Corruption Of Worship By Aestheticism

Because worship reveals both the terrifying power of God and his awesome mystery, it cannot always be aesthetically pleasing. Worship is a rehearsal of God's saving acts in history. Art and beauty may serve it, but must never dominate.

The next false gospel to be identified as threatening worship today can be described as the corruption of "aestheticism." By "aestheticism" we mean the autonomy with which art insinuates its vision of reality into liturgy and takes captive the Christian substance of liturgy—the conscious or unconscious affirmation art commonly makes that the reality which Christianity names "God" is most authentically experienced as Beauty rather than as the Holy.

     To reject the corruption of aestheticism in worship is not to deny the liturgical function of art. The cleft between much Protestant worship and art which prevailed until recently (and to which many congregations are still heir) was due largely to the failure to make this distinction. Rightly afraid of aestheticism, free-church Protestantism wrongly feared art. Human nature was misread, our rationality was overestimated, and our imaginative and sensuous life was underestimated. The human mind was mainly seen as a continuously working "idol factory"—in Calvin's famous phrase—and the inescapability of symbols was not understood. The relation of the divine to the natural was distorted, and spirit was opposed to matter in an unbiblical dualism. Because much Protestant worship preferred to see reality opaquely rather than honestly, the shock of the human predicament which art could teach liturgy was prudishly declined. And falsely supposing that art would corrupt rather than enhance our passion for life, much Protestant worship clung to its Puritanisms and its pieties.

     Now, however, the situation has largely changed, and Protestantism has, as it were, grown up into an awkward kind of artistic age. Having learned at great cost how art when exiled from man's life at one place will reappear at another, free-church Protestantism has determined that the cleft shall be overcome. From a posture of revulsion, free churches have now moved to clasp art in such vigorous embrace that while the affinities between art and liturgy are affirmed, tensions are ignored. Driven to self-criticism by the growing sophistication of people, aware of the impact which art in its numerous forms—especially film—exerts in our mass media culture, and eager to reassert affinities which never should have been lost, free-church Protestantism has resolved that the varnished oak pulpit and bare-walled "sanctuary," the clerical sack suit and flyspecked candlesticks, the gospel hymn and the Akron architecture, must go. For good or for ill, free-church congregations have largely abandoned their Puritan legacy in a kind of cultural adolescence and, athletically overreacting as good Protestants tend to do, have undertaken to "enrich worship"—to use their favorite term—that it may be made "aesthetically exciting."

     In the worship of certain free churches the fear of the Puritans has been vindicated: the god of Beauty has displaced the God of Christian revelation. The attributes of deity which Christian thought must insist upon—the personal character of God, his holiness, his active righteousness, his moral will, his judgment and mercy—are displaced by a vision of God as Beauty. The terror of God's deeds in history is made to give way to his harmony and joy. The eschatological event of Jesus Christ "shattering the backbone of history"—in Chesterton's famous phrase—is rendered into a tale of poetry and charm. "The God who acts" gives way to the God who smiles. Similarly, the person to whom such aestheticized worship is made to appeal is not the one whose soul needs redemption and whose will needs rescue; rather, it is the aesthetic individual whose sensibilities are to be titillated and whose imagination is to be intrigued. In this respect aestheticism has learned only too well from errors of the past. Persuaded that people are primarily symbolic animals, it addresses them as essentially creatures of feeling and imagination. It would engage our senses and shrive us with God's beauty rather than confront our will and search with God's holiness.

     Predictably, the action of worship at its very core in turn becomes corrupted. Appreciation and impression become the proper response rather than decision. Contemplation is more fitting than commitment—"the aesthetic posture projected to cosmic ends." In a metaphor of Gerhard van der Leeuw, the right liturgical response to the thunder and lightning of Sinai is to enjoy the glow of the landscape. Further, the moral character of worship often is bleached out. Because the worshiper's aesthetic sensibilities are appealed to more than his or her conscience and will, we are not addressed in our moral predicament by a moral God. Our contrition is not evoked; our intercession on behalf of others is not claimed; and the ethical implications of worship for our life in the world are left unpronounced. Still further, the salvational nature of worship is corrupted into a kind of liturgical hedonism. The holy agony which Christian worship authentically is becomes narcotized with aesthetic pleasure. And not seldom the song of Pan is more prominent than the Kyrie eleison.

     To be sure, when art authentically serves liturgy instead of taking liturgy captive for its own purposes, this need not happen; let us be clear on this point. If art will subordinate its vision of reality as Beauty to the Christian vision of God as the Holy; if art will address the worshiper not with pleasure but with that judgment and mercy that beget salvation; if art will let its love of the vitalities of existence be chastened with the paschal Life of the gospel, then aestheticism is no problem. But to ask of art these renunciations is probably to ask it to yield up that autonomy which is definitive for its existence. The bald truth is that art in a sense always threatens liturgy; and liturgy rightly looks on art with an incorrigible suspicion simply because the polar enemy of liturgy is idolatry.

     Given the possibilities of aesthetic corruption, therefore, it is always dangerous to think and speak of worship as an "art," of the planning and conduct of worship as the "art of worship," and of forms of worship as "works of art." Liturgical integrity is easily undermined by using the vocabulary of the aesthetic so substantively. One may perhaps speak in this fashion colloquially, but always at the risk of sacrificing theological to aesthetic canons. We do best to think and speak of art in relation to worship as an adjective, not as a noun. Let it always be remembered in this connection that historically the church has not undertaken to formulate liturgy primarily as a work of art. Its concern for liturgy has abundantly mothered artistic creation, yes; but from the primitive church to the present, the k?rygma, the gospel, has exerted the controlling influence in the shaping of liturgy. Even in its eras of greatest artistic flowering, the church could be quite indifferent to the artistic propriety of its liturgical forms, and the outstanding contributions to the church's liturgical life were made by men and women who were not first artists but people of faith, of theological concern and pastoral integrity who placed whatever talents they possessed at the service of the gospel.

     Now let it be said that the God of the gauche may be nearer the true God than the God who smiles, and the one who gnashes his teeth may be nearer the kingdom of heaven than the one who only enjoys the biblical landscape. Further, liturgy on occasion will prefer the ugly to the beautiful as a less untruthful way of rendering the encounter between God and man, in order to declare both the terrifying power and fascinating mystery of that Holy One with whom human destiny is bound up. One mark of the Holy, it must always be remembered, is that it repels as well as attracts: it daunts as well as fascinates. And worship whose forms offend may more authentically enable us to meet God than worship which only gives pleasure.