which God has prepared for the children of earth.

The eschatological reservation concerning the cultural embeddedness of all aesthetic dimensions of Christian liturgy will be made more explicit at the end of this essay. To a discussion of various languages and the aesthetic dimension of all liturgical rites enacted we now turn.

Time and Space

From the beginning, Christian liturgical celebrations involved the use of cultural modes of communication, language itself being a primary instance. The words and texts employed in the liturgy operate within a complex of nonverbal phenomena. The sense and force of the words employed in worship depend radically for their range and depth upon the nonverbal features of the rites and how they are enacted. The meaning of a sung text, for example, has a greater aesthetic range than the same text recited. The same text or gesture—or their combination—has a different connotative range in different seasons or feasts during the church year.

Among the primary nonverbal languages that constitute the poetics of liturgical celebration is time. Because liturgical rites are temporal, unfolding the juxtaposition of text, symbols, and ritual acts over time, participation is itself a temporal art. Within the duration of a single liturgical rite, for example, a eucharistic celebration, the meaning of the texts and the symbols are cumulative and dramatic rather than self-contained. Each text or gesture or liturgical subunit may possess its own determinate sense, but the significance and the broader radiations of meaning can only be discerned in light of the whole pattern. Worship may be impoverished, of course, by lack of coherence or structural dislocation, illustrated by the proliferation of sequences in the Renaissance period. Thus the poetry of an Entrance hymn or a festival Gloria may be fully grasped only after its connection with the praise and thanksgiving of the eucharistic prayer is sounded. The remarkable complexity and aesthetic power of images in the Exsultet at the Easter vigil do not fully unfold until the temporal process of reading and hearing the whole sequence of readings is completed and the baptismal covenant is sounded. Liturgy is a temporal art and is, in this sense, properly analogous to music, to drama, and to dance. This is why liturgical participation requires a sense of the “dance” and the “drama” of the rites, even when these art forms do not appear explicitly. The temporal art of liturgical celebration is in this respect intrinsically musical and dramatic.

The language of time also works in the accumulative associative power of specific elements within a rite. Thus, the aesthetic range and significance of eating and drinking together take time. In everyday life, we come to understand the multiple levels of meaning of such acts only after we have had meals together on birthdays, after funerals, on anniversaries, and through the changing seasons of human lives in a wide range of ordinary circumstances. Symbols deepen as human beings mature with them. The source of the inexhaustibility of primary symbols is located here. At the level of texts, the same is true. The same antiphon or full responsorial psalm, when used in different seasons of the year, yields a different range of potential value and force in texts (hymns, psalms, prayers, and lections).

The language of time also involves discipline in cycles of the week, the day, and the year. The aesthetic depth of liturgical participation is related to the experience of feasts and seasons. The liturgical year is a treasury of the church’s memories of who God is and what God has done. The temporal cycles of day, week, and year intersect with the sanctoral cycle of holy men and women to form a powerful hermeneutical pattern.

A second nonverbal language is that of space. Because the liturgical assembly occupies a place and arranges the furnishings in that space, a pattern of acoustic, visual, and kinetic perception is set up. The places form environments that house the action of the liturgy. Each space and its interior arrangement may be said to possess specific aesthetic properties, encouraging specific kinds of actions and discouraging others. Some spaces invite a static and sedentary approach to God—in fixed auditoria, for example. Others invite freedom of encounter and movement or uncluttered contemplation. The visual focus of the room has a profound effect upon the poetics of textual images and the function of vestments, vessels, gestures, and the uses of light within the liturgy.

There is also the history of the use of the building and the interior spaces which influence the tone and style of the liturgical celebration. So in a space where families have gathered for generations, where weddings, funerals, and rites of passage have taken place, where the very sound of sung prayer has given association to the action itself, the aesthetic values of the space may dominate or even conflict with the actual style of celebration. At the same time, how we arrange furnishings—altar, ambo, font, musical instruments, presider’s chair, the paschal candle—bears strongly upon what can potentially be brought to expression within the assembly.

