Make Christianity Beautiful Again?
Confusing good taste and good news
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Daniel Kim
TRUTH BE TOLD, I am a slave to beauty. My mother was an art historian, and my father was a literary junkie who had read the library of Western and Eastern masterpieces by the time he was twenty years old. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of being carted around in a pushchair across London, speeding through the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery. Almost every childhood holiday involved my sweaty child hands being pulled through the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, and almost every cathedral in Continental Europe while mum took notes. She would sit me down in front of the Impressionists and try to explain to her ungrateful boy the impact of linseed oil on paint.
Meanwhile, at night, my dad would put me to bed, telling stories out of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Until the age of twenty-four, I was convinced that the great war fought under the two great Trees of Valinor that gave light to the world was a creation of my dad’s imagination, until I realised he was simply a wonderful plagiarist. It was a very privileged upbringing, and I am infinitely grateful for it; it has served me incredibly well throughout my life.
But it produced in me the most awful of faculties—that thing we call ‘good taste’. Other people call it ‘pretentious’, and C.S. Lewis called it the ‘gluttony of the subtler kind.’ Truth be told, aesthetic value often means more to me than moral value. I find bad art more offensive to my soul than a crime. Despite my best intentions, I find it hard to resist my impulses to roll my eyes at the mediocre and critique the great and the good. And nowhere is my eye more critical than when it turns to Christian art—even from its very beginning.
THIS IS ONE OF THE EARLIEST Christian depictions of Jesus. Can you see him? Painted on faded Roman plaster around 240AD, here are four disciples perched on a boat, raising their hands towards two people on the water. There’s Peter, decapitated by 1,800 years of history and erosion. And next to him, holding his hands, is a figure wearing a flowing toga, the seams vanishing into the seams of the water. Does he have hair? It’s hard to tell, but he seems to have some pretty intense eyebrows. Behold the man—ecce homo—here is Jesus. The water-walker God-Man reaches his hand out to the terrified Peter and says over the storm, “Take courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.”
This little panel was discovered in the baptistry of a converted house-church built into the walls of Dura-Europos, one of the most eastern cities of the Roman Empire. In a city that pulsated with the strength of Rome, crowded with temples to the gods of the world, a motley community of Greek, Syriac, and Latin speakers met to worship their God. And in the back of this house was a small windowless room with a pool built into the wall—the baptistry. The walls are painted in burnt-umber tones that tell stories from the Bible, including our water-walking Jesus. If you were a new believer, you would have been led into this room with the whole community processing with oil lamps illuminating the drawings in the flicker of smoky candlelight. You would go down into the depths of the cool water, hearing the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. As you blink the water out of your eye, you lock eyes with your saviour—‘take courage’.
It’s a beautiful scene…
But, if I’m completely honest, and if I take off my gold-tinted sentimental glasses, and put on my well-trained, curated, beauty-intoxicated, European eyes, it’s kind of a rubbish, pastiche drawing. His arms are disproportionate to his body, and anyone with a working knowledge of human anatomy can tell you that human legs are meant to be slightly more than two sticks. It looks more like the kind of thing a child would bring back after the obligatory Noah’s Ark Sunday school session. Part of me wishes it were Rembrandt's Prodigal Son greeting me on the wall.
BEAUTY IS VERY MUCH on the lips of today’s theological, philosophical, cultural, and social discourse. “Modern man doubts the truth, resists the good, but is fascinated by beauty”, wrote Cardinal Godfreed Daniels. Christians from across the aisle have taken up the call: Make Christianity Beautiful Again. How many times have I seen and heard the Dostoevsky quote ‘Beauty will save the World’ typed over pictures of Gothic cathedrals or Italian marbled paper?
So the agenda is set, it seems. We must appeal to Beauty as our chief apologetic. Beauty is the call from God himself—drawing us upwards and outwards, propelling us beyond the closed realm of a physical universe and into the realm of splendour and delight which, ultimately, calls us into the presence of the divine. And to this, I say Hallelujah, Amen. Yes to the patronage of the arts. Yes to poetry nights over lectures. Yes to the attention to detail on the human experience of Christian worship and prayer. But in all these things, let us not become aesthetes—addicts to the aesthetic. Let us not become Christians of good taste, idolaters of so-called Beauty.
Let us remember, beauty is also a terrifying and accursed thing. The most powerful gifts from God can become insidious and soul-destroying curses. One of the oldest myths in the Western world was about how a bunch of powerful men went to war for the sake of Beauty. When Napoleon ordered the invasion of Italy, he did so, ordering them to ‘take possession of the best paintings’.
When we appeal to Beauty, we are playing with some serious firepower. “We don’t consume beauty like a commodity—beauty consumes us like a fire” (Jean-Louis Chrétien). Beauty is persuasive, seductive, violent, even! We don’t grasp it. It grasps us. Beauty captivates us, which means that it also takes us captive! So powerful is its force that we can confuse an aesthetic experience with a mystical experience. It is entirely possible to find what is evil and foolish beautiful. Satan comes as an angel of light and beauty.
Like everything under the sun, Beauty itself is in need of redemption for it to be used for the good pleasure of God. And redemption is always shaped like the redeemer: crucified, dead, and resurrected. The crucifixion of Jesus was supremely ugly—a disfigured, beaten, bent, tortured body, unjustly murdered. And yet, by it, we are made beautiful in the sight of God. If we are to have a Christian conception of Beauty, it must be one that is crucified and resurrected. Jesus, who had ‘no beauty or majesty to attract us’, gave us eyes and hearts to understand that Beauty itself has been transfigured on the Cross.
As St Bonaventure wrote: “Who would look for beauty now in such a roughly handled body? We saw the most beautiful of men on the cross…who possessed neither beauty nor form, yet it was from the [ugliness] of our Saviour that the price paid, for our beauty, streamed forth.” And that’s why those paintings from Dura-Europos had such an impact on me—they condemned the man of good taste. Christian art is beautiful insofar as it speaks of the truly beautiful one—the crucified one. As those early Christian believers went under the water of that baptismal font and rose to new life, face-to-face with an artistically disfigured Christ, they encountered the beauty of beauties.
THE DURA-EUROPOS CHRIST reminds me of another encounter I had with a water-walking Jesus. One thousand eight hundred years and 5,000 miles away in Hong Kong, there is a mural of Christ walking on water. It adorns the wall of a drug rehabilitation centre run by one of the most faithful missionaries of the 20th Century—Jackie Pullinger. Painted directly onto white concrete, Jesus walks across an acrylic sea. Behind him is not the dusty landscape of Galilee but the skyline of Hong Kong, and Peter is about to step out onto the water, reaching out towards Jesus.
The paintwork can’t compare with anything in the Louvre or the Uffizi, and the human proportions are slightly off. And yet, this has been the Christ who has accompanied thousands of addicts, gang members, and prostitutes through deep darkness and into his beautiful light, and it is under the gaze of this Christ that they were baptised. And it is this Christ who, every morning, hears the sweet sound of worship from these lips. When I was confronted with this painting, I sobbed at the beauty of it.
If we are to Make Christianity Beautiful Again, it has to keep this Christian experience of beauty at the very heart of it. Otherwise, all we’ll do is replace the idols of ‘good arguments’ and ‘Reason’ with ‘aesthetic craft’ and ‘Beauty’. I, for one, am desperate to be a person of good news rather than good taste.
So can beauty save the world? Who knows. The jury is still out. But one thing we know for sure is that a saved world is beautiful. Lord, give us eyes to see.
Daniel Kim
Writer & Theologian
Daniel is the co-founder and head writer of ChristianStory, an animation project bringing to life the history and theology of Christianity. He is also the Anglican curate at St Aldates church, Oxford.
What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
Thanks so much for featuring me :)
Thank you very much.
“Primitive art” can be quite different from “bad art”. The primitives will help you see something that you had overlooked.
And Dan, please keep writing.