Sound and Sight

Within the temporal-spatial setting, the acoustic and visual domains come into play. The art forms of music, whether congregational, choral, or instrumental, depend in larger measure on the properties of the building and the arrangement of the space. The relationship of sound and silence is crucial to music, but it is also part of the intrinsic music of the rites themselves. So all liturgical utterance has pitch, rhythm, intensity, and pacing. The silences between words spoken and sung are as important as the sounds themselves, for together they create the primary acoustical images of praise and prayer. Analogously, the pace, intensity, rhythm, and tone of ritual actions are part of the hidden music of the rites enacted.

The aesthetics of sound and sight are not ornamental to liturgy but are intrinsic to the very nature of liturgical celebration. Thus music is not to be conceived primarily as something “inserted” into the rites. Rather, explicit music should seek to bring to expression the implicit music of the rites. The implicit music is at one and the same time related to the juxtaposition of texts, ritual acts, and symbols, and to the specific rites in their context. The actual acoustical experience of prayer or of preaching may carry more force than the semantic context of the actual words. Thus fully articulate musical liturgy is more festive and generates a greater range in levels of participation. At the same time, the style and quality of music must be judged appropriate to the nature of the rites and the nature of the assembly.

Following Vatican II, the United States Bishop’s Committee on the Liturgy published documents pertaining to the aesthetic dimensions of Christian liturgy. Music in Catholic Worship (1972, 1983) and Liturgical Music Today (1982) present complementary sets of guidelines concerning music in the liturgy and provide a theological groundwork for integrity in liturgical music. The earlier document deals with the role of music, both instrumental and choral/vocal in various rites, while the latter proposes criteria for planning and conducting liturgical celebrations.

The whole liturgical environment is to be served by the arts—this is the primary concern of a third document, Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (1978, English/Spanish edition, 1986). Particular emphasis is placed upon the liturgical assembly as a servant to God’s created world and its calling to be “sign, witness, and instrument of the reign of God” (par. 38). Precisely because the assembly seeks to remember and to cultivate the redemptive power of God, it must nurture a climate of wonder, awe, reverence, thanksgiving, and praise. Therefore liturgy must seek what is beautiful in its total ethos as well as in the specific objects, gestures, sign-actions, music, and related art forms employed.

In these documents, the acoustic, visual, and kinetic dimensions of liturgical celebration are integral to one another. The confluence of these arts in liturgy enables the assembly to discern the presence of God in the whole of the symbolic actions. The materials and the form are to reflect the beauty and dignity of the rites they intend to serve. Special focus is devoted to the climate of hospitality, the experience of mystery, the reality, and efficacy of the range of symbols through word, gesture, and movement. A paragraph in Environment and Art concerning the concept of the beautiful in Christian liturgy is especially noteworthy:

Because the assembly gathers in the presence of God to celebrate his saving deeds, liturgy’s climate is one of awe, mystery, wonder, reverence, thanksgiving, and praise. So it cannot be satisfied with anything less than the beautiful in its environment and all its artifacts, movements, and appeals to the senses.… The beautiful is related to the sense of the numinous, the holy. Where there is evidently no care for this, there is an environment basically unfriendly to mystery and awe, an environment too casual, if not careless, for the liturgical action. In a world dominated by science and technology, liturgy’s quest for the beautiful is a particularly necessary contribution to full and balanced human life (par. 34).

Liturgical Aesthetics and Human Emotion

The relation between liturgy and human emotion is complex, but it is evident that Christian worship forms and expresses particular patterns of emotional dispositions in human beings. Music, poetry, dance, symbolic actions—all these have to do with the affective capacities in human life. Liturgy may be regarded as a time and place where the language, sign-action, and symbols concerning the divine shape and express deep human emotions as gratitude to God, hope, repentance, grief, compassion, aversion to injustice, and delight in the created order. The Christian life itself is characterized by the having of such emotions and they’re having become wellsprings of attitude and action in life. The language of Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments have to do with elemental features of human existence: emotions linked to birth and death, suffering, sin, and oppression as well as with desire, joy, hope, and happiness. These deep emotions are not simply named or described in the language of liturgy; they are evoked, portrayed, sustained, and refined in the rites.

Holy fear, repentance, and amendment of life depend upon sharing deeply in the mystery of prayer and ritual action as in the shared meal of the Eucharist. The language of the liturgy in descriptive, ascriptive, and performative force shapes us in particular affectional ways of being by addressing God and being open to God. So eucharistic participation points toward a life of gratitude and self-giving. The very fourfold action of taking the bread and cup, blessing God over them, breaking the bread, and giving the gifts presents the pattern which the eucharistic community is to live out in daily life.

To learn gratitude to God or awe or love of God and neighbor one must learn to pray with the church. The graciousness, the holiness, and the love of God create the possibility of authentic worship. But the experiential power and range of liturgy is required in turn for the deepening of such dispositions. The integrity of the art of common prayer and ritual action requires that such gratitude, awe, and love is not confined to the liturgical event itself. That is, these religious affections are not simply aesthetically held states of feeling. Yet without the aesthetic dimensions of participation in and through the forms, no sacramental self-understanding in life can emerge. As Environment and Art rightly observes: In view of our culture’s emphasis on reason, it is critically important for the Church to reemphasize a more total approach to the human person by opening up and developing the non-rational elements of liturgical celebration: the concerns for feelings of conversion, support, joy, repentance, trust, love, memory, movement, gesture, wonder. (par. 35)

Christian liturgy that seeks emotional and symbolic authenticity and depth must always pay attention to the materials and the forms employed. Language that is only clear or cognitively precise with no overplus of poetic meaning will diminish the power of the symbols to hold together multiple levels of meaning. If the ritual actions are perfunctory or merely efficient, the texts and symbols will be diminished. If the music is always immediately accessible and without surprise or tension or durability, the texts wedded to such music suffer reduction in imaginative power and metaphoric range. The quality of texts, gestures, movements, and the form of the symbols is critical to levels of participation. Attention to each element and to their interrelation in the whole pattern of the liturgy is necessary to the power of liturgy to draw us, as church, into the gospel proclaimed and the saving mystery enacted. This is what leads Joseph Gelineau to say, “only if we come to the liturgy without hopes or fears, without longings or hunger, will the rite symbolize nothing and remain an indifferent or curious ‘object.’ Moreover, people who are not accustomed to poetic, artistic, or musical language or symbolic acts among their means of expression and communication find the liturgy like foreign country whose customs and language are strange to them.”

Liturgical Style and Culture

The question of style is not a matter of mere technique. If it were so, we could produce awe-inspiring liturgical rites by manipulating lighting and symbols. But the aesthetic dynamism of authentic liturgical celebration is the opposite of manipulation and magic; it is the opening of the mystery of the realities signified, proclaimed, and ritually participated in. This “opening” is a matter of faithfulness and attentiveness to the whole environment of worship. Each unit or element of the liturgical assembly, and each “sub-rite,” invites a particular quality of disposition that is appropriate to the nature of the rite and its context. This goes together with the honesty and integrity of materials and the aesthetic adequacy of the forms. Both the leaders and the assembly as a whole share mutual responsibilities for the art of the liturgy. The presider and other specific ministers become focal points and representations of the prayerful participation of the assembly. Activities of gathering, singing, praying, reading, listening, bowing, touching, eating, and drinking all require a heightened sense of receptivity and active participation as a community of mutuality. The cultural variables here are many, since different cultures exhibit differences in behavior in the course of such activities.

The church’s teaching and catechetical approach to preparing the worshipers—both long-term and immediately in the room of celebration—can not neglect the aesthetic dimensions of specific cultures. The study of liturgical forms and teaching the primary symbols of faith must create a hospitable environment. Assisting the worshipers to participate fully in the musical forms, for example, requires sensitivity to the range of musical styles available to the people. Giving the assembly a model of good “performance practice” in responsorial psalmody, the hymns or sung responses can open up new dimensions of the cultural heritage. The problems of musical participation raise all the issues of liturgical participation. Creating appropriate spaces of silence for reflection on the readings and in relation to the sign-acts and symbols is part of the nonmanipulative art of the liturgy.

The poetics of celebration requires examination of the specific cultural context of the assembly. In our post-conciliar period, new emphasis is being placed on the modes of expression indigenous to the social and cultural history of the people. If the liturgy is to signify the divine/human interaction, then modes of appropriating and sharing the basic symbols must be mediated in and through the language, music, visual, and bodily style of the people. The aesthetics of liturgy thus demands that we know the differences between, for example, patterns proper to a North-American cultural tradition formed principally in Northern Europe and patterns that are Afro-American or Hispanic.

At the same time, the symbolic action points to realities that are in tension with all inherited cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior. The permanent tension in the poetics of liturgy is between the necessity of local cultural modes of perception (expression and interpretation) and the common culture of Christian faith and life. Only by maintaining this tension can we also assert specifically Christian faith and life over against the assumptions of much postmodern and technological culture. Though each subculture has its own integrity, there is a manner of celebration which is Christian, stemming from the particular claims of the paschal mystery. There is a way of enacting the rites which is ultimately the human reception of what God has done in creation and in Jesus Christ. This has been referred to by Gelineau and others as the “paschal human in Christ”—a manner enacted in particular cultural languages that evidence “both reserve and openness, respect and simplicity, confident joy … and true spontaneity.… ”

Afterward

Liturgy belongs to the created world and thus is an art, for the created order belongs to God. The aesthetics of authentic liturgy concerns the intrinsic means, not simply the eternal decoration, or the rites themselves. Without such aesthetic considerations as honesty of materials, quality of craft and performance, appropriateness, proportionality, and integrity within the liturgy of the art forms and the people, the whole of the liturgy is diminished in its symbolic power.

Yet, lest we take delight only in the beautiful forms we have managed, and not discern the enabling grace of God in and through the forms, the final word must be eschatological. All artistic effort is itself proleptic as well as participatory in God’s creativity. The mystery celebrated is never exhausted or fully contained in the liturgy. Liturgical rites authentically celebrated point beyond themselves to the eschatological vision and the “heavenly liturgy” of Christ of which all earthly celebrations are but hints and guesses. This way all attention to the aesthetics of Christian liturgy is but a servant of the vision of a created order transformed and reconciled to the life of God. There all that is creaturely will be permeated with light, dance, and song. Insofar as we experience the prefigurement of that reality in particular times and places, the aesthetics of liturgical celebration become congruent with the holiness and the beauty of the triune life of God, at once incarnate in the world and yet transcendent in glory beyond all created things.

A Biblical Philosophy of the Numinous Aspect of the Arts

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The biblical conception of God as holy has profound significance for the philosophy of the worship arts. The biblical worshiper encounters the Lord as the Holy One. The basic connotation of holiness (Hebrew qodesh) is not the goodness or righteousness of Yahweh but the fact that he is encountered as one “set apart,” sacred or sacrosanct, unlike that which is experienced in the ordinary events of life. There is, in other words, a numinous aspect to the encounter with the Lord, a quality of mystery, dread, and fascination in his presence, which calls forth a spontaneous and intuitive response of worship. The rational mind cannot encompass his being, nor can human language adequately bear the majesty of his presence. Worship, like theology, must express itself through transforms of the experience of the holy, symbols that point beyond themselves to the real reason alone cannot grasp.

It is here that the fine arts make their essential and distinctive contribution to the worship of Almighty God. Whether visual, auditory, literary, choreographic, or liturgical, art forms can augment the worshiper’s sensitivity to the sacred in a way that common verbal communication cannot. Language, as a means of communication, depends on the premise that a symbol used by one speaker will be intelligible to another and therefore involves a rational process that issues in some kind of linear, conventional ordering of phonemes and thought units. Art forms, as well, require the application of rational processes in their creation and appreciation, but as a means of communication, they operate at another level, touching the intuitive faculties of the human psyche. Art may be a window into unseen realities. The Last Supper fresco of Leonardo da Vinci is more of a humanistic tour de force of Renaissance technique than a vehicle for grasping the passion of Christ. By contrast, the roughly contemporaneous Last Supper of Tintoretto, its scene shading from the table of Christ and the disciples into the heavenly host, is a numinous window into the eternal truth “This is my body”; and the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grünewald, with its massive, distorted depiction of the crucified Christ, conveys with compelling force the weight of sin and suffering borne by the Savior.

The Bible is full of artistic creations, symbols fashioned or enacted by worshipers as expressions of that which cannot be encompassed by ordinary speech: the tabernacle and the temple, with their furnishings; the vesture of the priests; the ark of the covenant and its cherubim; the symbolic acts of liturgy and sacrifice; sacred gesture such as bowing down and lifting hands and festival processions; the many word symbols of covenant liturgy, hymn, and psalm, prophetic song and vision, parable and preaching. The colors used in the Mosaic tabernacle and its priestly vesture are sometimes interpreted as prophetic, standing for some theological truth or concept; in fact, their “meaning” is to serve as artistic expressions of the numinous quality of the house of God.

As an art form, even unintelligible speech, or speaking in tongues, conveys such a meaning in relationship to the presence of the holy and is not an ecstatic or emotional activity as some nonpractitioners suppose. The most numinous of the arts is music, which speaks most directly to the intuitive capacities of the worshiper, bearing a sense of majesty, wonder, mystery, and delight, and bringing a release of the soul even without recourse to words. It is well to recall, in this connection, how much of the Bible is poetry and song. God is not an idea but a reality encountered at the deepest level of being; from this perspective, art is not only permitted in biblical worship, but it is also mandatory.

A Biblical Philosophy of the Image of God and the Arts

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In both ancient mythological religions and modern evolutionary philosophy, humankind is an accidental appearance on the earth. In ancient Mesopotamian myths, for example, the creation of man is a by-product of the cosmic struggle between competing deities. The evolutionary philosophy that underlies the modern view of man is not far removed from that of ancient mythology, for it sees the origin of humankind as the result of the operation of blind, impersonal forces of time and chance. By contrast, the Bible represents humankind as the deliberate creation of God, who made humans, male and female, in his own image (Gen. 1:27).

The concept of humankind as created in God’s image has several implications for human artistic activity. First, it suggests that there is no need to fashion an artistic image of the deity; humankind is already that representation—the handiwork of the Creator who has provided his own visual reminder of his presence in, and ownership of, the earth. As an ancient king would erect an image of himself at the boundaries of his territory to signify the extent of his kingdom, so God has placed humankind on the earth as a sign of his dominion. The scriptural prohibition of any kind of molten or sculpted image of Yahweh, which stands at the head of the laws of the covenant (Exod. 20:4; 34:17), gives statutory expression to this principle.

Second, as the representative of the Creator, humankind is charged with the management of the earth and the life that fills it (Gen. 1:28–30; 2:15). Human beings fulfill this role in exercising their capacity for making. To use J.R.R. Tolkien’s word, they become sub-creators; as sub-creators, “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker (“On Fairie Stories,” in Tree and Leaf [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964], pp. 54–55). To create a work of art, as a reflection of God’s creative activity, is to bring together seemingly unrelated elements into a new design that does not occur in nature.

Third, as beings made in the image of God, people find their deepest selves through worship, the expression of communion, and covenant with their Maker. The artistic effort should not be motivated by “self-expression” in worship but by the desire to glorify the Lord and express longing for him.